The Mail & Guardian asked young professionals to describe their national identities and Ivor Chipkin, author of Do South Africans Exist?, to evaluate the responses
Zweli Twalo
”To be very simplistic, I am a South African because black people like me survived police brutality and I am South African because I am a child of Mandela,” laughs writer and artist Zweli Twalo, a self-professed Rastafarian and co-founder of Sounds of Edutainment. Twalo unpacks his complex identity by describing himself as a human first with ”every other label trailing behind”. Although he is proud to be South African, he sees himself as part and parcel of Africa and is adamant that South Africans are not yet unified because of the economic inequalities and a lack of cultural and religious acceptance.
As a young Rastafarian from the Eastern Cape he does not believe his religious and philosophical roots are recognised in the country’s new dispensation. ”In terms of politics we all appear unified, but on closer inspection you will see that we are not mobilising for the same goal.” — Vuyo Sokupa
Rukeya Slamang
”Although I am Muslim and coloured, I’m not the kind of girl who speaks softly, casts my eyes down and wears a doek. I’m a South African. And I’m uniquely different, because I’m not one thing only and I refuse to be stereotyped,” says 25-year-old Rukeya Slamang, who is a champion in Muaythai — a type of Thai boxing.
Slamang, who works for a recruitment agency in town, says Cape Town is not conducive to being a South African. ”Cape Town is incredibly groupie and people stick to their groups — coloureds mix with other coloureds and blacks with blacks and whites with whites. That’s how this town still operates. Most people still see themselves either as blacks or Muslims or coloureds or whites — most people describe themselves in terms of their religion and their ethnicity,” she says.
”If you tell people you’re Muslim, they expect a soft-spoken girl with a doek on her head, while I’m loud and outspoken and make a lot of noise.”
Slamang says her parents had wanted her to be different, but over the years have come to accept the way she is. ”My parents are religious people. They only look at themselves through the eyes of their religion. They see themselves as Muslim first and finally. That’s not who I am. I’m a South African and a Muslim and coloured. But I am mainly Rukeya. That’s my citizenship.” — Pearlie Joubert
Hendrikus Vorster
Hendrikus Vorster (27) sits surrounded by the knick-knacks of Tant Malie se Winkel, an antique shop and restaurant he manages, just beyond the Hartbeespoort dam wall. An old stove against one wall, shelves lined with tin cups and old photos of the area serve as a backdrop to Vorster as he talks quietly and deliberately about what he thinks it means to be a South African.
”I lived in London for two-and-a-half years and the way I knew what a South African was, it didn’t matter whether they were black, English whatever; they all say lekker, they know what a braai is,” he says.
Being in another country made him more positive about South Africa. ”When foreigners ask you about your county and you tell them how you experience it, they all go, ‘Wow, that is so great.”’
He says the process of describing his home got him thinking about what South Africa has to offer: ”Over there you really start missing what you have here, the sunshine, all that stuff,” he continues.
Vorster describes himself as Afrikaans first, ”being an ordinary guy” second and a South African third. He is getting ready to start his own carpentry and specialised furniture business next month and says South Africa is a country in which he wants to start a family and raise children. — Lynley Donnelly
Tshepo Riba
Tshepo Riba (27), a West Rand-based statistician, thinks that South Africans have become more like citizens of the republic than they are nationalists. He believes that imposed colonial ideologies still prevail. Riba describes South Africans as a very submissive people, whose freedom of expression had been stolen by an oppressive regime. He blames colonial influences for ”making blacks into what they are today”.
”I’ve always considered myself a MoPedi before I am a South African, because I believe that South Africa as a nation was only established to mark certain [geographic] boundaries.” Colonial influences, he believes, were historically imposed on people and that makes it difficult for them to suddenly turn against them.
”I am an Anglican by faith because it was imposed on me from the beginning, but I would have preferred an African religion instead. But the problem with African religion, as you might know, is that it is now out of practice and it is not as relevant as it was before.”
In terms of establishing a national identity, Riba thinks South Africa still has a long way to go. After all these years, he says, South Africa is still to achieve a new national culture that represents its multiculturalism. ”I think the old political system and the new one are the same. The slight difference is that the new one is trying to be inclusive of everybody,” he adds. — Monako Dibetle
Mahlako Mahapa
Twenty-four-year-old entrepreneur Mahlako Mahapa identifies herself as an African woman first and then a South African Pedi: ”I regard myself as African. Most of my friends are from the rest of the continent.”
”I do not believe in calling myself proudly South African or ascribing to a South African identity. I support the South African cricket team because they’re the best team representing the continent,” she says.
Mahapa reckons there are certain benefits to being South African. ”Being a young black woman I am glad to be South African because in the times we live in right now there are unlimited opportunities and there is growth potential.”
Mahapa does not believe in borders and says that ”we are all Africans”. — Haydée Bangerezako
Sandhya Lalloo
Fashion designer and lecturer Sandhya Lalloo (27) from Lenasia sees herself only as a South African Indian and believes that her nationality and culture are intertwined.
Lalloo says South Africans are rapidly re-establishing themselves as a collective, and not by their different cultural backgrounds. ”As a nation, we already have a reputation of being hard workers and very friendly. When I went overseas people could readily tell that I was South African because of my independence and willingness to work harder.”
Despite her awareness of a clash between her Indian heritage and Western influences, Lalloo thinks that colonialism matters less lately. ”I believe, everything depends on what we have and what we want to achieve as a country. We are responsible for making this country what we want it to be. I think that at this stage we are learning from each other as much as we can,” she says.
Lalloo stresses: ”I am Indian and I know that my heritage will always be there, but I don’t dress or speak Indian at all.”
