Desperate times, desperate protesters

I was in tears today as I watched the TV coverage and looked at these images of today’s ANC Youth League demonstration outside Luthuli House in Johannesburg. The visuals of attacks on media, riot police, water cannons and stun grenades are so reminiscent of the very bad old days that I am filled with despair.

For some time I have been seriously concerned about the political and economic future of the country that I love. I am no politician, nor am I an economist, but as an ordinary South African citizen it is plain to me that the country is becoming increasingly divided as our “leaders” either ignore or exacerbate the problem.

It is undeniable that there are massive social problems that we need to address as a nation. If I, as a middle class and comparatively privileged South African, have reached the end of my financial and emotional tethers; how much worse must it be for the truly poor and disenfranchised? We are all the victims of the poor service delivery. We are all victims of the ever-increasing crime. And unfortunately, we can’t all move to the supposedly greener grass of “developed” nations.

So as despicable as I often find Malema and his methods, I have to concede that he does represent a large number of South Africans. As much as I may disagree with his methods, I must recognise that the problems he seeks to address are legitimate.

But Malema himself does not scare me. To my mind, he is a shrewd and greedy man who has been lucky enough to make a space for himself in a country beset by division. It is his supporters, who appear willing to engage in whatever violent  action occurs to them when the mob mentality hits, that truly frighten me. Not because of their tactics – which I think we can all agree are morally reprehensible – but because, to me, they represent a people pushed to desperation. A people pushed to the very limits of poverty. A people unheeded by their president and government representatives. These are fellow South Africans so desperate to find an enemy that they are willing to turn on the party that spawned them. And people desperate for an enemy are dangerous.

Today’s demonstrations scared me more than the countless break-ins and crime, more than the seemingly endless upward spiral in the cost of living. They scared me because of the attitudes and desperation that they highlighted. Perhaps the most frightening thing of all is that a large part of me understands. While I could never condone violence against anyone, I have a tiny inkling of how it feels to believe that things are not getting better. I know what it is like to fear that they never will. I understand the hopelessness. I get it. I too am tired of feeling like – despite my best efforts – the realities of living in South Africa are engineered to keep me financially and emotionally fragile.

Looking into the eyes of these demonstrators, I can’t help but wonder what will happen when we truly reach the end of our collective rope. There is so much rage and hate, so much fear and desperation; that I am no longer confident that we can overcome the sins of the past. Or the sins of the present.

Like oil and water, I fear that South Africa’s many factions will never mix without an enormous amount of agitation. I fear that Malema will get his revolution. Because what other option has been left to the millions of South African’s struggling to endure an insufferable situation?

Of beach holidays and insect bites

I’m a firm believer that one should learn something from every experience. Sometimes this happens to me, sometimes it doesn’t. This holiday seemed to be particularly educational.

First, the basic info.

Holiday duration: One week.

Holiday spot: Sheffield Beach, KZN North Coast.

Holiday party: Husband, son and assorted extended family members.

Here’s what I learnt:

