Fear will keep you safe.
If you are a South African raised during the last 50 years or so, you know this for a fact: fear will keep you safe. Fear will keep you alive.

My parents taught me.
SABC 1 taught me.
Huis-Genoot taught me.
School taught me.
Experience taught me:

Be suspicious. Don’t trust anyone. Don’t talk to the ousie on the corner. Don’t touch unattended parcels. Go to the big field if the siren blares twice. They hate you because you’re black. They hate you because you’re white.

I am an excellent student. I learned well.
So I sit in my kitchen, 15,811 long, long kilometres from my homeland and I shake. It is barely perceptible, but the ripples reach far, far, daar doer aan die anderkant…**

My fear is a soldier home from the war; a war I went into too young to understand and finished too old to forget. It used to have a purpose, but now… now the war is over – suddenly, unexpectedly – and after a brief period of indulgence for the telling of stories and ooh-ing and aah-ing over scar tissue, it is expected to reintegrate seamlessly into polite society.
But the soldier wakes, screaming in the night. It has brought the enemy home, safe inside my skull, where I can never escape.

Fuck you, South Africa! How much farther do I have to go before I can outrun the acrid stench of fear that envelops me so completely? The Gift of Fear – ha! Some gift. You keep your fear in the box it came in, the packaging still pristine; a collector’s item. Talk talk talk about the gift of fear and you’ve never had to wrestle the shrink wrap off while a woman howls and bleeds in a public bathroom.

Lies.
This is the legacy of apartheid.
Fear.
This is what we were trained to do.
We.
Every colour in our new rainbow nation.
Fear your neighbour (but fear his garden boy more).
Fear the culture that is not yours. Fear the skin not like mine.
Fear the dark, fear the day. Fear the crowds and fear the quiet places too.
Fear the man with no teeth and holes in his clothes; the woman screaming for help down the road.
Keep apart.
Fear will keep you safe. Fear will keep you alive.
Fear will keep you apart.

Lies. Isolation.
Fear will eat you alive.

I was born into fear.
Into a country gripped by fear, torn apart by fear, a few short weeks before the Soweto Riots. It is my inheritance. It is my legacy.
And now I sit in a kitchen 15,811 long, long kilometres from my parents’ house. It is my kitchen. It is my house. And I shake.
But I am safe and the shaking will soon stop.

* I shamelessly stole this phrase from the book of the same title – Country of My Skull – by Antjie Krog. It is magnificent and heart-wrenching and the movie adaptation doesn’t completely reek.

** “Waaaaay over there on the other side…”

It was a Sunday afternoon. My dad had taken me out walking in veld; the pale winter Transvaal sun on our skin, the tickle of tall, dry grasses around our legs. At some point I dropped my blankie but sounded the alarm too late. My dad turned around just in time to see two young black boys run off with it. When we got home, I burst into the kitchen, flung my arms around my mom, shrieking, “The flater-boys stole my blankie”. I was two and couldn’t quite get my tongue around “native”. It could have been worse. It could have been coon or kaffir.

The thing is; I had always considered my parents to be liberal, certainly more liberal than the Afrikaaners. They treated our maid well. Sarah was one of the family, except that she was only allowed to use the peppermint-green enamel plate, bowl and mug. She lived on the property, except it was a back room, and her shower was in the toilet. She could come and go as she pleased, except she had to use the service entrance. And, she couldn’t really come and go as she pleased, could she?

As a young South African growing up in the late 70s and 80s there was a lot I didn’t question, there was a lot I didn’t notice. I didn’t notice that there were only whites on the beaches in Durban in the Christmas holidays. I didn’t realise that the bomb drills at primary school were because there was a State of Emergency and we were too close to Alex for anyone’s comfort. I did know there were toilets for whites and toilets for blacks at Eastgate, but I didn’t know there were different coaches on the trains, different rows on the busses. I only heard about the pencil test well into my twenties. Ignorance is bliss.

And now?

I rebuke my parents who exist in some sort of racist overdrive. Words like kaffir, coon, and native aren’t tolerated anymore; black doesn’t feel PC, so now it’s just “they”. “They” broke into the neighbour’s house. “They” shot the guy down the street. “They” are causing trouble at work. “They” give shit service at the mall. You know the drill. They won’t say it, but we know what they’re thinking. The signs aren’t there anymore, but the words are. Perhaps that was the dialogue all along, when the adults were talking. And I’m ashamed.

A few months ago, my car was broken into, in my secure parking lot, in the middle of the night. I called my dad and shrieked down the phone, “the flater-boys stole my car radio, my gym bag, my Havaianas …”

My life lesson.

