What about the Ancestors?

I remember that day very clearly. An excited call from my partner, Leon, saying “We have got a child”. I went into panic mode. I had made my position very clear, both to him and into Social Welfare. I wasn’t going to have just any child thrown at me. I wanted to be sure that I could “bond” with the child first – not that I had the vaguest idea of what that might mean.

So I went to see this child, which they thought would be right for us. He was lying quietly in his cot at the far end of the room, sucking his finger. I looked at him. He looked at me. After a while, I put out my finger and he took hold of it. And at that moment – that instant – I knew that this child was mine. I knew that I was his father and he would be my son.

When we adopted our children, the legal wording of the adoption order was, for me at least, very important. It said that this child was now “as if born to you”. The ancestors of that child (and the state) for whatever reason, handed him over to me and my partner. Our children were not “abandoned”. They were consciously and lovingly handed over. Those children are now mine - “as if born to me”. These two black boys now have two white fathers.

And it happened quite naturally, fairly early on, when I was asked by one of them about the identity of an old white lady in my photograph album, that I explained that she was my mother. “Your grandmother”, I explained, “she died a long time ago”. And we moved on to the next set of pictures. “And that is your Aunt, and that is your cousin…” and so it went.

Both the children refer to Leon’s parents, who are much more to them than pictures in an album - as “Granny” and “Grandpa”. And Leon’s parents make no distinction between our children and the children which his brother has produced biologically. Our ancestors are now the children’s ancestors. They have no others.

Of course besides anything else, the question of culture has also come up fairly frequently. Just because of the fact that these children happen to be black and me white, do I need to start doing a course in gumboot dancing? Should I rush off and get myself circumcised? Should I have a regular supply of Mopani worms in the house to make them feel secure? This is as crazy as it is bizarre and it reveals, I am afraid, just how far we are away from a really non-racial society, where colour is the least significant thing about a person.

No, we are not there yet. And yes, I have no objection to “exposing” my children to cultures other than my own. I also have no illusions about the difficult path they will need to tread. They need to be secure, not in some fantasy culture from somewhere else, but in their own skin, for who they are. And force-feeding them Mopani worms will not make it easier for them. It may make it a whole lot worse.

The violence of culture

The other day, I glanced, casually over at the naked man, who was standing next to me’s gym bag – the way one does - (you know how we boys have to compare everything). And to my horror, I saw, lying amongst the aftershave, sweaty Jockeys and hairbrushes, a gun! It was a large looking gun in a leather holster, and it was lying at the bottom of his gym bag!

I shook my head in disbelief. I looked up at the naked man and then back at the gun. He glanced disinterestedly in my direction and went on dressing. I said “Is that a gun in your gym bag?”. He looked into the bag with some surprise, as though I was asking if it were, perhaps, a tortoise.

“Yes!” he said, followed by a silent “Duh! Of course it is a gun, you idiot! What did you think it was – a tortoise?”
“In the gym!?” I said, my voice rising the way it does when I am about to have a heart attack.
“In my gym BAG!” he responded aggressively, as though that solved everything.

I left the matter. I said nothing. I stared horrified at the bag and its extraordinary contents again and then I just carried on getting dressed. On my way out, I asked for one of those silly little cards to write down a complaint, (which never gets attended to, or answered in my long experience at Virgin Active). I asked whether Virgin Active had any policy about bringing guns onto the property. The unhelpful man at the desk didn’t know if there was any policy. When I asked him whether Virgin Active had any safe to lock the gun away, or any system to keep it safe. Or any sign anywhere prohibiting bringing guns into the gym. He said no, it didn’t.

I once made a suggestion, on another one of those placatory little suggestion cards which the gym provides to make you think something is going to be done about your issue , that Virgin Active provide condom dispensers in the change-rooms. After all, a healthy lifestyle is what a gym is all about, surely this would be a little thing to do, which could go a long way in making free condoms available in a closed and non-threatening environment. The smiling man who continuously asks me how I am, but doesn’t give a fig, stopped smiling briefly when he read my suggestion. He said he didn’t think “they” would allow it, because the gym was a family gym. So, condoms are not allowed, but guns are. It is a strange world we live in!

