‘Live in Melville,” they said. ”There’s a great vibe, it’s really mixed.”
Six months later I can confirm the vibe. The ”mixed” bit though has turned out to be a mirage. Whites own the walled houses, the shops, cafés and tennis courts. A few blacks do join in the moneyed leisure but most guard cars, sell trinkets, wait on tables or snooze in the shade after tending other people’s lawns and children.
Hardly a model of integration, but enough for Melville to earn the white liberal’s adjective of honour: mixed.
This is not how it is supposed to have been. Apartheid gave way nine years ago to the rainbow nation, a miracle of forgiveness and normalisation aided by an emerging class of blacks who wore the same clothes and drove the same cars as middle-class whites. This affluent vanguard would stake claims in the white northern suburbs.
In some areas they have, a house here, a shop there, but not enough to plausibly turn these areas mixed. Economic disparities are one reason, but there is another reason: the enduring social barrier between black and white.
For a newcomer it is perhaps the city’s most striking feature, but you swiftly learn not to harp on the subject in the company of liberal whites.
Having, in their view, fought on the right side of the struggle, and emerged triumphant, they look for multiracial fruits. Today’s harmony is a wonder, but one that can be exaggerated. The fiction of mixed Melville, for instance.
Sometimes the pretence dissolves into foot-shuffling admission, like the night at the Horror Café in Newtown when a group lauded the reality of integration and I was crass enough to ask why the only black person in the pub was the bouncer.
Sometimes it is not so clear-cut. You attend parties where the races mingle and laugh, but towards the end you notice some clusters have become all-black and all-white, guests gravitating towards their own.
In mixed gatherings conversation is more circumspect. Whites hesitate to criticise, say, the (mostly black) government lest they appear racist and blacks hesitate to criticise, say, a white author lest they appear chippy.
I know several whites who profess — boast might be a better word — to have many black friends but on closer inspection turn out rather to have many black colleagues and acquaintances.
”They invite you to their homes, they smile, everything’s nice, but they’re still judging you,” a black businessman and follower of Steve Biko’s black consciousness told me.
Optimists point to children growing up with mixed-race friends. Others find solace in the ease with which blacks from other countries — Nigeria, Ethiopia, Britain — mix with white South Africans. ”So you see, this awkwardness between black and white South Africans is really not a racial thing,” they say.
Yes, history, politics and economics do play a part — but no matter how disappointing, the obvious cannot be wished away. It really is a racial thing. — Â