The Chairman Hjof gets cozy at the cozy cave

The chairman and i, being white tourists following along with the general tourist route recommended by guide books, the white-dominated baz bus, and the other white suckers backpacking through the country, decided to go from one famous beach village, chintsa, to another, called coffee bay. inbetween the two places is an inland city called mthata, the once-capital of the once-transkei homeland (or ‘bantustan’) created by the apartheid government as a way to oppose the demands for freedom and independence on the part of the liberation struggle with degrading, dependent puppet-states of black subjugation, which nonetheless would be referred to by the apartheid state and their puppets as black ’self-determination.’ anyway, our friend sean in grahamstown was raised in the transkei (as a white south african, one of a small percentage of families that seized upon certain tax incentives and so forth in order to make a life for themselves in the homelands, and thereby provide the little statelets with a certain skills-base that they needed to achieve a sliver of legitimacy) and so he asked us whether we were planning on heading to mthata. having read some things about it in the guidebooks, the chairman confidently said, “yes, of course.” to which sean replied, “ok, good, because mthata is, well… a shit-hole. yes, it’s a total toilet.” and sean sure was right.

ah, but i said already that we were headed to coffee bay, 80 km down from mthata. well, we sure thought we were clever. we were going to the white tourist zone, but we used black transportation to get there, a little private taxi, which is the transport available (other than hitchhiking) for black people who cannot afford cars or buses. and as we were arriving late to mthata (too late, we thought, to take the two hour trip down to coffee bay by hitchhike or taxi) we decided to sleep in mthata. and two ladies in our taxi told us they knew of a place for accomodation, and that it was right next to their house, actually. so, we were delivered to the cozy cave, a remarkable little place, a place so amazing that one hopes that it can be humorous. we sure tried to make light of the situation…

mmm… what a nice dinner we had…

The Chairman Hjof remembers boyhood on the ‘wild coast’

from east london, we went to a little village called chintsa, which is the start of the so-called ‘wild coast’ of south africa. we stayed in a crazy backpackers, which was kind of like a commune for weird, alcoholic sports lovers. that part was pretty crap. but we had a nice time wandering the beach, being boys again, finding neat animals and messing with them, and then playing some chess, to finish it all off.

here’s a weird puffer fish, which the chairman, being the fully civilized person that he is, ’saved’ from a little pool that he’d been washed into, and put back in the larger stream/ocean:

and here’s an octupus. the chairman wanted to get a better look at it, so he tried poking it with sticks, or at least poking the ground nearby, but it didn’t work. the little guy was sneakier and more patient than us little boys:

The Chairman Hjof mocks his settler kin

once the chairman was feeling a little better, he and i and doerte hitchhiked to east london (ironically, the route to east london passes berlin, potsdam and hamburg, so our hitchhiking signs said, “london,” “berlin” and “potsdam,” which no one but us found funny). arriving late, there wasn’t much to do there but walk along the beach. but we found out on our map about a memorial to the german settlers that came to the area in the 19th century.

turns out that this apartheid monument has been fused with a ‘hero’s park,’ that is so strange, and so weirdly placed, that it’s almost laughable. it consists of this:

and this unexplained list of names:

The Chairman Hjof makes his presence in grahamstown known

after a midnight pillow fight to celebrate the chairman’s birth (he was assaulted from all sides by lena, simon and i) and a crazy attempt to kite surf, which ended up sending him hurling through the air for a good 30 meters or so, we arrived in grahamstown on the chairman hjof’s birthday.

the national arts festival was pretty fun. we spent a week there, as the chairman had a friend who let us stay in her apartment for the week (we were alone, as she was house-sitting elsewhere) and so we had a very domestic, married-couple life with our friends, complete with omelettes, espressos, fela kuti and bedtime stories. there were a number of excellent performances we went to. most notably: a play written by zakes mda called “you fool, how can the sky fall?” which was mocking african dictatorships, zimbabwean (jazz) musician oliver mzutukuli, a play about a prominent activist and city council member (for the now-destroyed [to make it a 'white' area] district six neighborhood in cape town) from the 20s through to the 50s, named Cissie Gool, a great pantsula dance performance, a crazy irreverent, mocking afrikaans hip-hop artist named max normal and lectures on the repercussions of the corrupt ANC arms deal of the early nineties and on the so-called ‘border war,’ of apartheid white male conscripts fighting against the guerrilla forces and the cubans in southern angola.