Indeed it is a strange world. It is a strange world where it is fine for dad to leave the house in the morning, on his way to the gym, with a gun strapped to his chest. It is a strange world where his partner sees that as normal. And, in an environment such as that, it is even stranger that a business seemingly dedicated to health, wellness and all those other good things, can simply ignore the fact that in the flimsiest of lockers, with the tiniest of locks, a gun can be left lying in a gym bag, unattended!

But that is now our culture. And the more we accept it, the more we remain silent in the face of it, the more it gains power and credence and the more it becomes normative. That is the tyranny of culture. Because “that is what we do”, it is allowed to go unchallenged. So, we can publicly torture bulls to the point of death, before we stab them in Spain, or we can tear them apart with our bear hands in Kwazulu-Natal – because “that is what we do”.

We allow the thing to gain a power of its own, because we are too feeble to call it what it is – ghastly and unacceptable, whether or not, it has the veneer of “culture” hiding its ugliness. The man in the gym, with his gun lying in his gym bag undoubtedly felt it was his “right” to carry a gun. One could say, I suppose, that carrying a gun is now part of his “culture”. He would undoubtedly argue that there is a prevailing “culture of violence” in our society and that he is simply trying to protect himself. But the violence of his “culture” - of gun-owning and gun-carrying and gun-leaving-lying-in gym-bags - simply adds to it, and allows it to normalize and continue.

Imbibing Cape Culture

I spent the day today, or most of it anyway, at the end of year staff party. These things are necessary – when else during the year can you get drunk in an office situation and make sexual advances on people you usually pass files to?

This one was held at a government facility on the beach at Melkbosstrand. It is a strange, unimaginative building, built right on the primary sand dune. It was never legal. Some people in the Department got into a bit of trouble in the 1990s and then the matter was forgotten, apparently. So the building remains – a real blight on the fairly rough landscape.

The theme was “West Coast” so there was lots of sand, and sea and West Coast delicacies – like Snoek (fish) on the braai (Barbecue); tripe curry; potjie kos (stew cooked in a three legged cast iron pot. There was also West Coast culture, which I saw, for the first time in full cry today.

My experience of ‘Coloured” (or mixed race) people of the Western Cape has been that they are fairly formal. “Mr” this and “Mrs” that. They are fairly conservative and fairly underexposed. They stick pretty much to themselves. (Naturally, I am talking in huge generalisations here – but this is just my observation. And of course, all generalisations are false...)

So, to see them “letting their hair down” (as my mother would have said) was an interesting experience. They jived. They danced. They did things which I think are called “party dances” where everyone does what looks like an aerobic exercise to music. Women in scarves cooked Snoek over open fires and stirred massive three legged pots. Inside, the Karaoke was reaching fever pitch as slightly flat vocal chords murdered yet another song. (Or maybe not! Maybe that is what they were supposed to sound like!)

The man managing the dance music seemed to cater for the “African” and the “Coloured” groups, in particular. The African set had lots of Kwaito and what I have come to recognise as Hip-Hop; the Coloured set had beat-y sentimental love-song type numbers. And there was an unfamiliar (to me anyway) unity between the two groups on the dance floor. Off the dance floor, the two groups sat apart from each other, in groups of their own. The whites also formed their own group. This is what life in the work environment is like. This is what Cape Town is like.

It cannot be that language is the issue. Everyone in the department understands English. And whereas not everyone may know how to speak Afrikaans or Xhosa – in the work environment, English is the way people communicate. So language cannot be the reason why people choose to sit together.

The other thing I noticed rather a lot of, was alcohol. Alcohol which appeared to have been brought from home in cooler bags – not bought by the state. It was flowing freely. Even after lunch, it was very much in evidence and I battled to understand how people would be driving in that condition. But obviously, they were going to be.

It was, however, the performer who strummed a guitar and his strange accompaniment on the accordion that gave me a taste of Cape musical culture. It was vibrant, simple and enjoyable. And all of this next to a sea that was the most extraordinary azure colour – “Kabbeljou (Cob) water” said someone. "Haai (shark) water", said another. It was astonishingly beautiful – with Robben Island in front of us and Table Mountain to the left. It was a celebratory day I had, for sure. Just a pity it was, as is usual here, a culturally divided one.

