Dominic wrote an excellent blog entry on being a young white South African, and the strange position such a person finds himself in. Darb wrote a rather thoughtful reply, and I've been meaning to put my thoughts down as well.
I'm not South African. I was born and raised in Zimbabwe, as a Zimbabwean. My mother managed to obtain British passports for the whole family, but I've never thought of myself as British. Seven years ago, I came to South Africa to study at Rhodes University, and I'm still here. I'm finishing up at Rhodes, and I am then going to work at Adept in Stellenbosch (a town near Cape Town, in South Africa).
I'm not South African, but I really wish I was. I am applying for my citizenship, although I haven't heard back from them yet. My perspective, therefore is different from Dominic's and Darb's. They were born and bred in this country, they have always known who Madiba is, and so on.
However, for all that, I really love this country. It drives me mad when people talk about South Africa "going downhill", and how they're so glad they can "get out" - by which they mean they get to go to the crowded, stressful, expensive nightmare that is "the first world". As far as I'm concerned, South Africa couldn't be better. I'm not an economist, but from what I can pick up, the currency is more or less where it should be - strong enough for prosperity, but weak enough to allow decent exports. There's crime and all, but ye gods, this place has a tenth of the danger of Britain or America. Plus, as far as the computer world goes (important to me, since that's What I Do), South Africa is perched on the very cusp of everything - I wouldn't go anywhere else. Our very own Ubuntu Linux won both the distribution of the year and the community of the year. We have just produced an Open Source TV Show, and VoIP is about to take off. Heck, we're even safe from natural disasters!
But apart from being a great place (in my opinion, etc) to live, there's something more about South Africa. Dom and Darb both focussed on the cultural side of things, and there is definitely something special about South Africa in that regard. Even though I can't claim to be a part of it, I really get the feeling that there is something there, and it's brilliant. Take music. South Africa has invented so much of its own, from Kwaito to the weird blend of hip-hop, jazz, and... well, everything else... that we get from African Dope Records.
Thus I find myself in the very strange position of wanting to be a part of a group that is itself trying to work out of what it is a part. I want to be a young white South African, but the young white South African doesn't know what he or she is. Should we feel guilty? Should we be exasperated with those that keep laying the political and historical overtones onto everything? Where do we stand?
My sister recently gave a presentation on Zimbabwe to her classmates at the International University of Bremen. She is in a bit of a strange position, too: a white Zimbabwean with a British passport does not get a lot of credibility among the international students there. She read this poem out during the presentation:
Homeland
by Michelle Frost
Within my soul, within my mind,
There lies a place I cannot find.
Home of my heart. Land of my birth.
Smoke-coloured stone and flame-coloured earth.
Electric skies. Shivering heat.
Blood-red clay beneath my feet.
At night when finally alone,
I close my eyes - and I am home.
I kneel and touch the blood-warm sand
And feel the pulse beneath my hand
Of an ancient life too old to name,
In an ancient land too wild to tame.
How can I show you what I feel?
How can I make this essence real?
I search for words in dumb frustration
To try and form some explanation,
But how can heart and soul be caught
In one-dimensional written thought?
If love and longing are a "fire"
And man "consumed" by his desire,
Then this love is no simple flame
That mortal thought can hold or tame.
As deep within the earth's own core
The love of home burns evermore.
But what is home? I hear them say,
This never was yours anyway.
You have no birthright to this place,
Descendant from another race.
An immigrant? A pioneer?
You are no longer welcome here.
Whoever said that love made sense?
"I love" is an "imperfect" tense.
To love in vain has been man's fate
From history to present date.
I have no grounds for dispensation,
I know I have no home or nation.
For just one moment in the night
I am complete, my soul takes flight.
For just one moment.... then it's gone
and I am once again undone.
Never complete. Never whole.
White Skin and an African soul.
In my (upper-middle class, privileged, educated, white) opinion, we should stop messing around with guilt and righting-past-wrongs and all that. I'm so excited about the future of this country, I don't want to have to mess around with the things that were bad in its past. But I am well aware that the wrongs of the past are slightly more important to those on whom they were inflicted.
Looking back on what I've written in this post, I haven't really said an awful lot. I've definitely given the impression that I'm almost irrationally in love with the country, and I've posited that we poor over-privileged white people endure terrible hardship and have a terrible time, because our identity is so ambiguous. I think my real point is simply that I, like Dom and Darb, really want to push things forward, and it has to start with us.
Update: Neil has written about how feels as a slightly older white South African.
