the corner office

I think I'm all done on the politics front, but I replied to a post at Ben Langhinrichs' site, and I decided to store it here as well.

Ronwen's a few years younger than I am, and we were chatting this evening about something and she made the point that even in those few years, her youth was completely different to mine in terms of our experiences. I matriculated at a whites-only school. (I was the head boy, and caused a stink by telling one of my teachers that I'd rather vote for a communist ANC than for a pro-capitalist Conservative Party, because at least a political system in which the ANC could participate wasn't evil, but that's another story). The town I grew up in was whites-only, and for a large part of my childhood one did not see black people after dark because of curfews. My mom invited a black work colleague around one afternoon for tea, and it was a Big Thing because interracial social interaction was something that just didn't happen. Nelson Mandela was only released from prison in my last year of school, and when the event was televised, it was the first time anyone in South Africa had been allowed to see his face in decades (until he was released from jail, almost nobody knew what the most iconic anti-apartheid figure looked like). When Ronwen matriculated 5 years later, we'd had our first democratic elections, she was in an integrated school, and the idea of having a black family live next door to you wasn't foreign at all.

Normally I, like most South Africans, try not to dwell on the past, and I don't want to be known as the dude who talks about apartheid all the time. But when we have children one day (and it's unlikely they will grow up as South Africans), it might be hard to explain to them what it was like being a kid in the 80's in South Africa. Were all the people we grew up with horrible monsters? Were our parents and grandparents all evil ogres for living in this society and doing nothing about it, perhaps even supporting it? Perhaps one of the hardest things to come to terms with is just how easy it is for otherwise kind and caring human beings to develop very warped ideas about what is right and wrong.

Anyhow, this is what I wrote at Ben's site:

Out-and-out villification is one thing - and people often see that for what it is, but it's the subtle, supposedly-reasoned arguments that I was referring to.

When we were in school, we were never explicitly taught to hate black people - in many respects there was no official sentiment that non-Whites were inferior in any way (although the environment was such that out-and-out supremacists didn't have to worry about what they said).

We were taught that we needed apartheid (which means 'separateness') because whites were a minority and it was the best solution to 'protect our Christian, Western way of life', that we were all just too different to integrate naturally, that if the black majority were allowed to come into power we'd become an atheist, communist country. Sure, the rest of the world didn't like what we were doing, but they didn't understand our situation which was precarious and 'special', and besides, the first-world things we brought to Africa was in everyone's best interests, it's not like anyone was starving, were they? Most black people live lives better than our neighbours, so what if they can't vote or enjoy the same rights we can? They have their homelands where they can do what they want, and live however they like, why can't they just let us do the same?

Those sorts of sentiments, with a healthy dose of fear given what had happened to many ex-colonies in Africa in the 60s and 70s, was all that was needed for many otherwise-decent people to think that apartheid was either perfectly reasonable, or at the least, a necessary (not-really) evil.

Except that it was evil. To this day, it's a sensitive issue. I think many South Africans take perverse comfort in seeing what happens in the rest of the world, simpy because it reassures us that we weren't the only ones capable of such wrong-doing. Thankfully, for us at least, it's part of the past. 2004 is the 10th anniversary of South Africa's democracy. Things aren't always hunky-dory, but at least, 10 years later, I don't have to be ashamed to say I'm a South African.

Regular politics-free programming will continue shortly.