‘It is not very nice being white in South Africa if you’re young, even though I’m not a racist and had nothing to do with apartheid ever,” reads an anonymous comment posted on the www.southafrica.com website. It is by no means a lone assertion.
There is a certain awkwardness that comes with being a white South African these days. I felt it at the fifth annual Steve Biko Memorial Lecture last month at a small venue in downtown Johannesburg.
“To be Afrocentric is to see Africans as owners of knowledge, concepts, ideas, as well as owners of ourselves,” stated speaker Molefi Kete Asante, a United States academic and author of The Afrocentric Idea. His comment buttressed the long-held opinion that blackness needs to dislocate itself from Western distortions.
I was engrossed but also bemused — a “whitey” at an enraptured gathering of Johannesburg’s new economic and intellectual elite, participating in a celebration of blackness. I wondered whether white South Africans could celebrate, or, better yet, interrogate their whiteness with the same conviction I witnessed that evening.
In December 2002 I attended the Battle of Blood River celebrations at Ncome river, the troubled epicentre of pre-modern South African history. To say that the event is a paean to Afrikaner kitsch overlooks the fact that it is also a reactionary celebration of “whiteness”.
Not that the people there saw it that way. “The people here take this absolutely seriously,” affirmed one celebrant. “It is not just empty symbolism or the fulfilment of an annual ritual — it is the confirmation of a promise they made to God.”
Of course, not all whites celebrate Reconciliation Day with the same blinkered verve. But I am just as suspicious of well-healed urbanites.
Recently, a young photographer named Michelle Booth unveiled an exhibition that consciously sought to interrogate whiteness. “The point of looking at whiteness is to dislodge it from its centrality and authority,” read a quote by Richard Dyer framing one of Booth’s photographs.
White visitors to the Rosebank gallery were anything but impressed. “I take umbridge [sic] at Booth and her elk [sic] who continually perport [sic] to ‘speak’ for all white South Africans,” objected one viewer. “I’m not, for one moment, at all ashamed of my whiteness and have nothing whatsoever to be embarassed [sic] about for having a white skin.”
“The most powerful thing about your ‘art work’ is the blatant racism you display toward people of your own colour,” remarked another.
These responses are telling. They articulate an ongoing belief among white South Africans that whiteness is beyond scrutiny. There is no sustained popular dialogue around this issue; whiteness is hostile to its own interrogation. Yet the word “whiteness” has been in the local vernacular.
In 1948, for instance, the acclaimed English travel writer HV Morton used it as a factual descriptor — not a pejorative — to characterise the white condition. “Every white person is, by virtue of his whiteness, an aristocrat,” he remarked, presciently adding, “and consequently, burdened with the anxieties and responsibilities that should go with that status.”
In present-day South Africa, the burden of these anxieties and responsibilities persist — particularly the anxieties. Such introspection forms the nub of growing academic work around whiteness. JM Coetzee’s book, White Writing, is a trailblazer.
Published in 1988, it scrutinises the pastoral novels and landscape poetry once at the core of the white South African literary canon, examining some founding myths of whiteness, particularly the “disturbing realities” of land and labour. In his introduction Coetzee remarks: “White writing is white only insofar as it is generated by the concerns of people no longer European, not yet African.”
This summation beautifully evokes South Africa’s frail white constituency.
More recently, books such as Melissa Steyn’s Whiteness Just Isn’t What It Used To Be (2001), as well as a growing body of art works and critical texts, have done much to particularise the debate — in academic terms, at least.
Liese van der Watt, an academic at the University of Cape Town, is a highly articulate and charged conversationalist. Her starting point is simple: there is a current and prevailing “crisis of whiteness” in South Africa. Her insights are informed by the increasing number of art works and items of popular culture variously demonstrating anxiety, restlessness and activism around whiteness. She cites the bearded buffoonery of the “whitey” in the Vodacom ads as an example.
“All these various actions by artists and advertisers have, in effect, foregrounded whiteness,” said Van der Watt, “making people aware that they are white. What people do with that knowledge is a very different issue.
“In some cases this awareness has made them retreat more and more into their cluster homes and suburbs,” she said. “Many white people have experienced a form of psychological emigration from this country.”