1. If you visit KwaZulu Natal, you will be bitten by mutant bugs hyped up on sugar cane and Durban poison. These bites will turn into gigantic red bumps and will be impossible to cover up with even the most hard-core concealer and foundation. If you are me, you will be bitten on the face. More than once.
2. Always take more than one swimming costume because trying to get your sweat-dampened flab into a wet one-piece just sucks. Its like trying to pull your knickers on while coated in glue.
3. If you have lived in Gauteng for more than 10 years, you are officially a Vaalie. Do not try to fight this. Embrace it and you may end your holiday unscathed by traditional Vaalie afflictions. See point 4.
4. The fashion/beauty magazines really are right. Everyone, regardless of skin tone, should wear sunblock. Living in Durban for the first 18 years of my life and being of a naturally tanned skin tone, I had never really had to worry about this before. Prior to this holiday, I could count the number of times that I had been sun-burnt on one hand. And those instances involved either Vaseline or cooking oil. (What can I say, I was a particularly stupid teenager.) This January, however, I managed to pick up an incredibly fetching sunglasses, t-shirt and dress burn. Oh the horror! Especially when coupled with the giant mutant bug bites.
5. No matter how hard you try, you cannot resist Aunty Merle’s chocolate chip cookies. Or the chocolatey goodness of Canadian Peppermint Bark.
6. If you are lucky enough to have a house right on the beach, beware of tiled floors. Sea spray and humidity will ensure that they are always wet. This makes them very slippery. My bruised coccyx proves it.
7. Hangovers are worse when you’re on holiday and your family expects you to be awake, fed and on the beach by 9am.
8. If you don’t move your flip flops into the shade of the beach umbrella you will give the soles of your feet 3^rd degree burns. Similarly, if you don’t wear shoes to the beach. Even if you leave by 11am.
9. Eating a sand-coated nectarine is very unpleasant. Even three-year-olds recognise this. You will therefore be stuck with your own sandy nectarine, as well as your son’s.
10. Nothing on earth beats the sound of your child’s screams of laughter as he tries to outrun waves. This is pure joy.
11. I really don’t like swimming in the sea. It’s hard work. The push and pull of the waves, trying to remain upright – it’s all a bit of a mission really. So is having to deal with the sand in Everything afterwards. Much better to lounge in the pool on a pool noodle.
12. Sometimes, as a mother, you just have to get over yourself and stop being paranoid.
13. Chasing your son along the beach might leave you looking like an idiot, but it sure is fun. And it will make you happy.
14. Watching a line of grown people standing in the sea, staring at the breakers and jumping at each wave is pretty hysterical. Especially if you’ve had a few white wine spritzers. It’s like some sort of badly choreographed line dance. Somehow, kids avoid looking ridiculous by actually playing in the waves. Adults just stand there trying to look cool and end up looking idiotic.
15. Get over your body issues, because no-one is watching. Unless you’re part of the Wave-Induced Line Dance. Then they’re pointing and laughing. But not at how your butt looks in that bikini.
16. There will always be at least one fisherman. He will catch something big and scary (like, say, a hammerhead shark or ray) and then release it into the shallows to make things more exciting for the line of wave jumpers.

Growing up at the coast, many beach life-lessons were imparted years ago. I just happened to be reminded of them while on this holiday. So here’s what I remembered while on holiday:

1. Beer tastes better when you’re at the beach.
2. Building sand castles is really fun. Those little buckets and spades are awesome.
3. Watermelons just taste better in KZN.
4. It will be cloudy and rainy half of the time, but warm. This leaves you grumpy and sweaty. You will wish that the sun would come out. Then it will and you will realise your folly as you weep for your tender sunburnt skin. This too will leave you grumpy and sweaty.
5. KZN mosquitoes are impervious to all types of insect repellent. They love that shit.
6. It will be so hot that in order to sleep you will need a fan on in your room. This will give you a sore throat every morning. Every evening you will try to do without said fan and within 20 minutes decide that the sore throat is worth it.
7. It is useless to wear any type of make-up because by early afternoon it will have slipped to the general vicinity of your jowls.
8. Your sunglasses will always slip down your nose because you’re so sweaty.
9. Showering is useless because you will be sticky within minutes. Better to let the salt of the ocean form a dehydrating crust on your skin.

As with any holiday, one of the best parts of it will be returning home. This too can be an opportunity for learning.

Things I learnt upon my return:

1. If you don’t have a house-sitter and the power trips, things may get ugly.
2. The garden looks better after being untended for a week. So maybe I should stop loving it quite so much.
3. You should always make the bed and change the linen Before you leave. Coming back to an unmade bed is no fun at all.
4. You will slip right back into your regular habits and then feel faintly depressed at how routine your life really is.
5. Nothing beats showering in your own shower and sleeping in your own bed, on your own pillow.
6. Flying makes me constipated.

And that pretty much sums up my educational experiences so far this year, so there’s nothing left to do but wish you all a wonderful 2011!

PS: I’m a glutton for feedback, so leave a comment and make me happy.

Of cultural mash-ups

Last week I wrote a post about race and cultural identity. The response was awesome and left me questioning why the issue of race is such a perennial favourite. Is SA just race obsessed? I haven’t travelled much – certainly not as much I would like – but I have the distinct impression that this obsession with race happens all over the world. But why? And will it always be this way? Surely, humanity will one day reach a point where we say “Screw it, we’re all people. Maybe the colour of my skin doesn’t matter all that much. Like the colour of my hair or eyes.” Because, lets face it, at best race is a boring dinner conversation and at worst a divisive force that keeps us apart and prevents understanding.

