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.

In After Such Knowledge, Eva Hoffman poses an important question of relevance to this essay: how is it, she asks, that as second generation Jews, who did not live through the horrors of the Holocaust as did our parents, we nevertheless behave as if we were there? The author of Lost in Translation (the book, not the movie) names this phenomenon “the paradoxes of indirect knowledge.” She attributes this indirect knowledge to the intergenerational transmission of spoken and unspoken knowledge from the parents who were there, to the children who were not. The consequences are devastating for the second generation, for they bear and express the bitterness and the loss of their parents long after the initial terror was actually lived. I knew immediately that this insight

4 stretched way beyond the trauma of the Holocaust; it explained the beliefs and the behaviours of my white students.

For those seven years I tried to immerse myself inside the lives of my white students. I attended and spoke in their different Afrikaans churches. I visited their homes. I spent time with their parents, often talking about adjustment and change to the promised non-racial order. I observed teaching and learning in white Afrikaans primary and high schools. I did speeches at Afrikaans cultural festivals and workshops at Afrikaans cultural associations. I did training with principals and teachers from the Afrikaans school community, and did endless talks about sameness and difference at school events such as prize-givings. I took the students to the malls and the movies, and accepted their invitations to watch them run, box, jump and play rugby and netball. We eat together, we cried together and we prayed together. In their university residences and in bush camps, we talked for countless hours about race, identity and the transition into a new country and a changing university. And this is what I found.

The single most important finding from this intense experience working with white (mainly) Afrikaans students is that like all South African youth, they are decent, idealistic and committed to their country; and that they are capable of change. These young people are not, in general, wide-eyed racists going about the university residence halls seeking out black people for racial attack and humiliation. This is not my experience. There is however a serious problem. They carry within them the seeds of bitter knowledge that, left unchallenged, can easily germinate into the most vile and vicious racial attacks on and outside the university campus.

In the case of white Afrikaner youth, how is this troubled knowledge transmitted? It is channelled through five influential agencies: the family, the church, the school, cultural associations and the peer group. In itself, such an observation about knowledge transmission is hardly novel within sociological observation. The problem is that these agencies transmit the same dangerous messages in all-white social circles over and over again; worse, these messages have not been interrupted over the period of transition despite the spectacular changes in the formal institutions of democracy. To be sure,

5 some of the potency of these messages might have been diluted as a result of the collapse of some of the historical agencies of socialization—such as the state media under Apartheid. But by and large, the three core messages of transmission have remained in tact.

The first message is about racial exclusivity (we belong by ourselves); the second is about racial supremacy (we are better than them); and the third is about racial victimization (we are being targeted by them). What reinforces these messages in the hearts of young white people is the threat of social collapse around them through things like rampant crime, electricity failures, corruption in government, and affirmative action. In the belief system of white youth, these social events are interpreted through a singular lens: black incompetence, black greed, black barbarism, and black retaliation.

It is not hard to understand, therefore, why white students stepping into their first integrated experiences in the undergraduate university years would revolt against learning and especially living together with black students. It is also not hard to grasp why right-wing political parties, without any chance of prominence within the broader society, would exploit the bitter knowledge of white students. This has been the primary strategy of the Freedom Front Plus as it infiltrated the white Afrikaans universities to wreak racial havoc on these campuses.

The strategy of the Freedom Front Plus was brilliant in its perversity. It would not appeal to “race” to purvey its inflammatory ideas; it would appeal to “rights.” Students should not be forced to live together; they have the rights of association. Students have the right to learn in their own languages, implying Afrikaans and therefore largely if not exclusively white classes. Students who pay for their education (erroneously implying only white students) should have the right to choose where they live on campus and in what language they are taught.

For institutions that for many years ran their student elections along party political lines, like the University of Pretoria, the Freedom Front Plus sailed into the perfect storm. It won every student election by substantial margins with election posters that

6 contained the most grievous racial insults. And on campuses like the University of the Free State, where this bitter knowledge was fed through separate residences long after other institutions had deracialized their living arrangements, the advent of the Freedom Front Plus was like fire attracted to an oiled rag.

