Telmarines: the ultimate Whenwes

Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've just finished reading Prince Caspian for the fourth time, and this time I read it chapter for chapter with Inside Prince Caspian by Devin Brown, and most of my comments on it will be found in my review of Inside Prince Caspian.

I will add one thing here, though -- that on this reading I was struck even more by how C.S. Lewis got it absolutely right about the notion of white supremacy -- which in Prince Caspian appears as Telmarine supremacy.

Back in the 1960s, when I first read it, Kenya had just become independent, and there was a flood of disgruntled white immigrants from Kenya into apartheid South Africa. They soon became known as "Whenwes" because of their habit of prefacing most things they said with the phrase "When we were in Keen-yah...".

They were also given much air time on South African radio (no TV in those days), especially by current affairs host Ivor Benson, who seemed to have a Whenwe from Kenya every week on his prime-time propaganda show, where they spread the message that the white man should rule, and black people were incompetent and unfit to govern.

One of the things we wondered about was why, if they wanted to get away from black people, white Kenyan immigrants didn't go to a country where there were no or few black people. Why did they come to South Africa, where the majority of the population were black?

It soon became apparent, however, from what they said on the radio, that they could not do without black people, because there would be no one to "clean my carpets, scrub the floors, and polish up the hearth". They needed black people, but only if they were subservient to white rule -- and that is exactly how C.S. Lewis portrays the Telmarines in Prince Caspian -- as the ultimate Whenwes. They were unwilling to stay in Narnia if they were no longer the ruling race, with all others subservient to them.

And C.S. Lewis nails it. He nails it absolutely. The Telmarines are the Platonic ideal Whenwes, white supremacists to the core.

View all my reviews

Total Onslaught: Apartheid's Dirty Tricks Exposed

Totale Aanslag: Apartheid se Vuil Truuks Onthul by De Wet Potgieter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The history of the Total Onslaught and the dirty tricks of the apartheid regime, told by a journalist who doesn't bother to hide his sympathy for them.

That was all I wrote as a "review" on GoodReads, and it wasn't really a review, just a copy of a note I had made in a list of books I had read. 

I read it 14 years ago, and couldn't really write a review now unless I read it again. 

My reason for posting this now is that an online friend mentioned on Facebook that he was reading it, so I mentioned that I had read it and found a kind of dissonance between what was said in the book and the way in which it was said. 

On the surface, a catalogue of evil deeds of the apartheid security forces (Shock! Shock! Horror! Horror!), but a subtext of salaciousness (Nudge! Nudge! Wink! Wink!), like a British tabloid gleefully reporting the vicar's adultery. And  the author describes with relish how the perpetrators of some or other outrage would gather in some bar to celebrate it and congratulate each other.

It occurred to me, as I said that 14 years later, that this might, just possibly, have been very subtle satire that my mind was too coarse to grasp, but on finding the book on my shelf and opening it, I thought that unlikely. 

It also made me a bit curious about the English translation. In the Afrikaans the subtext is there, plain to see. But the nuance could be lost if it is translated into English, because the idioms do not translate well, or do not have the same force when translated.

But what confirmed my initial evaluation was a caption to a photograph. 

The photo showed a worried-looking President de Klerk, and the caption read:

F.W. de Klerk, 'n duidelik bekommerde man in die dae toe hy Suid-Afrika uit die era van Totale Aanslag gelei het na Totale Oorgawe

I don't know what the official English translation says, but my reading of that is, F.W. de Klerk, a clearly worried man in the days when he led South Africa from the era of Total Onslaught to Total Surrender. 

"Totale Oorgawe" can be translated as "Total Surrender" or "Total Capitulation", and it is the kind of phrase that only a diehard bittereinder supporter of the apartheid regime would use, and it, as well as the more nuanced idioms, clearly shows where the author's sympathies lie. Anyone else would say something like "a negotiated settlement".

The Origins of Racism

Someone asked me on Twitter what I thought the origin of racism was. Was it just a matter so skin colour, or was it more an economic thing?

That's a big questiopn, and can't be properly answered within Twitter's 250 or so character limit, so I just said it was a matter of both, but the proportions of the mix might vary according to circumstances. The bloke who asked wasn't too happy with that, so I thought I'd try to respond at greater length. He asked for my personal view, but I hadn't given too much thought to the origin of racism, seeing it more as a thing that is there and that we have to deal with whenever and wherever we find it, regardless of its origin.

He also asked for my personal view, so what follows is what I think, and not necessarily what anyone else thinks.

One way of answering the question is by evolutionary biology, which can be used to give an explanation for the origin of racism, xenophobia and prejudice. Human beings seem to be hard-wired with a distrust of things that are strange. Strange people, strange animals, strange plants, strange or unusual events. If you see something strange, treat it as dangerous until it is proved to be safe. In terms of evolutionary biology, in the past, some people didn't do this, and they died, because the strange thing turned out to be dangerous. If they died as children, they did not grow up to have kids of their own, and so those with the trustfulness gene did not pass the gene on to their children, and those with the supicion gene lived to pass that on.

It's also a learning thing. Once, when I was about 4-5 years old, we came home and found a large puffadder lying stretched out in the garden path. I thought it was dead and my parents called me away and said it was only sleeping. And so it proved, when it woke up. And so I learned to distrust apparently sleeping snakes. If my parents had not been with me and warned me, I might not have lived long enough to write this. And so we learn prejudice. I am prejudiced against sleeping snakes. And those who learn prejudice young tend to live longer than those who don't. It is an evolutionary survival trait.

And so we learn to distrust strange people, those whose language, customs appearance etc differ from our own. And that is partly learned behaviour. amd partly an inherited evolutionary characteristic. Those who are suspicious of strange things tend to live longer and to breed more. So much for evolutionary biology.

But there is also a mythical/theological explanation.

One of the best descriptions of this is in C.S. Lewis's science fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet. In the story two men, a mad scientist and a greedy financier, build a spaceship to go to Mars, which they want to colonise and exploit. They kidnap a philologist, who quickly learns the language of Mars, whose population is in three races that live in harmony. Mars, which the locals call Malacandra, has a spiritual ruler, a planetary angel, called the Oyarsa, and it turns out that earth, the "silent planet" of the novel's title, has a bent Oyarsa, who has corrupted his planet and its inhabitants. The mad scientist speaks to the Oyarsa of Malacandra, a racist rant about the human racve being superior to all others, and so destined to dominate and displace them. The Oyarsa of Malacandra says he sees what the bent Oyarsa of earth has done -- he has taken one good, the love of kin, which is not the greatest good, and twisted it to persuade the human race that it is the only good. In other words, racism comes from the devil.

While I see the explanatory value of both of these -- the evolutionary biological, and the mythic/theological, it is only the latter that enables us to fight racism. From the point of view of evolutionary biology, racism is neither good nor bad; it just is.

The National Party (NP), which ruled South Africa from 1948 to 1994, defined "nationalism" as "love of one's own". The NP claimed that its policy of apartheid was based on "Christian Nationalism". But what is "Christian Nationalism". B.J. Vorster, who became Minister of Justice in the NP government in 1961, and Prime Minister in 1966, said in 1942, when the NP was still in opposition:

We stand for Christian Nationalism, which is an ally of National Socialism. You can call the anti-democratic system dictatorship if you like. In Italy it is called fascism, in Germany National Socialism, and in South Africa Christian Nationalism.

But it was very clear that in spite of the "Christian" epithet that they tacked on to it, race trumped Christianity. One's "own". in the NP worldview, were not one's rellow Christians, but one's fellow white Afrikaners, who could accept other white as allies, provided they served the Afrikaner nationalist cause, but not fellow-Christians of other colours or races. The blood of kinship, of volkheid, was thicker than water, even than the water of baptism. "Christian Nationalism" meant that the "volk" came first, and Christ was second or lower, and certainly did not count in determining who was "one's own". And this the God who said "thou shalt have no other gods before me".

And so, in C.S. Lewis's story, after the mad scientist has ranted on about the superiority of the human race, its civilization, its science, medicine, law, armies, architecture, commerce, and the right to succeed other races as the right of the higher over the lower, the Oyarsa of Malacandra says.

