| SISONKE | Dennis Brutus said: |
| LEBO | There will come a time we believe when the shape of the planet and the divisions of the land will be less importantWe will be caught in a glow of friendshipA red star of hope will illuminate our livesA star of hopeA star of joyA star of freedom2 |
| SISONKE | Brutus reminds us that freedom in South Africa has always had a spiritual and moral quality. The founders of this democracy believed that they were creating a society in which friendships could and should exist across the races.Today, a cohort too young to have ever known formal apartheid is asking why they should trust whites. This is a pragmatic response to a poorly managed reconciliation process, but it is worth remembering things weren’t always like this.Helen Joseph remembers walking into prison with Lilian Ngoyi after the women’s march when with some bitterness, Ngoyi said to her:3 |
| LEBO | You are better off with your pink skin. |
| SISONKE | Joseph agreed and thought of her friend once they were both in prison. |
| LEBO | My pink skin brought me a bed, sheets, blankets. The mattress was revolting, urine stained. But Lilian slept on a mat on the floor with only blankets. I had a sanitary bucket with a lid. She had an open bucket covered with a cloth. |
| SISONKE | Similarly, Elinor Sisulu writes that when she was imprisoned with Albertina Sisulu, Barbara Hogan kept asking: |
| LEBO | Is Ma Sisulu being given this food? If she is not, then I don’t want it. Take it away.4 |
| SISONKE | The days of friendship stronger than the bars of a jail cell seem distant now. Today, almost 80% of black people in Gauteng say that they will never be able to trust whites, and almost half of whites polled say they think that blacks and whites will never be able to trust each other.5 When I speak with nostalgia about this generation of women Lebo says: |
| LEBO | I wonder if we, perhaps, are not idealistic about this solidarity? Does it look more real because the consequences of white people’s actions in showing support for black people were so harsh back then? Did struggle offer a place for intimate and sincere friendships, like sisterhood? I am thinking of how we support each other in close relationships, especially female friendships. The kinds of friends who help you get out of bad relationships, who pick you up when you are down, who watch your kids when you need to take care of yourself, who tell you when your man is up to shit ... Did relationships across colour go there?6 |
| SISONKE | I am shaken. The old idea of friendship as a tool for anti-racist struggles seems irrelevant and old-fashioned now.Sekoetlane Phamodi confronts interracial friendships with a thoroughly modern sensibility: by deleting his white Facebook friends. |
| LEBO | As I trawled through profile after profile and album after album, piecing together both my real and Facebook life narratives and where my ‘friends’ fit into it, I started to notice a disturbing pattern.A vast majority of my ‘friends’ were white. And, for an overwhelming majority of these, I was one of a handful of black individuals in their social circles. Wait, what? ... In every friends’ list and every photo album, I found myself playing a bittersweet game of ‘spot the black’. Our mutual friends were almost always lily white. The social events were lily white. And the status updates and posts were well punctuated with whiteness. I began to turn this over and over in my mind. How was it that in a country where more than 80% of the population was black, I found myself the sole or one of a handful of blacks in a lily-white list, party or picture frame? How was it that in a country where more than 80% of the population was black, my white ‘friends’ had, if at all, so few black meaningful friends?7 |
| SISONKE | Simamkele Dlakavu reflects on a Facebook fight, reminding us that just beneath the surface there is often a well of white rage: |
| LEBO | Last week, I witnessed on Facebook interracial ‘friendships’ explode when a black friend of mine posted: ‘It seems that if you’re white and male 70% of the work is [already] done.’ This is the response she got:‘Actually my friend you [are] so far [from] the truth it’s actually scary. White men especially young white men have [it] very tough in this black empowered country. Now try be a white male and look for a job in this anti-white country ... well sorry hun it ain’t going to happen due to the fact that us white folk don’t meet the BEE requirements. My husband is a white male and 70% of his work isn’t done for him hey. If anything he has had to work harder due to the fact that his skin ain’t black. So let’s rather say be young and black and my darling this country is your oyster. But yet everyone is so up in arms about apartheid ... personally it’s the best thing that happened for young black south africans [sic] cause now white people especially men don’t stand a chance here.’ 8 |
| SISONKE | No wonder then, that many of us are skeptical of white friends. Their feelings matter more than ours. Our gains are seen as their losses. Zama Ndlovu illustrates: |
| LEBO | My first promotion came in 2009, a year so bad the economy saw a record negative economic growth. Despite this, I was one of a handful of people to get a coveted promotion. A white male friend and colleague cut my celebratory mood short with a passing comment: ‘Let’s not pretend your promotion had nothing to do with affirmative action.’ |
| SISONKE | Ndlovu is remarkably insightful about this personal sleight. She notes: |
| LEBO | Over time I have had to constantly remind myself that my white friends and I occupy the same spaces but live in different worlds. In their world, apartheid was a 46-year-long incident that ended in 1994, the moment Nelson Mandela dropped his ballot into the ballot box.9 |
| LEBO & SISONKE | With friends like these who needs enemies? |