Because I’m a parent, I think it’s pretty natural that my next question is whether it will be like this for my son. And that Really got me thinking. Because in his three years on this earth, I have been unable to adequately explain or clarify for myself what my son actually is in terms of race or culture. My own race and cultural identity is difficult enough to define, but on a good day I can make some headway. For my husband, I think that it’s easier – not many people would dispute that he’s a pretty WASPy South African with some Germanic influences. But what does that make my son? Is he coloured because he has a coloured mother? Or does he follow in a long line of WASP males like his Dad?

The way that my husband and I look also makes it difficult to define our son. Is E a light skinned coloured kid, or a white kid with a really great tan? And is skin colour/hair curl/nose shape a reliable indicator in the first place? I know lots of Jewish people with curly hair and Greek people with great tans. So really, the physical indicators of race seem to be pretty meaningless.

The issue of E’s culture becomes even murkier when you consider the fact that, because of our different cultural backgrounds, my husband and I are in all likelihood creating a brand new culture. A mash-up, as it were. So are we creating a new and unique race/culture or is this just the way the world is going? As inter-cultural and -racial marriages happen with increasing frequency around the world, will we one day end up with one giant global cultural mash-up? I kinda hope so. Because when this happens, race and culture’s divisive abilities just fritter away. Its tough to hate <insert appropriate nationality here> when your great-grandfather hailed from that very country/religion/whatever.

At the same time, there is obviously something to be said for maintaining cultural identity. Knowing that there are other people out there who share your history and ideology provides a sense of identity and security. Each culture has great things to offer the world and it would be sad if these disappeared. Which I think happens.

Jason and I are very aware of the traditions and values that we pass onto our son. And yet there are things being lost along the way, simply because of the time and place in which we live. We don’t live in the predominantly white northern suburbs of Jason’s youth. Nor do we live in the coloured townships of mine. The suburb that we live in is an eclectic mix of religions, races, cultures and socio-economic groups, which is one of the reasons that we chose it. Unfortunately, this means that E is missing out on many of the ‘sights and sounds’ of his parents’ cultures and loses something in this. I suppose he will form his own reference points over the years. Will these be more generically South African or will they just be particular to our familial ‘mash-up’? And what will the effect of that be? I’m not sure. I wish I could answer these questions. I hope that his life experience will be richer because his parents come from different backgrounds, but I also worry that he will never have the sense of belonging that comes with fitting into a particular group.

Not that living in a single group community necessarily guarantees a sense of belonging. I should know. This has always been a problem for me. Growing up, I was obviously a little coloured girl living in the appropriate Group Areas Act-assigned suburb. My neighbours were coloured, as were my friends. But because of my parents’ particular backgrounds I spoke a little differently, my hair was a little too straight and light, my skin was too pale and my eyes too green. To compound it all I didn’t like the right music and was a little too into Nirvana and The Cure to garner true social acceptance. I was the odd one.

Then, as I was about to enter high school, government decreed that South Africa’s schools should be opened to all races and my parents dutifully made the financial adjustments necessary to send me to the closest ‘white’ Model C school. I was going to get the best education that they could possibly afford. This was both burden and blessing. I did, in fact, get a great education. And suddenly I was around kids who shared my tastes and viewpoint. Unfortunately, they were almost exclusively white. And being the coloured Goth-girl with almost all white friends was not a good thing to be. So my oddness became even more noticeable and I felt estranged from both groups.

My friends’ parents would still obsessively lock their doors when they gave me a ride home. My parents would never feel comfortable at the school PTA meetings and they certainly never formed relationships with my school friends’ parents. The fact that my friends were labelled at all is important. I had ‘school’ friends and ‘home’ friends. My ‘home’ friends had mothers and fathers who could pop in and chat to my parents. My ‘school’ friends’ parents dropped me off at the gate and high-tailed it out of ‘the hood’. So despite finding individuals who I could connect with, I was worse off in terms of general societal/community acceptance because, essentially, I didn’t belong to either one – straddling the fence of the South African racial divide. Which may explain my own obsession with this topic. (The tale of eventually marrying a white guy is a subject for a whole new post.)

I just hope that E doesn’t experience these sorts of issues, because I know from experience that it is hard for an angsty teen to deal with racial acceptance while working through all the usual hormonal and existential crises. Perhaps by the time he is a teen, there will be enough mash-ups for it not to matter. Maybe belonging nowhere means that you belong everywhere.

