Recently, my little sister told me a story that made me rethink some of my disillusionment with South African society 15 years after apartheid.
It was not a story about politics. It was a story about a boy. She blushed and fumbled her way through this story and when I asked her his name she said ”Luvuyo”. It struck me then how different our lives were.
When I was 15, apartheid was recently over and I was attending a private school which, despite being home to the daughters of several ANC MPs, certainly did not provide me with the opportunity to meet any boy called Luvuyo.
My class photos show a sea of white with the odd dark face scattered between us. My little sister’s class photo reveals the reality of our demographics and shows her to be part of a minority.
More than the novelty of the possibility that she could have met and fallen in love with someone who wasn’t white was the fact that it did not register for her as a salient feature of his identity. At no point did she describe him as black; only as smart, kind, funny.
My little sister’s story made me wonder if, despite my perception of the lack of progress in the grand state project to transform South Africa, small private stories have started to succeed where the state has failed.
It is no surprise that one of the first major pieces of apartheid legislation was an act with jurisdiction not over the divisions of public space that came to symbolise apartheid so iconically, but over that most intimate and private of spaces — relationships. The Prohibition of Mixed Races Act of 1949 and the Immorality Act of 1950 criminalised love across the racial barrier. It is easy to forget that, not very long ago, my little sister would have been walking a dangerous line, courting not only a boy but a violent encounter with the state.
The story of my friend James and his love affair clearly illustrates why it was so important for the apartheid state to police the intimate if it was to maintain its stranglehold on the country.
The story of James and Thabo could not have happened 20 years ago. They might have fallen in love, but their lives would have been consumed by escaping the state and hiding their relationship.
James (24) is a middle-class white boy from the ‘burbs. He met his boyfriend, Thabo, at the University of Cape Town. They had mutual friends, saw each other at a few parties, one of them asked the other out for a coffee (they argue about who initiated this) and soon started dating and fell in love. Their story is so ordinary, so common, it is inconceivable to imagine it a crime.
James had already told his parents he was gay. Thabo’s parents live in the Free State and, a few months before taking James home to meet them, he came out of the closet to them, too. James was worried about how he would be received by Thabo’s parents, but when they arrived, his mother greeted him with a huge hug.
They spent the next few days exploring the intertwined histories of their two families — James’s ancestor had been a missionary at Thaba Nchu and established the mission in the community where Thabo’s family had lived.
As it turns out, James and Thabo are not from such different places after all. Their love affair not only defies the bigotry of racism and homophobia, it also highlights the generations of interwoven lives that South African society consists of — the very histories and links the apartheid state sought to erase.
Apartheid was a time when the state entered our homes in omnipotent and menacing ways. Growing up, I knew of love stories destroyed by the state.
One story involved a friend of my parents, a single mother of two who met a charming and charismatic man. At the time she was working for an anti-apartheid organisation. She married this man, who soon changed from charming to violent and began behaving suspiciously.
When information relating to her anti-apartheid work was leaked, she realised that her new husband was probably a spy. The marriage lasted six months, but I have often wondered how long the suspicion and fear lasted afterwards.
I have tried to think about the meaning of these events for my parents’ generation, tried to compare it with my own.
The questions I ask when falling in love range from ”Does he like dogs? Does he read good novels?” to ”Is he planning to emigrate?” and they cannot compare with the questions that faced women of my mother’s generation: ”Is he an apartheid spy? Will his political activities get him arrested and killed?” or ”Will we ever be able to hold hands in public? Will our children be treated as second-rate citizens?”
Transformation may still be sorely lacking for the majority of South Africans, but the slow process of change has surely begun, in real and meaningful ways. The realm of the intimate is no longer policed by the state and it is here that hope for real transformation lies.
Kelly Rosenthal is a PhD student at Oxford University