/ 24 April 2017

Slice Of Life: Making the difficult move to connect

Thembelihle Mashigo.
Thembelihle Mashigo.

There was something of a Penny Sparrow moment at a local high school. In a WhatsApp group, there was an incident between a white boy and a black girl in which there was a lot of name-calling and some quite racist things being said. So I was part of a group that were called in to the school to facilitate discussions and conduct workshops with the pupils around race and diversity.

The girl is quite a wordsmith and would use language that many of her fellow pupils didn’t really understand. During the discussions, when it was her turn to speak, she spoke in a way that was kind of condescending. But I understood why she did that. I was listening to a radio interview with Chris Hani’s daughter recently, during which she said the one thing her father drilled into her was the importance of mastering English; to know it so well that she could speak over the oppressor. This, of course, comes from black people’s history of being seen as inferior.

A lot of the white pupils didn’t attend the workshops. And later, when we split the pupils into different groups, we found that in those groups, the white kids would sit together on one side and the black and brown kids would sit together on the other. But there was this one white boy who sat next to that black girl. I asked him why he chose to sit next to her. He said: ‘We lost each other in our anger, so sitting here is my way of connecting. With social media, so much gets lost that chances to repair things are very limited.’

I was deeply moved by that. I saw something very brave in that. I also work with older people on these issues so I know that making that kind of move – that move to connect – can be very, very hard for people. But that gave me hope. That, even though there is the difficulty of making that kind of move, there is hope.

Thembelihle Mashigo, 35, as told to Carl Collison, the Other Foundation’s Rainbow Fellow at the Mail&Guardian