Walls are easy to identify, but psychic migration is not. Nonetheless, if you listen carefully, it forms the backbone of many popular conversations. I recently spoke to an exasperated economist who articulately critiqued the Employment Equity Act, stating that it defied positivist economics. For him, whiteness does not owe history any debts.
But it is not just employment equity legislation that shows whiteness to be a vulnerable construction. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission demonstrated white complicity with and complacency about apartheid, and effectively detonated the legitimacy of white nostalgia.
“Even though people feel nostalgic, many don’t want to simply hanker after the past because they now know it was wrong,” explained Van der Watt. “That is the core of the displacement [white] people are feeling.”
But it is not a universal condition, and there are no absolute terms. As Van der Watt stresses, “Whiteness is not monolithic. There are ‘others’ contained within the understanding of white. Some whites are trying to engage with their whiteness in a constructive way.”
Does this include Tony Leon? After all, he did say: “I am no guilty white”, which is what audiences were saying at Booth’s show.
“Guilt is a passive emotion, where you feel bad about something and don’t do anything about it,” said Van der Watt. “This might explain why Leon wants to walk away from the notion of guilt — it doesn’t really move you to activism.”
Antjie Krog, author of Country of My Skull, was less enthusiastic in her appraisal of Leon’s statement: “That is actually just stupidity. Privilege is in the bones, you don’t wipe out privilege in one generation.”
Like Van der Watt, Krog expressed the belief that increased activism around whiteness will help dispel misgivings and fears.”It is only when you are constantly challenged that there are other ways of doing [things] that people realise things about their position and privilege,” said Krog.
Krog admitted that her thoughts on the subject are guided by the pronouncements of Njabulo Ndebele. She regards Ndebele’s inaugural Steve Biko Memorial Lecture in 2000 as a key text on the subject, saying it “helped a lot of us to see that there is a difference between being white and whiteness. The latter word refers to a construct, a thing that you make.”
So whiteness can also be deconstructed. For Ndebele, this is critical. “The quest for a new white humanity will begin to emerge from a voluntary engagement by those caught in the culture of whiteness of their own making,” he remarked in 2000.
Deon Snyman (38) is one such individual engaging with Ndebele’s challenge. I first met him in 2001, when he was still a minister with the Unifying Reformed Church, a multiracial offshoot of the stolid Dutch Reformed Church. Snyman’s small, rural mission at Dingaanstad, in northern KwaZulu-Natal, overlooks Umgungundlovu, the former royal residence of Zulu King Dingaan.
“My main aim is reconciliation,” he told me. Snyman’s great-great-grandmother was killed in the nearby hills, at the Battle of Bloukrans, a precursor to the Battle of Blood River.
“Afrikaans people have a very big responsibility,” Snyman said. “They must take the initiative, the first steps towards reconciliation.” Not satisfied with his ministering alone, Snyman signed the Home for All initiative, a contentious declaration of collective guilt for apartheid endorsed by a prominent group of white South Africans.
It was not just the dismissal of this event by many white South Africans that has caused Snyman to re-evaluate the potentialities of whiteness in contemporary South Africa.
Writing to me two years ago, on April 27, he was in a particularly disconsolate mood: “I spoke with an Afrikaans guy yesterday. We talked about the Aids pandemic in the area I’m ministering in. With great enthusiasm in his voice, he asked if it is really true that so many people are dying of HIV/Aids-related diseases. I could sense that he was dreaming about Aids ‘rescuing’ South Africa from a black majority, of South Africa becoming white again.”
Snyman ended his letter with a sombre insight: “When I speak to my black friends, I sense that they are becoming impatient with their white fellow-citizens. I’m quite certain that’s what happened in Zimbabwe.”
His words and actions echo something Ndebele pointed out in his lecture: “On balance, white South Africa will be called upon to make greater adjustments to black needs than the other way round. This is an essential condition for a shift in white identity in which ‘whiteness’ can undergo an experiential transformation by absorbing new cultural experience as an essential condition for achieving a new sense of cultural rootedness.”
Even a cursory glance at contemporary South Africa suggests that this shift is frustratingly slow in the realisation. Nonetheless, the experiential transformation Ndebele talks about is taking place — it is suggested in Snyman’s story and the provocations of white artists and academics.
That such “activism” is problematic for many white South Africans underscores its necessity.
A comment by a black visitor to Booth’s exhibition eloquently reiterated this point: “People, especially those privileged, do not want to talk about their privileges.”