‘I began to understand something quite important about South Africa: My fear of blacks was obscuring my understanding of the fear blacks felt for my white skin.’ 

[Rian Malan, My Traitor’s Heart]

i am almost finished reading ‘My Traitor’s Heart’ by Rian Malan which was highly recommended to me. The tagline of the book is ‘A South African exile returns to face his country, his tribe, and his conscience.’

Hm, it’s been an interesting book for me to read. It has made me uncomfortable on a number of occasions and for probably the wrong reasons. i really don’t like the way Rian refers to black people as ‘blacks’ and maybe that doesn’t seem like a big deal but that has always been something that has felt jarring to me. i prefer to say black people or coloured people over ‘the blacks’ or ‘the coloureds’ because it feels a little dehumanising otherwise, but maybe the use of ‘black’ ‘coloured’ ‘white’ is already that.

There are ways that he writes that feel really close to the borders of being racist and i have tried to figure it out as maybe he’s writing from the perspective he had at the time and the book is meant to be the journey towards him becoming less so. There is nothing overt, but always just hints or ideas off to the edge and so i can’t really name it, but it hasn’t felt super comfortable.

The one that really got me though was when he referred to a black dignitary that was driving in the car with him as Majosi Nxongo and then followed that in brackets with [pronounced Nongo] and i was like WHAT? Even with my ridiculously useless first level of isiXhosa, i know the ‘x’ is a click. i checked this out with my friend Mahlatsi just in case it was some kind of exception, but nope. Typo? Possibly, but if so it is a very unfortunate and horrible one. That mistake made me doubt a whole bunch of other stuff i was reading – if he gets something this simple wrong? So that was frustrating.

But it was a part i read earlier this week that really stood out for me, actually two parts, the first which shows just how ridiculous and painful and deep this whole racism thing went [and still goes] with some people. This bums me out SO much:

THE MURDER VICTIM this time was an Afrikaner traditionalist, an elder in the Dutch Reformed Church and a supporter of Dr. Andries Treurnicht’s Conservative Party, which stood for a return to the granitic, unyielding apartheid of the Verwoerd and Vorster eras. He made the mistake of driving into a township on a bad day and had an accident in a hailstorm of stones. He was white. A black mob hauled him out of his wrecked pickup and trampled him to death.

In the aftermath, I knocked on the door of the dead man’s home and found myself facing his widow. She was young and slender and pale with grief. After her children were in bed, I asked her to tell me about her husband. She said she couldn’t. She said her family would not like it. She hinted at some terrible secret, something too dark and painful to be aired in public. I pressed her, though, and she finally relented.

She said her husband was brain dead when he reached the hospital, and that doctors told her there was no hope for him. They wanted to turn off the life-support systems and use his organs to give life to others. She thought that that was a good idea, so she gave her blessing. The machines were turned off, and her husband was allowed to die.

And then his heart was transplanted- into a black man. The widow saw no wrong in that at all, because she was not one to hate, but the family in the countryside… It tormented them, tortured them. They could not eat or sleep for the thought of their white son’s heart beating on inside a black body. They simply could not bear it. They wanted the heart back. They wanted the widow to hire a lawyer and sue the hospital to force the doctors to slice that black man’s chest open and return their son’s heart to them, so that it could be buried with the rest of him. That is why she could not talk to me. It was not a dispute to be aired in public.

And so I left, mesmerized by the appalling power of the story I’d just heard. Tbey wanted the heart back. The shelves of my flat were lined with books about apartheid, dozens and dozens of books about apartheid, all dismissing the idea of race as a biological misnomer, rooted in the dubious pseudoscience of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

“To speak of race,” sniffed the journal Critical Inquiry, ‘is to speak … generally in metaphor.” That about summed up the conventional wisdom, but the conventional wisdom was incapable of interpreting the widow’s tale. I found it hard to see her story as a metaphor for anything. In South Africa, it was reality.

= = = = = = = = =

They wanted the heart back? How does a country heal from that kind of broken?

The second passage was the one that contains the opening quote: ‘I began to understand something quite important about South Africa: My fear of blacks was obscuring my understanding of the fear backs felt for my white skin.’ 

We tend to view racism from our own perspective. And even as many of us try to learn and understand and figure out ways forwards, i think we still do this way too much. What does this mean for me? What do i have to do? What do they want from me? And so on. This passage helps to open that up a little:

= = = = = = = = =

I have a wise friend in Johannesburg who says he knows where the race question lies. “It lies in your heart,” he says, ‘too deep for you ever to find.” Note quite, Adriaan, not quite. I found it in mine. When I came home from exile, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that I was seeing South Africa clearly for the first time. The poverty, despair, and injustice were all the more apparent to eyes that had seen the United States, and yet this was not the only curse inflicted by my alien senses. I was accustomed to hearing English and seeing white faces, accustomed to living in a more-or-less homogeneous culture. After all those years away, I felt acutely white back home. I couldn’t talk to many Africans, and communicating through interpreters was difficult. Stories got garbled, poetry lost its resonance, and narratives foundered in misunderstanding. The more questions I asked, the more confused I became, especially with regard to the most important question of all: Where do we really stand in relation to one another, ‘bra?

