So, I’ve been in South Africa almost two months now and I keep hearing about experiences friends have had with race and how South Africa is coping sixteen years after apartheid ended. I’d like to share a few of these with you.
I’d love to write about everything I’ve been learning about in my Segregation and Apartheid class, but that would be a post in itself given the amount of information I’ve been reading and writing about for it. It’s all really interesting material and can probably be read about by picking up a book on South African history from about 1900. While white legislators usually disguised their motivations for implementing segregation as paternalistic, they truly were about white supremacy and growing the white economy. It should be noted that there is a difference between segregation and apartheid. Segregation was an early form of separating races into distinct territories and can mostly be viewed as based on tradition. Segregation by 1948 was engrained into the society and became apartheid. It was all about separating ethnicities via harsh legislation and movement controls. Apartheid was ended in 1994 but the racism caused by it still remains in 2010.
My friend Brooke has made friends with a couple of Zimbabwean guys down the street who work at a car wash. They talk about life, South Africa, Zim, and the US, among other things. Francis usually likes to walk Brooke back down the street to the gate of our apartment complex just to accompany her and make sure she gets back safely. One time on their way back an old white man on the road started yelling angrily at them in Afrikaans. Francis told Brooke not to pay attention to him and it occurred to her that he was yelling at her for walking with a black man. The fact that people have desensitized themselves to blatant racism is absolutely absurd to me. Maybe it’s the fact that mass racism died decades ago in the US.
I met, Lerato, a black South African, through a volunteer service we both participate in. We went to get coffee one day and had a few stares as we walked down the street together. And I still smile when I see two races walking together, as you don’t see it as often as you’d think given the proportions of the population. Lerato introduced me to his friend Tom after thinking we’d hit it off. Tom doesn’t think much about politics, but he’s an activist without knowing it. Tom and I have been hanging out a quite a bit recently and the other day he told me that he and Lerato were the first interracial roommates in University of Pretoria Residences. That was in 2008. They had been friends before and wanted to room together as first years (not freshmen, sophomore, etc. – here everything is first, second, and third year). They had to go to the resident advisor and request to be put together because housing looks at race when determining placement. They ensured the advisor that they, a black man and a white man, were perfectly fine with rooming together. The resident advisor had to call their families in addition to this to make sure they were okay with it. They were eventually placed together despite the administration’s concerns. Tom said that since then there have been no other interracial roommates, but I find this hard to believe. The University does, however, still take race into consideration when placing students together so as not to upset families back home.
We have also discussed where Tom comes from in the north of South Africa. He says that it’s a very traditional part of the country. Black and whites still don’t mix, and if they do, bystanders are usually pretty shocked. It seems to me that as you get closer to the equator, the more afraid people are of that which is different from them (note homophobia in the American south, race relations in northern South Africa and in Zimbabwe, and ethnic conflicts in several central African countries).
I’ve said it before but though apartheid has been over for sixteen years, the remnants still exists. The scars run deep. This generation gives us hope, though. You see more young people than older generations mixing and accepting people for who they are. I can only hope that this spreads to the rest of the world. In the words of Dr. Seuss, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