Hip Hop enters my life

I found myself yesterday evening sitting in a darkened Primary school hall, waiting for a Hip Hop (what does one call it” Show? Exhibition? Display? Performance?) ... choose any of those words ... to begin.

The crowd was standard primary school parent fare. There were the trendy mothers; the matter-of-fact no-nonsense mothers; the mothers with too much time on their hands; the mothers with too little; and some grandparents looking scared. There were fathers as well, some looked a little unwilling, but everyone was putting on a brave front.

The music is not hard to describe – especially for those of us who demand that it is turned off the moment it makes its appearance on commercial radio stations one may be listening to on one’s travels – it is unbearable.

The lyrics ... or perhaps more accurately, words to accompany the unbearable throb of the other stuff are impossible to unscramble. The opening one went something like this:
Da da de Da da ... wanna be a mole; Da da de Da da ... all about control; Da da de Da da ... sitting on a pole; Da da de da da ... lookin’ at a hole.

I have no idea what they might mean, but I could not fail to notice the extraordinary things the dancer on the stage was doing. He was an older bloke of (it’s difficult to judge these days and was a bit hard to see, because his shirt kept on sliding down his torso to cover his head) something like 18 perhaps? He was balancing on one arm, T-shirt around his head and woolen cap having fallen off, naked torso and jeaned legs thrusting and contorting in the air.

For a novice, like me, it was a fairly eye-catching and dramatic beginning to an evening which really was revelatory. Hip Hop is a whole cultural thing, which I have absolutely no idea about. It has happened around me, for the past 20 years, and I have simply been able to turn a switch to get rid of it. There are movements the kids were doing with and to each other, which I have no idea of. Poses, stances, jerks which signify stuff. Stuff like – “well that’s me”; or “I’m done, your turn now”; or “ yes, I acknowledge your clapping out there”.

It was a bit like watching athletics, ballet and mapantsula - all rolled into a Tik pipe and lit with the American flag. But it is, for better or for worse, common culture.

The clothing they were wearing was most improbable – and it meant that the skill was not only in jerking your legs in the air, while you swapped hands in your handstand. But you also needed to make sure your oversized jeans would not fall down when you were right side up, or that the crotch had not fallen down so low, that you would be completely restricted when you wanted to disengage your legs from your hip joints – which you would do often. You also have to manage your cap on your head, when you are upside down.

I was lost in wonder and amazement! And the amount of technical skill was almost unbelievable. I mean, these were not professional dancers, they are kids! Some of them were kids at Primary school and others were from the nearby High school. I could not believe my eyes, when I saw my own, usually somewhat shy child, leaping around and doing cartwheels, in time and in sequence!

So, what do I make of it? It was, certainly, bewildering. And as my partner’s father commented afterwards – “If we had to do that we would need a Hip op!” But the fact is, it was all really impressive. And I saw this phenomenon in a completely different light last night.

Does that mean I am going to allow Hip Hop on the car radio – bloody hell, no!

Trans-racial togetherness

After much to-ing and fro-ing we were invited to attend what was described as a “trans-cultural” adoption group yesterday. Now, what might a “trans-cultural adoption group” be, you ask me?

Well, this particular group was one where white single mothers, who have adopted black children have got together on a monthly basis – for reasons of support, I suppose. I would have called that a trans-racial adoption group. The fact that they call it a trans-cultural adoption group is cause, I would say, for some concern. It goes back to the substantive matter of whether or not culture is racially defined. This, after all, was one of the fundamental tenets of apartheid ideology – that we are all racially and culturally separate-able and circumscribable. It then took it further. It said that culture was something fixed for all time. It was something which was defined primarily by skin colour, and once defined, it was something one could not escape.

