John Matshikiza
With the Lid Off
How refreshing it was, a couple of weeks ago, to find myself inside an aircraft, preparing to fly away from the South African debate about exactly who or what is entitled to be considered an African, and get out into the real Africa that lies beyond the Limpopo.
In that Africa, the debate is a non- starter. There are Africans, there are settlers, there are immigrants, and there are visitors. In some countries, where history has made it so, there may be Indians or Lebanese who have been there for generations, and are still identifiable by their distinct links to their origins. They do not feel shame in being Lebanese or Indians who happen to have been born in Senegal, Ghana or Uganda.
In East Africa the Arab and Indian populations remain largely distinct, living, marrying and breeding among themselves. Yet, like everyone else, they speak Swahili fluently. This makes them, particularly those of Arab origin, part of the far-flung Swahili culture. It’s not a tribe, it’s not a race, it’s not a nationality. It is a state of being that transcends all of these.
They are not anxious about being identified as African or non-African, because they are part of Africa, far more than they are part of India or the Middle East.
In Mozambique and Angola, everyone is a Mozambican or an Angolan. Everyone speaks the same language, Portuguese, which has been absorbed into the body of Africa and become an African language in its own right. In Luanda and Maputo there are pitch-black people whose only native language is Portuguese. It does not make them feel or seem any less African.
If someone is an Angolan mulatta, it is merely a physical description. It does not consign her to the isolation that the label “coloured” gives to, and is largely accepted by, the 8% of the South African population to which it applies. The mulatta does not question her African identity, she lives it.
It is only in South Africa, and the English-speaking neighbouring countries that have been infected by its peculiar mentality, that these details of racial identity have been given such inordinate importance. The debate in this country about who is an African is not about the African continent, it is about the grip that the mentality of apartheid still holds over South Africans of all colours.
Under apartheid, “African” was strictly for blacks, and “European” was strictly for whites. “Africans” had, for some reason, quietly replaced “natives” and “bantus,” and were later to become just “blacks”.
In post-apartheid South Africa, many whites want to escape the burdens of the past and show that they wish to identify with the aspirations of the majority of the population – namely, the blacks. These whites cannot reasonably be called “blacks” all of a sudden, just because they want to be seen to be on the side of the good guys, the Mandelas and so on. So they revert to a term that unfortunately used to be reserved for blacks, but gave a confusing continental identity as well: namely, “African.”
But for many blacks, the fact that they used to be called “Africans” (and didn’t much care for it at the time) has left them with the lingering belief that the term is synonymous with “black”, just like it used to be in the bad old days. Therefore, whites should stay out.
The issue is uniquely and horribly South African, and is as intractable as so many of the other horrors of social engineering that have been hastily swept under the carpet so that South Africa can be allowed to rejoin the international, and especially the continental African, community.
These thoughts were accompanying me as the plane cleared the clouds, taking me off for a short season in war-torn Congo. I was flying towards a war, but I was also flying towards a kind of peaceful relief from the aggressive intensity of South Africa.
In the war zone, in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, I met the gentlest people. Brutal colonisation, repression under black dictators, war and famine had not changed the fundamental beauty of their spirit. They knew who they were, what place they occupied on the African continent, and were profoundly aware of the nature of the war that was causing them this endless suffering.
For almost everyone I talked to, South Africa held the key to their salvation. If the South Africans would come, they said, all of this would stop.
I had to pause. I couldn’t help thinking that South Africa was itself a country at war, with the difference being that the war was undeclared and buried deep in the national subconscious. It is not just a low-intensity racial war, like the one that recently surfaced in the press. It is also a high-intensity war of murder, wanton robbery, rape, violation, self-loathing and xenophobia. What role would a South African army of occupation play, carrying with it, as it would, the burden of its own unfinished business?
What profound powers of mediation can be exported from a country that still regards itself as superior to the so-called makwerekweres who inhabit the rest of the continent? Should the physician not heal himself, before venturing out to heal the anguish of the world?
It was a question that never left me as I ventured deep into the “Heart of Darkness”.