The thing is, we all now fervently believe that it is safe to venture out of the woods. The thing is, it isn’t.
Consider this. Nosimo Balindlela, provincial minister for sports, arts and culture for the Eastern Cape, has just instituted a civil claim to the tune of R100 000 against a (presumably white) woman, Erika de Beyer, who called her a baboon in the parking lot of an East London shopping centre some time last year.
The baboon-speak woman has already paid a fine of R1 500 for the offence, and says she has apologised to the provincial minister. But the provincial minister is not yet satisfied, saying that “she pleaded guilty just to get this thing over with,” according to her lawyer.
De Beyer, the baboon-speak woman, continues to protest that she regrets her parking lot outburst, and alleges that the provincial minister never responded to her apology. “I’m going to leave it to the court to decide now,” she says.
What is interesting about this particular incident is that the baboon jibe was uttered, they say, in impeccable Xhosa — meaning that both women were operating in the same language system, if I can put it that way. It is not unusual to find Xhosa-speaking whites in the Eastern Cape (or Tswana-speaking whites in the North West province, or Zulu-speaking ones in KwaZulu- Natal, for that matter.)
The question it raises, therefore, is: What was the true underlying meaning in De Beyer’s outburst? If you call a black person a monkey or a baboon in Afrikaans or English, the implication is clear. If you call them a baboon in their own language, which has effectively become your own, what then?
Consider this. A black Xhosa woman or man calling another black Xhosa woman or man a baboon might start a mini clan war, but you couldn’t put it down to racism.
I suspect that this is the unspoken weapon that De Beyer is using in her defence. As far as she is concerned, she was operating within meaningful and acceptable boundaries of colloquial use of a common language.
But the fact that she is white and the person she had insulted is black (and a senior local political figure to boot) gives the whole incident an edge that pushes it beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse. Never the twain shall meet, no matter how many apologies De Beyer makes to soothe the ruffled feathers of Balindlela.
It will be interesting to see how the court decides in this matter.
When we were at school we were taught by rote the silly jingle, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”
Pass the sick bag, Alice. Kids like me in predominantly white schools were always told by our classmates to lighten up. “Why have you got such a chip on your shoulder? We’re only joking when we call you ‘sunshine'”, they would say. Or “darkie” or “coon” or “nig-nog”, or worse.
“Why’s the black power sign like this?” they would ask, clenching their fists in the air in mockery of the Black Panthers or the sleek, brave, gold medal-winning black American runners who donned black leather gloves as a symbol of protest against their own country at the Mexico Olympic Games in 1968, or thereabouts.
“Yeah, why’s the black power sign like this,” my spotty white friends would ask.
“Why?”
“Cos if it was like this,” they’d retort in triumph, opening the formerly clenched fist and displaying a wide open hand, “they’d fall out of the trees!”
Hee-hee. Hee, hee, hee.
“Come on, Sambo, we’re only having a laugh. Let’s go and play football.” Which is probably why I never developed much of a taste for football, or any other sweaty group sport.
Yeah, sticks and stones, my foot. If you showed signs of being particularly sensitive to this casual vulgarity coming out of the mouths of babes in the playground, they would gang up on you in a threatening way:
“Hey, we’re just joking, Coco Pops. If you’re so sore, why don’t you call us something back? We wouldn’t care.”
And the thing is, wrack your brains as you might, there is no equivalent epithet to throw back in the face of your arrogant playmates. “Honkey”, “cracker”, “grey-meat” just doesn’t cut it with the same lethal contempt as all the names that they are able to muster to throw at you. Which makes them all the more contemptuous of your helpless, pitiful pain.
It’s all a joke, they tell you. But then you sit bolt upright when you read a story in a newspaper, from the Rainbow Nation in 2004, that goes like this: “A tenant at a Mpumalanga farm will appear … in the Nelspruit Magistrate’s Court on a charge of murder after he allegedly shot dead a farm labourer he ‘mistook for a monkey’.” The suspect says he took out his shotgun and shot the supposed monkey when he saw it on top of one of his avocado trees.
“It was only when the labourer fell on the ground that the suspect saw it was not a monkey, but a person,” the report concludes. It is not reported that the white man with the shotgun expressed any regret when his unfortunate mistake was discovered.
This goes side by side with the ongoing trial of three people who threw another farm labourer over a fence into a lion enclosure on a game farm, also in Mpumalanga, after they had given him a nearly fatal beating when he came to claim back wages. The labourer, needless to say, was devoured by the grateful lions, who have not been charged.
Human beings have an endless capacity for manipulating language in the service of their own personal ends. But it’s a very small step between a baboon slur in an East London car park and a mistaken monkey at the end of a live shotgun in rural Mpumalanga.
Whatever the courts decide, you and me know we still have a very long way to go, don’t we, Boet.