Having grown up at a boarding school in the Free State near the one-street town of Tweespruit, I was surprised when a researcher I interviewed for The Media‘s sister website Marketingweb commented on what is obviously a new discovery for her – that there are a lot of similarities between blacks and Afrikaners.
There is a popular joke among black South Africans about an Afrikaner boy who was lost at the airport and looking for his mother. Scared, he sees a black flight attended standing not far from him and decides to ask him for help.
“Askies Oom Kaffir,” he says, “Kan u help? Ek soek my ma.”
When I told this joke to my colleagues some were not sure whether to laugh or not, surprised that I found it very funny.
This happens to be one of my favourite jokes, not only because of its innocence and yet unintentionally insulting nature but because it highlights one of the similarities I’ve noticed between blacks and Afrikaners – how they raise their children.
Growing up, my mother would smack me silly if I were to address an adult by name. We were taught to use “brother”, “aunty” or “uncle” in front of the person’s name regardless of whether we were related.
Till this day, I still can’t refer to my friend’s mother by her first name, Winnie, even though that’s what everyone else calls her. I call her Mrs Graham, short of saying Mme (mother) Winnie, regardless of the number of times her son Stuart has told me to call her by name. It just doesn’t feel right. And this is also what I’ve picked up during my interaction with Afrikaans-speaking South Africans – that they too were taught to refer to their elders, not only relatives, as “oom”, “tannie” and so forth.
I remember the first time I saw a young Afrikaner child receiving a hiding. It was in Roodepoort in the 1980s and, boy, did that child get a beating. All I could do, besides wince, was sympathise with the little boy for I knew very well what he was going through – having received a couple of hidings in my lifetime and “graduating” from a wet washing rag to a belt when I was a bit older. Worse for him, his mother was smacking him with an open hand on his bottom.
“Hao, Ma, hante lemakgowa a shapa bana ba bona? (Mother, I didn’t know that white people also beat up their young?),” I asked my mother, as we walked past the all too familiar scene. “A shapa maburu, ha bapale (Boers give a good hiding, they don’t play),” she responded, not fazed at all by the sight.
With so much media attention given to race relations in South Africa, I wonder what impact a research study looking into such similarities would have on our society. Would it help, perhaps, in improving our perceptions of one another?
Already, it seems progress is being made as a number of companies are now not only focusing on race to understand people’s purchasing decisions. There’s now an increasing focus on people’s mindsets and the environments that shape them, proving – like Metro FM stated boldly a couple of years ago – that what makes you black (or even white, Indian or coloured) is not the colour of your skin or the texture of your hair. It is your soul.