What does this mean for transformation? It means recognizing that the students are not the enemy and that as teachers and leaders in schools and universities, we have failed white youth by not interrupting their troubled knowledge—the consequences of which are now painfully visible throughout the country.

South Africa’s education policies since 1994 have had as its presumptive audience black students in schools and universities—as the national curriculum and the proposed pledge of allegiance for schools so clearly demonstrate. Our national policies do not speak to engaging and disrupting the bitter knowledge of white students; from a policy standpoint, it seems as if this knowledge either does not exist, or that by some miraculous feat, white and black thrown together in the same educational spaces would simply find each other despite the rival knowledges they bring into the learning commons.

Within universities, this problem is compounded by the fact that institutional knowledge, beyond simply syllabic knowledge, has not been the subject of a searching national review of what counts as worth teaching and learning and knowing in the first place. The social, psychological and epistemological bases of an essentially white knowledge remain undisturbed inside universities. Even though the exoskeleton of the institutional curriculum shows ready compliance with regulatory demands from bodies like the South African Qualifications Authority, the endoskeleton of institutional knowledge remains firmly intact. Students therefore achieve mastery of technical knowledge in engineering, economics or education, for example, without ever being intellectually challenged about the nature, history, politics and purposes of knowledge in their disciplines in the wake of apartheid.

7 The white students in this essay do not have a memory problem; they were not there, so to speak. They have a knowledge problem, and it remains a bitter knowledge that must be interrupted. Little can be done to disrupt what a white child learns on his mother’s knee or in the church’s pews. It can however be eroded by insisting on the integration of all-white Afrikaans public schools. And by the time white students reach university, there has to be a direct recognition of and compassionate engagement with the bitter knowledge of these learners—or we place at risk not only black staff and students at former white universities. We threaten the very foundations of social cohesion in a still fragile democracy.

Still, this aggression by especially white male students at the transition point from high school into university remains a major threat to South African society in general and black South Africans in particular; in other words, it forms part of a broader burden born by black people as a consequence of white behaviour historically and into the present.

From Bearing Whiteness to Bearing Witness

I not only bear witness to the tragedy of racist aggression among young white Afrikaner men; as a result of living, learning and leading in Pretoria, I also had the privilege of bearing witness to transformation. Two months into the writing of my book on a Fulbright Scholarship, I became aware of the fact that the manuscript was incomplete and I had to start from scratch. In an emotional moment, I dumped the first version of the book for reasons not immediately clear. And then it dawned on me that I had written this book to show how as a leadership team we had changed our white students; what I did not realize, until writing, was how profoundly they had changed me.

Coming into the University of Pretoria as a black person with a chip on my shoulder, determined to transform the racist institution and its inhabitants, I had it all figured out. I occupied the moral high ground, I was oppressed, disempowered, disenfranchised; and these backward people, the racists, would be taught the evil of their ways and be brought to a knowledge of the truth.

8 It was not one event, but a series of interactions with white students that led to my personal transformation. One example would suffice.

The picture before me already suggested that this was an unusual visit. A young girl in her first year of study, neatly dressed, sitting upright with a tentatively bright smile on her face. Next to her sat her father with a half-dirty shirt short of two or three buttons, and shoes that had seen some years. “Welcome,” I started, “how can I serve you?” And then the impossible happened. The man started to shiver, and with a broken voice told me that he had a confession to make. I leaned forward, moved my chair closer to him, and told him to take his time. “My daughter has been attending your classes illegally,” he struggled to say. “I know it is wrong, but I could not bear to keep her away from university because all her life, teaching has been her passie (passion). The truth is, I do not have money to pay for her registration and her fees.” I was emotionally moved by the plight of this parent. As I saw him struggling to articulate what must have been doubly painful: owning up to financial struggles in the presence of your child with such obvious eagerness to learn; and acknowledging economic vulnerability in the presence of a black man with the authority to redress his situation.

