Ties that Bind. Shannon Walsh

SISONKE Repudiating the protections of whiteness always preoccupied Nadine Gordimer. In the 1980s she talked about why she didn’t move to Zambia in characteristically descriptive terms: LEBO I discovered I was only a European there like any other white person. I took that very hard. At least in South Africa, even if I get my throat cut, I’m an African. SISONKE Her ideas on where whites fit in the subject of an early 1959 essay by the same name offer us a guide for today’s questions.²⁰ LEBO If we’re going to fit in at all in the new Africa, it’s going to be sideways, where-we-can, wherever-they’ll-shift-upfor-us. This will not be comfortable … it’s … a matter of whites learning how to live in a different way, truly accepting what is coming which is black majority rule and not fearing, not wanting guarantees of group rights which will set them aside, set them apart, mark them out forever. … They can’t be wanting to boss people around and doing all their thinking for them.²¹ SISONKE It is hard to imagine whites fitting in sideways where they can. But we must. If South African whites are to be ordinary and not special how might they behave?Perhaps a young white man buying his first home would be prepared to live in an affordable and pretty home in Soweto’s swankier parts.We cannot be friends if the very thought of making a smart financial decision of that kind repulses him and his parents.Maybe a group of concerned white citizens can voluntarily, without any prompting from black people, seek to change the name of John Vorster Drive to Fatima Meer Road. We cannot be friends if whites aren’t willing to celebrate our heroes as their own. Perhaps white parents in the Saxonwold neighborhood where Malan had his encounter would re-enrol their children at the neighborhood schools alongside the children of their domestic workers. We cannot be friends if whites cannot see the sense and national importance of a single education system in which the destinies of black and white children are intertwined and equally valued. But there is more: whites must perform these nation-building and privilege busting acts SISONKE & LEBO without any expectation of praise or hero-worship for subjecting themselves to the same conditions as blacks. SISONKE Then one day, without even noticing it, because it will happen without dramatic announcement or need for validation, we might wake up and realise that we have fallen into friendship and one morning just like that, LEBO We will find ourselves caught in a glow of friendship, SISONKE deep and LEBO intimate and SISONKE real and it will be of no consequence at all because the world around us will have changed so much that we will finally LEBO Finally LEBO & SISONKE be able to call ourselves free.

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      NOTES

      1 This piece was first performed at the 2015 Ruth First Memorial Lecture, August 17, 2015. I am so grateful to Ruth First whose life and death speak to us across the ages, and I am thankful to the committee for keeping her memory alive. In particular I want to thank Indra De Lanerolle and Eusebius McKaiser for pushing me to be more rigorous. Lastly, thank you to the talented Lebo Mashile, who took a leap of faith to perform these words with me.

      2 Brutus 2008.

      3 For a full discussion (including these quotes) of the phenomenon of prison friendships during the apartheid era, see Caine 2011.

      4 Caine

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