It's a Black-White Thing. Donna Bryson
DONNA BRYSON
It’s a
Black
White
thing
Tafelberg
To my family
Sing a song full of the faith
that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope
that the present has brought us.
From the poem
‘Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing’ by
James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938)
Prologue
‘Sjambok’ is one of those Afrikaans words that non-Afrikaner South Africans of all languages have imported. Seemingly simply because it sounds so much like what it is: blunt and violent. No South African would call it a mere whip.
Picture a stocky, ruddy man in khaki shorts wielding a sjambok, preferably made from the hide of some large, tough wild animal. This is the stereotypical image people have of a farmer from the Free State, the heartland province as locked in South Africans’ imaginations as Alabama or Mississippi are in Americans’.
Stereotypes can be understood as one of the ways we tell stories. They can be a place to start, but go beyond the stereotype and you find a fuller, richer story.
Once, dining alone in a restaurant in Bloemfontein, I was invited to join a group of young professional South Africans, all originally from elsewhere in the country. Here I was, a black American journalist, sitting at a table with black South Africans, surrounded by tables filled with other black South Africans at the back of the restaurant. The white diners were all seated at the front.
I asked whether my dining companions had noticed the restaurant segregation, something I had not experienced elsewhere in South Africa, even in the tense 1990s, when I had visited towns large and small across the country. My companions had noticed, and said it was common in restaurants in Bloemfontein. As transplants from other South African provinces, they had heard that some of their white fellow citizens in the Free State had a reputation for brutal, intractable racism. They said they were afraid to protest when a restaurant host invariably led them to the back.
At the turn of the century, I had met Mothusi Lepheane, an advocate raised in the Eastern Cape who had worked in Johannesburg before moving to Bloemfontein to head the provincial office of the South African Human Rights Commission. He told me: ‘You find that this part of the country, some parts of it are 20 years back. There are still places here where racists don’t even know they are racist. It’s just the way they were raised.’
Many South Africans from other provinces think of racism in the Free State as something particularly marked compared to elsewhere, as if bred into the DNA of the farmers who have for generations sent their sons and daughters to the province’s premier university to turn them into doctors and lawyers and Dutch Reformed Church dominees.
Stereotypes, like lies, are best kept simple. The complicated truth of the province of the Free State, its university and their histories is that they are a microcosm, not an exception. The truth of this one place holds lessons for many other places, across South Africa and beyond.
New South Africans are bringing all their identities to the project of creating a national identity right here in the university in Bloemfontein. Some combine myriad identities in one family history. The complex, brilliant, kaleidoscope that is South Africa can be found on the campus of the University of the Free State (UFS). Its students are not stereotypes, but individuals striving to build a community.
The Free State’s sleepy, provincial university found itself at the centre of an international uproar over a video some of its white students made in 2007 to announce their opposition to racial integration in their hall of residence. The video became public, on the Internet, in early 2008. The students’ video showing them humiliating the black women who cleaned their dormitories was viewed worldwide on YouTube and discussed on Facebook, making UFS an international symbol of the persistence of racism in South Africa. The idea that South Africans studying at the university more than a decade after apartheid’s end would go to great lengths to record such sentiments was perhaps as shocking as the video’s images of casual racism.
I experienced these events as a journalist with some first-hand historical perspective. I had reported from South Africa for the news agency Associated Press from 1993 to 1996, a heady time of great optimism. Then, after assignments in Asia, the Middle East and Europe, I returned to Johannesburg as Associated Press chief of bureau in 2008, finding South Africans less euphoric, but still hopeful. I had arrived in time to cover the aftermath of the video scandal.
This book, partly a story of how and why we tell stories, was a chance for me to explore what happened after other journalists had turned their attentions and their cameras away from Bloemfontein, and left the South Africans there alone to determine how to understand their past and use it to tell their own future.
Writing this book was an opportunity for me to return to a place I thought I knew. I had, after all, visited Bloemfontein and UFS several times as a reporter before embarking on the book. It meant revisiting a subject, race relations, that is often discussed in easy clichés. As a reporter, my job is to cross lines of race, gender and experience to tell others’ stories. But reporters can grow complacent, imagining that listening is the same as engaging. Embarking on a book forced me to dig deeper in a way that will have a lasting effect on my journalism. I had the privilege of engaging in many long talks with people who care deeply about their university and their country, and who believe change is a challenge to which they are equal. I emerged with a deeper understanding of the values and hopes all humans share. I also came away with a renewed commitment to making the simple point, again and again, that we do share a common humanity, and that we have to guard always against backsliding into suspicion, fear or stereotypes.
Racism and the frighteningly wide gap between poor black people and even middle-class white people don’t make the Free State exceptional. No corner of South Africa has escaped the burden of apartheid’s legacy, just as no corner of the United States of America can claim to be free of my homeland’s racial horrors. Yet, in the context of race relations, few places are watched as closely as this province and its university as they confront the meaning of their history. Some here bristle, saying they are being singled out by those more interested in congratulating themselves for being less racist than in genuinely exploring how to end racism.
What I have seen on my many visits to the university is that people from the Free State choose to embrace this sort of scrutiny and their history as inspiration. If they are seen as exceptionally responsible for the horrors of the past, they can be equally exceptionally imaginative in finding solutions for the future. That sense of the possibility of reinvention, that determination to turn a history of hate and racism into fuel to empower those committed to change, are perhaps nowhere so apparent as on the sprawling, tree-shaded campus of UFS.
‘Sjambok’ is and isn’t an Afrikaans word. Its truth is complicated. It comes from the Malay word for a large whip, cambok; it is a word shared by – or perhaps snatched from – people Europeans brought as slaves and exiles from Asia to the tip of Africa. It was in Africa that Afrikaners forged their culture and language, now one of South Africa’s 11 official languages. With its Dutch foundations and smatterings of Portuguese, Malay and African languages, including that of the indigenous Khoi people, Afrikaans is a linguistic atlas of South African history.
South Africans are masters of the alchemy of borrowing and adapting. Today the Free State needs those transformative skills more than ever.
1. Songs of change
It started with singing that night in 1996. Billyboy Ramahlele feared it would end in a campus race war.
Ramahlele was new on the job – the first black man to head a hall of residence at what was then called the University of the Orange Free State. As head of the Kiepersol