I cannot help but feel Rory Carroll’s narrative of disillusionment (”Why I never quite fell for South Africa”, August 18) was better saved for the psychoanalysts’ couch than as social commentary on the new South Africa.
As a fellow Brit living in South Africa, I sympathise with some of his points. It is true that race saturates everything, creating the feeling of walking on eggshells. But the moment we feel the crunch underfoot, so to speak, shouldn’t that just spur us on to think about how to tread differently rather than not tread at all?
How can reconciliation happen otherwise? It’s the stuff of ex-pat legend, sipping G&Ts in Happy Valley, spreading white mischief on the veranda at safe distance from the real lives and real problems of the ”natives”. But keeping your distance only serves to keep you distant. If ex-pats socialise only with people of a similar income and education level, if they have far more white friends than black, if they only live in the Happy Valley of gated suburbs, can we really justify this by saying that it is ”only natural”?
Such depictions of naturalised entitlement have also characterised conservative white anxieties at dealing with the new South Africa by, in fact, not dealing with it at all. Carroll’s depiction of South Africa as a one-party state, rife with Aids, corruption and crime, reproduced every tired media image of the African continent.
The descriptions of Jo’burg wine bars and sexual opportunities aplenty available to a white man in Africa said much more. Every colonial stereotype about lascivious and dangerous black bodies was lurking in the account of ex-pats scared of HIV/Aids refusing to date black women. Incidentally, some studies suggest black African women are over-represented in statistics due to the prenatal approach to statistical gathering of HIV/Aids rates.
Concern at the government’s criminal negligence of the pandemic is laudable — yet, ironically, in a narrative of ”dangerous black bodies” in Jo’burg wine bars, he reinforces every stereotype that President Thabo Mbeki’s intellectualist ”African renaissance” and traditional-remedies approach to the pandemic (in a misguided way) seeks to refute.
As any good psychoanalyst will tell you, we choose to see what we want to see. On my first day in South Africa, a variety of people (that is, black, white and coloured) told me I would a) be mugged or murdered if I took the train; or b) stabbed if I went by taxi.
By my second day, the hyperbole got so bad I began to detect a discourse of moral panic with distinctly racial overtones. So, I got on the train and shunted myself sardine-like into overcrowded taxis. People’s horror and fear of these spaces seem quite at odds with my experiences of them. I sometimes wonder if we are living on the same planet, and since I don’t have a car, it’s true that I’m definitely not living in the same South Africa as those that do.
Of course I cannot deny the trauma many South Africans have experienced through violent crime against themselves and their loved ones. However, panic about crime can act as a self-fulfilling prophecy. We become what we fear. People assume they will be attacked if they walk about Cape Town, so streets are empty, a virtual ghost town after 6.30pm. Subsequently people get mugged in the empty public spaces, easy prey when there is no one else around.
Poor street lighting and inadequate transport infrastructure compound this psychological curfew. This also helps create a rampant car culture, neither ecologically sustainable nor conducive to breaking down the physical or emotional barriers constructed by apartheid. This car culture in turn creates new variations of apartheid spatial ordering and segregated access. Those with cars can drive in insulation to equally insulated malls. Those without cars must shuttle back and forth in dangerous and overcrowded taxis.
I am warmly welcomed into a diversity of South African homes simply because I have made a little bit of effort to cross barriers both physical and psychological. These homes have never seen a white person cross their threshold in 12 years of post-apartheid possibilities.
I have stood astounded in township streets as elderly women with tears in their eyes embraced and thanked me, simply for entering their communities and walking down the street. That’s all I did. But for them it spoke of something visible and powerful to the psychological barriers of apartheid, as yet so omnipresent for people of all races in the new South Africa.
Divisions run so deep here that its arguably easier for me, as a foreigner, to cross the rubicons of space and race than it is for someone from a ”coloured township” to cross into the world of an ”African township” or vice versa. It is also easy because as a white foreigner, I am in actuality relatively safe from violent criminality, much of which occurs in contexts of domestic intimacy and entrenched poverty.
So, now, when someone tells me I’m crazy to jump in a taxi and go to the townships, or when ex-pats lament the fact that they lived in a bubble and failed to engage with ”African daily life”, I listen carefully to this. What could be at stake? True reconciliation, perhaps?
Phyllida Cox is a postgraduate student at the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town