I see now how the lord of the silent world [the devil] has bent you. There are laws that all hnau [intelligent creatures] know, of pity and straight dealing and shame and the like, and one of these is the love of kindred. He has taught you to break all of them except this one, which is not one of the greatest laws; this one he has bent till it becomes folly, and has set it up, thus bent, to be a little blind oyarsa in your brain.

And that is the essence of racism, "love of one's own" blown up out of all proportion until it becomes thoroughly evil.

The Herstigte Nasionale Party, a far-right breakaway from the NP, put a further twist on the concept of "one's own" when they coined the slogan "eie volk, eie land", and I wonder if the irony of the English translation escaped them or was intentional -- "own people, own land", when owning people, of course, is slavery. They seem to have dropped the Christian epithet by then, because their concept of owning land took no account of the God who said "Woe to those who add house to house and field to field until there is no more room" (Isaiah 5:8).

So yes, I believe that the ultimate origin of racism is the devil.

But what about the relation of racism to skin colour and economics?

That varies from place to place and time to time.

I suspect that a lot of white racism in America is economic in origin. During the trans-Atlantic slave trade period thousands of black slaves were exported from Africa to America. During that period in the Americas nearly all black people were slaves, and nearly all slaves were black people. And slaves were ipso facto at the bottom of the economic pile, and so inferior in status, in power, and in almost every other way to non-slaves. And so in the Americas slavery became associated with blackness, and blackness with slavery, and hence with inferiority. This, in itself is probably sufficient to account for racism in the Americas. There may have been other causes too, but the historical link between blackness and slavery is certainly the main cause.

Something similar happened in southern Africa. Slavery in the Cape Colony, which lasted until 1835, was mostly of black people from other parts of Africa and people from southern Asia. But it differed from America in that on the eastern border of the Cape Colony, during the slave period and after, there were large umbers of free and independent black people, who outnumbered both the slaves and the free people of the Cape Colony.

It is also worth noting that white racism increased exponentially at the time of the New Imperialism, which lasted from about 1870 to 1914. White Christian missionaries who came to Africa from Europe before 1870 may have had a certain amount of ethnocentric chauvinism, in preferring their own customs and culture to those of Africans they encountered, but they had no problems, for example, with appointing a black Yoruba ex-slave, Samuel Crowther, as Anglican bishop in Yorubaland, which later became part of Nigeria. But their successors during the New Imperialism denounced that as unwise and premature, and it was a long time before there was another black bishop in Nigeria. This was not so much economic, as about skin colour and culture. The New Imperialist white missionaries (and colonial officials, and businessmen) were imbued with a sense of their own superiority as white men.

There was a connection with economics too, but skin colour drove economics rather than the other way round. In the British colony of Natal laws were passed to diadvantage black farmers and favour white ones, limiting cattle trading and the like. And in the Union of South Africa in 1913 the Natives Land Act prohibited black people from acquiring any more agricultural land. And later, in the 1950s-1970s the NP government tried to deprive black farmers even of the little land they had, simply because they were black.

But the question of the origins of racism arose in the context of a different discussion on Twitter, when Jay Naidoo observed that he went to a restaurant where the food was good and the garden was good, but he was the only darkie there, and he wondered why that was.

I commented that at most of the restaurants I've been to recently there have been people of all colours there. But most of the restaurants I've been to in the last 10 years have been in the middle-class eastern areas of the City of Tshwane, Other places may differ. But (and this is where the economic factor comes in) most of the patrons of those restaurants, regardless of colour, have clearly also been middle class. That particular part of the city is also embassy territory, so in any given middle-class restaurant, on any given occasion, there might be a fairly cosmopolitan clientele.

But imagine if a homeless person, dark or pale, came in for a meal. Middle-class people, whether black or white, would ne likely to notice and wonder what was going on. They might think it too rude to stare, but they would notice. And perhaps some of the proprietors might invoke "right of admission reserved" notices to turn away someone of an obviously different class, lest the middle-class patrons be put off and not return, because they feel uncomfortable in the presence of someone who is so obviously not one of them.

So, regardless of the origins of racism, and though I think it is still a factor in South African life, I think class is a more important factor, which is why in South Africa the gap between the rich and the poor is among the highest in the world, and the attitude of many seems to be that expressed in the following verse, sung to the tune of "The Red Flag" (O Tannenbaum):

The working class can kiss my arse
I've got the foreman's job at last.

Apartheid lunacy returns -- or did it never really go away?

You can't make this stuff up. More than a quarter of a century after the end of Apartheid, a teacher is being disciplined for not sticking with his "official" apartheid-era race classification: 'Coloured' teacher on fraud charge for saying he was 'African':

A Western Cape teacher has been summoned to a disciplinary hearing on Wednesday for claiming to be “African” in his CV, instead of sticking with his “official” coloured identity. Glen Snyman, a teacher at Grootkraal Primary School in Oudtshoorn, allegedly self-identified as African when applying for a principal's job at another school in October 2017. He ultimately didn't get the job.

Wasn't the Population Registration Act repealed long ago? Or has the Race Classification Board being re-established? are they going to stick a pencil in his hair to prove a point at the disciplinary hearing, as the old Race Classification Board was rumoured to do? 

It seems that racism is now growing all around the world, as "race" becomes more and more important in so many people's minds for evaluating people's place in society and one's relationship to them. The demons of apartheid have been around for too long, and it's high time we exorcised them. 

 

Time Traveler by Merriam-Webster: Words from the year you were born

A friend posted a link to this site, which shows when certain words first appeared in print. I found quite a few surprising ones. Time Traveler by Merriam-Webster: Words from 1980:

When was a word first used in print? You may be surprised! Enter a date below to see the words first recorded on that year. To learn more about First Known Use dates,

My friend was born in 1980, and some of the ones I found surprising for that year were: BIOS, expansion slot, freewriting, green fingers, gridlock, heavy lifting, Usenet, and yuppie.

I really thought that most of them were older. Then I went back to the year I was born, 1941. There were a few surprises there, but perhaps there were some words that could be said to have defined my life in some ways, such as:

anti-totalitarian -- I was born in South Africa in 1941, and in 1948 the National Party, with its totalitarian policy of apartheid, came to power.

apparatchik -- linked to the previous one. The struggle against the apparatchiks, the petty authoritarian bureaucrats of the apartheid state.

existentialism -- philosophy of my youth, especially Kierkegaard

identity crisis -- spin-off from apartheid. Apartheid told you that your racial identity was the most important thing about you. Without racial identity you were nothing and nobody.

kissing cousin -- I became interested in family history because I wanted to know who my cousins were. I'm still not sure how kissing cousins differ from other cousins, though.

klatsch -- for the last four years one of the highlights of our month has been a literary coffee klatsch.

Klein bottle -- today at TGIF we discussed the mystery of consciousness. I've been thinking about it for quite a while. If you want to know what Klein bottles have to do with consciousness, see here.

metalinguistic -- I've been interested in language and culture for most of my life, and quite a lot of my blog posts have been about the relation of language to culture.

multiethnic -- one of the defining periods of my life was when a group of us set out to establish a multiethnic Orthodox Church in Johannesburg in the mid- to late 1980s.

So those are some of the words of my lifetime, and my life. 

Twenty years of Model C

It is now twenty years since"Model C" was forced on formerly "white" schools in South Africa, and we still haven't heard the end of it.

Two years later apartheid officially ended, democratic elections were held, and one would have thought that Model C schools, a last-ditch attempt to retain a vestige of apartheid in the former white schools, would have been swept into the dustbin of history, never to be heard of again.

But instead we hear of them quite frequently, and people speak of "Model Cs" and Model C accents", so that instead of being seen as the last twitches of a dying monster, Model C continues, undead, like a vampire, to plague the new South Africa -- as its inventors intended, though perhaps not quite in the way that they intended.

For those who weren't around when Model C schools were introduced, perhaps a brief recap of history may be in order.

The Union of South Africa was formed, in 1910, from two British colonies and two former Boer republics, which became provinces of the Union, and education was regarded as a provincial matter. So the provinces had differing education policies, but within any province all schools followed the same syllabus, and wrote public exams (such as Junior or Senior Certificate) to the same standard. There was disparity between black and white schools, with more money spent on white schools, and white teachers being paid more, but they had the same syllabus and wrote the same exams.

