Natives are regrouping

A Namibian friend once told me a story about going into a German-owned restaurant in the old Windhoek and ordering a sandwich. He was given bread and polony. When he asked if he could have butter on the bread to make it more palatable, the proprietress told him: ‘No butter for natives.”

Bizarre stuff. Unlike many other natives, this guy was in a position to pay for the butter if it cost extra. He was prepared to pay for the sandwich, same as the rest of the customers, who generally tended to be the you-know-whats. But he was a native. On principle, whatever the money, natives didn’t get to get butter on their bread.

Wind forward to liberation days, post-independence, post-Namibian liberation, post-Mandela’s triumph after years of prison ascending to the presidency of a reconciled South Africa in 1994.

We’re in 2006, and it looks like there’s a new kind of war going on. Nowadays, according to well-placed, self-proclaimed intellectuals of the new dispensation, the whole struggle about refusing to be treated like a native has been turned on its head. Nowadays, to be native is cool. It’s the only thing to be. The only thing is, now you apparently have to apply, and run the risk of rejection.

I phoned a number of formerly native friends, all of whom have made a name as intellectuals, and asked if they had, unlike me, been invited to join the Native Club. Their responses varied from baffled to outright indignant.

Some said, in the famous attitude of Groucho Marx, that they wouldn’t be prepared to join that kind of club if it was prepared to have them as a member. That is the kind of self-defensive response you would expect of a typical dilletante with a chip on his or her shoulder. That is what dilletantes and intellectuals, pseudo or otherwise, do.

Others, more numerous, were amazed at the idea of anyone trying to even think up the idea of a ‘Native Club”. What was the struggle about? (And of course, my limitation is that I am still stuck in the days of the struggle, so most of the people I called were themselves also still stuck in struggle attitudes.)

Didn’t we struggle so that natives could stop being called ‘natives” and get butter on their bread?

Apparently that is a non-issue. The issue nowadays is that you have to earn the right to be a native.

Me and my ex-friends from the not-too-distant anti-native struggle, when I finally stopped asking them awkward questions on the phone, were collapsed in confusion. In the words of the late Winston Churchill, most of us are gobsmacked.

Then I spoke to a young chap from a newspaper who was too young to have even known anything about pre-1994 history — what my daughter describes as ‘the days when there were still dinosaurs”.

What did he think about the Native Club? I asked.

To my amazement and reluctant fascination, his answer was identical to that of the dinosaurs I had been speaking to. ‘What the fuck is that?” he said, although his words as he spoke to me on the phone should remain unprintable.

He, like me and all my dinosaur friends, including the venerable Esk’ia Mphahlele, had not been invited to join the Native Club, in spite of his interesting credentials, and in spite of his visibly intellectual, black, native hide.

But he did take the trouble to draw my attention to an article by the chairman of the Native Club, one Titus Mofolo, who also happens to be political adviser to the current president of South Africa, explaining the logic of the club and its objectives.

‘We seek to build a climate congenial to continued reflection and self-examination by the native intelligentsia, asserting itself in the realms of arts and culture, socio-economy and politics,” the chairman said. The main focus of his statement was that the country’s intellectual representation of itself had been hijacked by the ‘neo-liberal philosophy [that] is dominant in SA [sic]”. These neo-liberals are apparently ‘consistent in trying to shape the form and content of the transformation of SA [sic] through public discourse, vocal and visible campaigns for their causes and better networking”.

It’s an interesting argument. Like a polony sandwich without butter, it suggests a lot of possibilities but doesn’t satisfy any of the pertinent questions that might give some substance to your hungry, questioning, black or white stomach. Since we all live here, or are trying to do so.

I would say that the real threat comes not from the carefully unnamed neo-liberals (and, since I haven’t been invited to join the Native Club, I must include myself among their number, along with other loudmouthed dinosaurs) but by a kind of neo-fascism that has no colour.

It’s a different kind of sandwich. It calls itself the ‘Native antidote to Liberals”.

To be honest, I can’t even taste the polony in the argument.

But then I haven’t been invited to join the club, where I could have got a taste of what it’s all about.

And then again, I guess you could say: ‘That’s just all sour grapes.”