Is fear a reason for apartheid? Or ignorance? Or is it rooted in intolerance and hatred?

While chatting about this subject a couple of weeks ago on a forum, someone suggested that going to an exclusive (read: all white) school was actually a good thing, because how could you become a racist if you’ve never had interaction with a black person… How could you hate something you know nothing about? That doesn’t sound right to me, in fact, I know it’s wrong, but yet…. But yet… there seems to be something there.
None of the people I went to school with are racists. At least I don’t think so, but at the same time they live in small secluded little worlds that don’t allow them to interact with people of different colour or ethnicity. It’s not hatred… it might be fear… I simply think its ignorance. Is that the same thing as racism?

I don’t know.

I do know this: I don’t like segregation. I don’t think it’s good for the country, or the community or the individual.

And yet I still see it all the time. My nephews go to an all Jewish school – and they have little to no interaction with kids of different faiths or class or colour. To them life is all about keeping up with the Jankolowitz’s.

How sad I think, in a time when it’s cool to diversify, to be a part of something bigger, to be exposed to a larger world.

I love my childhood friends, we’ve grown up together, been through so many of life’s important moments, and I see the same traits in them. And it bugs the hell out of me.

Is this the legacy of segregation? Not hatred, but simply apathetic ignorance.
Shit, I hope not. It’s gonna take a long time to sort out this country, any country, if it is.

I didn’t know about state of emergencies, sanctions and such other things.

None of it affected my life, it simply didn’t concern me.

However, there are a couple of very vague, very confusing memories in my head, and I think this is about the time I started realising. One of them was when the beaches were “opened”. I don’t know if I actually remember ever seeing a sign that said “slegs blankes”, or if I added it to my memories from seeing them in pictures years later, but I sure as hell remember the day they were taken down.

I don’t recall anyone in my “camp” being particularly happy or upset about what was happening, it was pure apathy.

But, I do remember hearing a family acquaintance letting everyone know how he felt. It was likely the first time I had heard the word “k****r” used with true hate. The barrage of swearing and metaphors about animals made me almost think that this was a big joke, he couldn’t be serious.

Could he?

It wasn’t until years later when I first visually recalled that memory that I realised it was not a joke at all. Two epiphanies had occurred at once. Firstly, I figured out that we were separated, so much so that we couldn’t even share the same piece of sandy beach and blue water, and secondly some people were actually upset that they now had to give up their “private” beaches.

Really?

How did it ever get that far?

Somehow, I learned the “feeling” of separateness and with that came the fear of the unknown. He was the bad guy, the one who would steal everything I had, kill my family and destroy everything I loved – but I never saw him.

He wasn’t the the “boy” who did our garden once a week nor my father’s colleagues, nor was he the father of the black kids in my school. They were all regular people, sharing (and I’m pretty sure about this) the same faults, tendencies and good traits as their white counterparts.

But they got the bad rap, all because of the invisible man who was waiting to wreak havoc.

How blind we were.

Our days were filled with building our own farms yards and hide-outs and learning each other’s games, languages and customs. We played cricket and football and went horse riding together or joined our fathers in the veldt. But meal times and after hours were spent with our own families. Our milk and meat came from the same source and we both dreaded our inoculations from the sister in her travelling clinic. You were taught to treat me with respect, I was taught to treat you with the same respect. We were too young to understand that we were different because of our skin colour, but we understood that my parents could afford a car because my dad owned the land we lived on.

Then one day our worlds became bigger than the farm we knew so well. We had to be educated, we had to go to school . Your school was on the neighbouring farm, but I had to go to the big school in town. You could walk the 5km to learn to read and write, while I had to be driven the 30km with my suitcase. You could walk home again after school, but I had to stay in the hostel until Friday afternoon.

I didn’t want to go to my school; I wanted to go to your school. I wanted to walk back home and steal figs with you or swim in the dam when it was hot. I wanted to eat the food your mom made for my family (not the horrid stuff they fed us in boarding school) and I wanted to sleep in my warm bed. But I wasn’t allowed to join them join you at the farm school BECAUSE I AM WHITE.

Slowly it dawned on me how things really worked in the world beyond our farm. I can’t go to your school because I am white, you can’t go to my church because you are black. You can’t buy the house next to my grandmother’s in town, not because you couldn’t afford it, but because you are not white. You are not allowed to shop in the same shops as my mom, but could buy your groceries in the part of town I wasn’t allowed to go to because it was “dangerous”. There are many things you couldn’t do that I took for granted. I am only now starting to realise how different our people were treated.