I softly admonished the father for not coming sooner, and asked why he doubted that we would not try to find the resources to make his daughter’s dream of becoming a teacher come true. I send them to the Student Administration and my resourceful colleagues found a bursary to cover her expenses. What transpired in my office that morning has social significance well beyond the otherwise ordinary case of a student in financial need. A white father and a black Dean had just overcome their “different and dissonant knowledge[s]”4 to mend the tattered lines that separated us. Both of us needed to come into that space in which we acknowledged a human problem, and the white parent took the first steps. As I watched his daughter leave the room, a bounce in

4 “The recognition of ‘likeness’ in face of different and dissonant knowledge paralyses rather than liberates imagination,” says Inga Clendinnen (1999), Reading the Holocaust, Cambridge (England), Cambridge University Press, p .19

9 her step, I just wondered if she realized how she had changed me without even saying a word.

The problem with South Africa before and after Apartheid is that we insist on collapsing race and economics into the same face; whites are rich and privileged, blacks and poor and underserved. That is true of blunt averages as a national measure of social status, but what it conceals are the thousands and thousands of poor whites and the struggling classes among them who barely make it. Apartheid was as much a racial system of oppression as it was a capitalist system of exploitation; among the victors, the nationalists want us to believe only the former, and the Marxists only the latter. But it was both.

What happened in my office that day was for me a profoundly moving experience. As I saw this desperately poor white man, I relived my own struggles to stay in higher education. As I looked into the eyes of this poor father, I saw my own father many years ago as he sat distraught about where he would find the money to keep me in university. And as I saw his daughter, I saw myself. For the first time, I did not see white skin but common humanity.

This is what Inga Clendinnin in her powerful little book, Reading the Holocaust, calls “the recognition of likeness,” that moment of transformation when one sees in your neighbour nothing else but the shared humanity that binds you.

I need to say this: it is impossible for South Africans to scale the deep racial, ethnic, religious, class, language and nationalistic barriers that separate us, until we have had such a moment. Until we are stripped of the arrogance of race and recognize the likeness of our brothers and sisters, we can never be truly free.

10 The unbearable whiteness of being

When the recognition of likeness comes to white South Africans, it is profoundly moving and enables black and white observing this transformation to move closer to each other.

So too with staff, and one of the most moving came through an email communication from a colleague who eventually opened-up on hearing how the political head of police during the 1980s, Minister Adriaan Vlok, had confessed to his role in the attempted murder of church minister and anti-apartheid activist, Frank Chikane, who was now head of the Presidency in the new South Africa. She asks,

What makes me different from Vlok? I also knew and did not know that I knew…I accepted that the black domestic worker could only eat mixed- fruit jam in our house; that her children did not need the education that I got; that the communists were hiding behind black takeover, Coca-Cola and butterflies on denims.

One accepts the system dished up for you provided it makes you feel safe and privileges you. And you do not ask too many questions: ‘there are people at the top who know what they’re doing, my child…’ Only when you begin to feel the pain yourself and something bad happens to someone you know, then you begin to rethink…But I did not know anyone, and especially did not know their pain because artificial separation ensured that there were no opportunities to discover each other. And such separation was enforced through fear, for association could quickly bring the security police on your track

Rising up against the system was appropriate for the rebels and the artists and those rich people who were exposed overseas to other anthropologies…This is my rationalization: they lied to us. The system deceived me. Forgive me, because I did not know what I was doing. The

11 fact that there were people like Oom Bey or Amanda Strydom or whoever else, those I idolize [and] they free me from who I am. Because how else must I cope with my unbearable whiteness of being?

There are all kinds of social messages contained within this powerful communication between a white Afrikaner woman academic and a black male Dean within this historically Afrikaans university. The closed circles of transmission that shaped her consciousness are confirmed as she demonstrates that Apartheid was not simply a matter of keeping people apart, it was a system designed to shield the children from other kinds of knowledge—the knowledge of other people, their pain and their struggles. Moving with the singular story through her life, everything seemed to fit into place even down to the most ordinary observations such as the choice of jams (jellies) for the domestic worker.

What keeps her in this knowledge frame is not only the received knowledge from her mother and the reassurance that others know better, also the veiled threat that to depart from the storyline as given is to be disciplined. She is however conscious of her own choices, not simply a victim of authority and circumstance, and in doing so she points to the rewards of security and privilege which come with not seeking to know more or different. It is at this point where she comes to the recognition of another knowledge, and is then able to make the most complex of moves that enable her to seek forgiveness.