Of Race and Cultural Identity

As I get older, I am grateful for the peace that comes with having a few more years under your belt. Mostly, I am pleased about the dwindling relevance of the angst of my teens and early adulthood. I no longer feel the need to question who I am, why I am here and how I want to be be perceived. Yet some questions linger. Perhaps it is because my circumstances and cultural reference points today are so different to those of my youth and childhood, but one of the things that I just can’t seem to shake is the question of racial identity. I know that this is a minefield in South Africa, and probably everywhere else in the world. Its just not something that I have ever been able to answer adequately. Perhaps I never will. Perhaps the fact that there are no easily identifiable answers points to the fact that race really shouldn’t be an issue at all.

Over the years, I have had many discussions with family and friends about what it means to be coloured and what the coloured cultural identity is. I have had as many answers as discussions.

I have heard, “Of course there is a coloured culture! It can be difficult to explain, but coloured people can recognise each other.” Coloured koeksusters are different to Afrikaans koeksusters. Our roti is different to Indian roti. ‘Play-whites’, ‘twanging’, Jack Purcells and Bomber jackets – worn together. These things are (supposedly) ours alone. While I recognise that there is some truth in all of this, I also know that there are so many similarities between various South African cultures that the differences are almost completely cancelled out.

Some say that there is no specific coloured culture because coloured people are by nature so diverse. Our cultural references are tied not only to the languages we speak at home, but to which part of South Africa – or even a particular city – we grew up in. “Even the slang is different,” I’ve been told. These differences can be distilled down to the suburb and street you grew up in, the school you went to and the amount of curl your hair holds. Then again, isn’t this true of everyone regardless of colour? And yet we wouldn’t argue that there is no such thing as culture At All, would we?

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve been told that there is no such thing as a coloured person. Supporters of this theory are particularly fond of citing the fact that ‘coloured’ is a created race that exists only in South Africa and no other country. ‘We are all black,” I’m told. “Calling yourself coloured is to take on the false racial stereotyping of the apartheid regime that sought only to divide and conquer.” Again, I can see a kernel of truth in this. But I can’t ignore the fact that there Are coloured people in South Africa and we Are a separate racial group and this Has led to a whole new set of cultural references. Perhaps the way in which it happened was false and engineered, but it did happen and to deny that is to deny our history. Also, I must admit that this response makes me really uncomfortable because – to my mind – it is inflammatory in its implication that an entire group’s existence and experiences can be negated by saying, “It should never have happened, therefore the consequences do not exist.”

Being exposed to such diverse opinions since childhood has left me confused and unsure of what to believe a lot of the time. So its probably easy to understand why Chris van Wyk’s Shirley, Goodness and Mercy and Eggs to Lay and Chickens to Hatch had such an impact on me. Here, I am presented with literature that speaks not only to the human in me, but the South African and – undoubtedly – the coloured.

Van Wyk grew up in a time and place separated from my own youth by a few decades and a considerable distance. Yet I understand the picture that he paints of a Riverlea in the 60s and 70s, that goes beyond his proficiency with the written word or our common ground as South Africans. I recognise this place. I recognise the dog tied up in the back yard while children play in the street. I have tasted the somewhat bizarre combination of roast chicken, roasted potatoes and biryani served on special occasions. I close my eyes and can smell a multitude of curries being cooked in a dozen different houses as I walk up the street with my friends. What I will always think of as ‘the five o’clock smell’, because that is when most of the mothers came home and started the cooking. My jaw aches in sympathy at the horrific surprise of biting into an elachi seed cleverly disguised in a lamb curry. I know how to play kennekie. Perhaps there are white and black people who know these sights and smells as well as I do. And yet the special way in which they are combined, I am convinced, is particular to coloured people.

When I first heard of van Wyk upon the the release of his first memoir, Shirley, Goodness and Mercy; I went straight out and bought a copy of the book – just as I did with Eggs to Lay and Chickens to Hatch. Here was a man who grew up in a suburb not too far from my father’s home in Coronationville. A man who was what I had always looked for while growing up – a coloured literary role model. These books have meant a lot to me. They have connected me to a people from whom I have often felt disconnected in my later years. They have provided a sense of familiarity, recognition and comfort that I have rarely experienced in my years of reading books produced by Americans, Englishmen and even white South Africans.

And so I say thank you to Chris Van Wyk for answering a question that I have been asking for close to 30 years. Clearly there is a coloured cultural identity, for I share it with you, across time and space.

But I am still left wondering, “Is race really important and should it define us, colouring our interactions with each other?” I don’t know. Perhaps that’s a question for another book… If you know what that book is, let me know.