I go back to farm now for holidays, but very little has changed. We still treat each other with the same mutual respect. My dad is still the baas, but you are now a farm worker alongside my brother. A lot has altered in the world outside our kingdom; our children will now be able to go to the same school, our families greet each other while shopping in the same shops, we can all worship whichever God we want to in whichever church building we prefer and some of the houses in my grandmother’s old neighbourhood have black families living there. These changes were not always easy, yet it was natural.

I am a little sad though – the school on the farm next door had to close down. The money that was meant for the teacher’s salary disappeared with the school books. Instead all the farm children, regardless of skin colour, have to stay in town during the week.

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.

Have you ever watched two children of the same race do this? Now, have you ever watched two children of different races do this? Funny how the behaviour is precisely the same, huh?

All but the most ignorant know that ‘racial’ differences are arbitrary social constructs, right? I mean, at the genetic level, people are the same. Hate groups masquerading as legitimate organisations may feel sick to the stomach at that statement, but the ‘pure mind’ inherently realises this. The mind tampered with forgets.

The pettiness isn’t in that the laws were passed as opposed to them being accepted by the intelligent.

Alas, everybody has character flaws.

My flaw is that I’m extremely liberal. Liberal to a fault, even… so much so that I think there’s something wrong with those who are not. I don’t get it. Insofar as that which others do neither harms you nor interferes with your livelihood, why have a say?

Interracial relationships? Absolutely! Why limit options due to something arbitrary like race? Word to Seal and David Bowie: your wives are beautiful.

Interracial adoption? Sure. I’m confident children in orphanages want (need?) parents, and those who want (need) children shouldn’t be stopped from offering children a home due to pigmentation.

Hey, if we could sidestep race for a second, GLBT marriages? Why not? That’s a conversation we should have, but it’s probably beyond the scope of this piece.

Children get it. There’s nothing in skin. You, me, society teach them otherwise. You, me, society, teach them incorrectly. You, me, society need to be deliberate in reversing that process.

Sixteen years and a bit of education later, those years seem so preposterous. The feared Communists, for whom we waited in vain, were the African National Congress. They were making door-to-door visits in our area, which was an IFP bastion, and so in an effort to secure our votes, the IFP ran a very successful propaganda campaign against the ANC. So successful was their propaganda, that they have never lost the majority vote in that part of KZN.

I have never experienced apartheid in any form. I don’t even know what a dompas looks like. I grew up in a world where the ANC was the enemy, for crying out loud! I grew up amongst white people. Some of my best and most loyal of friends are white. I never ever got the feeling that I was supposed to be inferior to anyone. And even in school, when the other black kids used to mumble about ‘discrimination’, I had no idea what they were on about. I have an academic knowledge of what racism is, but I’ve never emotionally identified with the notion. I’m a black South African, but certainly not “formerly disadvantaged.”

This presents me with a dilemma. A few weeks ago, a white friend of mine called me ‘boy’ on my blog. I took it as a joke, made a snappy comeback and thought no more of it. Apparently the word ‘boy’ is laden with racial connotations, and another blogger rose to my defence and viciously attacked my friend for daring to insult me. I was flabbergasted. In the ensuing debate some bloggers lambasted me for refusing to take offence at this obvious racial slur. But the plain truth is that I certainly didn’t feel like an affront had been committed, chiefly because I knew my friend wouldn’t do such a thing. But I also didn’t feel racially slighted because I didn’t grow up under apartheid, have never been told that I am less than anyone else because of my skin colour and have never been discriminated against for being black. I have no experience of apartheid, petty or otherwise.

Apparently this is very difficult for older black people to understand. They don’t understand why I don’t read into every word that comes out of a white person, they don’t understand why I see nothing wrong with relationships across “colour lines” and they especially don’t understand why I think they are wrong for being so suspicious and sensitive. Don’t get me wrong. I’m in no way diminishing people who went through the horrors of apartheid. I am very proud to be a black South African, partly because of our struggle heritage. And I’m not saying that racism is now completely dead in South Africa. But I certainly don’t accept that I should now carry the pain of an apartheid past simply because of my skin colour. It is very painful for me when I experience “discrimination” from my own people, because I’m too young to have gone through apartheid.

Isn’t this what the struggle was all about? Isn’t that why Nelson Mandela spent all those years in prison, so that one day there can be people in South Africa who have no painful memories of apartheid?

I have since been informed that petty apartheid covered the more ‘minor’ aspects of apartheid, such as the Immorality Act and those laws that restricted access by black people to ‘whites only’ beaches, parks etc.

