It’s quite an amazing week of remembrance, with other things going on in the midst of it. It’s June 16, and much is going on to mark it. Books are being published, concerts are being held, and everybody is asking everybody the question: ‘Where were you on June 16 in 1976?” Eery refrains of ‘Where when you when John F Kennedy was shot?”
I had a challenging conversation with a young a black waitron in the northern suburbs this week. The conversation took a surprising turn because it reminded me once again that not all of us are youths anymore, and this moment of remembrance was making us older youths forget what it was to have the passion of that youthdom, if there is such a word. I was suddenly, in my mind at least, going in the direction of history leaving those of my generation behind, or us leaving it behind, or getting lost in the backwash, like an ocean liner moving on. La Nave Va. That, and all of history’s preconceptions.
But the conversation became more about deeper things. The waitron brother wanted to talk about blackness, because he had seen me wearing a Steve Biko T-shirt some weeks before.
The Steve Biko thing has almost come to be taken for granted, like the Che Guevara poster, the movie, and the T-shirt that goes with it. But the Biko effect, if I can call it that, was a powerfully significant part of what led us up to the doors of June 16. The waitron wanted to talk about blackness, because of my T-shirt, and wanted to know where I stood regarding it. Biko and blackness seemed to be synonymous. For him I had become an icon in the Biko thing.
And here I was talking in the past tense, even though I was only joking. And suddenly it made me think, on this significant 30th anniversary of what that June 16 moment was all about. It made me think about it all in a different way.
So we started to talk about blackness. I was being challenged by his eager curiosity, by his eagle-eyed commitment to a cause for which he no longer had a focus, since everything has been generalised and globalised. So I had to think about this blackness thing afresh.
And then I wanted to know from him what he knew about blackness, because, even before Biko and June 16, the issues around it were fraught with challenges that are no longer part of what could give the waitron and me a context within which to have a conversation. And yet, between whiles, as he slipped backwards and forwards to our table, we were having a full conversation. And sometimes we were laughing about it.
Blackness makes you black. Blackness is like putting you on a chessboard, where things are strictly black and white, and there is no in between, only the White Queen and the Black King.
But the reality is somewhat different, as it started to dawn on me while we were talking in the northern suburbs of Old Johannesburg.
Blackness, on this June 16 anniversary, is what you make it. Blackness is a reaction to having been called black for all these generations. Blackness is, and always will be, a relative condition. As one of the struggle poets once said, ‘Black is Struggle”.
I found myself saying to this waitron person: ‘I’m not black. I know I’m going to get into a lot of trouble for saying it, but I refuse to be called black anymore. Black by you? Black by who?”
And I showed him my hand compared to his. Neither of them was close to black. The chair that I was sitting on, as I said to him, was painted black. But why do you want to be black like a chair? Who’s sitting on your aspirations? Who is defining them?
June 16 makes me think about a lot of things. There is that stuff of getting out of the violence of apartheid that flung so many of us into various diasporas, both local and not so local, always involuntarily. Bringing it all back home.
Above all, June 16 has to remind me of a turning point in our history. The black youth of the trapped townships, my absent twins, stood up on their hindlegs, like animals surrounded in the the veld, locked out of the former hinterland and said, ‘The hell with all of this”.
Or that’s what it seemed like in this conversation.
He asked me why, at this historic moment, 30 years down the line, I seemed to be saying that I wasn’t proud of being black. Because that was what made him proud of me. Being black in that Biko T-shirt. Tough. Troublesome.
I know I’m going to get into a lot of trouble for saying this. But: no, I’m not. It’s June 16, and I don’t think it’s time to be proud of being what we are not.
The only thing that is black about us is what is black about the rest of the sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly landscape we live in.
Ugly landscape?
Yup. We live in one. The beauty sinks away all around us under the light of the full moon that we take so much for granted.
We allow it to slink away. We wake, hoping that it’s going to be another beautiful day — especially since we are here in Africa, like the day we were born, which we can’t actually remember.