Now, to assume that the culture of the children in this group - because they happen to have black skins - is of a different culture to the parents with white skins, to my mind, is highly problematic. There was even some casual discussion, in the group of nodding in the direction of the “culture” of a particular child. So, I heard that one child’s biological background was Zulu. I wonder what, in reality that is going to mean for the child? Lessons in Zulu dancing? I discovered, when I did a DNA test of myself, that I had Croatian roots - what on earth does that mean in my life, other than vague curiosity?

We were invited to the group somewhat curiously, being neither single nor mothers, you understand. We went, because we feel it is in some way important for our children to understand that they are not alone in the world – that there are other families like ours. But the problem is, what happens when there are some fundamental discordances relating to values? Is that something we want them to be exposed to as well?

As it was, the leader of the group revealed that there was some issue about us being a same-sex couple. Apparently there was some discussion in the group about having men in the group, because there was a lack of male role-models. When our names came up, apparently, one comment was “but do we really want two gay men in the group?” Again, it is really a question of values. Of course, in the real world, our children are going to need to realize that not everyone is accepting of gay men parenting children (trans-racial or not). But do we want to belong to a group where some of the parents are not completely affirming?

It’s difficult. This is, after all, Cairp Tahn. This is one of the most racially divided spots on the African continent. So, there is some sense in taking what is on offer. But does that mean that values need to be compromised as well? I really don’t know. I suppose I also have some missionary zeal left in me, which means that I still feel constrained to convert the infidel, but does one do that in the context of one’s children? That is a question which we will be considering in the next while, for sure.

Trans-racial parenting

My children are black. That is an accident of their physiology, as much as my relative paleness is of mine.

We have, in our employ, a childminder, who comes originally from Venda. Venda is famous for, amongst other things, Mopani worms. One day, I arrived home from work to find my eldest child chewing on a large, seemingly juicy Mopani worm, which he had demanded from her plate. My personal reaction was revulsion – but he seemed to be enjoying it, so no harm was done and I made no comment. I notice that today, 7 years later, Mopani worms do not seem to feature on his list of favourite foods. They could, because they are still infrequently present in our household, but they don’t.

When we were living in Johannesburg, our children attended a mostly black pre-primary school. The accent of the eldest child was that of a non-model “C” black South African. Very unlike mine, which, although not Queen’s English by a long shot, has been accused of being slightly “posh”. Our other son, who attended the same school, seemed to have an accent more like ours. When we moved to Cape Town, it took two weeks before the eldest child spoke in a broad and immediately recognisable “Cape flats” accent. The other maintained what he had before. Both children again went to the same school.

My point? Culture, and everything that goes with it, is learned behaviour. It is not somehow connected to one’s DNA. Their culture isn’t somehow connected to their colour. If my eldest child doesn’t eat Mopani worms, it is not because he hasn’t been exposed to them, but because the dominant culture in which we live, as a family, doesn’t expose him to them often enough for him to want them. If he is now speaking with a Cape flats accent, it is because that is the dominant accent he is exposed to at school and one which appears to help him fit in, whereas the other child doesn’t seem to have the same kind of needs.

When we adopted the children, the legal wording of the adoption order was, for me at least, very important. It said that this child was now “as if born to you”. The ancestors of that child, (and the state) for whatever reason, handed him over to me and my partner. They were not “abandoned”. They were consciously and lovingly handed over. Those children are now mine - “as if born to me”. They now have two white fathers.

Now, just because of the fact that these children happen to be black and me white, do I need to start a course in gumboot dancing? Should I rush off and get myself circumcised? Should I have a regular supply of Mopani worms in the house to make him feel secure? This is as crazy as it is bizarre and it reveals, I am afraid, just how far we are away from a really non-racial society, where colour is the least significant thing about a person.

No, we are not there yet. And yes, I have no objection to “exposing” my children to cultures other than my own, (which is the reason, by the way, that we were at a friend’s ancestor do!) But I also have no illusions about the difficult path they will need to tread. They need to be secure, not in some fantasy culture from somewhere else, but in their own skin, for who they are. And force-feeding them Mopani worms may not make it easier for them. It may make it a whole lot worse.

Are my black children white?