Some provinces insisted on single-medium education for white pupils (either English or Afrikaans) while some allowed dual or parallel medium schools. Provinces could decide whether or not to subsidise church schools and by how much. Most church schools were subsidised.

When the National Party came to power in 1948 it took control of black schools away from the provincial governments and centralised them under the Department of Bantu Education, with a different syllabus tailored to National Party ideology. The government then established "homelands", and when these "homelands" became "independent", control of education was given to them, but only for black pupils. White pupils living in the "homelands" (or white enclaves within the "homelands") had white schools still controlled by the provinces that the homelands had formerly belonged to.

The central government later took control of Coloured and Indian education, and, with the 1983 introduction of a tricameral parliament, took white education away from the provinces as well, placing it under the House of Assembly, the white section of parliament (the others were the House of Representatives, for Coloureds, and the House of Delegates for Indians, but even together they could not outnumber the House of Assembly, so whites remained firmly in control).

So white education became a white "own affair" under the House of Assembly, and all was well in the apartheid heaven that the Nats had created, except that the few remaining church schools (that had not been nationalised at the time of Bantu Education) were no longer anybody's "own affair" and began to admit children of all races.

And then in 1990 the De Klerk government released jailed opposition leaders and unbanned opposition parties. The writing was on the wall. Democracy was coming, and soon all these white "own affairs" schools would come under the control of a non-racial parliament. How to preserve the little bit of "own affairs" apartheid heaven from what was still seen by many in the NP government as the "total onslaught"?

So they came up with a crafty plan. Democracy was beginning to become politically correct, so let's give the parents a say in the schools. So they decided to hold referendums of parents at each school, and presented them with four Models -- A, B, C, and D. If a majority of 90% of the parents in a school decided in an 80% poll to adopt one of the models, then they could have it.

Model A was basically the status quo. An all white school run (and largely paid for) by the House of Assembly own affairs. Model B was similar, except that the school could decide its own admission policy. That meant that if the governing body of the school decided to admit pupils of all races, it could do so.

Model C was essentially privatisation. The school would become a private school, controlling its own admission policy, and would become responsible for upkeep of all the buildings and property as well. There would be a subsidy for teachers, but not to cover all maintenance. Model D was basically one for special needs schools.

In some posh white suburbs the richer parents were attracted to Model C, which seemed to them to be a way of getting a private school on the cheap. Among the less rich, it looked as though in Model C the government was saying, in effect, "if you want black kids in your school, you must pay for it".

The school our children went to, Clapham High School, voted overwhelmingly for Model B. Twice. Over 90% of the parents voted for it. The first time, in February 1991, it just fell short of the necessary 80% poll. So they voted again in September 1991, and made an effort to get all the parents to vote, and well over 90% again voted for Model B.

And a month or two later the school was informed by the government that it would become Model C, which the parents had rejected by an overwhelming majority of votes -- twice.

It was a case of "You will be privatised, whether you want to or not".

Perhaps that was a punishment for wanting to admit pupils of all races, and rejecting the apartheid dream.

And two years later the apartheid dream (which was a nightmare for most people) ended anyway.

Quite a number of parents from different schools held meetings to discuss ways in which Model C could be resisted, but in the end nothing came of them.

But Clapham High School became a Model B school in 1992, and on the 8th of January of that year the first black pupils came to the school. In 1993 it was forced to become Model C, like all the other "House of Assembly" schools. Some relations of ours were thinking of emigrating to New Zealand, and told us that it was because they had had to take out an extra mortgage on their house to pay the Model C fees.

One of the more cringeworthy moments was at a school annual general meeting, where the principal referred to "the successful integration of the formerly Model B and now Model C pupils". To refer to non-white pupils as "Model C pupils" seemed patronising in the extreme. We hoped that after the democratic elections of 1994 we would hear no more of that sort of thing.

Model C schools were introduced about 18 months before the end of apartheid, in a desperate attempt to keep apartheid alive. The song has ended, yet the malady lingers on, and on, and on, and on...

Whiteness just isn't what it used to be - book review

Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used to Be": White Identity in a Changing South Africa (Suny Series, Interruptions: Border Testimony by Melissa E. Steyn

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


For most of my lifetime obsession with whiteness has dominated South African politics, society, economy and even the landscape. When I heard quite recently that there was an academic discipline called "Whiteness Studies" my immediate reaction was negative. Some of my blogging friends assured me that they had found it useful, and this was one of the books they recommended, and since it was based on stories told by people I found it in the library and began reading it.

Melissa Steyn collected stories from 59 white people in South Africa and divided the narratives into different categories, and commented on the various approaches. This book is the result.

The first chapter is a kind of potted history of "Whiteness Studies" and the various view its practitioners have taken to the phenomenon of "whiteness" in a global sense. In part it deals with the fairly well-known phenomenon of Western modernity, where Westerners (mainly from Western Europe and North America) thought that their society was central and normative, and others quaint and peculiar and exotic. So, for example, Western anthropologists confined their studies to non-Western cultures (and often did so in the service of colonial rulers). The proponents of Whiteness Studies call this kind of cultural chauvinism "whiteness". But even after reading Steyn's book, I am not convinced of the adequacy of the description, and I find that Steyn herself falls into the same cultural chauvinist trap by not disclosing where she is coming from, and pretending to be "objective", even when she is aware of the dangers of that approach.

The main manifestation of this in the book is that, while the bulk of the book is devoted to the the analysis of people's responses to Steyn's questionnaire, the questions that elicited those responses are not revealed to the reader. If this forms the bulk of the book, then surely the questions themselves could have been put in an appendix. Apart from anything else, that might give readera a chance to try to answer the questions too, and try to analyse their own responses.

In addition, while Steyn collected 59 narratives, these narrators are not really allowed to tell their own story. Steyn is the only narrator, setting the scene, telling the story, and pulling a quotation, sometimes as short as a single sentence, to illustrate the point in her story. So I get the impression of a stage magician, displaying tricks to an audience, with the quotations from the stories being pulled out like a rabbit from a hat or a coin from the sleeve at the appropriate moment, with only Steyn really knowing what is going on behind the scenes.

For instance, there is this:

Such is the fear of being perceived to be aligned with what is morally reproachable that even to talk about "race" could implicate one in racism. The topic is a no-no:

"Whites can never know how blacks were affected by Apartheid. [computer analyst] "

At first sight, this seems to be a complete non-sequitur. It certainly doesn't seem to be an instance of race being a "no--no", because it mentions race ("whites", "blacks") and the relations between them ("Apartheid"). Either Steyn is misrepresenting the narrator, or she is interpreting it in the light of its context, which she has failed to quote, and this is withheld from the reader.

Taken on its own, the sentence can be interpreted in a variety of ways, of which the most likely (it seems to me), is that since, because of Apartheid, whites were separated from blacks, they could not know how blacks were affected by apartheid because they were kept isolated, and whites could not see what was happening, and their was little comparable in their experience. For instance, if a black man died in town, his wife and children, if they were allowed to live in the town at all, would be endorsed out to a "homeland" because they became surplus to the labour requirements of white society. Much of this was invisible to most whites, and so they did not know and could not know the extent to which this took place, nor what it was like do be endorsed out and forced to go and live in a rural area where you knew no one.

Maybe the context shows that the narrator meant something different, but Steyn does not show us the context.

Similarly, Steyn castigates those she regards as adopting a liberal "colourblind" approach, saying that they are "in denial", yet when, in another section of the book, she cites an example of that approach, she praises it.

The Apartheid system tried to make me think about "white" in a certain way and about "black" in another way. I strive to define my own reality and I try to avoid being hamstrung by other people's projections. [lecturer]

Steyn says "Whatever whiteness may have meant in the past, this narrative perks up in tone when it considers what may develop now that whiteness has lost its power to dominate."

Yet elsewhere she says that to claim that whiteness has lost its power to dominate is to be in denial. The difference, if any, isd hidden behind the stage magician's black cloth that she pulls away to reveal the rabbit in the hat.

One of the narratives, however, I could identify with:

I have discovered that, despite apartheid, I have more in common with black South Africans than with other whites, be they British, Dutch, French or American... When I first went overseas in 1986 I thought because of my colonial British background I would find Britain home. Instead I became increasingly aware that I was not British, and that I was African. This is how I came to see myself as a white African. [lecturer]

I wrote something very similar in a blog post at What is African? Race and identity | Khanya long before I had ever heard of "whiteness studies".

