Bearing Whiteness

Bearing Whiteness: A pedagogy of compassion in a time of troubles The Lecture will focus on the trauma of loss and change for white South Africans in the wake of apartheid. It will begin by tracing the roots of “the rage against alterity”i among white South African youth and the consequences for post-1994 society, and for black citizens in particular. Conscious of the fact that the weight of writing, popular and scholarly, attend to the white man’s burden, the Memorial Lecture will turn this notion on its head, by talking, so to speak, about the black man’s burden. The Lecture is based on my seven years of experience of working with white students, staff and senior managers of the University of Pretoria during my tenure as the first black Dean of Education. I will spend some time talking about the trails and tribulations of Afrikaner youth in particular, and the stable conceptions of the past as well as the apocalyptic understandings of the present, that lead to catastrophic events such as Waterkloof, Skierlik and Reitz, among others. As I led and loved, taught and learned, in Pretoria during much of this turmoil, I will show how we engaged white students (and staff) through what I call a post-conflict pedagogy in which the lines between victim and perpetrator begin to seriously blur. Bearing Whiteness: A pedagogy of compassion in a time of troubles Pile on the Black Man’s Burden ‘Tis nearest at your door1 Introduction When I first submitted the title of this address, one of the organizers politely inquired whether I meant “bearing witness.” I suppose, given the ecclesiastical context for the Memorial Lecture invitation, coming as it does from the Catholic Institute of Education, this was a reasonable misreading of the title. To be frank, I wish to do both, but my more deliberate focus is on the black man’s burden or, put differently, the burden of whiteness as borne by black South Africans. The idea for this title dates back more than 100 years to a poem by the black American clergyman H.T. Johnson with the title “The Black Man’s Burden”, one of many responses to Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 Poem, “The White Man’s Burden.” Kipling of course was arguing for the USA to take up the burden of empire (as did European nations) in places like the Philippines Islands. To Johnson and others such a call merely extended the oppression of black people in the USA to brown people’s elsewhere. But on to the main story. I do not need to tell this audience that our democracy is on shaky grounds right now. The rapid deterioration in the public discourse is at its lowest point since the early 1990s as political leaders rush to outdo each other with “killing talk.” The precipitous state of public institutions—from the Human Rights Commission (HRC) and the Presidency to the SABC and the Judiciary—represents red flags to our fragile democracy. The alarming spiral in violence—whether it be on immigrants in squatter settlements or on citizens in their homes—suggests that those charged with protecting 1 First lines of the poem “Black Man’s Burden” by H.T. Johnson, published in April 1899. Available in full from http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5476/ accessed on 14 July 2008-07-14 1 us have lost the will and capacity to do so. And all of this is happening on the back of an escalation in food costs, fuel prices and interest rates which place the poor in a particularly vulnerable position. This being South Africa, these dangerous tendencies in our country are often interpreted through a racial lens. And what I have seen, read and felt through the pages of the Afrikaans and English press, through the scanning of scores of bloggers columns, and by listening to the flourish of call-in talk shows on radio and television, is that for many white South Africans this is decidedly a black problem. In other words, the weight of public discourse suggests a white man’s burden. A prominent Afrikaans commentator talks about “volksmoorde,” suggesting that Afrikaners are being targeted in the violence of the farms and the cities. But often the discourse is a lot subtler: watch, for example, how every other day the issue of the loss of skilled labour through emigration is presented as the loss of white skills because of the inability of a black government to retain such talent. Kevin Pietersen, moan the cricket commentators over and over again, would not be scoring centuries for England if he was not forced out by blacks insisting on affirmative action in sport. My prime evidence, however, comes from bloggers columns to The Times and Letters to the Editor in the main Afrikaans newspapers.2 Here a thinly veiled racism unleashes day after day the most horrific venom against black people in general and a black government in particular for everything from AIDS policy, to the Zimbabwe crisis, to crime in the suburbs, to the mismanagement of public utilities, and to corruption in the civil service. I am certainly not uncritical in relation to the misguided policies of government on these matters, as my many public writings would demonstrate. What I do take issue with, however, is the explicit and underlying racism, the lack of historical accounting and the shameless portrayal of a glorious past. In a fascinating article titled 2 The most sustained analyses of Letters in the Afrikaans press to reveal the white mind in matters of transition was done separately by Wiida Fourie 2006, A phenomenological interpretation of perceptions of those writing to Beeld newspaper about the socio-political changes in South Africa, 1990-2004, MA thesis in Communication Sciences, University of South Africa (December) ; and Melissa Steyn 2004, Rehabilitating a whiteness disgraced: Afrikaner white talk in post-Apartheid South Africa. Communication Quarterly 52(2): 143-169 2 Is the bad mood justified? JD Landman found that while 60% of South African remained positive and optimistic about the country, only 31% of whites were optimistic. In his analysis, Eskom is the straw that broke the camel’s back. It brought up all the subliminal fears that whites have about black governance. Never mind the fact that in the mid-seventies Eskom had a similar crisis when the whole country was without power for 18 hours and power tariffs rose by 75% to fix the problem. Somehow the current Eskom crisis is seen as the beginning of the end3 Yet if white reaction to black governance was simply a matter of words, this would be bad enough. But as I will now show, this reaction has turned violent in a most intriguing section of the white community: white youth at the end of school and the beginning of university, and it is to this group that the analysis now turns. Racial knowledge without racial power Nothing since the Boeremag adventure, that included the Soweto bombings of 2002, sparked fears of racial retaliation as did a series of race attacks by Afrikaner youth in the past two years. The first sign of trouble stretched back much earlier to December 2001 when the Waterkloof Four, boys from prestigious public high schools in the east of Pretoria kicked a homeless black man to death and badly assaulted another. But it was the emergence of the Reitz video, made in 20007 to protest residential integration at the University of the Free State, that really opened the broader debate about race, retaliation and reconciliation in South Africa; in this case four while male undergraduates recorded their humiliation of older black women (and one man) through a series of attacks, one of which required them to ingest urine-laced food. Shortly thereafter the 18-year old Johan Nel, from Swartruggens in the North West province, drove past the white suburbs of this town to target a squatter camp called Skierlik, to 3 Is the bad mood justified? BoE Private Clients, Investment Research Team, JP Landman Political Comment 3 offload his gun into the bodies of black people, killing four women and children, and seriously injuring six others. How is it possible that young white students, born around the time of Mandela’s release from prison, could hold such firm views about the past, such rigid views about black people and, especially among the boys, such fatalistic views about the future? This was the question that dogged me during my early years as the first black Dean of Education at the historically white University of Pretoria. It made no sense. These white students had no direct experience of Apartheid; they did not live as masters and madams through the worst years of racial oppression; they did not police the townships during states of emergency; and the boys did not have to face the trauma of compulsory military service on and often beyond the borders of South Africa. Despite the fact that these were, technically speaking, post-apartheid children, their beliefs and behaviours mirrored those of their parents—the people who upheld, supported and benefited directly from white domination in the decades before they were born. The more I listened to my almost all-white undergraduate class of more than 2,000 students, the more this question besieged me. After seven years as Dean I resigned from the University of Pretoria to complete a book that seeks to answer that question. The book is called Knowledge in the Blood and subtitled, How white students remember and enact the past (Stanford University Press, 2009). It is a book that in many ways predicts the recent behaviour of white male students.

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