I’ve never met a white person who will admit that his or her parents were accomplices to and beneficiaries of apartheid. Whenever the subject comes up among us post-apartheid inter-kids, it is discussed to the nth degree, but it seldom gets personal.
I have never heard my friends Nicky or David say something like: “Actually, my parents were racist and I used to kick my servant.” The defence is always that their parents knew it was wrong and that they can’t remember not having black people in their school, or they claim that their best friend was black.
It’s not as if I think they are lying. Although I do remember a white girl in my standard three class publicly declaring that God forgot all the black people in the oven. And instead of retaliating verbally or physically, in our outnumbered humiliation we black children laughed with the rest of the class.
We may have grown out of that 1995 kind of insensitivity and vulnerability, but apartheid is still an issue that is skirted around in our inter-racial discussions.
It’s not easy as a black person to associate your friends with it or to interrogate them about it.
Similarly, it is unlikely that they will come out bearing their scarlet letters of guilt. Not that I want to interrogate anyone. I’m not waiting for the apology my history has conditioned me to wait for. It may not be the most valiant approach, but it allows me to feel that I have moved on.
My interest in this subject is propelled by my developing friendship with my Afrikaans-speaking neighbours and their friends. We talk about the fact that they are white Afrikaners and we are black, but not from a perspective that presupposes the stereotypes that black people have about Afrikaners, or vice versa. We don’t see it as the next-generation bridge-building effort that it is, we just enjoy each other’s company.
We talk about shared cultural principles and values. Like how our parents taught us the importance of serving food to adults on a tray, how we were all taught to use “the suffix” when talking to parents and adults. We couldn’t just say an empty “yes” or “no”. We would say “ewe, mama” or “hayi, mama”, and they would say “ja, ma” or “nee, ma”. We talk about getting hidings for the same things. We talk about everything that is not race-related, as if it’s an effort on both our parts to forget about this thing we are reminded of every day.
But we don’t forget and that’s what binds us. And then we drink. Some of us even go on dates, unsure whether it could be another obligatory de-othering exercise or something more, born out of genuine affection. Who cares? I am interested in finding out about them precisely because they are different.