One of the most memorable moments on my return to South Africa in the early 1990s occurred when I was walking with my daughter, then nine years old, through the tumult of central Johannesburg, from the Noord Street taxi rank towards the Market Theatre precinct.
It was one of those deceptively beautiful, hot
Johannesburg days. Against all the odds, we were “back home”–a sense of belonging, even though I had spent most of my formative years in other countries, and my daughter had been born in Paddington, London, and had never, till then, set foot on South African soil.
At some point, we stopped off at one of the many street cafés that lined the route — my daughter wanted something to drink. In perfectly normal fashion, we stepped up to the counter and made our order. I think I might have hesitated for a couple of seconds, debating whether to have a ginger beer or a Coke. The shopkeeper immediately started shouting at me, telling me to make up my bloody mind. It wasn’t as if his shop was exactly full. It was just that that was the way he was used to interacting with his black customers.
You got it: the shopkeeper was an Indian man of about my age. We had never met before, but here he was, like a bolt of lightning shattering our clear, blue skies, making us feel ugly, despised and defiled.
His insolence triggered something deep in me. From the soles of my feet, I felt an anger like I hadn’t felt in a long time building up and roaring out through my mouth, before I had time to analyse it. Snarling from the back of my throat, I gave him an unmoderated piece of my black mind, looking him straight in the eye.
I don’t think he had ever conceived of a black person speaking to him like that. In the silence that had fallen over the whole shop in the wake of my outburst, I told him to keep his lousy colas, and felt his shocked eyes following me as I grabbed my daughter’s hand and walked back out into the glassy, Highveld sunshine.
We had probably walked two blocks before I became aware of myself again. I was striding blindly through what had suddenly become a hostile, alien town. It was the realisation that my daughter was clutching my hand more tightly than ever that brought me back to my senses. She was scared as hell, sobbing silently as she tried to keep up with me. She had never seen her father so furiously out of control.
In spite of the accurate force of my outburst, I had been humiliated in front of the person I most wanted to protect from the buffets of the world.
South Africa’s black/Indian thing is a long-playing affair. In a sense, my reaction on that very specific, almost innocuous, occasion was based on a deep-rooted genetic impulse. I had never been in that situation before, having left South Africa’s stormy shores as a child. But my reaction was instinctive. Perhaps I was unconsciously summoning up memories of seeing my father humiliated in the same manner in Durban in the 1950s, and reacting in the same, pointless way.
And that’s the point. Mbongeni Ngema’s controversial new release, AmaNdiya, has raised hackles all over the country. Most people (including myself) haven’t even had a chance listen to it, but have strong opinions regardless.
Ngema argues that he is merely raising an issue that has become explosive in KwaZulu-Natal. Black Durbanites are particularly supportive. Look at what has happened to our city since the death of apartheid, they say. Every shop, every office seems to have been Indianised. Even the sidewalk cobblers are Indians these days. And every single one of them, man, woman and child, is guilty of unqualified, racist abuse, from dawn till sunset and on into the night.
At the other end of the scale, liberals of all stripes (including myself) wring their hands and ask why a high-profile (if controversial) figure such as Ngema should encourage us all to wallow once more in the bitter trough of South African racism. Rather than simply rehashing an age-old problem, why does Ngema not put his intelligence and popularity at the service of finding a solution?
There are other commentators again who say: “Forget the content, is the song worth listening to in the first place? Does it have any artistic merit?” For those few who were able to listen to it before it was pulled out of circulation, many say the piece is sadly lacking in this department. If it isn’t going to catch fire on the dance floor, they argue, its message, whatever it is, will fall flat anyway.
What no one seems to have bothered to unpack is the root nature of the relationship between blacks and Indians in South Africa. You find the same thing in the Caribbean: poor Indians were transported from one end of the British Empire to another to serve as indentured labour, initially in cane fields and as railroad construction workers. The Empire chose to give them higher status in the artificial colonial pecking order. By dividing one section of the forcibly conscripted working classes against another, the capitalising coloniser was able to rule all the more effectively, and wash its hands of the consequences.
The consequences are reflected in Ngema’s articulation of a gut reaction based on the lowest common denominator — and in that early experience that I encountered with my daughter on the mean streets of Johannesburg. But those instinctive reactions do not deal with the fact that Indians have been victimised as well, and are partly reacting out of a sense of fear and insecurity on their own account.
It is hardly worth mentioning that many (perhaps most) people of Indian origin were also part of the anti-apartheid struggle, mobilised by political visionaries like Mahatma Ghandi and many others.
We must surely conclude that it is unwise to make sweeping statements about any racial group — not least of all because one racial slur will inevitably give birth to another. Are we ready for a rash of bhangra-jive tunes about the Zulus in general?
But Ngema has certainly got us all talking. The man is no fool, and, true to form, he will probably be laughing all the way to the bank, even as we speak.
Or rather he will be, once the irritating little problem of a high court interdict has been got out of the way.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza