Amsterdam was the place where, for the first time, I saw people considered black and Indische (Indonesian) walk the streets of a city centre, by day and by night, with what struck me as a sense of ownership and belonging. Their postures flipped the posture of deference – albeit a posture held for white people – with which I was familiar. This experience left a lasting impression on me. It was 1982. Donald Woods’s book, because of its liberal outlook and along with many others, was banned in South Africa. It was not on the meagre shelves of Korsten Library. For a while after reading about Steve Biko, I saw myself as Black, in the Black Consciousness sense of the word.
Over time, I knitted together the feelings, glances, gestures, postures and tasks of my world in Korsten and my world at school, Paterson High, in the brown brick-clad township of Schauderville. Woven into these worlds were the worlds of my classmates, the worlds of some of my mother’s family and that of my music teacher, Mr Oersen, who lived in the wealthier suburbs of Gelvan Park and Parkside. Woven into them were the worlds of the people I encountered in Gelvandale, where my mother taught and my father policed, and the world of a house in Kabega Park, in a neighbourhood reserved for wealthy people who were classified White. I was eleven years old when I was ushered into a room in this house. Graced with nothing but a grand piano, it was several times the size of our home on Stanford Road. Paralysed by its opulence, I stood in its acres of lush garden after I had failed my Trinity College piano examination. This was the first time I entered the home of wealthy white people who radiated a whiteness imbued with power and aloofness. With the exception of Aunty Dolly and Colleen, who did not live their whiteness in this way, I knew of white people at a distance, even though whiteness as a construct of superiority seemed close and everywhere. I encountered white people walking in the city centre, shouting orders to road construction workers, and sitting in police vehicles. I knew of poorer people, classified White, who lived in far less grand railway houses. None of this knowledge offered balm for either my shock or my failure.
The intersection, in this psycho-social encounter, of an aloof whiteness, material wealth and a negative judgement of my performance (whether justified or not), rendered inferior much of my being – from the home in which I grew up to my capacity to play the piano (see Fanon 1986: 149–50). For Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2013: 103), a scholar of decolonial thought, colonisation and its vital source, namely, changing conceptions of race and changing forms of racism, are the ‘naturalisation of the non-ethics of war’. Apartheid, the epitome of a colonial state, made death literally and metaphorically a constitutive feature of everyday life. Each daily and repeated humiliation that characterises black life in an anti-black world sounds multiple moments of death for a black person. Steve Biko’s tortured, ‘naked, manacled and lonely body lying in a Land Rover’ (Ndebele 2007: 129) is a particularly searing example of a moment of ‘incomplete death’ (Fanon 1967: 128) from which Biko was driven to his ‘actual’ death. My humiliation at my piano examination is one example among considerably milder moments of ‘incomplete death’.
IN THE CREVICES OF RACIALISED LIFE
The countless contradictions of living inside apartheid showed up in the complex relationship between my family and Julia – as all of us, young and old, called her. She was a mature woman, classified Bantu, who helped my mother with household chores.6 She came from Coega in the Eastern Cape, and lived in KwaZakhele and later in Motherwell township in Port Elizabeth. She was born on Christmas Day and her given name was NoKrismisi. Her surname was Ndulula. Today I would address her as MaNdulula. Julia was her English name; English names had been long required by colonial governance, on the one hand as part of its power of subjection and on the other as a sign of its linguistic incompetence. Toward the end of my primary school days, among my mother’s suite of instructions regarding my conduct towards the woman whom I called by her first name, two are firmly etched in my memory, word-for-word:
My girl, Julia is not here to clean up after you. She’s here to help Mummy with work Mummy can’t do. So, you must still wash your dishes, make your bed, tidy your room, clean the bathroom and make your lunch.
And:
Two men in brown uniforms will come to the house together at any time. The white man will knock at the front door, the black man at the back door. They are the dompas [pass book] police coming to catch Julia and put her in the gomo because she doesn’t have papers yet. Remember, don’t open any of the doors. Julia will hide. You stand on a chair, open the passage window and tell the white man: ‘Meneer, my Ma sê ek moet vir niemand die deur oop maak ’ie.’ It doesn’t matter what he says, just repeat: ‘Meneer, my Ma se ek moet vir niemand die deur oop maak ’ie.’7
The dompas police came, choreographed as my mother had warned. Julia hid. I did as my mother told. The police went away.
Respect and compassion for an Other from an Other underlay these instructions. So did a savvy negotiation of apartheid authority. These practices informed many of my mother’s teachings. Fluent in isiXhosa herself, my mother taught me how to greet an ‘older African man’ respectfully: ‘molo tata ’mkulu’.8 She impressed upon me our responsibility as a family to provide soup and sandwiches for the road construction workers who spent all day outside the front wall of our home wielding pick-axes as they chorused in rhythm with their working bodies. I do not know the words they sang at the time. I do know that a common chorus among road construction workers was this: ‘Abelungu ’swine, swine, swine. Hulumeni ’nja, inja, inja. Hulumeni ’nja!’9 My mother neglected to teach me the respectful ‘Ma’ or ‘Mama’ due to the woman she employed as a domestic worker. She neglected to tell me what the road workers sang of and why.
At the same time, she instilled in me an awareness of aspects of the lives of Others expressed in the materiality of her and our lives: oppression, exclusion, racialisation, humiliation, hardship and poverty. I see in her practice a living tension between attempts to acknowledge and live alongside the colonial wound while at the same time living through this wound by inflicting it on an other Other. Alongside her complicity with some of apartheid’s norms, my mother’s daily interactions with Others were shaped by a yearning for humaning. This double performance of race – active recognition of its materiality in poor black worlds, on the one hand and, on the other, enacting its humiliations and silences – was the shape of South Africa’s apartheid ‘raceocracy’ (Hesse 2012): its paradigmatic colonial ascriptions and arrangements of race that seeped through the everyday and stained the very way in which we held and came to know at least parts of ourselves as Other.
LIVING AFTER 1994
I spent ten years (1983-1993) studying at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Like other black students, I applied to the apartheid state for a permit to study at this university that was reserved for white people. Industrial sociology was my ‘permit’ subject. It was not offered at the University of the Western Cape, the university reserved for people classified Coloured. I was taught the Western canon: Marx, Weber and Durkheim. At the end of 1993, I returned to Holland to complete my doctoral studies. From there, I went to London in April 1994 to join the winding queue of South Africans. I was there to cast my vote for the first time. I had just turned thirty.
On my return to the ‘New South Africa’ at the end of 1994 much of my working life continued in the corridors, lecture halls and library aisles of UCT. This time I walked on legs sturdier than those I had stood on at the time of my Trinity College music examination; legs no longer bent under the weight of an aloof whiteness on the shoulders of my student years at UCT. If my mind floundered in the struggle to make itself, my body seemed to emulate the self-assured comportment of the black Amsterdammers. Shortly after 1994, some activists described South African politics as ‘African chauvinist’ –