| SISONKE | It is not only that whites are insensitive to the experiences of their black friends, it is also the case that whites who are friends with one another often form strong bonds over casual racism. Remember this news item? |
| LEBO | (newsreader’s voice) In Pretoria today, two University of Pretoria students will face disciplinary action after a photo of the two dressed up as black domestic workers went viral.The photo shows the two women covered in brown paint, wearing scarves over their heads and with pillows stuffed into their skirts to make their buttocks look bigger.The photos were posted on Facebook but were soon removed.10 |
| SISONKE | Why do fun and carefree moments of white youthfulness so often involve mocking and denigrating black people? After this event, on radio someone called into PowerFM and asked, |
| LEBO | How can we be friends with these whites when their children can so quickly forget the intimacy of being mothered by black women? |
| SISONKE | The TRC should have investigated the domestic labor system. It might have helped whites understand that in South Africa racism and intimacy are not mutually exclusive, that in fact racism and intimacy are often bedfellows. Novelist Sindiwe Magona’s star character Stella tells this story: |
| LEBO | There swimming afloat in that water of hers was her panty … she’d left it there for me to wash.What? Me? I taught her a lesson, that very first day. I took something, a peg, I think, and lifted that panty of hers and put it dripping wet to the side of the bath which I then cleaned until it was shiny shiny.You think she got my message? Wrong. Doesn’t she leave me a note? Stella, wash the panty when you wash the bath.What do you mean what did I do? I did not go to school for nothing. I found a pen in her bookshelf and found a piece of paper and wrote her a note too: ‘Medem,’ I said in the note, ‘please excuse me but I did not think anyone can ask another person to wash their panty. I was taught that a panty is the most intimate thing … my mother told me no one else should even see my panty. I really don’t see how I can be asked to wash someone else’s panty.’That was the end of that panty nonsense.11 |
| (Lines delivered as both Lebo and Sisonke laugh) |
| SISONKE | … The most intimate thing. Cleaning and feeding whites in a racist society is intimate. And we all know that intimacy is complicated. In 2010, Sarit Swisa, a Master’s student at this institution [University of the Witwatersrand] interviewed young white South Africans about their attitudes towards the nannies who raised them. |
| LEBO | Ethan: Ja, like I have racial issues but it would never, she’s different. She doesn’t fall under that category in my book and ... the thing is as well; she’s the only domestic that we’ve ever had that I’ve been close to. The rest have been ... they come, they go, they steal, they this, they that. I don’t trust them.Laura: Like, even from a young age we always tried to help her to get better at her English and um, my mom used to pay for her to study while she was working for us so that she could not be a maid but she just chose that, that was better for her. But at least she did get an opportunity to study and stuff so, which is good for her |
| SISONKE & LEBO | if she ever decides to do anything else.12 (Chorus) |
| SISONKE | These children remind us that white people have never quite known what to do with black people’s feelings. Our labor has mattered: our arms that push strollers; our backs that carry white infants; our hands that wash white women’s panties.More than that, as Rian Malan reminds us in this passage from his memoir, black female bodies have often been used in other ways by white male teenagers: |
| LEBO | After practice I set off on foot down to Abbotswold Road, swept along by a gang of jeering, sniggering teenage boys. Whenever I stopped, they joshed and jeered so I had to keep going. We came to a big white house. My mates decamped outside under a streetlight and I slunk down the dark alley that led to the servant’s quarters, moving on tiptoe because what I was about to do was unlawful. I tapped an iron door and the black woman opened it, wearing a satin nightgown. The room smelled of all the things I associated with servants: red floor polish, putu, and Lifebuoy soap. Even her bed was waist-high on bricks to thwart the tokoloshe. I took off my clothes and clambered onto it and then I was in her arms, overpowered by the smell of her, and terrified, utterly terrified. I couldn’t talk to her because we had few words in common. I didn’t know what to do. I recoiled at the thought of French-kissing her, but I did it anyway because I was a social democrat and I did not want to insult her. And then I pulled up the nightie and instants later it was over. I rolled off and asked, ‘Was I good? Am I big enough?’ She said yes. She was very kind.13 |
| SISONKE & LEBO | This is why we cannot yet be friends. |
| SISONKE | Like many others, this ritual of white male bonding and friendship involved violence and laughter at the expense of a black body. These bodies are often but not always female. This news item too began with laughter, the object of a joke was a Muslim man with a beard. |
| LEBO: | Kazi (27), from Ventersdorp, was with his father’s friend Anser Mahmood when they were attacked at a Chicken Licken outlet on Monday.‘Two white people ... they called him [Osama] bin Laden in Afrikaans because of his beard ... and then they called us kaffirs’, Mahmood told Sapa by telephone on Wednesday.‘I don’t know what he hit me with. I was unconscious.’‘Nobody helps us. They wanted me dead also, but I survived.’North West police said a murder docket had been opened for Kazi’s killing.14 |