I cannot think of a more powerful acknowledgment of this dilemma, the burden of whiteness, than in Amanda Strydom’s recollection of her own troubled knowledge:

My colleague who asked for forgiveness and who carried the burden of what she called “the unbearable whiteness of being” wanted me to see her connection to the words of a song of the progressive Afrikaans singer, Amanda Strydom. Her song captures so powerfully the confrontation between the knowledge of the past and the future, and the disciplinary knowledge of parents conveyed here through maternal redirection of emotions and paternal signaling of disapproval; watch how Amanda (and my colleague) encounter the confrontation with the knowledge of Hector Petersen, the first child to fall when he was shot and killed at the commencement of the Soweto Uprising in 1976

12 when black school students marched to resist the extension of Apartheid in the curriculum through the Afrikaans language:

Ek was neentien jaar oud toe Hector gesterf het (I was nineteen years old when Hector died)

Hy was dertien jaar oud met ‘n koeël deur sy lyf (He was thirteen years old with a bullet through his body)

Dit was koud in ons voorhuis op die sestiende Junie (It was cold in our sitting room on the sixteenth of June)

En die wind het geruk aan die vlag by die hek (And the wind tugged at the flag by the gate)

En my pa het gesê ‘draai tog jou serp om’ (And my father said ‘please put on your scarf’)

Uit die sitkamer voor ons nuwe TV (From the lounge in front of our new TV)

En dis toe wat ek sien hoe jy val langs jou suster (And it was then that I saw how you fell alongside your sister)

En my ma sê “kom eet die bobotie word koud” (And my mother said “come and eat the bobotie [spicy minced meat dish] is getting cold”)

Ek was neentien jaar oud toe ek sien wat hier aangaan (I was nineteen years old when I saw what was happening here)

Hy was dertien jaar oud en het lankal geweet (He was thirteen years old and had known for a long time)

En my pa skud sy kop vir Soweto se kinders (And my father shook his head at Soweto’s children)

Wat mars teen die taal wat hy jare lank praat (Who marched against the language he knew for years)

Ek was neentien jaar oud en Hector skaars dertien (I was nineteen years old and Hector barely thirteen)

13 Ek was veilig verskans teen die skreeuende waarheid (I was safely protected from the burning truth)

In die naam van die Heer en die swakheid van vaders (In the name of the Lord and the weakness of fathers)

Wat niks aan die sirkus van waarheid wou doen (who would do nothing to the mockery of truth)

Sharing the burden

How, you could rightly ask, does any human being, whether the perpetrator or the oppressed, begin to move towards a state that enables the recognition of likeness? My experience is that this cannot be achieved outside a state of brokenness.

Let me illustrate.

The Afrikaans girls school in Pretoria has an annual camp for Grade 10 children where students are exposed to broader topics than the school curriculum allows. Speakers talk about Afrikaans culture, about living in a democracy, about careers and life choices, and about self-awareness and personal development. A good friend on the staff, and one long involved with Afrikaner youth development outside of schools, invites me to speak on the changes in the country and how white youth can respond. This friend has a more liberal streak than many of her colleagues, and I can only imagine what the invitation must have cost her. But this event was to fundamentally change my life and my disposition to Afrikaner youth, and their families.

I try to connect with young people not only in their own language but in a cultural idiom that makes sense to them and that further enables social connection between speaker and audience. I start with some biography, telling them about my earlier years growing up in South Africa, about the dispossession of family property given to whites, about the struggles of my parents to give their children a decent living, about the gangs and the violence that threatened in the townships where I grew up, about the spiritual lives of my parents, about my choice to become a Christian and an active preacher, about my encounters with the brutality of Apartheid in the lives of the high school students

14 whom I taught, and about my hatred at the time for all things white. The story is interspersed with humor, and this keeps them attentive, but I sense clearly that the atmosphere is tense and that this workshop will have to be handled sensitively. The biographical sketch is a crucial introduction, for this will be the first time they hear such a story, so directly, from a black person and in Afrikaans. It lays the foundation for what will happen next.