Steyn summarises the argument of the Introduction in her conclusion

In the Introduction, whiteness has been theorized as the racial norm, the invisible center that deflects attention from itself by racializing the margins, and constructing them as the problem. Whiteness then believes in its own homogeneous neutrality. Whites are then described [in the Introduction - STH] as generally unaware of their own racialization, unconscious of their privilege, or of how their implicit assumptions of white entitlement are a consequence of certain historical relations, not something essential about whiteness itself.

I'd go along with that, especially where North America is concerned (and Steyn wrote the book while living in North America). South Africa, however, is somewhat different. Whiteness was anything but unconscious.

But it appears that Steyn was also suffering from the same disease.

On page 26, writing of English-speaking South Africans' attitudes towards poor rural Afrikaners, she writes, "Like ethnic working class whites and partially racialized groups in America, Afrikaners had to 'fight' for the status of first class citizens."

"Ethnic working class" what are they? Just as "whiteness" is invisible to the dominant white group in America, so is ethnicity. "Ethnic" whites are the "other", the "them". And Steyn uses that terminology without batting an eyelid, withouit scare quotes, without even the almost obligatory [sic] used in some academic writing when politically incorrect language comes up. But Steyn is not quoting, she is using the terminology herself, thus identifying with those who believe they have no ethnicity, and manifesting "ethnic blindness".

Perhaps I might have read this book differently if I had read it before engaging in a discussion on whiteness studies with some others (see Whiteness, whiteliness and White Studies | Khanya).

And one of the biggest problems I have with this book is that it seems to be saying that even if we have deconstructed whiteness, and dumped it, we must now reconstruct it in order to deconstruct it again, like Sisyphus. It's a bit like a child being told by its mother, "You must have a bath tonight, whether you need it or not." And the proponents of whiteness studies seem to be saying "You must have an identity crisis, whether you need one or not."

One thing I will say, though. I didn't find it boring. It was a page-turner.



View all my reviews

The generation gap

The other day I was at a seminar on The Mission-shaped Church, and I became aware of the generation gap.

There were a couple of questions that baffled me.

One was quite amusing, or rather the response was. A couple of people from Malawi spoke about Africa having an oral culture rather than a written one, and so in their church, where the Bible was regarded as important, they had difficulty in getting people to read the Bible. A young guy, who is well-known for his enthusiasm for electronic technology, and who blogs and tweets and does all that good stuff, asked one of the speakers, "What is the literacy rate in Malawi?" The response came quick as a flash, "You can look it up on Google."

I don't think the speaker knew the questioner, but many in the audience did, and knew of his fondness for computer communications, so there was much laughter. The speaker went on to explain that he didn't go around with statistics at his fingertips.

I was puzzled by the relevance of the question to what the speakers had been saying.

And the same questioner asked a question of another speaker at the same meeting. Just "Why?"

And I didn't understand why he asked the question.

Forty or fifty years ago, when I was at meetings like that, I often asked questions that old fogeys didn't understand. That was the generation gap. And now, suddenly, without being aware of crossing it, I'm on the other side of the gap.

So that got me thinking about the generation gap.

And I "googled it".

Well, not quite. I did a search in my diary for the word "generation" within three words of "gap" to see what I had said about it in the past, and if I could see when and where I had crossed it.

But sticking with last Saturday, for the moment, I wrote

As we were leaving I talked a bit to Annemie Bosch, and she said that though progress was slow, the Dutch Reformed Church was beginning to reinvent itself. And I thought that perhaps it was succeding in doing so, with all these hippie-like dominees in their casual clothes at the meeting today, so different from the formal
besuited dominees I had known in the past, among whom I felt out of place. Things have changed a lot. But then I realise that my picture and experience of dominees, like Tom Carpenter of Melmoth, who was concerned about petty morality and strained at gnats like fishing on Sundays, but swallowed camels like racism and apartheid, is way out of date. They've come a long way since then, but then it was a long time ago - 30 years, a whole generation. And it is now nearly 20 years since David Bosch died, and Annemie continued to be a warm and cheerful motherly figure...

What a drag it is getting old, as the Rolling Stones used to sing in my youth.

More than 40 years ago, on 5 December 1968, to be precise, I went to supper with some friends, John and Shirley Davies, in Parktown, Johannesburg. John was the Anglican chaplain at nearby Wits University. About 3 weeks earlier I had stopped being a full-time student for the last time. The Davies's three children were Mary (10), Mark (8) and Elizabeth (6). This is what I wrote:

We had supper then, chicken salad with Mackeson Porter, Mark pulled a wishbone with me, and won, and asked me to choose the pieces, and won again. I said he had already won in pulling it. Mary explained that one could win twice. John spoke of a conference on the generation gap, Shirley said cynically, "I suppose all the speakers are over fifty." We had a bit of an argument as to what constitutes the generation gap. I said it was people between 40 and 65 who, as a group, were most conservative. Shirley said I only said that because of where I am. Then she asked Mary what she thought. Mary said, "Nothing." "What do you think about anything?" I asked her.
"Nothing," she said.

Mary is now a grandmother.

Nearly four years later I was a hanger on a student conference, a conference of the Anglican Students Federation being held at KwaNzimela, in Zululand. I'd been deported from Namibia, and was hanging around waiting to be banned, staying with Rich and Phyllis Kraft. Rich was Director of Christian Education in the Anglican diocese of Zululand, and had arranged community development training and experience for the students. So on 6-July 1972 I wrote

In the morning I took some of the students to Nkwenkwe. Among them was Simon Shikangala, who comes from Ovamboland. Daphne Mahlangu and Mary Theyise said that Simon would not teach them any Kwanyama songs, so I said I would teach them a Herero one, and taught them Matutjandangi. I took photos of the work projects when I got back to KwaNzimela, and in the afternoon went to fetch more poles, and in the evening went to fetch the students from Nkwenkwe, with Fr Sibiya. They were an all-black group, as it is a reserve area. They had done guite a lot of work. The girls had hoed in the orchard, and the boys had put new doors into one of the buildings. Patrick Lebethe, one of the city kids from Joburg, had asked Father Sibiya
how the people came to live so far from civilisation, and Fr Sibiya said "You've come to civilise them, haven't you?" On the way back we sang Herero songs all the way, and Zulu choruses that Mary had taught us the other night.

Back at KwaNzimela Phyllis said I had been very subdued since coming back from Johannesburg, and said I could stay with them as long as I liked, if I was certain I was going to be banned. She said on previous occasions when I had visited them, I had been creative and looking forward to doing new things, and now I wasn't doing things like that any more, but just content to be sent to Nkwenkwe, and to fetch poles and things. It's true, one can't plan for the future when one will in all probability be banned. In a way banning will come as a kind of liberation, because it will take away the uncertainty of not knowing what can be planned for.

I had accepted Rich Kraft's invitation to stay and help with the ASF conference readily, mainly because they were friends and I enjoyed their company, which I would not be able to do after I was banned. It would also extend the limited time of freedom remaining to me, as the SB probably did not know I was there. I was sure that my banning order had been signed on the same day as Dave's, and I wanted to enjoy what little freedom remained to me. I also enjoyed the company of the students.

One reason for being subdued, as Phyllis Kraft had noticed, was that I had said goodbye to many friends - the Schmidts (a family I knew in Windhoek, who had returned to America) possibly for ever, the Morrows had gone back to Windhoek, and if I were banned, I might never see Dave de Beer, who had been banned while I was staying with in in Johannesburg a week earlier) again. Running errands for the ASF conference made me feel useful, and it was living for the day. When the conference was over, however, it would be yet another parting, and if I were banned to the Melmoth district, I'd just be a drag and a sponger, a burden on all. A local farmer did offer me a job on his farm maintaining the tractors, but I was strictly an amateur mechanic, and was not confident that I could do it.

