In White Writing, JM Coetzee describes white South Africans as “no longer European, not yet African”. Almost 20 years later, we may ask if white South Africans are any closer to Africanness. Can white South ÂAfricans be African?
Frederik van Zyl ÂSlabbert is suspicious of answers that define “African” along ethnic or racial lines, and rightly so — his “abiding revulsion for closed systems” is the hard-won inheritance of all South Africans. But his own answer, “I live in Africa, therefore I am an African”, is too quick, and has its own problems.
First, his sweeping inclusivity, like the sweeping exclusivity he disputes, effectively denies that the question matters very much. But the milky diaspora leaking into the Commonwealth’s more sunburnt corners suggests that it is a question worth asking, and answering, in contemporary South Africa. More white South Africans have packed for Perth in the past 12 years than under apartheid. Reluctant expatriates or vehement ex-patriots, their common characteristic is that they have clearly elected not to define themselves as African. While these unsettlers are not the majority, neither are they statistically insignificant. It is a fair and important question just how representative these people are of white South Africans in general — after all, they too lived in Africa. Once.
A second problem with Van Zyl Slabbert’s definition is that it is too inclusive — it was equally true of white South Africans under apartheid. If the tension Coetzee describes means anything at all, if there is any sense in which whites are “not yet African”, then Van Zyl Slabbert isn’t answering the same question. The reason, I suggest, is that the Africa that defines Africanness is not a location, but a shared undertaking.
Van Zyl Slabbert points to President Thabo Mbeki’s “I am an African” speech and calls himself African “because my president told me so”. But focusing on the inclusion of white settlers on the list in the speech’s first half (the carefully ambiguous phrasing is “whatever their own actions, they remain, still, part of me”), he overlooks a later, more complex criterion: “The pain of the violent conflict that the peoples of Liberia, Somalia, the Sudan, Burundi and Algeria [suffer] is a pain I also bear. The dismal shame of poverty, suffering and human degradation of my continent is a blight that we share.”
What is wanted is not residence in Africa, but solidarity with Africans — what Joseph Conrad (of all people) called “solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate”. Solidarity does not come bundled with citizenship. It is not cultural, racial or linguistic sameness. It is not synonymous with credulous support or acquiescence. It is both empathy and the commitment to a shared existence which empathy should entail. It is the recognition that being an African means being with, and through, other Africans. This is not another of the tautologies Van Zyl Slabbert tilts at, but the recognition that our identity derives from our shared existence and our shared fate.
Such solidarity was always circumscribed for white South Africans. Many contemporary South African whites have inherited either the specific commitments or the general insularity of past generations. But the implicit hope — the “not yet” — in Coetzee’s description points out that this is not inevitable. There are those who want to be “pale natives” or “Anglo-Africans” — those who see “Afrikaner” as an achievement, not a birthright.
Being African, in this sense, is not (necessarily) about wearing dashikis or speaking isiXhosa to power. But neither is it a matter of whipping out an ID book and pointing to the second word after “nationality”. When a black South African asks a white one, “Do you consider yourself African?”, she is asking, in effect, “Are you with us then? Those of us who commit to this place?” And when a white South African asserts, “I am an African”, what it should mean (if it is to mean anything at all) is, however uncertain our fate, it is a shared one.
It isn’t obvious how many white South Africans can say this. Some never will — their commitment to insularity, or uncomplicated suburbia, or (crassly) to race precluding any real solidarity with others. Most probably haven’t considered the matter any further than pointing at that second word. But for those who can, perhaps we can say that they are “no longer European, white yet African”.
Jason van Niekerk teaches philosophy in the part-time studies programme at Wits University