| SISONKE | The white men who killed Kazi were brothers: a bond even closer than friendship. It was a bond that allowed them to beat a black body to death. Roedolf Viviers was sentenced to just eight years for the murder. His brother walked free. I think of Xolela Mangcu who has noted that: |
| LEBO & SISONKE | This country is moving closer and closer to the brink of racial war, simply because white people refuse to take seriously the pain of black people.15 |
| SISONKE | The present climate is combustible in part because whiteness itself is constructed as being under fire. Inside the laager, whites have a camaraderie, united by their victimhood and blacks increasing ‘racialism’.The celebrated artist Willem Boshoff offers a stunning example of this mentality: |
| LEBO | I am proud to be labelled racist if it means that:I am revolted by dim-witted 4x4 politiciansI appreciate security walls electrical fences, alarms and guard dogsI detest crime and criminals no matter what the colour of their skinI fly into a rage when sports teams are forced to select undeserving playersI could scream in frustration when jobs are given to unqualified people …16 |
| SISONKE | The ideology whites have built in service of themselves in this country lives and breathes through their allegiances to one another. It is facilitated by friendship and a sense of being attacked by people who don’t look like them. |
| SISONKE | Many blacks are outraged by Boshoff but Ferial Haffajee has a different take: she is tired of black outrage because she thinks that whites are of diminishing importance in South Africa. She writes: |
| LEBO | Think Bonang. Cassper. Minenhle. Do we celebrate how lovely we are as deeply as we rage at remnant racism?17 |
| SISONKE | Haffajee has no time for this talk about black victimization. She doesn’t understand our race obsession when we are now in charge: |
| LEBO | I see a generation saying it is enslaved in a system of white supremacy. I feel I live in another world in one country; my freedom is precious and I would yield to nobody, especially 21 years after it finally arrived. I imagine no white supremacy because freedom means I don’t have to countenance it any longer. And if found, you can today, kick it away like a cowboy boot from a piece of tumbleweed in a Western.18 |
| SISONKE | I don’t agree with her but I accept that her challenge forces us to imagine what it will be like to one day to: |
| LEBO & SISONKE | kick racism away like a cowboy boots from a piece of tumbleweed!Whoooo! |
| (Laughter and triumphant sounds from Lebo and Sisonke.) |
| SISONKE | This day will come I hope, but it will need white people to think about the words of Njabulo Ndebele: |
| LEBO | If South African whiteness has an opportunity to write a new chapter in world history, it will have to come out from under the umbrella of international whiteness and repudiate it. Putting itself at risk, it will have to declare that it is home now, sharing in the vulnerability of other compatriot bodies. South African whiteness will have to declare that its dignity is inseparable from the dignity of black bodies.19 |
| SISONKE | Repudiating the protections of whiteness always preoccupied Nadine Gordimer. In the 1980s she talked about why she didn’t move to Zambia in characteristically descriptive terms: |
| LEBO | I discovered I was only a European there like any other white person. I took that very hard. At least in South Africa, even if I get my throat cut, I’m an African. |
| SISONKE | Her ideas on where whites fit in the subject of an early 1959 essay by the same name offer us a guide for today’s questions.20 |
| LEBO | If we’re going to fit in at all in the new Africa, it’s going to be sideways, where-we-can, wherever-they’ll-shift-upfor-us. This will not be comfortable … it’s … a matter of whites learning how to live in a different way, truly accepting what is coming which is black majority rule and not fearing, not wanting guarantees of group rights which will set them aside, set them apart, mark them out forever. … They can’t be wanting to boss people around and doing all their thinking for them.21 |
| SISONKE | It is hard to imagine whites fitting in sideways where they can. But we must. If South African whites are to be ordinary and not special how might they behave?Perhaps a young white man buying his first home would be prepared to live in an affordable and pretty home in Soweto’s swankier parts.We cannot be friends if the very thought of making a smart financial decision of that kind repulses him and his parents.Maybe a group of concerned white citizens can voluntarily, without any prompting from black people, seek to change the name of John Vorster Drive to Fatima Meer Road. We cannot be friends if whites aren’t willing to celebrate our heroes as their own. Perhaps white parents in the Saxonwold neighborhood where Malan had his encounter would re-enrol their children at the neighborhood schools alongside the children of their domestic workers. We cannot be friends if whites cannot see the sense and national importance of a single education system in which the destinies of black and white children are intertwined and equally valued. But there is more: whites must perform these nation-building and privilege busting acts |
| SISONKE & LEBO | without any expectation of praise or hero-worship for subjecting themselves to the same conditions as blacks. |
| SISONKE | Then one day, without even noticing it, because it will happen without dramatic announcement or need for validation, we might wake up and realise that we have fallen into friendship and one morning just like that, |
| LEBO | We will find ourselves caught in a glow of friendship, |
| SISONKE | deep and |
| LEBO | intimate and |
| SISONKE | real and it will be of no consequence at all because the world around us will have changed so much that we will finally |
| LEBO | Finally |
| LEBO & SISONKE | be able to call ourselves free. |