While I was growing up, I never knew anything about apartheid, my first knowledge only came, really, when I was around 19 and my friend went to Rhodes and became a political activist. But this only impinged on the periphery of my life and I thought she was doing it to be different, or to make some kind of statement, and as she was there and I was still in our suburb, what she got up to, thought, believed or did had even less impact as time went on.

Of course I knew that black people were not allowed on beaches or in parks, but that, to me, was just normal life. I never noticed anything inconvenient, wrong, untoward or in any way questionable about the laws that were in place at the time. I merely presumed that was how it was. Actually I never even thought about the laws as being laws, if you know what I mean. I never thought about politics, or legislation or any of that kind of thing.

My parents never discussed the politics of our country, they never discussed who they voted for, and I assume it was the Nats but I do not really know. We were an a-political family, through and through.

Black people were treated kindly in our house but we were taught by our mother that they were not as clean as we were; therefore they had to be given different cups to drink from and plates to eat off. All this, to me, was perfectly normal.

I never questioned why black people were not allowed to live in our suburbs. I never knew they were not allowed to live in our suburbs to be perfectly honest. I just assumed they stayed where they wanted to stay.

When I went to a private school we had black people in our class (only two at that time, in 1981) and again I never asked myself why they had not been in our government schools, presuming that as Afrikaners went to Afrikaans schools, so blacks must go to black schools.

This was the way life was.

I remember saying some of this on a forum I belonged to some years back and having a huge fight with a black woman who said there was no way I could ever have been unaware of what was going on in our country; but of course there was a way, we all grow up with our own version of reality and this was mine.

I never asked myself whether black people were badly treated, whether black people in other countries were allowed to own homes in white suburbs, walk, sit and holiday where white people did. Where you do not see a problem, you also do not envisage any solutions or raise any questions.

I am not weighed down with any guilt about all this today, either. I am in no way responsible for the choices and decisions of my government or my parents.

“How old do you think I am?”

“Isn’t my baby beautiful?”

Is your epiglottis in danger of being swallowed?

Not mine.

I’m expected to answer questions like these all the time.

I get asked these questions because I’m a freak of nature – like one of those people who attract lightning bolts, and I’m forced to answer them.

I’m forced to answer them because I have no choice in the matter.

I have no choice in the matter because I cannot lie.

That’s right. There it is. It’s out there – I am incapable of lying.

And people supernaturally seem to know this.

My inability to deceive is not only evident in the obvious – like a whopping uncover-up story, an off-white lie, and a ‘no Oscar to the lady with the fake illness’ performance.

Even in silence the truth is broadcasted by my face.

Disclosing my number to demonstrate what happens when I attempt to hide behind a telephone would be privacy-suicide. Sorry.

Case study #9347945608456983456∞ shall have to suffice:

Answering “Absolutely,” after a guy at a wedding asked me, “Do you think I’m fat?”, it was later revealed to me that he was a psychiatric patient suffering from Body Dismorphic Disorder, and I had possibly set him back years in therapy.

Later, this same man asked me if I thought his ugly girlfriend was pretty.

I said nothing.

“I knew it!” he screamed.

“I said nothing!” [twice to one man in one night God!]

“You didn’t have to,” he pointed at my face, “You. Cannot. LIE!”

And so, if you have a shred of pity for me, read the following and, just this once, kindly bare before me the naked truth:

I am the product of an Apartheid-supporting family. I am also the product of a family so petty, a grandparent despised their grandchild into adulthood for observing a rotten front tooth while perched upon his knee.

Hence, I do not want to find a microfibre of pettiness entwined anywhere in the fabric of my being.

Is it?

I understand the irrationality of petty Apartheid.

The thought of “Whites Only” insignia offends my cerebral cortex.

However, on instinct I act as if they didn’t.

I’d like to see a mental Pass Book every time I wonder when they’re going to stop allowing illegal immigrants across the border, and give us whitey’s a chance to make up numbers.

I baulk at the sight of Heidi Klum and Seal kissing.

A black man may take the front seat in a taxi – I’d rather be left standing next to my broken down vehicle in quicksand than climb on board.

And I’ll gladly step off the pavement if he’s walking toward me – even quicker if he’s approaching from behind with speed!

I shall not attend any black club, restaurant, shop or church. The very thought makes me contort in my chair in such a way I may need a chiropractor – a white one.

I find a white waiter serving black customers unfitting, a white woman holding a black baby biologically immoral, a white beggar unjustifiable [and always give him more money], and many more of these consciously illogical black-man-invading-white-world situations abhorrent.

And that’s the brutal truth.

Now it’s your turn.

Do these ingrained reactions toward a history of petty Apartheid make me a petty person?