Since Nkwenkwe was in a black reserve, white students would need permits to go there, it was one of the projects that only black students could work on, so they were the ones I got to know best. Patrick Lebethe, who had grown up in Soweto, amused me with his city slicker attitude. When we turned off the Eshowe-Melmoth road at the top of top of the hill, and went down over dirt tracks into the valley, he asked "Where do these people go to the shops?" and we said at the shop up at the turn off, where there was a small general dealer. He was astounded. "How do they get there?" he asked. "They walk." we said. I loved them. They were lovely kids. I called them "kids" because that was was how Larry Weeks, the American student who had visited us in Windhoek, talked. But there was also a generation gap. It was only four years since I had been a student, but we were a different generation. I was a student of the sixties, these were the students of the seventies. They seemed to have a stronger faith, a stronger commitment to Christ -- not divided into pietists and activists, like so many in the sixties, but holding both commitment to Christ and social concern together in a holistic way. That was to be shattered by the rocky rioter teargas show in Soweto four years later, and by the subversion of Inkatha by the National Party in the 1980s. I wonder how these kids made it through those times.

And now, of course, those "kids" will all be old farts like me.

And then, 25 years later, on 14 September 1997, I wrote

The papers were full of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings about the death of Steve Biko. It's hard to think that it was 20 years ago, and the SB men applying for amnesty are all old men. It makes me feel old too. Apartheid, and the struggle against it, dominated and gave meaning to our lives, and a new generation knows so little of it. It is a real generation gap.

And then, less than three years ago, we were visiting some friends who had retired to a dacha in the Drakensberg, Martin and Wendy Goulding. And they had other friends staying with them, Erich and Glenda Dokoupil. It was 1 September 2008, the first day of spring, and the september was all in bloom (in the northern hemisphere those bushes were called "may", because that's when they bloom there, but in South Africa they bloom in September).

We had dinner, and sat around the table talking about all kinds of subjects. I supose if I were like Dr Boswell I would record all the conversation, as he did with Samuel Johnson, but I can't remember all of it. At one point Wendy mentioned that we were living in a more visual culture, with films showing blood and gore and murder. In classical plays someone would come on stage with a message that someone had been killed, but now the death would be shown in graphic detail, and this must influence the minds of people, especially impressionable children, and their dreams. I said that was one of the reasons no one in our family went to see the film of "Lord of the rings" because it would interfere with the pictures in our heads when we read the book. Glenda said she had seen the film and not read the book, and didn't think much of it anyway.

We discussed the generation gap, and the changes that had taken place in our lifetime, but I said there was a bigger gap between us and our parents than between us and the younger generation. I remember seeing my father in a business suit, wearing a hat, and discussing business with simmilarly attired gents. We had a photo of them at a building site, possibly the still for Gilbeys gin, built at Isando in about 1952. I hated the idea of dressing like that, and wanted nothing to do with "business". But we dressed in much the same way as the kids of today. Perhaps our generation had started that dress revolution, and it has been accepted by subsequent generations. I mentioned old Deacon Petros Nghandi in Namibia, who had been born in about the 1870s, and came down to Windhoek from Ovamboland for a synod, and had never tasted ice cream, and when he was born there were no aeroplanes, yet he was looking at "Scope" magazine with pictures of men landing on the moon. That generation of people who had been born in the late 19th century had seen more changes than any other before or since. In our day people fly in the same airliners that they did when our children were born. Most airlines still use Boeing 747s which have seen few design changes since 1970, and though there is a new double-decker Airbus that carries more passengers, it doesn't look much different, and there are still fewer of them. There were far more design changes in aircraft in the preceding 30 years, in our lifetime. Yet our parents, born before air travel was anything but
a hobby for the very rich, had lived to see and fly in the same jumbo jets that our children had known all their lives. The only things that had changed from the 1970s was the electronics, with more sophisticated radar, GPS navigation and things like that.

Well, there are my reminiscences about the times when I used the term "generation gap". And if you did not enjoy my tale, as Tom Lehrer said (anyone remember him?) you've yourselves to blame if it's too long: you should never have let me begin.

Racial epithets

There has been an interesting discussion on the English usage newsgroup alt.usage.english recently. It started with someone asking whether African-Americans should be referred to as "Black" or "black" (with or without a capital "b".

I kept out of it at that stage, because I'm not American and certainly not a fundi on American usage.

But then it broadened, as these things inevitably do, and some people were asking about racial and ethnic terms in South Africa, and one person said he thought that Hindus in South Africa were called "black". And someone else said that the apartheid terminology was "Indians".

Well, no. "Indians" was the pre-apartheid terminology, and it was applied to Hindus and Muslims indiscriminately if they or their ancestors came from the Indian subcontinent, which is now divided into India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh.

One of the first acts of the apartheid government was to pass the Population Registration Act of 1950, which required that everyone have their population group registered, and this was done in the population census of 1951. Everyone was given a race (or population group) classification, which was one of Asiatic, Bantu, Coloured or White (all with capital letters, because they were official). Indians, Nepalese, Pakistanis etc were all lumped together under "Asiatic". In the 1970s the canons of political correctness were changed, and Asiatics became Asians, while Bantu became Blacks.

Then there was this snippet, with my reply:

>Apparently "brown" is now used to some degree to refer to
>Hispanics/Latinos in the U.S.

It is also used as a self-description by some former so-called "Coloureds" who are still so called in official documents in our so called "non-racial" democracy (scare quotes deliberate, indicating two-finger gestures with both hands in viva voce situations).

The Population Registration Act has been repealed, yet the same racial epithets continue to be used, though they are no longer defined. Apartheid may be dead, but it still rules from the grave, and its legacy lingers on.

All Saints: making it personal

The Sunday after Pentecost is All Saints Sunday in the Orthodox Church (which means that yesterday was Halloween)

Antioch Abouna: For All the Saints ...:

The saints personalise Christianity. There are versions of Christianity around which reduce Church life to a set of doctrines, good in themselves, but because they are not enfleshed in the lives of real people, such Christianity remains, abstract, dry, formal, conceptual. Think back to your time at school. I guess it's not the lessons you remember directly, rather the teachers who, for you, embodied and made accessible what they taught. So it is with saints. If you want to know who the Holy Spirit is, read the account of Motovilov's conversation with Fr. Seraphim. If you want to understand the place of monasticism in the life of the Church, read St. Athanasios' Life of St. Antony the Great. If you value the healing work of God, don't even read about it, just invoke the prayers of St. Panteleimon, St. Swithun or some other unmercenary healer. The saints make real, vivid and personal what we believe and how we live by those beliefs.

Last week at the Amahoro Conference I met Adriaan Vlok, who had been Minister of Law and Order in the apartheid regime. Truth, reconciliation and smelly feet: Khanya:

When he was Minister, Mr Vlok’s underlings had attempted to poison Frank Chikane, the General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, and Adriaan Vlok had appeared before the Truth and Reconciliatian Commission and later the Amnesty Committee and had apologised for that and other things. But he said that no one seemed to hear him, and in 2006 several things he read or heard convinced him that he needed to go beyond making a general apology, and apologise to a person, and Frank Chikane seemed to be one of those people. So he had gone to his office and washed his feet.

Adriaan Vlok told this story at the Amahoro Gathering and there was a sequel Truth, reconciliation and smelly feet: Khanya:

the person sitting next to him on the podium, Sean Callaghan, said he had been a member of Koevoet, one of the most vicious units of the apartheid security forces, who were, in effect, hired killers. He and others had had to have psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress, and his counsellor had told him he should not just curse the system, but a person to focus his anger on, thd the person he had chosen to do that was Adriaan Vlok. So he wanted to wask Vlok’s feet, and in the end the both washed each other’s feet, right there on the podium.

I found that quite scary. It was one thing to make repentance personal, as Vlok had done with Frank Chikane. It was quite another, in my mind, to make hatred personal. Sometimes we say "Love the sinner, hate the sin", but here was a psychotherapist urging someone to hate the sinner, namely Adriaan Vlok.

So I've been wondering at my own reaction. Why do I think that it's OK to personify virtues in the cult of the saints, but that it is not OK to personify vices in the execration of sinners?

My mind also goes back to the apartheid time, long before Adriaan Vlok was minister, under one of his predecessors, B.J. Vorster. Vorster passed a lot of repressive legislation to crush opposition to apartheid. He introduced detention without trial for 90 days (which Tony Blair wanted introduce in Britain, and Gordon Brown still wants to). It became personal when a friend of mine, Stephen Gawe, was detained. A few years later I was banned by another of Vlok's predecessors, as were several of my friends and acquaintances. I was then an Anglican, and the Anglican Church celebrated St Peter's Chains on 1 August, also called Lammas (in the Orthodox Church it is celebrated on 16 January). This celebrates the incident in Acts 12:1-11 in which St Peter was arrested, and the church prayed, and he was miraculously freed from prison. I regarded this as the patronal festival of all people who were banned or detained without trial, and was quite shocked when the Anglican Church's Liturgical Committee announced that they planned to abolish its observance. I regarded this as a slap in the face for all Anglicans who were banned or detained, and wrote to the chairman of the liturgical committee, Bishop Philip Russell, pleading with them to change their minds.

This led to quite a protracted correspondence. In those days, among Western Christians at least, "relevance" was regarded as one of the greatest virtues, and "irrelevance" one the greatest vices.[1] Bishop Russell was one of those who regarded "relevance" as very important and said that the Liturgical Committee regarded the feast of St Peter's Chains as irrelevant in our modern age. I was astounded that they could not see its relevance to South Africa, where people were being detained without trial regularly and every year more and more repressive legislation was being passed to enable them to be detained for longer periods and with fewer legal safeguards. I prayed that God would preserve the church from relevant priests.

Eventually Bishop Russell offered, as a consolation prize, a commemoration of Martyrs and Confessors of the Twentieth Century, which was introduced in 1975, commemorated on 8 November. The equivalent of the Synaxarion for the day explicitly mentioned Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King (neither of whom were Anglicans, though of course, neither was St Peter).

The implication was that I could consider myself among the "countless men and women of our time" who faced "misunderstanding, social ostracism, imprisonment and even death" for the sake of "the changeless truths of God". And it seemed to miss the point altogether. The commemoration of St Peter's Chain's was important to me because it was a concrete example of how the Lord "executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free, the Lord opens the eyes of the blind" as the Psalmist says. The point about St Peter's Chains is not so much that men imprisoned him as that God set him free, and that it was therefore an image of hope to those in prison. But that was not "relevant" enough for the twentieth century theologians of relevance.

No, it is better to personify good, and to depersonify evil, or to personify it only in the person of the devil. Apartheid made prisoners of us all, even Adriaan Vlok, and it is better to curse the system than to demonify a person, because that makes demons of us all.

And I wonder what the world would have been like today if George Bush and Saddam Hussein had washed one another's feet, and if Robert Mugabe washed the feet of the Zimbabwean refugees who sleep in doorways in Johannesburg.

But there were saints who did such things and more. They were irrelevant in the eyes of the world, and even in the eyes of some theologians, but not in the eyes of God.

Notes

[1] Colin Morris, a Methodist minister who worked in Zambia, wrote in his book Include me out: confessions of an ecclesiastical coward

(Karl Barth writes 'Jesus is immanent in the Church only because He transcends it'. In everyday speech this is like saying that something is wet only because it is dry, near only because it is far away, and relevant only because it is irrelevant...

... Ah, breathes the theologian. That is paradox and, therefore, profound.

... Ah, says the man in the pew, it's beyond me but I'll take the parson's word that it means something.

... So what? says the man in the street, it has nothing to do with the price of fish! -- a remark calculated to touch a theologian on the raw; say that he's unintelligible and he will take it as a compliment, but suggest that he is also irrelevant and he will sue you!

Maori rugby too racial for South Africa?

Maori rugby too racial for South Africa?:

In one of rugby's great ironies, the proposed match between New Zealand Maori and the Springboks in June could be canned because of the racial composition of the Kiwi side.

The match, mooted to be played in Soweto as one of a couple of warmup clashes for the Boks before their series against the British and Irish Lions, is now in doubt because of logistical issues, primary of which is South African objections to the 'racial' selection of the Maori side.

The Boks are due to meet Namibia in Windhoek in late May, but wanted to add the much tougher fixture against the Maori lineup in June as a final shakedown.

The irony is more delicious than they can imagine.

Back in the bad old days of apartheid the South African government banned a New Zealand rugby team from touring South Africa because it included Maoris. They said that constituted "outside interference in our domestic affairs".

At the time I was a student in Pietermaritzburg, and as white elections were impending Nusas (the National Union of South African Students) organised a "Reality Week" in which spokesmen for the various political parties could put their own viewpoints. The National Party was represented by a provincial councillor called Klopper, and it took the form of a debate with a representative of the Liberal Party, John McQuarrie, who was a member of the education faculty at the university. All the rugby fans were there in force to heckle.

To save typing, I simply reproduce an extract from my diary at the time:

16 September 1965

I went up to the Nat-Lib debate. The Main Science Lecture Theatre was packed pretty full, and I found myself sitting on the right-hand side behind four young fascists. Macquarrie spoke first and started with education, which was his own field. He dissected Bantu Education, and all the developments that had taken place since the government came to power, and especially over the last five years. He then went on to other fields, and did the same, quoting figures in evidence. He is a rather dour old Scot, and spoke drily and quietly, without any fuss, and was politely rather than thunderously applauded. He did not make any emotional appeals at all, just
facts and figures.

Then came Klopper, the member of the Provincial council. His speech was vague in the extreme, just the opposite of McQuarrie, who was concise and to the point. He gave nothing substantial to support his argument, but just gave a glowing picture of the wonderful utopia just around the corner. He made several appeals to patriotism. Every time he said something particularly hairy the five little fascists in front clapped dutifully like Pavlov's dog salivating when the bell rings. He said something about Mr Wilson learning his lesson at last, and that the Britishers were determined to keep their racial blood pure, which sounded just like something out of
"Mein Kampf", and Pavlov's puppies burst into clapping and cheering.

After Kloppers's speech came question time, and Macquarrie was virtually ignored -- most of what he had had to say was virtually indisputable, but Klopper had put his foot in it many times, and he was subjected to a barrage of questions. Several people asked why people were banned without trial, among them some students
generally considered right-wing and conservative, like Howie Miller, who had had a far-right manifesto for the SRC election.

Klopper always ended up by saying, when pressed by each successive questioner on this subject, "The Minister in his wisdom sees fit", and eventually Ray Rutherford-Smith added "... in his infinite wisdom." When some people questioned the wisdom of the Minister, Klopper assured us that he was an "honourable man", and an "upright Christian" -- yet he won't let Elliot Mngadi or Dennis Brutus attend church services.

Colin Webb asked him about two things he had said in the course of his speech. One was that all races are equal in the eyes of the government, and the other was that he himself had helped personally with cases of many people who had done themselves the injustice of applying to be classified as coloured ("you pay for that," a coloured in the audience has shouted when he said it). Colin Webb asked him why, if all races were equal, it should be an "injustice" to be classified as coloured. "But you don't understand," exclaimed Klopper, "they did themselves the injustice, they asked to be classified as coloured." Three times Colin Webb tried to explain to Klopper what he was getting at -- that if all races are equal, then there would be no injustice in being classified as coloured, but Klopper could not see it.

Then Hilton Kobus asked why the Maoris were banned from playing rugby. That, according to Klopper, was New Zealand's fault. "They called them Maoris, not us. If they called them white we'd play them tomorrow" and went on to explain a fantastic biological theory that when the white genes rise above 75% there is a corresponding
rise in intelligence, and so Martin Luther King was a white man, because he is too clever to be a kaffir. To judge from Klopper's efforts tonight, he must, according to his own theory, be a black man. In his summing up he said he was glad to see that people had only questioned him about little things, which showed that they must be satisfied with government policy in the broad front.

McQuarrie ended his summing up by asking whether the gold mines belonged to the black people or to the white people. If to the white people, did they belong to the English or the Afrikaans speaking? And then pointed out the futility of trying to divide things up in this way, seeing that the land belonged to all the people in it. "The earth is the Lord's," he quoted.

After the meeting we had a postmortem on the grass outside. All agreed that Klopper had made a poor showing, though one had to admit his courage in coming along. It was more than the United Party had. They had been booked to debate with the Progressives, to get all four parties on the platform, but consistently refused, but
consistently refused, Klopper had wavered, first saying that he wouldn't come if the meeting was held under the auspices of Nusas, and then wanted guarantees that there would be an all-white audience (in the event the audience wasn't all white) but he came none the less. Also, he kept his temper throughout the tough questioning he received. And at the end the fascists were no longer clapping him.

