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Username: Tonya
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Registered: 07-2006
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 08, 2008 - 03:38 pm: | 
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Chocolate-coated prejudice
Jonathan Jansen: An Eductaed Guess
Published:May 07, 2008
There is sweet success in understanding and dealing with the flaws in our thought processes
My local supermarket sells assorted Zulus for R39.95.
Facing the door of the Menlo Park Spar in Pretoria are three shelves of carefully crafted chocolate figurines behind a large orange label reading “assorted Zulus”.
There in sweet form is a bright reminder of the travails of South Africa’s race thinking. I would in a younger life have launched into a political tirade against the white shop owner for “essentialising” or “commercialising” Zulu identity.
This time I find it amusing, perhaps for the reason that those who now play out their racial fantasies about other people in public spaces no longer have the same power to insult those whom they cast as different.
Can you imagine a South African shopkeeper trying to sell chocolate images of “assorted Afrikaners” or “assorted Indians” or “assorted Englishmen?”
How, by the way, would you assort “Coloureds”— a group already assorted by dint of classification. Any one of these ridiculous attempts to capture in chocolate form different images of a racial or ethnic identity would draw angry responses under the charge “stereotype” or worse.
Yet day after day, now running into weeks, none of the customers has laid a complaint against this hysterical portrait of “assorted Zulus”.
I call together five young, black women cashiers around the till where I am checking out some groceries.
“What do you think about those assorted Zulus?” I ask them, pointing towards the offending shelves. “No, we’re Pedi; that one over there (the woman manning the Lotto machine), she is Zulu.”
I realised that I was not going to succeed here with my intended lesson on the saccharine construction of race.
The shopping display of “assorted Zulus” made me question what we as South Africans really think about each other. I am not talking here about the inconsolable racist, black or white, who wallows in bitterness against his fellow citizen.
I am, rather, talking about ordinary South Africans, well- meaning people who do not even realise that they carry within their being fictitious, even dangerous, knowledge about others.
That we carry such fiction “in the blood” should not come as a surprise — no race emerges from 350 years of colonialism and apartheid with wonder- fully pure knowledge about others. We are all scarred.
And so it was that while thinking about “assorted Zulus”, my telephone rings.
It is Japie Greeff (not his real name), a church worker from the Northern Cape who had read one of my pieces on racial reconciliation in Rapport some time ago. He asks for advice on how to teach the young white youth in his neighbourhood about blacks, as he put it, to prevent the kind of racist bravado currently on display in South Africa. The conversation proceeds in Afrikaans:
“I want to teach them about the black man’s culture,” says Japie
“No, Japie, black people like white people have many cultures, and teaching whites about cultural difference as racial essences is precisely the problem of the past 60 years,” I respond.
“But I thought blacks were different from whites,” insists Japie.
“Perhaps, but have you thought about sameness, how blacks and whites, like you and I, are often more similar to each other than different,” I push. “In fact, Japie, how is your culture different from mine?”
Silence.
“Okay, but for example, blacks only think about the here and now, and that explains the crime wave; in black culture, if you want something you must get it immediately, even if you have to steal it,” says Japie.
“Japie, have you ever heard of stokvels and burial schemes, common images of black investment practices in the townships? And have you considered that people who earn poverty wages might have little choice but to live from hand to mouth?”
Silence.
“You know, Professor, you are teaching me something new here. I did not think about this before.”
We conclude the exchange, and agree to speak further by e- mail.
I admire and make time for people like Japie Greef.
He recognises that there is a problem with race relations in our country and wants to do something about it. He does not rant and rave against black people; he wants to deal with the racism of white people.
In the process, Japie discovers that he himself has to change by dealing with his own flawed knowledge about black people before he can help the youth. What Japie does not realise is that, in recognising his own, he makes it possible for me to deal with my prejudice.
http://www.thetimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=762145 |
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