Ashamed to be South African

At one time, during the years of apartheid, I used to be ashamed to be a South African. I remember my first ever overseas trip, when I was lucky enough to be part of a student exchange programme with an American university.

I would hate having to tell people I was from South Africa, as the comments or just funny looks would then follow. As a white South African I was considered guilty for apartheid, unless proven otherwise. But it was even worse when the odd person saw my South African-ness as a good thing. I remember cringing when I was travelling long-distance on a Greyhound bus, and during our introductions the person sitting next  to me exclaimed for everyone to hear: “You’re from South Africa! You all are doing the right thing down there!”

Then, there was a time when I was proud to be South African. I was in Kampala in late 1993 for work, and people in the streets and the marketplace would ask where I was from, and then excitedly chat about the upcoming elections set for April 94. During and after the elections, of course there was all the hype and it felt good to come from a country where we were trying and seemingly succeeding to overcome our differences. The wins in the rugby World Cup and soccer Africa Cup of Nations just fed the feeling of pride.

Then over the years we began to realise the ‘miracle’ was more hype than reality, that it would take a long time, and hard work, to redress wrongs, to ensure people had houses, water, and electricity — the basics for a decent life. Our government did many good things, but many things that were not so good. Our economy was growing, but the gap between the rich and poor was widening, there was Aids denialism and so on. Still, we were normal — not much better or worse than most other nations. I could still hold my head up in international company.

Lately, I’m starting to get that uncomfortable ashamed feeling again when I travel. The comments about South Africa are once again either angry or derisory. “Did you see the CNN report on racist white university students torturing black staff?”  “Your president says there’s no crisis in Zimbabwe!”, “Jacob Zuma is going to be your next president — ha ha ha!”, “How could Thabo Mbeki prematurely announce our president’s death?”

The low point came last night, when I was traveling with some Zambian friends in a Lusaka taxi. My friend was asking about the recent xenophobia in South Africa and saying he was worried about his sister who lives in Johannesburg. He was also talking about how he was hijacked when traveling in South Africa, and saying how he always has to watch his back in Johannesburg. I wanted to say things are not all THAT bad. Then over the radio came the news bulletin — with the story that the entire Zambian under-20 soccer team had had its luggage stolen at OR Tambo International airport. I just groaned and hung my head.

(This first appeared on the Citizen Journalism in Africa site on the 17th of July, 2008: www.citizenjournalismafrica.org)

It’s all in the stories we tell

I have just finished reading The Uncertainty of Hope, by Valerie Tagwira. It is a novel set in the Harare area of Mbare, during the time of Operation Murambatsvina (which began, incidentally, almost exactly 3 years ago, on 25 May 2005 – see http://www.sokwanele.com/articles/sokwanele/opmuramb_overview_18june2005.html). The novel tells the story of two families, and their lives and losses as they try to survive the turmoil caused by the ‘cleanup’ operation, high prices, and food shortages — not to mention the ravages of HIV/Aids. Tugwira focuses particularly on the women, who are the ones trying to keep their families together against formidable odds — often having to deal with abusive men on top of all the other difficulties.

It’s a good novel. Not brilliant, but good (in places it’s a little too preachy for my liking, but Tagwira definitely knows how to tell a story and her characterisation is strong). I don’t want to give away the plot, but let me just say I found the rather upbeat ending depressing rather than uplifting — because in the light of recent events, it just doesn’t seem plausible. In the novel, in the midst of the worst of Operation Murambatsvina, when people’s houses and market stalls are being bulldozed, the characters take consolation in the fact that ‘things surely can’t get much worse’. Well, we now know they can, and have.

But The Uncertainty of Hope reminded me why fiction is so important. It’s important for lots of reasons, but one of them is that it teaches us, by helping us imagine — other people, other lives, other circumstances. I have read loads of news articles and features about Zimbabwe. They have given me a sense of what’s happening or happened, a sense of the facts of the situation, and the range of opinions being expressed. But Tagwira’s novel has given me more of a felt understanding of what people have gone through and are going through, than any news item or academic article could hope to do.

Thinking about the awful wave of xenophobic violence that’s hit South Africa over the past two weeks, I wish more people would read fiction. Yes, I know how naive and pie-in-the-sky and even callous that sounds. When people are dying, being beaten up, and having their homes destroyed, I’m wishing people would read more novels. What we need are houses, jobs, more effective police, better education in tolerance – not fairy stories!

But it’s all about stories! It’s the stories people tell one another about what it means to be South African, the stories we tell one another about what a foreigner is, what foreignness is, who is in, who is out, who’s to blame. Not one of these things has anything to do with fact — it has to do with our stories and the collective imagination.

The political scientist, Benedict Anderson, understood this well. In his book Imagined Communities, he defines a nation as “an imagined political community [that is] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” It is imagined, because it is simply impossible for all the members of a nation to know or even see one another. So they live in the mind, as members of a nation.

In South Africa, we’ve liked to imagine ourselves as the rainbow nation, a miracle-nation, a country where we’ve overcome intolerance and hatred and moved on to a democratic, tolerant society. Much of the shock and distress people are expressing has to do with the fact that that image, that ’story’, has been shattered in the face of undeniable evidence to the contrary. And the people who are attacking foreigners have their own imagined South Africa, in which foreigners are all criminals and job-stealers, and just do not belong.

The power of fiction is that it has the ability to influence and change the stories we tell ourselves and one another. It can stretch our imagination, to help us understand ‘the other’. And I also believe that reading stretches the imagination in a way that TV can’t. As we read, we re-create the characters in our heads, they live with us, live within us, they are our co-creations.

And as much as the news is necessary – we need to know, to be made aware of what’s going on – we also know that the news can de-sensitise. Endless images of hurricane victims and earthquake survivors and fleeing migrants are not pleasant to see, but eventually they just wash over us, leaving us numb and uncaring. Good fiction, on the other hand, has the power and potential to re-sensitise us all.

This post first appeared at www.citizenjournalismafrica.org.