THE RACE ISSUE

The Johannesburg weekly newspaper, “Mail & Guardian,” recently published its (annual?) “Race Issue.”  The idea of a “Race Issue” seems odd as a topic in South Africa since race define that country’s everyday.  And it sort of implies, although I don’t think they meant it, that now they’ll get back to reporting other things: We’ll talk about race again next year.

Anyway, I finally had a chance to read most of the articles.

So what can we say about them? Amongst others, there’s a lead article about utterances by ANC leaders; we find out that one white reporter does not want to talk about racism and voted for the Democratic Alliance; that there are nice black people in the Democratic Alliance; and there’s a meandering piece by novelist and educator Njabulo Ndebele about white and black expectations, etcetera.  This is all well and good.  But the relationship between race and class (how it stays the same, or changes), hardly comes up. It is all about identity. And about the preoccupations of the black and white middle classes.

But there were highlights. Especially the piece by journalist Pearlie Joubert.

Read that. Here’s an extract:

One recent Friday night I cooked for two very close friends — I will call them the “unmarried couple” — and a couple that we have recently kind of befriended.

The second couple, a husband and wife, I will call the “married couple”.

We drank wine and G&Ts and laughed lots …

The unmarried couple has two small children. These kids are my children’s closest friends. I love them almost like my own and I love their parents.

These two kids are adopted. And they are black. And it’s important that you know this because following on from a conversation about race and race-sensitivity and me once being reported to the press ombud for using the word “jinto” (meaning “slut” in Cape slang) the married woman said something like: “Is it a word for coolies or is it a Hotnot-thing?” In that same context and conversation she spoke about “Kaffirtjies”.

When looking at pictures of the unmarried couple’s two kids, the married woman said something like: “Ag, don’t you just want to kiss them?”

When the married woman said “Kaffirtjies” nobody at the dinner table said anything. But moments later I said: “You cannot speak like that.”

I didn’t shout this. I didn’t even say it angrily. In retrospect I said it a bit sheepishly, actually. Lightly. Conversationally. As one does with the candles gently throwing shadows across the walls and bouncing light off wine glasses. To which she replied: “Ag, man, you must really get over this.”

To which I replied: “You remind me of a caller on Radio Sonder Grense who said to Allan Boesak: ‘Ag, you people … Ag, you know man, I’m so sick and tired of you people telling my people that we must apologise. Now tell me, when are you people going to start apologising to us?’”

I told this story using that thick Boere-accent that only Boere and stand-up comics can imitate. Everybody, including her husband, laughed.

She simply said: “Exactly!”

Later:

Then the subject changed and we spoke about how one of the supper guests had pretended she was deaf to escape having a conversation on a flight between Johannesburg and Cape Town.

But the married woman had another point she wanted to make.

“You know, I hate it when fat people sit next to me on a plane.” She herself weighs the same as a large eggplant. Excuse me, I mean aubergine.

“So I was flying back from our little place in France and I was very tired and was just getting comfortable in business class [!] when ‘this mama’ came and sat next to me. ‘Aaa, no, I thought’,” she said. And she flung out her thin arms to emphasise the point that the “mama” was FAT.

The way she — and other whites — pronounce the word is not “mama” but “maama”, maybe to put a bit of isiXhosa into the pronunciation. So now we all know that the mama was fat AND BLACK.

Of course she must be black because fat white women aren’t called mamas. Only black women are “mamas”.

Again, none of us said anything.

What made it worse was that this thin, Botoxed white woman was talking about KwaZulu-Natal’s former health minister, Peggy Nkonyeni, who happened to be on the same flight — in business class. She was calling a provincial health minister a “mama”. Not because she has given birth to children, but because she was black.

I reckon using the term “mama” is, to her, like saying “Kaffirtjies”: a term of endearment you use when talking about blacks whom you don’t know or have any interest in, yet you somehow feel compelled to soften your prejudice.

Diminutives or words such as “mama” are excellent tricks to hide the brutality of our fears and ignorance, I’ve always found.

But the married woman was still talking: “I thought: noooo, not a mama, but then this mama looked at me and said: my child you look so tired and she held my [small, white -- my words] head against her [huge, black -- my words] breasts and I slept all night long from Paris all the way to Africa and it was the most wonderful sleep and the smell of her was so evocative,” she said.

By now everybody was squirming on the hard wood of my kitchen chairs.

But again we said nothing.

On all levels, the story is ridiculous. Would Peggy Nkonyeni hold some thin mlungu’s head on her tits sitting in business class on an SAA trans­atlantic flight? I don’t think so.

Anyway, you can’t hold somebody’s head, or hand for that matter, across business class seats. Unless you’re an orangutang with very long arms.