(here’s doerte and jodi sleeping beautifully in our little cottage):

i got myself a couple of new sweatshirts (cuz i also got my jacket stolen and grahsmtown was freezing cold) and some gifts for friends and loved ones. here’s one of my new sweatshirts, featuring the big JC that we all know and love. i like to believe that it’s really just a tree…

towards the end of our time in grahamstown, the chairman got sick, so doerte and i had to entertain ourselves…

somehow, we thought this sign wasn’t explicit enough, so we made it more clear:

Bakkie to the national arts festival

the chairman, lena and i all rode in simon’s bakkie up to grahamstown for the national arts festival. it was a fun journey, cramming into the back to sleep, and lounging about, looking constantly backwards, as we meandered through the mountains and along the coast.

The ‘Black Menace’: Towards a decisive and final attack on whiteness

“It was soon after the riots of June ‘76, and Johannesburg was so tense it was hard to breathe. Soweto was mourning its many hundred martyrs, and a political detainee named Wellington Tshazibane had just ‘hanged himself’ while in the custody of the secret police…

Whenever my phone rang, some white paranoiac came on the line to pass along another rumor.

Children were being butchered on their way to school. Some whites had heard that tomorrow was kill-a-white day. Others had it on good authority that black maids were being incited to poison the master’s tea…”

- Rian Malan, from “My Traitor’s Heart”[1]

“No, no need to fear, we are perfectly OK…

South Africa is not going to start slaughtering you and all that…”

- Thabo Mbeki[2]

“We shall need to see our efforts not so much as attempts to right wrongs on behalf of the blacks,

as to set our society free from the lies on which it is built.”

- Nadine Gordimer[3]

White South Africans repeatedly justified the continuation of the brutality of apartheid by reminding the country – and the world – of the “swart gevaar,”[4] or “black menace.” Having some awareness of the tremendous level of violence and humiliation they were inflicting on the general population, white people lived with the nagging fear that someday ‘the blacks’ would come thrashing into their heavily-guarded pockets of prosperity and privilege and simply annihilate them. Of course, like so many other places governed by the tyranny of white supremacy, the violence never boomeranged back enough to fulfill the nightmares of the ‘average white man and woman’ (who anyway would insist that they were totally innocent and had nothing to do with it, when it was all over).

Whiteness survived the decades of anti-colonial wars that brought ‘independence’ to the majority of the world’s people (and the corresponding radical upheavals within the various ‘mother countries’ of empire). Even if they have to wall themselves off within increasingly over-policed houses, suburbs, and nations, white people seem intent on protecting what bits of privilege they can. Millions will be locked up, surveilled, placed under military rule and/or straight murdered to protect the world’s whites from their own unwillingness to be accountable for the history of imperialism. So, the fear of the ‘black menace’ remains.

The situation is dire, but we seem to have reached a dead-end (or multiple dead-ends) in our thinking. ‘Undoing Racism’ is now the registered trademark of the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, one of dozens of grant-driven organizations that service the ‘anti-racism’ needs of the corporate and non-profit world. The branding of the phrase, ‘Undoing Racism’ is an attempt to control the way that we talk about Race, the limits and possibilities of our aspirations for a non-racial existence – and so far it’s working. Even within the radical left, (and for that matter the anarchist ‘post-left’) if we talk about race at all the conversation is inevitably driven down the narrow paths that the anti-racist NGOs have generated.

Who says there is such a thing as ‘people of color,’ that such a coherent unity between the world’s non-white peoples exists? For that matter, are there even African-Americans? Is there such a thing as a ‘white heritage,’ or an ethnic identification that white people might aspire to beneath and outside of the history of imperialism? Can the word ‘white’ really be replaced by the word ‘male’ or ‘able-bodied’ or any other privileged group, and convey roughly the same meaning? Are all forms of oppression truly ‘equal’? Towards what end do we speak in these ways? Do these articulations of the problems of race help us to end race once and for all? These are heretical questions that we are not meant to ask.

Undoing Racism is a registered trademark, which is based on a standardized definition of racism, which is based on a standardized set of ideas about who white people are and who people of color are and what that all has to do with feminism, anti-capitalism, environmentalism, and so forth. This straight-jacketing of rebellion against white civilization has led to the creation of a new kind of ‘black menace’ amongst the white ‘left’. Many white radicals refuse to ‘do anything’ about race because they are disturbed by the way in which militant politics are watered down by attempts to fit whatever work we’re doing within the anti-oppression paradigm that the NGO machine has generated. For example, when a new suburban development, or a dealer’s lot full of SUVs, or a ski resort are set on fire, white privilege is being attacked at the point of production. But no one is describing it in these terms; even the elves who carry out the arsons don’t think of themselves as committing an act of treason against Whiteness. The action remains firmly within the confines of ‘radical environmentalism.’ Then, if radical environmentalists want to attack white supremacy, the whole anti-oppression framework is imported into the movement, and suddenly we are led to believe that perhaps even civil disobedience is racist behavior somehow. As a result, talking to some white radicals, one gets the sense that they’re afraid that black[5] people have a certain inherently liberal ‘taint’ to them, and that if they align themselves too closely with ‘anti-racism,’ that taint will rub off on them.