She thinks most cultural norms and customs will make way for a South African culture that is equally representative of its multicultural society. ”Who knows, maybe in 20 years’ time there will only be people of one colour,” she says. — Monako Dibetle
Thendo Tshikororo
Thendo Tshikororo (22) lived in exile in the United States for 14 years before returning to South Africa in 2004.
”First and foremost I’m a mother; secondly I am a member of the black race. Having grown up in America in a subtle, yet sometimes overbearing, social order, I have come to realise that I don’t identify with blacks throughout the world.”
Tshikororo now defines herself as a ”black, Venda woman”.
”But I felt more South African in the US than here in South Africa. In the States everybody — whether black, white or Indian — appreciates each other more. We all liked pap and we all liked to braai. I felt more ostracised when I moved back here. I see colour as the biggest divide; I see more segregation here than togetherness.
”Somehow, though, I feel connected to the land. When I touch the ground here, I feel I am home.
”I don’t understand any of the other South African cultures because both of my parents are Venda. To be honest, I don’t truly understand or identify completely with Venda life or culture either. I don’t understand many of the intricacies of daily life or social interactions, and that somehow sets me apart.
”Part of my culture has died because I can’t articulate myself to the core of my being in Venda like I can in English.” — Haydée Bangerezako
Gatsaam
”It’s somebody with balls. You have to have balls to stay in this country,” says the 37-year-old bar owner and veteran biker known only as Gatsaam, on what it is to be South African.
”At this stage, everything is fucked up; they kick you when you are down,” she says angrily. Gatsaam’s frustration stems from the fact that in the space of a month, her bar, on the R512 out to Rustenburg, was burgled twice and then it was gutted in a fire. Her new premises, however, flaunts this sign above the counter: ”Hier bly ons, al ly ons [Here we live, even if we suffer].”
Bringing back the death penalty is a sure way to decrease crime in the country, according to Gatsaam, as she sees jail as an ”easy way out” for criminals who don’t fear getting caught.
Despite this, Gatsaam enthusiastically describes herself as a South African biker woman, with no hang-ups: ”What you see is what you get.” Her grandmother, she says, was one of the first woman motorcycle mechanics in the country.
When asked what she loves about living here, she says: ”I love Zamalek [Black Label]. I love biltong, beadwork and sunshine on my naked body. And nobody grows ganja like the South Africans.” — Lynley Donnelly
No easy walk to a free identity
”Africans are authentically so when they are able to ‘see’ themselves through liberated eyes,” says social scientist Ivor Chipkin in his new book, Do South Africans Exist? (Wits University Press).
Chipkin sets out to provide a critical study of South African nationalism.
The book began life as a thesis at the Ecole Normale Superieure in France and was written while Chipkin was a researcher at Wits, Oxford University and at the Human Sciences Research Council.
But do the young South Africans of 2007 still define themselves in terms of resistance? In this transcribed interview, Chipkin describes who is believed to be authentically African, and then reflects on the profiles of young South Africans featured in the Mail & Guardian‘s Freedom Day spread:
”What is ‘a liberated eye’ and who in South Africa is liberated? You have a couple of versions. One version, which comes through the Black Consciousness movement, is the idea of someone who is able to return and find in themselves an African. One who can recover and affirm being black or being an African again. It means a return to authentic African things.
”Some might valorise traditional authority as being the real African. In Steve Biko’s terms it means, dare I say, a return to an African mentality. Biko says Africans are not really problem-solving people — they tend more to celebrate things; they’re into music; they’re not really scientific. It makes me uncomfortable, but that is all part of it. An authentic African is supposed to have these sorts of qualities.
”Another version of being liberated, which was strongly co-present in the anti-apartheid movement, is of someone who comes out of the working-class struggle. It is the figure of someone poor and organised through the working-class struggle. It is the worker ultimately who is the real African because it was the worker who was first an African, but who was also exploited by South African capitalism.
”But it is not just a question of identity. This feeling of being authentic is now about being comfortable in the world of commodities in the modern post-industrial world. It is fundamentally informed by economic growth. It over-values [a new elite] — it doesn’t affirm yokels. Quite frankly, we don’t give a shit about those people, even though we see growing unemployment.
”Take our land-reform process, for example. It unduly promotes commercial farmers. We don’t have a huge black class of commercial farmers, but the perception is that we’ll train them somehow. The commercial farmer is more in line with the idea of who is part of the world of commodities, part of the global village. And a peasant farmer is so ‘uncool’.
”But look how different this is to India. India idealised those peasants, those unsexy, uncool people with parochial ideas sitting in villages. It put huge resources into those sorts of people. The kind of economic growth you are seeing in India today is the result. It has had huge success in terms of literacy, in terms of health. And we are squandering those chances, not because we have sold out to neo-liberalism but because of our concept of who is an authentic South African. That’s the gist of the book.
”What I think is interesting in the profiles run by the M&G this week is this idea that identity is a project of the self. The idea that one is working to produce one’s own identity — it is not something given, it is not something imposed upon one.
”As wonderful as it all sounds — all this fashioning, borrowing in and hybridisation — what is conveniently dropped from the picture is the political setting in which this all happens. This is usually in the context of a political project privileging certain identities over others.
”There is a public domain in which people are resisting the official version. Nonetheless, there is an official version of what a South African is. That version of identity is hugely significant. Not just about identity questions, but also in terms of the allocation of economic resources, economic policy, a vision of post-apartheid South Africa.
”Mbeki is appealing to a new kind of universalism — that the African more than any other person in the world embraces the true universal.
”You have interviewed a particular group of people. It would be very interesting to hear how people who are not employed, who are not making it in the new South Africa, how they feel about things.” — Matthew Krouse