In one of his occasional but welcome visits to South Africa, President Thabo Mbeki emitted another beatitude: this one was about the reactionary psycho-pathology prevalent among those white people still insisting on languishing in his republic.
Mbeki was quite clear. Many white South Africans are ”still locked in the apartheid past”. It is time they accepted that the days of baasskap are gone.
To help you work out if you’re still incarcerated by your prejudices, here’s another of the popular Loose Cannon self-test questionnaires. NB: This questionnaire is meant for white people but coconuts are welcome to try their hand.
1) You have just been retrenched after working for 35 years in your job. You know your business back to front, but whenever you scour the situations vacant columns you see the daunting phrase: ”Previously disadvantaged applicants will be given priority.” What do you do?
(a) Go along for the interview knowing that your vast experience and affable personality will win through in the new non-racist society.
(b) Take the matter to the Constitutional Court.
(c) Send your wife on to the streets.
(d) Emigrate to Zimbabwe.
2) You arrive home to find your home has been burgled. You telephone your local police station to be told that their officers will visit your home only if you pay for the petrol and agree to a hefty ”private investigation” fee, to be paid in cash. What are your immediate reactions?
(a) A surge of nostalgia for the days when BJ Vorster was minister of police.
(b) You write an embittered letter to Sheila Camerer.
(c) You rush out to the nearest ATM.
3) Several hundred squatters move on to the piece of vacant land next to your house. Within a month your electricity and water accounts soar by about 7 000% and, as carefully as you look, you can’t find where they’ve connected up. What do you do?
(a) Invite representatives of the squatter community to drop in for tea and a friendly discussion.
(b) Sign up for an Arthur Murray course in ballroom toyi-toyi dancing.
(c) Send an hysterical e-mail to Pam Golding.
4) At dinner parties the main topics of conversation invariably swing to matters of life in the new South Africa. What terminology do you use when referring to the new South African political parties and their appointees?
(a) Our darker brothers.
(b) Our democratically elected leaders.
(c) Affirmatives.
(d) Those &%*$*@! bastards.
5) At one of these dinner parties a fellow guest offers the following observation: ”I never thought that one day in the future I’d find myself longing for the days when PW Botha was still in charge.” What would be your reaction to that statement?
(a) Immediately leave the room.
(b) Vomit.
(c) Give him a high five.
(d) Empty your vichyssoise over him.
6) Your are tooling happily along the motorway in your beat-up Toyota. Behind you an out-of-the-box R750 000 BMW 735 roars up and from about 20cm from your back bumper, flashes its lights, blasts its hooter, weaves and dodges as it tries to pass you. In your rear-view mirror you see that the BMW’s driver is a black woman clutching a cellphone to her ear. What do you do?
(a) Wind down your window and give her the finger.
(b) Use the same finger to make little circular motions around the side of your head.
(c) Be overwhelmed with a feeling of long-overdue political equity sponsored by the sight of the magnificent car and its captivating driver, and wave her merrily on her way.
(d) Suddenly slam on your brakes to give her the fright of her empowered life.
7) You pick up a new history textbook your child has brought home from school. It states that Jan van Riebeeck was sent to the Cape with strict instructions from the Lords Seventeen in Holland to slaughter as many indigenous people as he could find. The vegetable garden was just window dressing. What do you do?
(a) Tell your child this is an atrocious lie, that Van Riebeeck was only instructed to kill black people, not Khoi-Khoi people, who were only to be whipped into domestic service.
(b) Quietly agree that it is high time the uncomfortable facts were revealed.
(c) Report Van Riebeeck to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
(d) Pay Athol Fugard to write a heartbreaking play about it.
If your escape from the psychological strictures of apartheid is working. you will have answered: a, c, a, b, d, c, b. Anything less, get some counselling from Humans Right for Lawyers.