I take out the Bible and paraphrase the story of The Good Samaritan, which in its Afrikaans translation has a much more powerful title, Die Barmhartige Samaritaan (the Compassionate Samaritan). It is the story told by Jesus to an inquiring lawyer who challenged him with the question, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus then tells of a Samaritan who goes down from Jerusalem to Jericho, is attacked and robbed by thieves, and who lies battered alongside the road. The story goes that a priest and a Levite passed by and ignored the man, but the Good Samaritan took care of him, transferred him to a local inn, and paid the expenses for his care.

After outlining the bare essentials of the parable, I call on three girls to explain to their 300 peers what the point of the story is. And like so many, they venture that this is about being kind to people—which is just what I wanted to hear. I then with some dramatic performance tell them that this is all wrong and that they, like me, have been totally misled. This is really a story about border crossings, about caring and relating “to those whom you think are different from you.” How else, I ask them, could we explain the effort Jesus makes to identify the religious and ethnic identities of the main characters in the story?

This seems to work, first because it is a biblical story which carries considerable legitimacy among these church-going children and their families; and second because it is a human story about things we all struggle with in this new South Africa. I then tell the packed and now very quiet audience that the single most important challenge they face to making it in the new South Africa is to move out of their white comfort zones and to embrace, not tolerate, their fellow human beings who, despite the accident of skin color, are in fact no different from them.

15 I was still working my way through the social implications of the Samaritan story for South Africa, when the hand of a Grade 10 girl shot up for attention. This kind of interruption of an adult is unusual in an Afrikaans school context, but I was happy to find response. “Well Professor,” she starts, “I agree with what you say about crossing bridges and stuff. But tell me this, how do I cross bridges towards someone who looks like the people who almost killed my sister and me a few weeks ago in a violent car hijacking?”

In all my years of teaching this was easily the most difficult question I had faced. It was direct, insightful and sophisticated. I was off-balance, and the experience of teaching told me that this required some reflection. “Let’s take a break,” I told the expectant audience, they too sensing a potentially slippery moment. I moved to a corner to think about what to say, but I was soon surrounded by about a dozen of the girls from this group all probing and questioning, several quite emotional about what they had just heard, for the first time, said several of them. I abandoned my quest for a quiet, reflective moment for dealing with the original question.

In these moments of high emotion, children tend to say things off-guard. One of the girls, who was clearly moved, said that when she saw this black man as a speaker, she started to prepare herself for a lousy speech in English or an even lousier talk in Afrikaans. “But you speak our language so well,” she offered. Another told me about her racist father, and that what I said made a lot of sense, “maar u moet my pa ontmoet” (but you must meet my father!). Yet another told me that she had a black friend and she would like to take her home, but what should she do since she knows her father will not allow such a visit. None of them spoke about their mothers’ attitudes; fathers loomed large as racial gatekeepers in their homes.

It was at this point that I realized that for some of these girls, the transmission line that carried knowledge from parents to children was a lot less secure than I had assumed. There was tension here, a willingness to break away, at least for some of the girls, but there were powerful re-socialization forces at work, as students of political socialization call it. And at the heart of that tension stood the family and its patriarch. One of the

16 teachers confided as I made my way back to the front of the barn, “don’t worry, they are more verlig (enlightened) than their parents.” I had to continue, and I did not know what to tell the original questioner.

“Listen, you asked a very good question, and I must be honest with you, I do not know how to answer you, but can I say the following?” I then told a story about how as a young high school student in Grade 11, I visited my grandparents home in Montagu, a small and picturesque town in the rural Western Cape province. This was the place of powerful memory, where the family lost its property to whites under the Group Areas Act around the time I was born. This was the act that, his daughters insist, contributed to the psychosomatic blindness of my grandfather. By the time this knowledge reached me as a child growing up, I was angry with white people. And it was with this anger that I traveled on a segregated railway bus to Montagu to visit my grandparents. Only now they were moved into die lokasie (the location, literally or, the township), away from the center of shops and tarred streets in die dorp (the downtown white area, where the shops are) where they used to live.

As I tell the story, there is complete quiet in the room, 100% concentration; the girls are absorbed and I am conscious of the need to retain as hard as I can, a managed emotional voice, so that the story is not detracted from in this critical moment. It is hard, since I have not told this story before, not even to my closest family, and I certainly did not expect at the start of this workshop to share it with 300 strangers.