I was pleased to be invited to a colleague of mine’s family ‘do’. “Exactly what kind of a family ‘do’ was it going to be?” I asked. “Oh”, he said breezily, “we will be introducing my youngest son to the ancestors”. I looked seriously at him. “Are there going to be any animal slaughters on the front lawn?” I asked as lightly as I knew how. “Because if there are going to be, then I’m not coming”.

He assured me that the hapless goat had already been killed, and that all that was required was for us to gather round and perform some kind of ritual or other. I thought that would be good, and so, with the aid of my GPS, ventured for not the first time into Gugulethu – (or, as some locals refer to it “Sjoojoolehtois”). Without a GPS, I have to tell you, it would be an impossible exercise. There are no street signs. And the streets themselves are named “NY121” and “NY122” etc. Why NY? Oh, it was explained to me, that stands for “Native Yard”.

Anyway, my two children and I – my two very white children with black skins – arrived. The men were in the garage, being men - and the women were in the living room. I seemed to be an honorary woman, so that is where I stayed for the while. I had noticed on the way in, (as did my saucer-eyed children) that there was the head of the hapless, slaughtered goat, lying next to a small fire that was burning on the front lawn. I noticed too, by the by, that the ground of the front lawn was so waterlogged that the house seemed to be floating. Such is normal, I understand in the Native Yard area.

At some point, a grass mat was produced and mother and child sat on it, were smeared with something red (I didn’t ask!) and all of us, sitting in a circle around them, were asked to take with our right hand, two small beads from a bowl and hold them in our left hands. Then the bowl collected the two beads from everyone’s left hands. These were the same beads that were made into a necklace and placed around Junior’s neck. The string of the necklace was bits of rubbed together Achilles tendon of the hapless goat. I was told that he would wear it until it fell off.

Just prior to this, the hapless goat was brought into the lounge in which we were all sitting, boiled, cut up and in a very large enamel bowl. My children looked at me with very large imploring eyes and said, very definitely, that they were not hungry.

When, later, I asked one of the elders, with whom I was sitting (by virtue of my age, I suppose, and the greying colour of my hair), what the bead ritual had all meant, I was told that the right hand takes, and the left hand gives, and so we are all involved in what that child is, because we all add something to him – to his life, to his being.

That, it seems to me, is a pretty important – fairly dramatic sort of statement. I’m not completely sure how it works out in practise, because obviously, the proof of the pudding must be in the eating, but it is a serious enough, laudable enough sort of principal. And it sure isn’t the way my culture deals with children! There is no way in hell that I could call anyone else’s child mine – and there is very little that I could do influence the way that child grows up. I see this in my own family. It is almost as though other people’s children are some kind of sacred domain. I can’t (and don’t) say when I disapprove of their behaviour, nor would it be expected that I should take any kind of responsibility for them, if they got themselves into serious trouble. And if I did get involved, it would not be because I see the children as mine, but because I would have some sort of connection with the parents.

So, I asked – what did Tata Mkhulu (grandfather) think of my adopted children? Are they white or are they black? Should I be worrying about whether or not to slaughter a goat for them, or not? Predictably, he said that they were not genetically mine, and that culture relates to genes. I said nonsense, in the nicest possible way, of course. And that they are as much my children as if they were conceived by me. And, to cut a long discourse short, we agreed to disagree – because our cultures are so completely different.

It all took me back to when I was living in Lesotho, with the dominant culture so vastly different from my own. With me feeling like I was on Planet Zog, and the Basotho behaving like I was just someone who had, over a period of centuries perhaps, just lost my way.

So, should I be slaughtering goats for my kids? And making bead necklaces for them to wear? I think not. Mine and my partner’s are the only ancestors around – and you know what? That’s what these kids have landed up with. And in my culture, ancestors don’t interfere. And to my children’s great relief, the goats are made of plastic.

Culture schmulture

Now, let me get this right. To be a man, what you need to do is to wait until you are 16. Then you need to join what in this part of the world gets called a "school". The "principal" of this said "school" takes you off into the mountains in the middle of winter, strips you, beats you to a pulp, starves you, refuses you water, makes you sing and then chops off your foreskin with a blade that is likely to cause an infection of one sort or another so that, in all likelihood, you either lose you penis in its entirety or, worse, your life.

That's what has been going on here lately. And believe me, not for the first time either. It happens every winter. And every winter we all watch shivering 16-year-old survivors of circumcision schools lying in hospital. We see anguished parents saying they didn't know that their child had gone to the school and now they are dead. And then we have to sit through this Africanist and that traditionalist saying how important it all is and this nurse and that doctor saying how tragic it all is.

But it is culture and God forbid we should dare actually to criticise it, let alone reject it outright or condemn it as nonsense of the highest possible grade. No, that we can't do because everyone is so keen to tango on the cultural eggshells. Thank God for the Zulus, I say. Because they once had a leader who was brave enough and sure enough of himself and sensible enough and (some would say) pragmatic enough just to do away with the ghastly practice with a majesterial wave of his royal hand.

And so began another culture just as strong---this time with foreskins, proving once and for all the utter senselessness and stupidity of those who would argue that life as a man can only begin once a God-given piece of you is chopped off. The cultural contradiction is thus fully exposed. But put a Zulu and a Xhosa man in the same room, the latter circumcised and the former not, and I promise you there will be a merry showdown about who is a man and who is not and why.

Thank God for the Zulus, because otherwise the whole thing could so easily be turned into something racial as well (forgetting that the Americans circumcise routinely, of course).
If we object to female circumcision on grounds of barbarism, what on earth makes us not reject male circumcision as a cultural practice? There is no logic in the argument. But culture, as we all know so well, seldom operates on the level of logic.

Many years ago, in the eighties, I helped six or seven young Cosas members who were in trouble. The noose of the security cordon around Grahamstown was being tightened and they were in grave danger of being caught. I helped them to get across the border to Lesotho.
And something I will never forget is when we were driving towards the Lesotho border, suddenly one of them got very agitated. The freedom songs ground to a halt and a serious discussion took place in Xhosa. I asked what was going on, because one of the boys looked extremely worried. They told me. They were all very excited about leaving the country. They were very excited indeed about joining the underground. But how were they going to get circumcised in Lusaka?

I had a discussion the other day, with an intern from Wits University who is working on our project, about the subject. He is Xhosa. He went to circumcision school and it clearly had a very large impact on his life. When he talks about it, he shows no regret. He says there are things that he can't talk about. Would he force his son to do it? No, he says, he would allow his son to make up his own mind. He would put to his son the benefits as he saw it and leave it at that. I believe he would, but what I don't think he is able to see is that the pressure to conform culturally would be quite enormous and would far outweigh any notion of objective decision-making on his son's part.

That is what culture can, and does, do. It pushes you into a corner. It forces you to conform and in the end, it leaves you with very little indeed, if you are not deeply critical about it. And in the end, we are left staring at each other's penises in the effort to determine which of us is in the in group and which of us is not, not unlike the Nazis did to the Jews.

I believe that circumcision schools should be banned. I believe that those who run them should be charged and put in prison. I think circumcision is completely wrong when it is practised by adults on children and I think it is a complete violation of their rights to their own bodies.
I have no view whatsoever on adults who want to mutilate themselves. I have only mild nausea about people who want to stick pins through their tongues, noses, belly buttons, ears and other available parts of their bodies. If people want to walk over fire, let them do so. If they want to hammer swords into their stomachs, please, be my guest. I accept that this is entirely, completely, absolutely their own business and my nausea is mine. But not children. That is a different thing altogether. And not 16-year-olds who can be persuaded by just about anything anyone around them does. These are different matters entirely.

The fact that it is tied up with someone or other's culture is entirely irrelevant to the argument in just the same way as we would need to reject most other forms of inhuman treatment dressed up in cultural garb, such as ritual murder for instance. Because a thing is cultural makes it neither good nor acceptable in its own right. Because a thing is cultural, or even because a thing is widely practised, gives it no credibility at all on its own.

Human rights has got to be the standard here. We have no other. Every form of religion, in its own way and some more viciously than others, has people doing things that others regard as crazy or inhuman or degrading. So religion cannot provide us with any standard.
Human rights must judge culture. Or if not that, it must hold it very firmly in check.