Wikipedia:
Hence, the idea behind apartheid was more one of political separation, later known as “grand apartheid,” than segregation, later known as “petty apartheid.”

I admit, I didn’t know. I don’t have any massive, open, mind expanding moment to look back on, when I first realised that the world was not fair, and that whether people were equal or not didn’t matter to those with the stick.

Clearly, I went through childhood and youth with either a wee pair of blinkers, or a broken memory writer. Or perhaps, when you’re young and innocent and privileged, you simply don’t notice what other people can and can’t do.

When I look around now though, there are all those innocuous little signs still hanging about; signs that provide us with hints, memories, scents, of… something. I’m not talking about the inequalities that still haven’t worked themselves out. But rather, physical things that remind us of times and injustices that I don’t remember, things that don’t quite seem comprehensible now.

The old Kensington Post Office, where Roberts Avenue is introduced to Lancaster Drive by Milner Cresent, used to have two doors. I always wondered about that.

I did some work at a company in the Joburg CBD, about three years back. The building had two sets of loos, right next to each other, on the ground floor. It’s just strange, you know.

About 10 years ago, I was in Orkney on a rowing camp, and a mate and I went into town to buy some things. There was a show in the parking lot of the SPAR. There was a mobile stage, and red bunting forming a large square in front of it. Inside the square, white. Outside, not white. In everybody’s defence, I didn’t see anybody enforcing this separation. Maybe that made it worse.

It’s a little bizarre to write this now, and think about how much it was a different world. And not simply different, but so different that it’s something that I can’t even fully understand.

And yet, it’s a situation that exists all over the world, even now. Be it as simple a thing as dress codes at a bar, or something as complex as where borders lie between countries, apartheid exists. And it’s petty. It uses different names, but the goal is the same – this is our spot, it’s only for people like us, and the rest of you can sod off.

The question is, can South Africa provide a model for the world on how to get past this? Can we, as the first country to go through and come out of state level segregation without major bloodshed, become a shining light, a beacon to those people in the world who are just people, who just want to live day to day, without harm or hatred, and don’t mind that others do the same?

I think we can. I think we have to.

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.

As a kid growing up, the rest of the world was geography, and maybe some news. And so, although I was from South Africa, and I knew South Africa, I never fully appreciated being South African, simply because patriotism is a relative perception.

There’s a dirty word. Laboured as it is with images of gun toting mentalists running around the world killing everybody, “patriotism” has acquired a terrible tarnish. In the words of Bill Hicks “I fucking hate patriotism man. It’s a round world, the last time I checked.”

It was my first trip overseas, in August of 1995. We went to Poland, on a rowing tour, and it was just about the best introduction you could hope for to the rest of the world. Rowers from all over the world congregated for two weeks in the (as I remember it) small town of Poznan. Everybody was there with a common purpose (to beat everybody else), and this gave us a bridge across all the nationalities. Regardless, it also made everybody very conscious of where they were from.

Now I’m not a big believer in the “sudden flash” way of life. Stuff doesn’t hit you like lightning one day while you’re wandering around on Aliwal beach drinking Old Brown Sherry from a plastic packet. Stuff hits you slowly, many times over, and one day you wake up to a filthy hangover and the realisation that the stuff’s been there all along.

That said, If I had to identify the moment I first became proud of being a South African, it was on that tour. We were standing outside our residence, waiting to go to the course, and one of our guys who was still inside unfurled a massive South African flag from the window. We were one of the first teams to be competing under the New South African Flag, and I remember looking up at it and feeling immensely proud, and wanting to tell everybody how great our country is.

But I was very young, and such overt sentimentality came easily.

To say that I fully realised in that moment what it meant to be South African would be a blatant lie. I am still realising. These days, I live with a group of people from all parts of the Western world, in a small city in China. Small enough that Westerners are still freaks to be stared at. Understanding how different we are, and all of the good things and bad things that come from being South African – all of the big things like the colour of our skin (Small town Chinese people often believe I’ve become white because I stayed out of the sun), and the little things like having two ways of spelling sentence/ance – all of these understandings are making me realise day by day what it means to be South African. And it’s cool man. It’s fucking cool.

Anyway, that doesn’t matter. Patriotism is what I felt the first time I fully appreciated being South African, and I’ll admit that just once. Right, now I’m off to kill some people who don’t look like me.