I continued and told how I was instructed by my grandmother to go down to die dorp to buy a loaf of bread. As I walked back through the now-white town I carried my anger and hostility on my sleeves, conscious in the knowledge of what whites stole from my grandparents. And then, as if on cue, a brick came flying across the road in my direction, clipping the back of my heel and hitting the sidewalk with a loud bang. In shock, I looked up, and saw a smiling white boy, about my age, leaning over his gate and pretending that he had nothing to do with the flying brick. Angry before the brick came, I rushed the boy, about my age but taller, and climbed into him. His father, unfortunately, was at home, and even more unfortunately, was an off-duty policeman.

17

I was kicked and bundled into his car, not knowing where he was taking me, but sure that this was not going to be a pleasant afternoon. I was angry enough not to be scared, yet. Every now and then he would throw me a question, like, “where are you from?” or more rhetorically, “do you realize what you have done?”, and I would answer where I could. With every attempted answer, he would slam his foot on the brakes, lean backwards, and throw a punch in my direction. I only later figured out why he was doing this; I was required to intersperse my answers with that humiliating word “baas” (master, as in servant to master). He was certainly not going to get that out of me.

We ended up at the Montagu Police Station and this is where I started to become anxious, but I would not show this anxiety to him. Behind the main desk sat a huge man, in the mandatory blue police uniform, looking half-disinterested. His off-duty colleague was pacing the floor, asking for permission to deal with me once and for all. I knew what this meant, for at that time and especially in the rural areas, I had heard what happened to activists and to black people more generally. The heat was building in the room, my heart pounded.

At this point my aunt came storming through the door and pleaded with the police to let me go. I was from Cape Town she said, and only visiting, and the family is expecting me back home. Her pleas worked, and eventually I was released.

The room is dead quiet, and I notice several girls in tears, and one of the teachers.

I turned towards the girl who asked the riveting question and said:

So you see, I too have this terrible knowledge of what happened to me, and all my life I have been struggling to cross this bridge towards people who look like you. And I must be honest, it is very difficult.

18 And so all I can ask of you is that you too try to cross the same bridge, from the other side, and maybe, just maybe, we will meet each other somewhere in the middle. For the sake of our country, we must at least try

That was the end of the workshop, nothing more could be said; the message carried powerfully, and I was very aware of the fact that like some of these Grade 10 girls, I had made a major emotional crossing myself in those moments of engagement. Still in tears, we talked and talked after that workshop. At that moment I realized, for the first time, that these children were my children, and that I would spend every energy helping them to make that transition across this difficult bridge.

The significance of brokenness

The origins of the term (brokenness) come from the spiritual world of evangelical faith. It is the construct of brokenness, the idea that in our human state we are prone to failure and incompletion, and that as imperfect humans we constantly seek a higher order of living. Brokenness is the realization of imperfection, the spiritual state of recognizing one’s humanness before the forgiving and loving power of God. But brokenness is even more than this; it is the profound outward acknowledgment of inward struggle done in such a way as to invite communion with other people and with the divine.

This might be unfamiliar and even uncomfortable territory for some, but it is a powerful set of ideas for relating to other people in a divided school or university community. Racial aggression, I found, breaks down in the face of an acknowledgement of my personal struggles with white people given my own pain and my haunting memories. I do not need to tell the Grade 10 girls this for any number of reasons. I could pretend it is all their dilemma, their burden, their history. I could extricate myself from the powerful moment offered by the Grade 10 questioner and place myself in the position of the didactic and moral authority, giving a neat set of instructions for coming to terms with the consequences of Apartheid.

19 In a post-conflict pedagogy, therefore, the teacher and the leader are part of the classroom story. They are not distant and ‘objective’ pedagogues floating above the emotional and political divides that separate those in the classroom. Teachers in this pedagogy not only bring-in their own identities, they also carry their own knowledge of the past. Such knowledge is out in the open and shared as part of the process of making sense of how to live together in the shadow of a shared history and with the prospects of a common future.