This criticism from certain anarchists is not just the Afrikaner nightmare flipped upside down; there is an important warning in the subtly racist fear of these young militants. The message is clear: the ideological and practical frameworks of ‘anti-oppression’ trainings are not generating the type of resistance that will be capable of making any serious rupture in the long night of racialism. At exactly the moment when people need to be thinking about how to add some claws to their struggles, anti-racism de-claws us. Race is a power in and of itself, and must be directly confronted, in constantly fresh and inventive ways.

The slippery beast of Whiteness has caught on to this ‘Undoing Racism’ business, and is far ahead of us, carrying on the business of empire and ecocide. We need to hit the poor fucker from different angles, armed with new tactics and new ideas.

---

[1] The grandchild of one of the architects of apartheid, Malan’s book is full of ‘tales of ordinary murder’ under apartheid.

[2] Thabo Mbeki is the current president of South Africa, and was one of the key negotiators for the ANC during the ‘transition’ to a majority government. This quote summarizes his message to the whites on the other side of the negotiating table.

[3] A prominent South African novelist, Gordimer’s work is very focused on supporting the struggle against racialism, from a radical white perspective.

[4] This is an Afrikaans phrase.

[5] For my part, I prefer to use the word ‘black’ in the sense that the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa spoke of it: as that portion of society that is not only not-white, but self-consciously wanting to identify themselves, in both name and action, as in opposition to the structures and ideology of White Power. That is to say, i reject biological framings of who is black or white, and reject also the term ‘people of color,’ because it assumes that all non-whites aspire to be something other than white, which is a dangerous assumption. For example, the BCM saw it as obvious that African, Indian and Coloured people working within the police department or other branches of the apartheid government were quite clearly not ‘black,’ and I would certainly agree.

‘We Were All Affected’: Colonialism through the eyes of whites raised in independent Africa

INTRODUCTION

A white boy is born in Zimbabwe in 1987. For multiple generations before his birth, his family had been Rhodesian, part of the white settler community that declared themselves independent from Britain in 1965, fought a desperate 15 year war against the black guerrilla forces, then finally conceded to a negotiated Zimbabwean independence – and Black majority rule – in 1980. The white men of the generation before him played active roles in Rhodesia’s ‘counter-insurgency’ efforts. At age 21, the young white Zimbabwean can name the various ranks his father, uncles, and family friends had within the military. Attempting to explain the significance of his family’s role in the Rhodesian army’s attempts to maintain white rule he says, “we were all affected” by the war.

In one simple phrase, this young man absolves his ancestors of any agency in taking up arms for white supremacy, and thereby absolves himself of any need to make amends to the majority of his countrymen for the legacy he has inherited. The cognitive dissonance between his conception of the “Rhodesian Bush War” and what black Zimbabweans refer as to as Chimurenga, or Liberation struggle, makes for a profoundly troubling conception of one’s self and one’s history[1]. It is a cognitive dissonance that white people experience – indeed, impose on themselves – throughout ‘liberated’ Africa.

If, in naming silences we refer not only to the absence of speech, but also to speech that is conspicuously absent of vital information, I take it as a given that white people in Africa are largely silent about their own participation in colonial and racialist regimes. While this silence has vast implications for the history of post-colonial Africa, I am interested in the effects such a silence has on the young whites[2] in Africa who are given silence as a set of instructions about how to navigate life. That is to say, I am inquiring specifically into the circumstances of that generation – or generations – that grows up in a context in which their ancestors were part of the colonial apparatus of white rule, but are now themselves citizens of a (majority) black democracy.

If we are to make a second presumption, which is that post-colonial African states are in a period of re-defining themselves, both in the present and of their own national history, then where do young whites fit in this process of re-definition? Do they see themselves as needing or wanting to develop a different set of values from the ideology of their parents (and ancestors generally)? Are young whites able to find a comfortable ‘fit’ within nonracial democratic systems – do they embrace their society and feel embraced by it – or do they feel marginalized by and antagonistic to the project of independence?

This paper is an attempt at beginning to address these questions; it points to what is still left to be done as much as it brings closure.

This paper is divided into two broad thematic fields of inquiry:

1. Taking responsibility for crimes perpetrated by white people, and/or in the interests of creating and preserving White Power.

