/ 17 March 2000

An enabling disability

David Beresford

ANOTHER COUNTRY

I think I am beginning to understand just a little of what it was like for Sandra Laing – the 10-year-old girl famously catapulted from white South Africa to black South Africa during the apartheid era.

It struck me a few weeks ago when I was

trying to buy a second-hand car. We had met the owner and inspected the vehicle about a week before and after some hesitation (prompted by previous and disastrous experience) the sale had been agreed. The much-relieved seller, who was due to fly overseas that night, arrived at our house for the hand-over.

I was in the street to meet him and we had been chatting for a couple of minutes – my right hand shaking as usual, from my Parkinson’s Disease – when my girlfriend came running out of the house to her car, anxious to get to the local public pool for a swim before it closed. The seller, clearly seeing in this hurrying figure the sale slipping from his grasp, set off in hot pursuit anxiously calling “Excuse me! … ughhh … Hello!” The comic tableau would have been complete if I had taken up the rear shuffling in shaky pursuit, waving my cheque book and protesting: “No, it’s me. I’m buying. Here I am!”

My amusement, at what I at first saw as an ironic reversal of roles for a long-standing male chauvinist, gave way to the puzzling question: why did he think she was the buyer? And then it dawned on me: maybe I was suffering something akin to racism – a disqualification through physical appearance. I was bumping up against that famous glass ceiling. I was disadvantaged … I was disabled. I was disqualified!

At this point, in writing this column, alarm bells clang in my mind just as readers may be reaching for their keyboards preparatory to banging off an angry e-mail to the editor or even (heaven forbid) Barney Pityana. An analogy between race and disease? Hey!

Well, let me get rid of my indignation first. A disease! Why is Parkinson’s a “disease”?

Disease. Pestilence. Plague. Unclean – how dare they label me so. Parkinson’s, so far as it is known, is no more infectious than a broken leg. Why don’t we talk of Broken Leg Disease? Maybe Bobby Skinstad should wear a bell around his neck so that the public should know and beware: here comes a dreaded case of Wonky Knee Disease.

Like all analogies, that between Sandra’s predicament and mine has its faults, none more than the personal detail that I was “disqualified” at what was possibly the peak of my career and I have, therefore, suffered comparatively little disadvantage. I can view my predicament (such as it is) with a humour not to be expected of a girl of 10 who has been handicapped at the outset of life. But the parallel between racism and what might be described as the “oh dear she’s deaf so get her a wheelchair” syndrome can be discovered there and with other forms of prejudicial stereotyping as well.

I stumbled across another variation in the breach, rather than its exercise, in Britain when I settled there in the 1970s. The Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch was ripping up the established order of things by taking over what was then the very symbol of the establishment, The Times. One of the members of the newspaper’s embattled board was quoted as saying disparagingly: “This fellow doesn’t know his place.” I thought initially that the reference was geographical – that, coming from the colonies, Murdoch was an outsider and was being disparaged as such.

A few years later, by now a foreign correspondent with The Guardian, I was back in London having a drink with a friend and colleague who said thoughtfully, over a beer: “You know, I’ve long envied you.” I looked up startled, because I had envied him for so long. A talented, young and good- looking journalist, he seemed the epitome of London sophistication to me, the “clumsy colonial”. The one thing which did baffle me was that he had always stayed a reporter in the newsroom.

“You arrived here from South Africa,” he recalled, “and you had only been in the newsroom for a few months when you were looking around and asking: ‘Well, what next?’ The next thing you were gone, to Ireland [I had become Irish correspondent]. I couldn’t explain to you that I was working class and I had overreached myself already, just by getting a job with the newspaper.” I gawped at my belated discovery of class consciousness.

“Know your place” … “overreaching themselves”. The language is of course only too familiar to South Africans. It was the language of Hendrik Verwoerd, justifying Bantu Education.

In South Africa I had absorbed the rules of racism. But, never having been shown the rule book of the class system, I had blundered on, empowered by my ignorance, unaware that I was “disqualified” (my ancestors in the United Kingdom were, I am told, “working class”). Murdoch, as is his nature, no doubt took a glance at the rule book and, seeing it for the rubbish it was, tore it up.

So, I stand, shake and smile today, looking back at the confused path I have followed to get to whatever social position it is that I find myself in.First I was born, melanin-disadvantaged, in a society where such failure to acclimatise was perversely advantaged. Then I landed up in a society where, just as perversely, ignorance stood in for inheritance.

And now, perhaps by accident of genetic predisposition (the theory currently fashionable among neurologists) I find myself in “another country”, this time amidst those supposedly disqualified for the game of life at least as played at the higher levels of society. “Know your place” is the unspoken imperative.

How do I deal with the situation? One obvious strategy is to take the analogy with race one step further, by seeing the issue as one of liberation and following the lead set by the black consciousness movement.

“Disabled is enabled?” Sure, I’ve come to believe it. But that assertion leads me to a difficult question.

A black power activist would have felt anger, contempt or pity for a colleague who resorted to skin-lightening cream. Should I want a cure?

Parkinson’s Disease is a brain condition which produces symptoms including shaking and rigidity of the limbs. It is progressive and no means of stopping or reversing its development has yet been found