Brokenness compels dialogue. The Grade 10 girls suddenly want to share their own stories and how they wrestle with parents and other significant adults in their lives caught between an old knowledge that is faltering and a new knowledge that is compelling. They have questions about what happened and how it could have happened, and as they move forward to talk, they risk confiding in a (black) stranger but also breaking primordial bonds of loyalty with the (white) family. This is a highly significant moment in a post-conflict pedagogical situation, and is the beginning of the end for the certainty conveyed thus far through indirect knowledge. And it is only possible when and because white students witness the humanity of the other side through the concession of brokenness.

Contrary to the logic of masculine thought, brokenness is not weakness. By contrast, brokenness reveals inner strength, the capacity to acknowledge not only human frailty but also human sameness. It is the paradox conveyed in Christian verse: “when I am weak, then I am strong.” This sounds like a near-impossible task for a teacher trained to and, indeed, eager to establish her authority in the classroom. And yet it is crucial to draw the students in and, more importantly, to demonstrate what it means to live openly and honestly with one’s own knowledge about and in relation to those in the classroom.

Blurring the lines between victims and perpetrators

It is the story of all encounters that when human beings from opposite sides of a divided community begin to honestly engage each other, they are often drawn towards the core

20 of each other’s humanity. It is in witnessing the weaknesses of others, that we see their humanity reflected within our own. This is the story of Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela when she interviews the icy Apartheid killer Eugene de Kock in his prison cell.5 Reflecting on her time writing the book in the United States of America, the author muses: “Alone with this material, thousands of miles from the streets of Pretoria, I was afraid, not of the memory of the evil schemes that were concocted in that city but of my own empathy for de Kock.”

It is the story of Dan Bar-On who as survivor of the Holocaust worked with the children of the perpetrators.6 Bar-On, after years of research and interviews with these children, comes to the startling conclusion, and I quote: “When moving later into working with parties in current conflicts, I had to learn to distinguish between the clear cut definition of victim and vicitimizer in the case of the Holocaust, which is less clear a differentiation when addressing current conflicts.”7

And it is the story of Nelson Mandela as he towers morally and emotionally over his captors and his accusers leaving no doubt that a simple narrative of black victim/white victor or black victor/white victim cannot begin to capture this unexpected complexity of the human condition. It is certainly the story of this book as a black academic leader and his white Afrikaner students begin to reach out towards each other.

One of the reasons we have made such little progress in resolving race and racism in society and in schools is our insistence on reifying the them/us duality even as progressives decry the way in which racists and racially-minded people “Other” black persons. We set the accusatory stage demanding that white teachers and students change their behavior in relation to black people; what we do not allow in this strident

5 In Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela (2003), A Human Being Died that Night: A South African story of forgiveness, Boston, Massachusetts, Houghton Mifflin, p.116

6 Dan Bar-On (1989), Legacy of Silence: Encounters with children of the Third Reich, Cambridge, Harvard University Press; see also Dan Bar-On (1996), Descendants of Nazi Perpetrators: Seven years after the first interviews, Journal of Humanistic Psychology 36(1), 55-74

7 From, A New Introduction for Legacy of Silence in German, March 2003, available on www.bgu.ac.il/~danbaron/Docs_Dan/Introd-german.doc accessed on 28 January 2008

21 posture is for an examination of how the white racist is himself scarred by and dehumanized through his own bigotry.ii Nor do we spend time asking and inquiring how this damning belief system came about within the biography of the bigot. We certainly do not find it worth the time and effort to begin probing what lies behind such disgusting behavior for, if we did, we would be peering into a dark and uncomfortable pit where we are likely to see something of our human selves.

This is the stirring contribution of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck in the Oscar- winning film The Lives of Others. The outer story of the closing days of the German Democratic Republic shows the cruel processes of surveillance on the suspected enemies of socialism. The inner story shows the complex humanity of all the characters from the Stasi officer (Captain Gerd Wiesler) doing the spying with bureaucratic determination; to the charming playwright (Georg Dreyman) who survives in the borderlines between criticism and acceptance of totalitarianism; to his girlfriend (Christa-Maria Sieland) desperate to retain her acting career. As the Stasi man gradually comes to doubt the worthiness of his ruthless eavesdropping on decent people dubbed enemies of the state, he begins to undermine the investigation and does everything in his power to save the playwright from certain imprisonment. As the playwright finds the courage to write a newspaper article critical of the suppression of the high suicide rate under the regime, he comes face to face with his moral ambivalence in the face of totalitarianism; and as the girlfriend is forced to choose between love and deceit, selling out her lover for the sake of a career, she can take it no more and commits suicide. From initial sympathy with those spied on, empathy shifts to those who spy, and eventually to all the main characters as the moral complexity and fragility of human lives (the lives of others) under totalitarianism begins to unfold. In the end, all the characters are forced into making impossible choices in their intertwined lives and forced relationships.

