Old Takkies Indaba

“Excuse me. Are you guys Afrikaans? I didn’t think so, because I’m English”. One of my mom’s favourite reminiscences about my precocious childhood.

Afrikaans. That filthy language of the terrible oppressor. The very crux of communication for the darkest times of South Africa’s history. The Cause of all our problems. The language my parents spoke when they didn’t want me to know what they were discussing.

What a depressing subject. Well, I’m not going to be depressed. I’m sitting on a beautiful little island in the Philippines (don’t ask why I’m writing), and I don’t want to ruin it.

So I’d rather talk about something else today. About unintended victims.

It’s a story we see (but don’t hear?) all to often. People doing things with the best of intentions, and ruining everything. Causing more pain, destruction, and humiliation than ever thought possible, against the very thing they were trying to save.

Affirmative action. Quota systems. Wonderful, uplifting, broad-based-benefiting social experiments. Necessary in every way, and a beautiful silver bullet fired from a well aimed gun, to solve all of our problems. To address all of the inequalities of the past. WHAAZZZAH! It’s done, everything’s cool and fixed.

But foresight doesn’t afford us the same privileges as her more popular and less useful cousin, Hind. Hind is the beautiful one, with the long flowing red hair, the heaving breasts, the shapely lips, the comely hips. God but we love looking at Hind Sight. Fore is the bitch. And she dresses frumpy, so few see the beauty beneath. And she wants flowers and foreplay. But man she’s worth it.

If only we had had the foresight to accept that people are still people, whatever you tell them to be. That ten years down the road, there would be a sense of shame and disappointment about AA. That the people who benefited most, are the ones who would have done so anyway. Who were always going to be rich, once the obstacles had been removed. But now they’re filthy rich. And the rest – people who moved into good jobs, with decent wages, and had to work twice as hard to be half as respected. It’s an uncomfortable truth, but one that is true none the less. Unintended victims of the social engineering put in place to benefit them.

This is important – EVEN people who haven’t benefited a stitch, are still victims to it!

Thank God in South Africa we had the guts to admit mistakes, and try to rectify them. And no, I’ve grown out of my precociousness (I think), and I’m not being sarcastic. I think South Africans are among the best in the world at learning from mistakes. Look, we make some doozies, but then we learn, and we try fix, and we move on. I know a lot of people don’t think so, but it’s exactly that recognition of the problem that makes us so unique.

One of the best examples of this is our learning what happens when you block or stop or reject a culture. Racism is only a symptom, it’s not a cause. What causes racism is cultural-ism. Fear of other cultures, other ways of life, other beliefs that we don’t understand, and don’t want it. I have a great theory about why this exists. It’s because we don’t want to lose our women-folk (I hope you heard that in my strongest redneck accent) to the other side. We don’t want bloody whites with our women – what if they’re happier? Does it mean we’re not as good? We don’t want black men… god, you know what they say about them! Etc. etc.

And in South Africa, it would have been so easy when apartheid ended, to simply turn around and say “Right, that’s it. You lot can sod off now”. But we didn’t. Because we’re South African. Because we (even when it doesn’t feel like it) love other South Africans, regardless of colour or creed.

But back to unintended victims (because I realise I’m beginning to ramble). Afrikaans is an unintended victim. How so? It’s a victim of the stereotype of racism. But Afrikaans speakers aren’t racists. Racists are racists.

Afrikaans speakers are people who sit in the front seat of the car and make sure I don’t know what they’re talking about.