• In what ways did whites intervene to set the boundaries of justice that could be pursued following decolonization?
• How do the terms of ‘reconciliation’ frame white people’s understandings of their new role(s) in society?
• How does the behavior of white adults (who lived under, and perpetuated, colonialism) translate to young people’s understanding of themselves as culpable in white supremacy?

2. Developing Post-Colonial value systems, or, “How shall we look at each other then?”[3]

• How are white people described in the new history of the nation? Who is describing them? Are white people involved in their own re-making? Are there dissident tellings within the white community’s overall narrative?
• To what extent do the changing social relationships between white and African youth translate to a different set of morals or expectations of white behavior?

Principally the study focuses on South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya. The choice of countries is mostly pragmatic. I have chosen countries with substantial white settler-colonial populations, and furthermore, in these countries, a great number of the whites didn’t flee[4] from the advent of black government[5]. Beyond pragmatism, I am interested in comparing and contrasting the effect of three different routes to independence[6] on post-colonial realities.

THE TERMS OF RECONCILIATION

“It does not occur to the descendants of the perpetrators (and often to the descendants of the victims) that true repayment can be meaningfully assessed only in a different form from the currency which has flourished on those crimes.”

- Jacques Depelchin

“We shall need to see our efforts not so much as attempts to right wrongs on behalf of the blacks, as to set our society free from the lies on which it is built.”

- Nadine Gordimer

After the Mau Mau rebellion had been suppressed at a cost of some 15,000[7] lives, independence came to Kenya in 1963 with the specter of the black demand for land still fresh on the minds of whites. In the words of one settler:

“We were frightened. Land was the big factor and we thought Uhuru would mean masses of Africans squatting on our farms… But when ‘Jomo’ didn’t realize our worst fears, we almost fell over ourselves with relief. He told us we must forget the past and build Kenya together[8]. We were skeptical at first; but gradually it became music to our ears. The bad man became our father figure, almost overnight.”[9]

In material terms, Kenyatta gained the confidence of the white population by suppressing the militant demands for land of the left wing and ensuring a basic level of protection for white property ‘rights.’ “Bolstered by British aid, advisers, and investment, the new rulers of Kenya maintained an open economy profitable to a growing number of multinational corporations aligned with Kenya’s black elite.”[10] In moral terms, an important precedent was set: ex-colonial settlers would allow for a level of social peace – broad compliance with black governance[11] – in exchange for minimal disruption to their hegemonic control of the nation’s economy.

By the time Mugabe came to power, in 1980, Samora Machel, president of Mozambique, would use the severe white[12] backlash against Mozambiquan socialism as a warning to Mugabe against pursuing socialism in Zimbabwe[13]. The boundaries of social justice had been clearly established. Therefore, Val Ingham-Thorpe explains:

“Prime Minister Robert Mugabe announced a policy of reconciliation. This was hailed at the time as taking a very mature and statesman-like approach.”

She continues:

“However, with hindsight, we can see that this policy caused several problems, having left intact many of the structures of oppression… indeed, whites often used the reconciliation policy to entrench still further their advantageous social and economic positions. They were not, and did not feel obliged to integrate themselves into the new Zimbabwe.”[14]

Writing in 1997, from within a Zimbabwean human rights organization, Ingham-Thorpe is clearly basing her claims as to the failures of ‘reconciliation’ on the lived experience of 17 years of independence. But what are the mechanisms of this failure? How does it come to be that, in Ingham-Thorpe’s words, “some of the events that have taken place since the end of the liberation war have demonstrated not reconciliation but rather silence, denial, and amnesia”?

According to Jay and Erika Vora, Zimbabwe effectively did “nothing” at all in terms of a structured process of reconciliation. They make this claim in order to contrast Zimbabwe against South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, (TRC) which they praise as, “one of the most remarkable efforts of peace making in recent human history.”[15] They are far from alone in making such a bold affirmation of the merits of the TRC. But for a scholarly investigation of the matter, this is a gross over-simplification.

Mahmood Mamdami, having undergone a much more thorough investigation of the language and mechanics of the TRC than Vora, asserts, in contrast to Vora’s optimism, that:

“The TRC extended impunity to most perpetrators of apartheid. In the absence of a full acknowledgment of victims of apartheid, there could not be a complete identification of its perpetrators. To the extent that the TRC did not acknowledge the full truth, the amnesty intended to be individual, turned into a group amnesty. For any perpetrator who was not so identified was a perpetrator who enjoyed impunity.”[16]

Mamdami’s central thesis is that the TRC addressed only ‘gross violation of human rights,’ as perpetrated by specific individuals upon individual victims. Furthermore, the TRC dealt with the actions of “any employee of the state… or any member of the security forces in the course of his or her duties” but only when the violations were conducted, “with the objective of countering or otherwise resisting the struggle [against apartheid][17].” [TRC 1: 82-83, ¶ 123] Therefore, despite acknowledging that “apartheid was in and of itself a gross violation of human rights,” [TRC 4: 288, ¶ 123] the TRC was unable to directly confront the specific policies of apartheid. As a result, the architects of apartheid policy were neither tried in a court of law, retaliated against through mob violence, nor asked to speak the ‘truth,’ but rather, quite simply, ‘let off the hook.’[18]

“If the ‘crime against humanity’ involved targeting entire communities for racial and ethnic cleansing and policing, individualizing the victim obliterated this particular – many would argue central – characteristic of apartheid… The consequence was to narrow the TRC perspective to a political reconciliation between state agents and political activists… It consequently ignored apartheid as experienced by the broad masses of the people of South Africa.”[19]

The failure to rectify the grievances of the majority of the victims of apartheid can be understood in simple numerical terms. “The commission acknowledged 20,000+ ‘victims’ of apartheid for whom it recommended reparations.” How plausibly is this a complete list of people owed reparations? Mamdami cites numerous examples of moments during the TRC’s mandate years (1960-1994) when thousands of people experienced ‘gross violations of human rights’ which were not dealt with by the TRC. In just seven days in March of 1990, “as many as 20,000 people” were forced to flee from their homes. In suppressing the Pondoland revolt of 1960-61, “hundreds of thousands” were victims of forced removals. Over the mandate years, some 80,000 people were detained without charges. And so on. “Could a ‘crime against humanity’ that involved a racial and ethnic cleansing of the bulk of its population have only 20,000+ victims?” Answering his own rhetorical question, Mamdami reminds us, with a hint of irony, that:

“The grounds for declaring apartheid a ‘crime against humanity’ were not the individual violations – killing, arson, etc. – that the commission acknowledged but the racial and ethnic cleansing – ‘institutionalized discrimination’ – that the commission refused to acknowledge.”[20]

The deeper implication of the TRC’s findings is that they, “rewrote the story of apartheid in a rather fundamental way.”[21] Having walled themselves off against both internal and international criticism during apartheid, white South Africans, presumably, had in the TRC their first opportunity to name and to face the nature of their decades of domination. Therefore, the TRC carried the power to frame the post-apartheid analysis of not only what exactly apartheid was, but also why and how it must be abolished. Mamdami, for his part, offers the following succinct definition of apartheid:

“The rule of apartheid was bifurcated: the law simultaneously racialized and ethnicized the population. Races were defined as those not native, not indigenous; whether they were accorded full civil rights (whites) or only residual rights (Coloreds, Indians), races were governed through civil law. In contrast, tribes were defined as those indigenous, those native to the land; set apart ethnically, each tribe was ruled through its own patriarchal authority claiming to enforce its vision of colonially sanctioned patriarchy as ‘customary law.’”[22]

According to Mamdami, this understanding of the nature of apartheid is obscured by the TRC’s attempt to ‘universalize’ the experience of apartheid, and the related over-emphasis on the idea of apartheid as a violation of democratic principles. “In trying to locate South Africa on a universal plane of rights violations, it dislocated both apartheid and its victims from a larger history of colonialism and its victims.”[23] However, Mamdami’s deepest, and most scathing indictment of the TRC is that:

“Even if all recommendations made by the Commission are to be implemented, it will leave in place the bifurcated division between civil and customary law. Its reforms will help deracialize civil law and civil power, but will not really promote a process tending to deethnicize customary law and customary authority… Will not the outcome of such a partial reform be a nonracial apartheid?”[24]

Indeed, with lynch mobs of South African citizens burning people with passports from other African nations because they don’t know the Zulu word for elbow, the grim affects of nonracial apartheid are undeniable.

Mamdami’s criticism that the TRC gave impunity, not amnesty to perpetrators of apartheid is not shared by the majority of observers. While the majority of black South Africans see a level of basic “effectiveness” in the TRC process, it appears most whites either dismiss it as wrong-headed or a waste, or use it as an excuse not to do anything further[25]. In 2000, a pledge of apology was drafted to try and encourage a broad process of white people taking responsibility for their participation in – and privilege as a result of – apartheid. From this basic acknowledgment, signatories pledged, “to use our skills, resources and energy … [toward] promoting a non-racial society whose resources are used to the benefit of all its people,”[26] This simple statement, which journalist Chris McGreal claims, “is no more than an acknowledgment of what many black people take as a truism,”[27] was signed by only 500 white South Africans. What of the other 4.5 million whites in South Africa?