What I have tried to convey in this Lecture is that just as racism is a relational problem, so is its resolution. Furthermore, what is required is a pedagogical reciprocity in which both sides are prepared to make the move towards each other. Put simply, the white person has to move across the allegorical bridge towards the black person; the black person has to move in the direction of the white person. Critical theory demands the

22 former; a post-conflict pedagogy requires both. The quest for understanding therefore works both ways and is simply not possible when the daggers on drawn on all sides and the powerful refuses to talk to the other side, the kind of recipe for war and annihilation.

In the classroom situation this is yet another example that conveys the complexity of teaching for how does a teacher even begin to create the pedagogical atmosphere in which the starting point is the recognition of the humanity of the Other? It has to begin by insisting that both sides at least make the effort to listen empathetically and therefore patiently to what the other has to say. It requires teaching that once the initial statement (or outburst) has been delivered, to move the speakers in the direction of talking about what lies behind the outward expression of a position. What are you afraid of? Why do you feel so strongly about that? Where did you learn about this? This kind of tactical questioning does not take what is first said at (in a manner of speaking) face- value. It understands that often the outward expression masks a pain, an anxiety, and fearfulness. Even the most egotistical expression of racism conceals a vulnerability that can and should be laid bare.

What are you so angry about? Do you really think it is this? How did this make you feel? Has this happened to you before? Tell me about it. These are the kinds of questions I often asked my black colleagues and students when they complained about racism. Often these claims were real and it is devastating as a leader to witness the hurt of racial bigotry inflicted on your colleague and student. It is important to acknowledge the racism and its effects, and it is especially important to embrace a colleague or student who has been the target of such violence.

But in a post-conflict pedagogy, the teacher’s intervention has to go beyond acknowledgment and embrace of those hurt by such acts. A post-conflict pedagogy requires that the target of racism is empowered to confront such behavior and to do so from a position of strength. What do you think can be done to change this behavior? This is a startling question for it places the agency back in the hands of the person insulted. It does not dwell on the hurt and it does not feed a sense of defeat. Changing the storyline is absolutely crucial even as the pain of racist assault is acknowledged.

23

Conclusion

Which brings me to the person we honor this evening. Those of you familiar with the life and work of Hans Brenninkmejier will recognise in this story about bearing witness, the call to brokenness, and the recognition of likeness that I have, in fact, told the story of the Bishop of Kroonstad. The book of testimonies in his honor, so aptly titled The Bridge Builder, is, you would notice, a central theme of this Lecture.8 The wonderful description of Bishop Hans as “A Man for Others” in the chapter by Mark Potterton again fits perfectly with the biographical image sketched this evening of what it takes to be a leader in a troubled country.

Bishop Hans would witness boldly in the face of adversity, and reach beyond his own skin when he testified on behalf of the PAC in the trial of 1977 and channeled monies to the liberation movements in exile. He clearly understood the seamlessness between bearing witness in the church and in the world, the same thing.

Despite his work of service in development across Southern Africa and in the poverty of the rural Free State, until I was invited to give this Lecture, I had never heard of Bishop Hans Brenninkmeijer.

Perhaps that is the point about bearing witness.

i Taken from Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (2003), “Two Kind of Uniqueness: The universal aspects of the Holocaust,” In Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg (editors), The Holocaust: Theoretical readings, New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, pp. 444-450

8 Philippe Denis and Kees Keijsper (eds), (2005), The Bridge Builder: A tribute to Bishop Hans Brenninkmeijer, Pietermaritzburg, Kwazulu Natal, South Africa: Cluster Publications.

24