Opinion
SA is a melting pot in which the flavours refuse to mingle
Hlamba imoto! Enza itiye! Thus began my attempt many years ago to master Zulu, and become more African than I was, or am. It soon occurred to me that the Zulu phrases were all commands: Wash the car! Make the tea! I'm not sure when we were going to get to "please", if at all. Perhaps that was the next lesson, but as one who neither drank tea nor cared for a clean car, I dropped out of the lessons.
My search for identity as a white South African has a long and not too successful history. When I was little, my mother decked me out in genuine shamrock shipped from the home country to celebrate St Patrick's Day — try explaining to classmates as an eight-year-old why your school blazer is garnished with a dead plant and gold and green harps.
The wearing of the green aside, I never saw myself as Irish. In later years, I went to the air force where, for 16 months, I was in the service of the master race. I soon learnt the racial pecking order: white Afrikaners on top, with Portuguese and Greeks at the bottom. Jews were beyond the pale, obviously, although the numbskulls who drilled us never seemed to click that Israel was apartheid South Africa's principal weapons supplier.I am reminded of all this after the incident in parliament this week, in which the EFF's own answer to Hendrik Verwoerd, Floyd Shivambu, unmasked Treasury official Ismail Momoniat as being less than African, and of "undermining African leadership" in the Treasury. Whatever nuance he was attempting was obscured by the latent racism in his remarks, which surely run contrary to the nonracialism at the heart of our democracy.
Quite a few commentators pointed out that Momoniat, unlike Shivambu, could boast of a distinguished record in the liberation struggle, as if this somehow elevated him above other Indians, and which missed the point, I thought. All credit to Shivambu, though, for hauling our country down into the gutter of identity conflict plaguing the world.
Consider, for example, that other great blob of flatulent ignorance now residing in the White House, Donald Trump, who calls a wholly American jurist a "Mexican judge".
Similar questions are being raised elsewhere: who is American? Who is French? British? Most countries we know today are amalgams of aboriginals, or indigenous people, and new arrivals over the past few hundred years, much of the migration being the result of colonisation of the physical kind involving actual settlers, or the push of trade and religion.The best example is the US, which took in vast numbers of immigrants from Europe, and at one stage may even have adopted German as its common language, rather than English. Nordamerika über alles? Eish!
True Americans, therefore, are of no particular colour or race or creed: they simply have to declare allegiance to the constitution and develop a liking for corn dogs. But that make-believe is being ripped apart by the reality of the African American experience of discrimination and police brutality. Just as inequality, and populism, are doing to our nonracial fabric.
In South Africa, we've had a few attempts to deal with the "race question": apartheid was touted as a system by which Afrikaner nationalism would rule a country it saw as divided by race and tribe. Apartheid even paraded itself as "separate development", hence the old Nats' insistence that what they wanted was "separate but equal", although the use of the word "but" unmasked the sinister truth.Since 1994, we have moved to nonracialism, which urges us to be colour blind in one breath, and in the next to see colour as vital to BEE and affirmative action, which are nonstarters without racial definitions à la the old Population Registration Act, or the comb-in-hair test when "science" was not up to the job.
In the struggle days, one was urged to define black as Africans, Indians and coloureds. Since then, however, the concept has unravelled, so now one even comes across the phrase "black African", suggesting there may be "white Africans". Please don't call me a white African, though. I much prefer mlungu , which I've been called many times, as when working on my pavement with my gardener (read black), and a passer-by said to another, in Zulu: "Hey, look at that mlungu working."
The more apocalyptic-minded among us may think that Shivambu's utterances are the harbinger of a race war to come. Should I fret: am I African enough for Shivambu? I have no idea. But I do know that if someone ever shouts at me Hlamba imoto! I'll be as ready with a bucket and sponge as the next man, African or otherwise. There'll always be a place for me in Africa, I hope — just as long as it's not in the sun.
• Peter Bruce is on leave..
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