“Quite a few whites will admit that they did do fairly well under apartheid. It is hard to deny the benefits of well-funded white schools compared to dilapidated black ones; the reservation of many jobs for a racial minority; and the group areas act which confined blacks to overcrowded and ill-maintained townships to keep them out of the hair of those in the plush white suburbs – except when they were required as maids and gardeners.

But there is a wholesale reluctance among the white population to admit individual responsibility for the system that imposed apartheid. Many whites will say they did not support it. Some claim they were really secret ANC supporters. It is hard to imagine where the National Party found all the votes that kept it in power for more than four decades.”[28]

With nobel prize winning F.W. DeKlerk as their role model, the TRC served as a backbone for many variants of arguments which claimed that the pledge was unnecessary, or wrong. DeKlerk claimed that his apology to the Commission ought to suffice, “and that ‘group judgment’ would cause ethnic tension and prejudice.”[29] In other words, the framing logic of the TRC – resolving conflicts between individual perpetrators and victims – carries the day.

Jacques Depelchin defines silences as, “facts which have not been accorded the status of facts.”[30] The ‘facts on the ground’[31] in South Africa today belie the tremendous silence on the part of white South Africans regarding their role in apartheid; a silence constituted both in opposition to, and through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. White people, as a class, constituted and reconstituted over generations, can not by named, or expected to account for themselves, within the discourse of reconciliation as framed by the TRC. Here, the five volumes of the Commission’s report, and the countless hours of testimony, congeal into the brutal silence of everyday normalcy, everyday apathy, on the part of the privileged.

HOW SHALL WE LOOK AT EACH OTHER THEN?

“Just as there are people physically maimed by the struggle between white power and black liberation, there is psychological, behavioral damage that all of us in South Africa have been subject to in some degree, whether we know it or not, whether we are whites who have shut eyes and electronically-controlled gates on what was happening to blacks…”

- Nadine Gordimer

“Whiteness must constantly struggle to re-invent itself and to maintain its (still) privileged, although increasingly contested, position in a global arena.”

- Nadine Dolby

At this point, across the globe[32], it has become a cliché for young people with privilege to claim that, “I do not feel guilty for it though because I was not responsible for everything that happened. I didn’t do those terrible things. It wasn’t me.”[33] Perhaps this casual attitude of teenage denial is the most striking marker of societies in which profound historical injustices have been left to fester. One white student at Fernwood High School[34] (in Durban) essentially says as much, in his own, racist[35] way:

“We were born in like ‘78, and whatever the white people at that time did to the black people is now on our backs, we’re sort of suffering for them. What’s happening is the black people are taking it out on all the white people.”

The reasoning is clear enough. White South Africans tried to slip out from underneath of any potential backlash against apartheid, thereby bequeathing the backlash to their offspring. Should black youth, then, ‘take it out’ – their anger, their disappointment, their hopelessness – on the parents and grandparents of their white schoolmates, who are anyway more responsible than their peers?

According to Dolby, such flippant youth, “do not simply mimic” the bitter, recalcitrant attitudes of their adult role-models; rather, they formulate their own recalcitrant viewpoint, in response to their own particular conditions. Like the viewpoints of their ancestors, “Blacks are positioned as morally inferior beings, who are only interested in retaliation and revenge. Yet, not surprisingly, the morals and behaviors of whites under apartheid (or in contemporary South Africa) are not questioned.”[36] But unnlike their parents, white students at Fernwood, “against their will and desire,” find themselves in a majority black school, and therefore, “confront black peers as equals and classmates on a daily basis. Their experiences with blacks are not distant, detached and infrequent, but intimate and constant.”[37] Correspondingly, the students engage in various conflicts over the culture and control of the school environment, struggling for ‘whiter’ music – techno – and other small gestures of “resuscitating whiteness as a valid, vibrant node of identity.”[38] Since the generation before them ceded a level of political and economic power, these youths find themselves in a circumstance where whiteness cannot be taken for granted and doesn’t seem to be ‘worth’ as much as it should, within the country of their birth. As a result, many students find solace in the global fact of whiteness, rather than the national. As one student explains, “I want to go overseas, I don’t want to stay here… All my friends will be here, but it’s no life to lead.”[39]

But white South Africa cannot be summed up by the glib commentary of their sixteen year olds; there are, of course, white people attempting to face squarely the question of white responsibility in the reconstruction of the nation. Reading novelist Andre Brink’s description of the social atmosphere following the election of the ANC, one gets the impression that he is living in an entirely other country from the students at Fernwood:

“We all share. We all talk, and laugh, and speculate together. In our midst are businessmen in suits, laborers in overalls, youngsters in jeans, the destitute in rags, the social climbers… All colours, all ages, all shapes and sizes…”[40]

Brink’s optimism is equally as troubling as the apocalyptic tone of kids afraid that their privilege has been ‘robbed’ or carelessly discarded. Luckily Brink’s position is far more nuanced. Isidore Diala writes of the ways in which Brink’s works after 1994 acknowledge, “the sombre realities of post-Apartheid South Africa, its violence, its disintegrating social services and justice system,” but still framing the central question as, “the role that whites must play in the new nation.”[41] In a way, Brink is raising the same questions the young people are asking themselves, only with a different tone, and through a different lens: who are we? What are we doing in this country, this time? What has all of this got to do with those who came before me? Similarly, when, for example, novelist and activist Nadine Gordimer encourages, “the average white to discover, earn, and affirm a valid identity in a society with a black majority,” she is not encouraging people to shove their whiteness down the country’s throat. Instead, she envisions a voluntary re-ordering of priorities, values and behaviors, in line with the overall ‘transition.’ Gordimer predicts that, “Groups of extremists who cannot adjust will die out with the present middle-aged generation… And as for those whites who threw in their lot with the black struggle – they are recognized as brothers and sisters and are active in all areas of reconstruction: they are long accustomed to contributing under the direction of blacks.”[42] Given Dolby’s insistence that whiteness ‘must constantly struggle to reinvent itself,’ it seems unlikely that the calcified values of privilege will merely ‘die out’ with time. Nonetheless, we ought to strive to articulate the circumstances whereby such a dying out could come to be.

Mahmood Mamdami offers a hopeful framing of an alternative possibility for the future when he writes that, “South Africa was confronted with a unique challenge: how to bring erstwhile colonizers and colonized into a single political community for the first time ever in history… For the state to integrate both victims and perpetrators – as survivors – into a single post-apartheid political community, it would have to acknowledge the majority as victims and take responsibility for reparations.[43]” The ‘right’ moment for setting about overcoming this challenge has already passed. Alright then, we are again in a moment in history where we might choose to rectify the injustices wreaked by our ancestors.

After the shrieking braggadocio of colonialism, white people now have conspicuously little to say about what they’ve done and what they ought to do now. But at some level, subtly, beyond the drunken, wobbling attempts to regain some footing on the solid ground of superiority, whiteness is cracking up. Somewhere a small boy, born in Zimbabwe, or somewhere else white men claimed to be ‘masters of the universe,’ is asking his parents, “how could this thing have happened?” And somehow, refusing to reply won’t work forever. Until then, “the confusion will be great, and the bloodshed will be great.”[44]

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[1] This is not a fictional parable, but rather an actual interaction with a young man who asked to remain anonymous.

[2] There are periodic references herein to the ‘young’ whites, a designation that is quite logical in the South African context, in which any high school or college aged white person born in South Africa had essentially no experience with apartheid. But this short-hand should not be taken to imply that I am not interested in the experiences of white adults, outside of South Africa.

[3] This is taken from the title of an essay by Nadine Gordimer

[4] Peter Knauss notes that, in the case of Kenya, “Whites who have ’stayed on’ are virtually unanimous in attributing to the ‘leavers’ views of extreme racial intransigence. In point of fact, however, some of these ‘intransigents’ have returned to Kenya, after a brief sojourn in Rhodesia or South Africa; others appear never to have left at all.” As quoted in “From Devil to Father Figure: the transformation of Jomo Kenyatta by Kenya Whites,” The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, 131-137. May, 1971.

[5] However, I do feel that a comparison between these countries and a place like Mozambique, where both many whites fled, and those who stayed were involved in an explicitly socialist transformation, would be quite useful.

[6] Speaking quite simply and generally, Kenya was granted independence directly from the British, Zimbabwe gained a

negotiated – by Britain – independence through protracted guerrilla war, and South Africa negotiated a transition to majority rule after mass mobilizations, coupled with an armed wing and international pressure brought the situation to an uncomfortable stalemate.

[7] According to statistics from the colonial office, Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mau (Cmnd. 1930, May 1960). Specifically, 12,590 Africans (described as Mau Mau) were killed in action or hung by the British, Mau Mau killed 1,880 civilians (58 whites) and 164 troops or police were killed.

[8] He references here a speech given in August, 1963, where Kenyatta states, “There is no society of angels, whether it is white, brown or black. We are human beings and as such we are bound to make mistakes… If we start thinking about our past, what time have we to think of the future?” As quoted in, Knauss, P. “From Devil to Father Figure: the transformation of Jomo Kenyatta by Kenya Whites,” The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, 131-137. May, 1971.