Such things were un discoverable in the eerie isolation of white suburbia, so I swore a pact with myself: Wherever I went, I would stop for all the black hitch-hikers I saw, to see what they might reveal.

At the outset, I’d fall into a near psychosis of fear whenever I saw a knot of black travelers on the road up ahead. I’d study their clothes and belongings for clues as to who they might be, search their eyes to see whether they were dangerous. Two times out of three, I’d conclude they were, but I’d stop anyway, full of misgivings and visions of my own murder. I’d pull off onto the shoulder and wait for them to catch up to the car. They’d yank the doors open and pile in, five or six black men at a time. I’d swallow hard and think, Oh, shit, now I’m really done for. I’d think. Okay, if they pull knives I’ll put my hand in my pocket and pretend I’ve got a gun, and maybe I’ll live to tell the tale. Then the doors would slam and I’d pull off, and the black man in the passenger seat would turn to me and say something like, “What kind of white are you, that you stop for blacks?” Or, “God has sent you to help us.” At such moments, I was stricken with remorse, to think I had harbored such ugly suspicions about such kindly people.

Sometimes it was even worse. Sometimes the hitchhikers didn’t come at all, and when I turned and looked back I saw heels disappearing into the bush at the roadside, or frightened eyes watching me from behind a distant tree. I was white, they were black, and this was a lonely road. They thought I was going to shoot or rape them.

I began to understand something quite important about South Africa: My fear of blacks was obscuring my understanding of the fear blacks felt for my white skin. On one occasion, I was lost inside a township in the Eastern (ape. The area was aseethe with unrest, and I was scared to get out of the car, but there was no choice. I parked outside a primary school and walked into a quadrangle teeming with tiny black children. They fell dead silent at the sight of me. It was like that brokerage firm ad on American television. Two hundred black children stopped chattering and laughing the instant I appeared. I smiled, but they didn’t smile back.

A teacher appeared, shook my hand, and apologized for his children’s odd behavior. The only whites who ever came here were policemen, he explained, and the children were scared of them. He was very friendly, though. He deputized a small black boy in a starched white shirt and short pants to guide me on my way. As we left, the teacher warned me to watch out for the white soldiers camped on the township’s outskirts. Just last weekend, he said, they captured two teenage comrades and forced them to drink gasoline.

My tiny guide had probably been raised on such stories, and clearly thought he’d been put in a car with the bogeyman. He perched on the edge of the passenger seat, rigid and speechless with terror. Hundreds of minute beads of sweat appeared on his face. I had never seen such a thing. I told him not to be frightened, but he didn’t really understand English, so l reached across and tried to put a reassuring arm around his shoulders. He cried out in fear, and cringed into his corner.

= = = = = = = = =

A group of us watched Ameera Conrad’s incredible ‘Reparation’ play last night and one of the messages i feel like it carried for white people in the context of the play was – ‘This is totally about you. This is totally not about you.’ i think that is the tension we need to hold tightly as we try move forwards in our land together.

How do i as a white person SHUT UP and listen? Not to reply or defend or justify or explain or reason. Just listen to hear and hopefully to understand. Listen to aid my empathy so that i will start be able to be seeing this ongoing story from other people’s perspective to the extent that it is ever possible. 

How do i as a white person continue to speak truth to whiteness? Continue to alert people of concepts like white privilege, allyship, the need for reparation, justice before reconciliation and more? 

This is certainly a time for white people to be out of the spotlight. For others to lead. But as we take a step backwards into the shadows, we must all of us make sure that we have a firm hold on at least two other hands of people we can guide back there as well.

So ja, not sure if i would recommend My Traitor’s Heart – it did have some of the ABSOLUTELY SHOCKING violent encounters of apartheid on both sides of the colour line and for that i think it is a good book to read, like Antjie Krog’s ‘Country of my Skull’ – not pleasant stuff to read but WE HAVE TO REMEMBER, some of us have to hear for the first time. This wasn’t just a case of ‘You get this beach, you get that beach’ which is certainly bad enough, but these were violent violent times, beyond anything we like to contemplate or talk about at polite dinner tables. i do believe there is a need for scarring our minds with some of that. Before we can truly grasp what we are trying to run away from.