So now I wonder -- if the New Zealand government decided to call the Maoris white, would we still play them tomorrow?

It's almost supernatural: The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent

Why is it that when one criticises actions of the Israeli government, one is often called "anti-Semitic", or accused of "denying Israel's right to exist". Here's a journalist who has had such experiences.

Johann Hari: The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent:

I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn't controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile 'pro-Israel' writers and media monitoring groups – including Honest Reporting and Camera – said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

I had a Jewish correspondent in New York who was forever sending me copies of the same article by Martin Luther King, Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism and vehemently denied any resemblance between the way Palestinians are treated by Israel and apartheid. Yet in many ways it is worse than apartheid. South Africa never tried to build a concrete wall around the "homelands", though they did accuse anyone who criticised apartheid (or any of its euphemisms, like "separate development") of being anti-South African, though the accusation that they "denied South Africa's right to exist" was implicit rather than explicit as in the case of the Israeli government apologists.

Let's face it, Zionism (in the sense of Jewish nationalism, rather than the African Independent Churches) comes from the same milieu that produced other Eastern European nationalisms that led, inter alia to the breakup of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, whose repercussions are still being felt today. In Africa, however, we call it tribalism rather than nationalism.

Kosovo UDI a headache for Canada

clipped from www.reuters.com Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia is a headache for Canada, which needs to find a way of recognizing the new state without boosting the fortunes of separatists in its French-speaking province of Quebec. Polls indicate that around half of Quebecers support the idea of independence for the province of 7.5 million. The Parti Quebecois, now in opposition in the provincial legislature, said that if Canada recognizes a unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo it would have to treat a similar move by Quebec the same way.

And then, of course, there was the speedy recognition granted to Ian Smith's Rhodesia, and "homelands" like Transkei, Bophuthatswana, etc.

Beyond the Boerewors Curtain: Identity and white English South Africans

In his blog Beyond the Boerewors Curtain Roger Saner asks an interesting question about Identity and white English South Africans

What also interests me about Apartheid is the white English role. Most English people in SA seem unaware that the British concentration camps were responsible for the deaths of 26,000 Afrikaner women and children. This is not a legacy to be lightly skipped over, and one that ties directly into one of the most thorny issues for English South Africans: identity. Who are we? We're not British, although many of us hold British passports (or can get ancestral visas, or flee to the UK when we get the chance). We're not Afrikaans, so therefore we're not responsible for Apartheid (so I've heard from many English people). 'Apartheid was something which the Afrikaners were responsible for, not us. We had no say. In all levels of government the only people who were employed were Afrikaans.' So we withdrew from the public sphere and happily existed in the neutral space between oppression and oppressed, mirroring the behaviour of everyone else.

The last sentence rather begs the question. What do you mean "we", white man? Just who is "everyone"?

In his book Ah big yaws? Rawbone Malong described the language, pronunciation and usage of White Urban English-speaking South Africans, WUESAs, or Woozers for short.

In a post on my other blog I queried the usage and assumptions of a certain school of church historians who have written about "the English-speaking churches" in South Africa. Is there such a thing as a Woozer identity?

I suppose that in a sense I'm a Woozer. I'm white, speak English as my first language, was born in South Africa and have lived in cities most of my life. But does that define my identity? In the year I was born a man called G.H. Calpin published a book called There are no South Africans. He was a nasty right-wing racist (I was later called upon to review one of this other books, which made that very clear).

I've been faced with the question at several significant moments of my life. I'll describe some of them, going backwards in time

One was 25 years ago, during the referendum of the tri-cameral parliament, in 1983. I was visited by a National Party canvasser, who tried to convince me that the proposed tri-cameral parliament was a good thing. He stayed most of the afternoon. My objections were different from most of those he encountered, and it took most of the afternoon for him to grasp what I was getting at. Most objections he encountered were from people who did not like the idea of having Coloureds and Asians in parliament, even in separate houses. What he found difficult to grasp was that I rejected two principles that he regarded as so axiomatic that he could not conceive of the possibility of anyone questioning them: group rights and "own affairs". And that related to one of the fundamental contradictions of apartheid.

Afrikaner nationalists liked to point out that nationalism was a good thing, and that it simply meant "love of one's own" -- and that is where "own affairs" came in. The problem for me was, what was my "own"? The "white group"? But what was it? One should have "own affairs" which meant one's own schools, language, religion, culture and so on. But Nat policy was to have separate English and Afrikaans schools. If the theory of apartheid were to be consistent, then there should have been an "English" homeland, which ran its own affairs. But there wasn't, of course. If there were, then the "white" group would be split, and could not outnumber the Coloureds and Indians, and the tri-cameral parliament would no longer serve its purpose of maintaining white Afrikaner Nationalist hegemony. For the same reason there could not be a "black" house fo parliament, because that would outnumber the whites, so the blacks had to be divided into Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana etc homelands. It was the old policy of divide and rule. As long as Afrikaner nationalists outnumbered all other whites (English, Portuguese, Greek etc), they could be coopted to boost the numbers of the white parliament, which Afrikaner nationalists would control. The moment one of the black groups outnumbered the white conglomerate, the racial arithmetic no longer worked. Chris Heunis resigned as Minister of Constitutional Affairs, and apartheid's days were numbered.

But to the Nat canvasser it was inconceivable that I should not see my identity as primarily white. I didn't want a tri-cameral parliament, I wanted one parliament, with one man, one vote. He said "But that has never worked anywhere." I said "Look west". That required more explanations. On our western border was Botswana, which in 1983 was the most democratic country in Africa. Admittedly it was a much more homogeneous population than South Africa. But I didn't see why it shouldn't work in a multicultural country like South Africa, and thought it was a lot better than having people of one culture telling all the others what groups they belonged to and what their culture ought to be. "Own affairs" was a farce, because the attitude of the Nat government was that "you will look after your own affairs, and we will tell you what your own affairs are".

An earlier defining moment was the publication of A message to the people of South Africa by the South African Council of Churches, in 1968.

In the past various Christian groups had criticised apartheid on the ground of its unjust implementation. The Message, however, attacked not merely the implementation and practice of apartheid, but its theory and ideology. It said that apartheid was far worse than a heresy, it was a pseudogospel.

Apartheid was a false gospel because it encouraged people to find their security in racial identity instead of in Christ, and it was therefore, from a Christian point of view, a form of idolatry. It set up racial identity as an idol. Christians therefore opposed apartheid not merely because it was bad in practice, it was bad in principle. It was based on principles and assumptions that could never be acceptable from a Christian point of view.

For me personally, that was not something new. The Message to the people of South Africa simply articulated something I already knew. It helped to clarify and reinforce things by finding terminology to describe them. Many people had believed that apartheid was a heresy. The Message went further, and said it was a pseudogospel, and explained why. It was a moment like the one when Elijah confronted the prophets of Baal. It challenged South Africa: if Christ is God, serve him; but don't pretend to serve him when your real god is the idol of racial identity.

For me personally the defining moment came in 1960/61, when there was another referendum, on whether South Africa should become a "republic", and did become a republic outside the Commonwealth.

It made me think about what it meant to be a citizen of the Republic of South Africa. The propaganda of the Republicans was that it would "unite South Africa". They said that the Afrikaners put South Africa first, while the "English" had divided loyalties, with one foot in Britain, which many Woozers still spoke of as "home", even if their ancestors had lived in Slouth Africa for generations. The Afrikaans word for Woozers was "souties", derived from "soutpiel" -- if one had one foot in South Africa and one in Britain, then another part of the body (in the case of males) must be dangling in the salty waters of the ocean in between.

But all this talk of "uniting" South Africa was going on simultaneously with talk of dividing it up into "homelands". And what was a homeland? A putative place of origin that black people (but not whites) were told they belonged to, and could be sent "back" to. So what did it mean to be a citizen of the Republic of South Africa? That you should have no other homeland (if you were white), but that you must have another homeland, if you were black. Clearly, the Republic of South Africa was going to be a Mickey Mouse country, with an elastic definition of citizenship that could mean anything but actually meant nothing.

And at the same time I read the New Testament, where St Paul said "our citizenship, our homeland, is in heaven" (Philippians 3:30). So it appeared to me that it was a toss-up between citizenship of the Kingdom of Heaven and citizenship of the Republic of South Africa, and I opted for the former. Baptism, it appeared to me, was a naturalisation ceremony for entering the Kingdom of Heaven.