[9] ibid.

[10] Wasserman, G. “Rhodesia is not Kenya.” Foreign Policy, No. 33 (Winter, 1978-1979), pp. 31-44

[11] Knauss stresses that, “their persistence in blatantly racist stereotypes of ordinary Africans, while bestowing extravagant praise on the ‘old man,’ suggested a process more complex than mechanical compliance with new political realities.”

[12] South African, Rhodesian, and US.

[13] Professor Patricia Hayes, as explained in a class lecture.

[14] Ingham-Thorpe, V. “Reconciliation in Zimbabwe: reality or illusion?” Development in Practice, Volume 7, Number 4, Novem, 1997.

[15] Vora, J. & E. “The Effectiveness of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Perceptions of Xhosa, Afrikaner, and English South Africans.” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 34 No. 3, January, 2004 301-322.

[16] Mamdani, M. “Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC)”. Diacritics, Vol. 32, No. 3/4, Ethics, (Autumn – Winter, 2002), pp. 33-59. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.

[17] Mamdami notes that “only 15% of the violations are said to have occurred during the heyday of apartheid.”

[18] The TRC even goes so far as to say that their findings, “should not be understood as a call for international criminal prosecution of those who formulated and implemented apartheid policies.” TRC 1: 94, ¶1. This in a global legal climate in which, “international law does not provide for the granting of amnesty for a crime against humanity.” TRC 5: 449, ¶ 63

[19] Mamdani, M. “Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC)”. Diacritics, Vol. 32, No. 3/4, Ethics, (Autumn – Winter, 2002), pp. 33-59. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.

[20] ibid.

[21] ibid.

[22] ibid.

[23] ibid.

[24] ibid.

[25] For a small, but scientific study of ‘general’ understandings of the TRC within South Africa, see: Vora, J. & E. “The Effectiveness of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Perceptions of Xhosa, Afrikaner, and English South Africans.” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 34 No. 3, January, 2004 301-322.

[26] McGreal, C. (20 December, 2000). “South Africa’s Guilty Reluctant to Sign Up.” Guardian Unlimited.

[27] ibid. The ‘truism’ reads: “We acknowledge the white community’s responsibility for apartheid since many of us actively and passively supported that system. Some white people were deeply involved in the struggle against apartheid but they were very few in number. We acknowledge our debt to fellow black South Africans since all whites benefited from systematic racial discrimination. We therefore believe that it is right and necessary to commit ourselves to redressing these wrongs.”

[28] ibid.

[29] ibid.

[30] Depelchin, J. (2005). Silences in African History. Between the syndromes of discovery and abolition. Dar Es Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota.

[31] A reference to Ariel Sharon, and his policy of seizing Palestinian land by simply placing settlers on the land, and then later saying that the ‘facts on the ground,’ confirm Israeli claims that the land is theirs.

[32] American whites and Germans seem particularly skilled at claiming that slavery and Nazism have nothing to do with them… Let me also note here, and apologize, that this section focuses solely on South Africa, without incorporating any findings about Zimbabwe, Kenya, or elsewhere.

[33] Anonymous student at Fernwood High School, in Durban, as quoted in Dolby, N. (Mar., 2001) “White Fright: The Politics of White Youth Identity in South Africa” British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 5-17. Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

[34] Dolby chose the school because it was historically a white school that had become 60% black by 1996, and while momentarily lauded as an example of the ‘Rainbow Nation,’ Fernwood had a great deal of racial tension.

[35] Classicly, he says, “I don’t want to sound racist or anything, but…”

[36] Dolby, N. (Mar., 2001) “White Fright: The Politics of White Youth Identity in South Africa” British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 5-17. Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

[37] ibid.

[38] ibid.

[39] ibid.

[40] Andre Brink, Imaginings of Sand (Secker and Warburg, 1996), p. 311.

[41] Diala, I. (2002). “Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, and Andre Brink: Guilt, Expiation, and the Reconciliation Process in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Journal of Modern Literature XXV, 2, pp. 50-68

[42] Gordimer, N. (1999). Living in Hope and History: Notes from our Century. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Note, again: “Some white people were deeply involved in the struggle against apartheid but they were very few in number,” which creates for a vacuum of viable alternatives to bitterness and resentfulness amongst the present generation.

[43] Mamdami clarifies this point by adding, “the people of South Africa – white and black – had yet to live under a single rule of law, the basis of a single political community.” I would add that any postcolonial African nations in which a significant portion of whites ’stayed on’ after independence would share this challenge.

[44] James Baldwin, in a debate with Malcolm X, speaking to the consequences of America’s widespread unwillingness to speak about the ‘dead body in the room’ that is racialism.