So it’s back into the steaming cauldron of South Africa. I tell you, I’m reeling. Within hours of landing, I was back in the thick of an implacable barrage of low-key racial warfare. The venue was a rather nice restaurant in Norwood, where a friend of mine was launching a book on African traditional healing. And what an event it was. A live demonstration of the arts of African healing was the centrepiece.
So there we were, a packed house made up mostly of northern suburbanites of white pedigree, with a tiny
sprinkle of black faces dotted in here and there like stray grains of pepper in a bowl of salt, specks of dried blood in a field of snow.
And there before us were a dozen or so black witchdoctors, mostly women, inhaling herbal smoke, dancing around to the sound of the drum and falling into carefully arranged trances, under the loving eye of their promoter-cum-nanny, a white male with a ponytail and a jarring outfit of Shangaan ladies’ attire, offset by Doc Marten boots.
The snowflakes watched with subdued amazement as the large, black women in big white bras twirled, muttered, sneezed and then finally fell to the ground in painful ecstasy, apparently in the process of tuning in to ancient spirits that were giving them messages in strange tongues.
‘What are they saying?’ the white people would whisper to each other in decibels that could be heard over on Louis Botha Avenue, five blocks away. ‘I don’t know,’ their friends would reply. ‘Is that dagga they’re burning in those bowls? Do they really go into a trance?’ And so on, none of them thinking to ask some of the bloods in the audience for enlightenment. The conversations remained strictly ‘them’ and ‘us’.
We bloods, meanwhile, were watching the antics of our witchdoctor cousins with embarrassed concentration, trying to avoid eye contact with each other, and with the white majority, who were by now giving us sideways looks with newfound insight into what really made us tick.
We were probably aching to ask each other the same snowflake questions anyway, but were silenced by an uneasy sense of being implicated in the hokum hovering over the room. After all, we are the urbanised elite, and are no longer in daily contact with our ancestors. How could we tell if it was real or just mumbo-jumbo?
So anyway, I was sitting there sipping a glass of wine after it was all over, musing over the milling gathering, the sangomas now dressed in street clothes again and tucking into a finger dinner like the rest of the crowd, when a young lady who used to be vaguely related to me by marriage came up and, apropos of nothing and without any preamble, said to me: ‘So whites really like you, don’t they.’ It wasn’t a question, it was a statement. ‘Which whites?’ I asked her. ‘Whites,’ she said.
Oh, boy, I thought, I’m home. The young lady was obviously giving me the results of an informal survey she had taken upon herself to conduct into the readership of this column. I’d heard it all before.
‘And what about blacks?’ I wanted to ask her. But it was too late. She had already walked away into the crowd, where she was proceeding to engage in friendly conversation with a lot of white people she knew, leaving me to stew in my own juices.
In the old days, you see, the struggle had been to get whites to stop hating us, by force, if necessary, so that we could get on with the business of living in this country together. Nowadays, if there are alleged whites who actually do allegedly like you (even if you didn’t go out there and ask them to) you’d better watch your back. These are the new rules of our personal politics.
A few days after the Norwood event, the whole issue blew up into our public politics, too. It came in the form of a full-page advertisement in a Sunday newspaper, in which a small and previously unknown interest group comprised of 11 black people who, by their own admission, are prominent in the business and professional life of this country, took it upon themselves to give a full-scale blast of opprobrium directed at the right-wing liberal white media and all those, especially us duped black hacks, who sail in it. Collectively, they said, we are undermining the great gains this country has made, especially under the leadership of its incumbent president.
It was back to the trenches, the old ‘them’ and ‘us’ deal, racial innuendo without names being named and incidents cited.
I was struck by the fact that the advert claimed that many reasonable whites, especially those in ‘big white business’, agreed with the signatories’ analysis of the evil practises of the country’s white-owned media.
‘So where are these whites?’ I heard myself asking as I checked out the list of signatories again.
But of course none of these so-called whites had been called upon to append their signatures to the advert. It was strictly a black thing.
The media (no names mentioned) certainly does get up to a lot of nonsense a lot of the time. But what is the point of answering nonsense with more unsubstantiated nonsense? Who are these whites? Who are these blacks? And where are the forums that are not endemically racist and reactionary, where black hacks (or, God forbid, black-and-white hacks) can rise above the status of stooges and engage in acceptable debate? Who defines what is acceptable, anyway?
So between the sangomas and the whites in the northern ‘burbs, and the luminaries of black business at large, I discovered that I was in deep trouble just by virtue of being back on the scene again.
As you can imagine, I find myself once more reviewing the situation with some alarm.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza