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.

Our Canadian Refugee

A friend of mine, whom I visited yesterday in Johannesburg wondered why on earth there was so much publicity, here, around Brandon Huntley – the 31 year old “crime refugee”, who has somehow managed the Refugee board in Canada to believe his ludicrous stories about being repeatedly and violently attacked by black South Africans. I think the reason is simple.

No-one is going to claim that there is no violence in our society. No-one is going to claim that there is no racism in our society. And no-one is immune from either of those. And, I suppose, there is no comparison between Canada and South Africa in that regard. But the issue is this. We have come through an extremely violent history. An extreme, one-sidedly racist, violent history. And that violent racism was honed to perfection, not by black people, but by whites. It cannot be a surprise – not even to Canadians – that there are consequences to that history.

And the thing is, the transfer of power from a violent, racist minority, to the remarkably democratic majority has been unbelievably peaceful. That has been the reality for white South Africans. By and large, white people are still living in luxury; they still have access to the best education; they still have jobs, and salaries and cars and bank accounts. That is the reality.

So, to base one’s claim on a fiction, is not only outrageous, it is profoundly disingenuous and extremely disturbing. That is why his case has evoked such anger. (Of course, those people who have actually been criminalised or attacked have come out in support – but they would be extremely unwise to see this man as their mouthpiece.)

After first trying to get citizenship through marriage, his next alternative was to paint himself as a victim. But he does so with no regard for anything but his own wellbeing and his own extremely selfish needs and wants.

There is an interesting article in today’s “Star” newspaper, where social historian Patric Tariq Mellet, who apparently shares common ancestry with Huntley, says that both he and Huntley descend from a woman of colour – Francina van der Kaap. She was great-great grandmother to both of them.

And so it is for most of us so called “white” South Africans. It is certainly the case for me and my family, and I tried to capture some of that sort of story in my recent novel. We all share a common history. We all share a common heritage. It is not something from which any of us can easily escape. Rather than trying to escape it, surely the challenge is to make our future safe and secure for everyone? Democracy, and the long struggle which that entailed, has made that future a real possibility.

My novel:
Remittance Man by Michael Worsnip, UKZN press, Pietermaritzburg, 2007

Slave Mentality

I came across an article recently, by political commentator Andrew P Jones, which made a very interesting point, in the after-glow of the Obama victory. His point is that while indeed the Obama ascendancy to the Presidency has been great and historic, the unquestioning support which African-Americans have given him is something deeply rooted in a master-slave mentality.

African Americans, he argues, have proved themselves in the past, to be virtually incapable of rallying around the “ideas” of liberty (incorporating such issues as restitution and reparations for slavery and psychological independence from the majority) but when a charismatic leader such as Obama comes along, they will follow him, blindly, to the end.

Jones relates conversations he had with his grandfather, who was born in 1861, four years before slavery was abolished. His grandfather had many recollections of the history (which largely preceded him), given to him by others. Most startling was that, contrary to popular belief, many slaves did not hate their white masters. Indeed, slavery was unbelievably hard, but rather than see their masters as tyrants, they saw them as benefactors who looked after them, so long as they acted like slaves. Slaves, he contended, had much more affinity with their masters than they did with other slaves, whom they treated with contempt – since the only way you could survive as a slave was by doing others down.

Most slaves didn’t have any concept of freedom, because being slaves was all they knew. Rather than being free, the fantasies they harboured was about living in the big house, and being the master. Jones’ grandfather had said to him that slaves didn’t want to be free. They wanted to be the master.

I have thought about this startling comment quite a lot recently as we enter a period of elections in this country – particularly in the context of the rather toxic politics of the Western Cape. And I have said before, in this column, that their Obama and our Mandela are not the same thing, by a very long shot. Obama had whites voting for him a-plenty. Mandela most certainly did not – however much they might now love him – I doubt whether they will, even now vote for his party the ANC, in any significant numbers.

But Jones’ argument puts a whole new perspective on it all. What he is saying is that African-Americans, in general, have voted for a master. Behind this master are all the institutions (political and otherwise) which are not in the control of blacks, but rather remain in the control of whites. This is very different from South Africa, where the black majority, once it gained political power immediately set about the task of remaking those institutions. To quote Jones:

“…white people, I submit, via their institutional control of the political system in the United States, elected their first black president, just like black people did … (in South Africa)... We African-Americans, on the other hand, because we do not have that kind of institutional control, nor the mentality that would create it, chose ourselves a master whom for now we shall treat like a king.”

In the Western Cape, slavery has left its mark in the psyche of the majority of the people, in a way in which it simply has not done in the rest of the country. Jacob Zuma’s ancestors were never slaves. They were oppressed, but they were never slaves. And yes, both have suffered immense oppression, but there is a psychological difference between them which plays itself out in the politics of the present (among other things). Because I would bet my bottom Dollar that what the majority of people in the Western Cape really want, and will demonstrate at the polls, is not freedom. Not real freedom - political, institutional, social and psychological - which they build for themselves, from scratch if necessary. What they want, is a master to look after them well.

25 January 2009

The Article referred to in this column is Andrew P Jones: “A people chained by a slave psyche” in The Argus 20 January 2009.
Andrew P Jones is a political commentator and author of the book Barak Obama: America’s Saviour or Judas Goat, Diary of a mad black voter