A triple whammy. A column by Guardian correspondent Rory Carroll and a series of online postings about it. A PowerPoint slide show called ”WorldCup_2010”. A popular cellphone chat room.
Common to all of them is traditional white racism that you don’t see much in mainstream media any more.
”Why I never quite fell for South Africa” is the title of Carroll’s swansong, as he ended a four-year stint in Johannesburg. After (understandably) hammering President Thabo Mbeki on Aids, Carroll asks: ”How can you fall in love with a country that forfeits the chance to save so many lives?”
Deep down, what is this saying? One, a dislike for a president is reason for alienation from people who voted for the man’s party? Two, foreigners are expected to fall in love with ”South Africa”?
What logic underlies such odd notions? Perhaps a view that one unlovable black person equates to all (because ”they” are basically homogenous)? Perhaps the assumption that foreigners are supposed, innately, to feel love for a place because they are white and the country comprises mainly blacks?
Strange stuff. Carroll goes on to write that in South Africa ”race still permeates everything”. What he does not write, however, is about how race might also permeate his own unconsciousness. A liberal outsider like him tainted by deep-down racism? Inconceivable!
Yet part of his gripe against South Africa is that the experience of being mugged triggered such a gut anger that he felt like committing murder. Not interrogated at all is the extent to which the race of the mugger was a factor in this fury. One suspects, though, that Carroll’s emotion would have been less intense had his assailant not been a black person … whom, of course, he was ”supposed” to love.
If Carroll can’t wholly come to terms with his own racial baggage, there is, however, no shortage of explicit racism in the chat-room responses to his article. A typical comment: ”The country has no logic. It depends on what mood these darkies wake-up in and how many Black Labels went down the night before that descisions [sic] are made.”
Another posting extends the narrative: ”WELCOME TO AFRICA! There is absolutely no place for European (Western) sensibilities here. It’s the Law of the Jungle that dictates whether you live or die.”
In a chat room on another site: ”SO another Liberal turned realist. Reality is ‘Africa for the Africans’! You cannot change them.” Predictably, another racist opines: ”Just give it some time, and he [Carroll] will have the same problems in London. They [sic] jungle is also creaping [sic] in there.”
That not just race, but old-style racism as well, is alive and well and living online is also evident in another cyber-technology.
Enter ”SouthAfrica_2010”, the PowerPoint slide show. This jokey ”delight” doing the e-mail attachment rounds consists of derogatory images of African people. A poor person’s makeshift shoes become an offensive reference to the ”latest gear” to be made available to players come the 2010 World Cup.
Images of dilapidated vehicles symbolise the transport to be used. There’s a picture of a brand-new street with a telegraph pole smack in the roadway, and of balconies that had to take cognisance of a lamppost predating their construction. The culminating message: ”So come to South Africa where we really know what we are doing!”
Finally, there’s MXit — a service offering a dirt-cheap chat room to South African teenagers using GPRS on their cellphones.
In the nature of such fora, users greet each other with the ubiquitous ”ASL?” acronym seeking out their mutual age, gender and language or location. But that’s not all: it’s also common for participants to append an ”R” to the three-letter question.
Those teens asking for race are clearly attaching social and individual significance to this identity characteristic. And my guess is that this is not with a view to exploring cross-racial cyber-relationships positively.
In all, there is some unpleasant thinking out there. The relative absence of blatant racism in polite society and media-public discourse does not mean that it has gone the way of apartheid. Instead, what seems deeply buried within Carroll’s article is thriving in the online world.
A range of reasons explains why such politically incorrect voices are seldom portrayed in the mass media. One factor possibly is that they are unwilling to be identified.
Indeed, common to the Carroll online postings, the PowerPoint slide show and the cellphone chat room is anonymity. There are strong racialist views out there, but none of the authors will give their names.
Maybe it’s a fear of retribution for being offensive. But there’s another strong possibility: to give a name would compel some thinking that real life is about individuals, not stereotyped categories.
The tragedy of racist narrowness is that, like Carroll’s mindset, it’s based on the thinking that you have to be wedded to social generalisations one way or another. So, if you cannot love ”a people”, you can certainly hate them.
Such a paradigm misses the excitement of South Africa today: the polyglot of hybrid and shifting conceptions of oneself and of others, and the dynamism of what race means (or not) at any given moment.
Fixation on race as an overriding worldview is a self-limiting mode of existence. It reduces life’s richness through its one-dimensional racialising.
Encountering such narrowness should help us remember that we are neither race-free (as Carroll might think of himself), and nor are we race-fixed (as his online supporters suggest).
But perhaps media coverage shouldn’t shield us so much from the views of small-minded people trapped in archaic ways of thinking.