The other day I saw a fat, white kid in the international departure hall at Johannesburg airport. His straining T-shirt had three broad hoops of colour across it: orange, white and blue. On his belly the flags of the Transvaal Republic, Orange Free State and Cape Colony bulged out of shape, and on his back was a terse message about how he came from some slough of despond on the West Rand, and was proud of his history.
So maybe Pallo Jordan is right to institute a programme of flag-raising and patriotic education in schools. But I don’t think so. Unlike the fat kid, I remember the 1994 midnight on Wale Street, and throngs of people outside the Cape Provincial Administration buildings.
The old flag was lowered. There were cheers. The new one broke suddenly open under the bright floodlights. There were louder cheers. Standing in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, in the middle of town, watching the standard of fascism and colonialism being replaced by this liberation compromise, with its mess of colours, is one of the brightest threads in my recollection of what freedom felt like when it was new.
But I also remember the stuff that fat kid is so proud of. My scout troop met in a dingy hall where Constantia begins its slump toward the Cape Flats.
There we were instructed by a recent graduate of southern Angola in handling the Oranje, Blanje, Blou. Raising the flag, and singing the national anthem — even for those of us whose leftish parents taught us to feel uncomfortable about it — was an extraordinarily powerful induction into the rituals of the totalitarian state.
That fat kid has an iPod, a future as bright as he is, and no obligation to die in some Angolan watermelon patch defending volkskapitalisme. What does he need the old, racist, nationalism for?
Most of the children in this country have freedom, and a future as bright as their state-funded education can equip them for. To what end do they need to be taught a new patriotism?
Installing the flag in every school is an anti-revolutionary gesture, instituting in the place of complicated, conflicting, disparate experience of South Africa, a fixed and changeless symbol.
Children need to be taught history, they need to be taught the Constitution, they need to be taught literature and music, they need to be taught their rights. Patriotism of a complicated, cautious, revolutionary kind might just emerge in the process. If it doesn’t, there’s probably a reason that a bit of flag waving won’t remedy.
Symbol of my freedom
Ferial Haffajee: COMMENT
Dear Nic
I want my children and their children’s children to proudly unfurl and raise the South African flag. And like you, my point of view is coloured by my childhood.
At Bosmont Second Primary School, one of those sell-out coloured schools, we children were made to stand in fidgety lines raising the orange, white and blue, singing Die Stem. (I still get sick when I try to hum it today, as a good new South African.) Then we were given sweets and sent home early on May 30, the day before somebody else’s Republic Day.
In later years, my older schoolmates jumped from windows when the police raided our high school to force them to celebrate May 31 after they chose to attend school to show it was not our republic. (Almost 30 years later, I swear I can still see the red spilt in defiance of the orange, white and blue.)
It is, for me, a flag of freedom, the antithesis of all that the old monstrosity represented. It represents the Constitution, built to shield us from the indignities and horrors of the past. The flag does not belong to the government, which is ephemeral, as all governments are. It is a symbol of a tolerant and debating society; it is symbol of my new right to differ and to complain; and to sing my own anthem. Or not. Excuse me while I go unfurl my flag.