So what the National Party was urging me to do was (in the words of Leon Bloy) the renunciation of my heavenly birthright for the pottage of this sinful world.

Because I was baptised, I had more in common with a baptised black person than with an unbaptised white one. The National Party tried to deny the truth of that, and to say that skin colour was more important than what God had done in baptism, that Babel could not be overruled by Pentecost.

And for the same reason, I couldn't get particularly particularly excited about being a Woozer, or see that as the core of my identity.

For a while I lived in Namibia, when apartheid was at its height, and many cities in Namibia had black "locations". In terms of the apartheid ideology blacks had no permanent homes in the cities, and were forced to go and live outside the city, beyond the town limits. Many did not want to move, and in Windhoek the Hereros were told that they could even give the new location a name, if only they could go and live there, and so they called it "Katutura" which means "We don't live here". And every new location outside every Namibian town was called Katutura, even if the government called it something else.

In Herero, "tura" means to live in a place as a homeland, to have a home in a place. Yet this was a metaphor for the Christian life. Hebrews 13:12-14 shows that Jesus was in Katutura, not Windhoek, because it was to precisely such a place that the world pushed him, and as his followers, that is where we are. We are pariki, the Greek word from which the English word "parishioners" is derived, we live beside the house, not in it. In Afrikaans, we are bywoners, squatters, sojourners. This is not our homeland: katutura, we don't live here.

Apartheid may be dead in South Africa, but the struggle against the pseudogospel still continues. I joined the Orthodox Church, and in South Africa, as an English-speaking Orthodox Christian, I'm in the minority. Greek-speakers, or people of Greek heritage, are in the majority, and from some of them one sometimes hears the same racist sentiments that we heard so often in the apartheid years. One woman once said, "The Orthodox Church is not missionary because its purpose is to preserve Greek culture." Non-Greeks are xeni. Hey, ho, I was born in South Africa, but I get called a xenos by a Greek immigrant. That puts me in my place. But actually it causes me to reflect that for both of us we are where we are in the church not because of birth or parentage, language or culture, not because of where we were born, or to whom we were born, but by a second birth of water and the spirit that makes us citizens of the heavenly kingdom.

Yes, racism is alive and well in the Orthodox Church. In 1985, when the first English-speaking priest was ordained in an Orthodox Church in Johannesburg, people came from other parishes, from far and wide, to shout "anaxios" (unworthy) because the Archbishop had dared to ordain a non-Greek, a xenos. Xenophobia rules, but it's not OK.

Some mouth the racist slogan "Hellenism is Orthodoxy and Orthodoxy is Hellenism", which is not merely a heresy, but apostasy. The Orthodox Church pronounced apartheid, or racism, to he a heresy back in 1872 (under the Greek name phyletism), but it still persists. Hellenism was anathema to Orthodox Christians from the time of the early church fathers. Hellenism today is the product of the secular nationalism of the 18th and 19th centuries, and is also a term for a neopagan religion. It has never been identified with Orthodoxy.

As an English-speaking Orthodox Christian, I like to worship in English, but I don't want to see an "English" Orthodox Church, in the sense that there are Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches. I want to see a South African Orthodox Church. I do sometimes get a bit annoyed when Greek-speaking clergy insist that I must use bad English translations of liturgical texts, because, being Greek, they know what is good for the English. But I've known that sort of thing all my life, when Afrikaner nationalists told me what was my "own" and insisted on giving me an "own affair". Most Sundays I worship with congregations that speak North Sotho (which seems to be one of the most difficult languages to learn: you can get courses in Greek, Russian, Zulu and Xhosa in bookshops, but not North Sotho). I enjoy the Liturgy in Afrikaans, often even more than in English, because there are not 25 different translations floating about, as there are with English.

But is there an "English-speaking" South African culture, a Woozer culture?

Not really. Not enough to form the basis of a distinct ethnic identity. Language and culture are linked, but English is a multicultural language. It is shared by many cultures throughout the world, and not only in South Africa. There was never enough of a cohesive Woozer culture in South Africa to demand a homeland. There was never enough of a group identity to which "group rights" could be applied. Rather, English-speaking South Africans belong to a whole range of overlapping cultural groups and circles, based on church, school, family, interest. Woozers who live next door to each other can find that they have nothing in common but language and geographical proximity. They have different friends, different interests, and might never meet and greet each other except casually and in passing. Woozers have never been a "volk".

While some were chauvinist (my Cornish great grandmother insisted on calling her Afrikaans son-in-law Botes "Boats"), and despised Afrikaners and kept aloof from "natives" others were more laid-back about such things and even made up satirical songs about them:

When I'm walking down the street I must be careful not to greet
people of a different pigmentation
Lest the government suspect or the Special Branch detect
a dark affiliation
to a communist organisation.
(sung to the tune of The wayward wind)

Perhaps this Woozer rootlessness made it easier for me to let worldly allegiances sit lightly, as I've described above. It may have made it easier for some others, I don't know. Since I was in my late teens I was aware of being a pilgrim, a stranger, a sojourner in the world, and am still reminded of it every time someone refers to me as a xenos.

And there is still the heresy, the pseudogospel, the apostasy of apartheid, racism, phyletism. A luta continua. Die stryd duur voort. The struggle continues.

Multiculturalism

There's an interesting discussion going on over at the alt.usage.english newsgroup.

Don Phillipson, of Carlsbad Springs, Ottawa, Canada, asks:

Citations are requested for the first uses of "multiculturalism" by governmental officials or politicians in Europe (inc. Britain) and the USA, preferably with enough context to indicate the meaning of the noun (or adj. multicultural.)

My tentative thesis is that this word entered contemporary politics in Canada (Multiculturalism Act 1971) and was then taken up in Europe (by Britain and by other countries that operate in French, German, Dutch, etc.) where its meanings were different: and ultimately in the USA where meanings were different again, whence it returned to Canada to function in ways unforeseen in 1971.

Most obviously, as legislated in Canada in 1971, "multiculturalism" had nothing to do with race (skin colour) or with immigrants. (It was a strictly local response to Canadians of "other ethnic groups" who told the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism that, because their ancestry was non-French and non-British and they did not see themselves as either "English Canadians" or "French Canadians," they were apprehensive that public anxiety about B&B topics should not mean they were "second-class citizens. The largest language groups voicing this concern were German, Polish and Ukrainian: i.e. the people were all "white" and mostly Canadian-born.)

In Europe e.g. Britain, "multiculturalism" was associated less with long-recognized white "races" (e.g. Scotch, Welsh, Irish) but with first-generation immigrants from Asia and Africa i.e. "visible minorities." In the USA "multiculturalism" was subtly different again, because there were new "visible minority" communities (e.g. from Korea and SE Asia) but also long-settled Hispanic and black communities. Most obviously, the largest visible minority in the USA was black Americans who had been settled in America for 200+ years and who had recently been engaged in the
Civil Rights movement, a significant social revolution.

Thus the "multiculturalism" associated nowadays with all-black US TV situation comedies is substantially different from that of (say) Turkish or South American
communities in Europe: and wholly different again from the concerns in 1971 of Canadians of Greek or Portuguese or Lebanese ancestry: and the word today in Canada is powerfully guided by American ideas based in demographic features that do not occur in Canada (i.e. the concept has completed a circle, during which its
meaning has changed.)

In order to test this thesis, it would be useful to have citations of the first official uses of the word "multicultural" in various places, e.g. Britain, Denmark, the USA, as well as current meanings.

My response:

I'm unable to give any "official" citations, though I'll note any if I find them and report them.

A purely impressionistic observation (from reading newsgroups and other electronic forums) is that in South Africa it tends to be primarily descriptive (South Africa is a multicultural country) and multiculturalism is the state of being multicultural, whereas in the USA and UK it seems to be regarded as prescriptive, since many people seem to object to multiculturalism.

To this South African, at least, objections to multiculturalism sound racist, and a demand for a return to apartheid thinking, which was the idea that a multicultural society was highly undesirable, and that therefore different ethnic/cultural groups MUST be separated, and could not possibly live together, be educated together, or marry each other.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on the matter? What do "multicultural" and "multiculturalism" mean to you?