CHAPTER THREE Literature Review
3.4 Featuring Identity: Race, Culture, Language and Religion
3.4.1 Apartheid: A context of Race
membership of the ISKCON Durban Temple consists of individuals from a variety of racial, cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
Those groups who spoke this language were advantaged and those that did not were discriminated against. This crisis was graphically demonstrated in the international media, when Hector Petersen a 13-year old school going youth was shot dead, and hundreds of other youth were injured by police, while protesting against Afrikaans as the
oo
enforced medium of instruction in their schools in Soweto on 16 June 1976.
The history of apartheid South Africa is replete with incidents of forceful and visible attempts of state bureaucracy to entrench particular racial identities to maintain power, economic and social control, the influence of which, according to Erasmus (2005), still continues to be prevalent in South Africa. However, under its ten-year-old democracy, South Africa is undergoing "a radical process of transformation, associated with which is the search for a new national identity and new models of identification for a diverse array of peoples" (Marschall, 2001). This transformation has also heralded in a championing of indigenous culture and identity. Yet simultaneously there is a desire of the state to create a "rainbow nation" - a celebration of the multicultural diversity and movement away from stereotyped racial classification of the past, to create a unified nation.
This position also reflects the current academic trends in deconstruction of racial
categories and emphasizes the fluidity, and multiplicity of identity construction, not only of black but other race groups as well. Hardiman (1994) in her study of the racial
development of whites in the USA states that although many whites in United States have a strong sense of ethnic identity that is tied to their immigrant ancestors' country of origin, they do not have a strong sense of racial identity or consciously think about it.
Nonetheless, "their identity as members of the White group in the United States has a profound impact on their lives".
Erasmus (2005: 8) regards race as a product of socio-historical and political factors, without biological or cultural basis, stating that these are meanings one learns or teaches to one's children, and as such can be unlearned as well. Although it is useful to
88 It was against this backdrop that the Hare Krishna Movement first reached the shores of South Africa in 1972. Bhaktivedanta Swami was to remark in respect of apartheid: "The philosophy of South Africa is simply on the bodily platform. It is all nonsense" (Letter to Cyavana, 1975, quoted in Riddha dasa (1997:
12) ushering forth one of the main ideas of identity within ISKCON.
understand race as a social construct, "even in 'non-racial South Africa' - racialised scripts of reality and behaviour are norms rather than exception". Erasmus reports that race still continues to shape economic inequality amongst poor and working class black people in South Africa; that learners in high education sectors still tend to group
themselves racially; and that historically white, coloured or Indian institutions either marginalize black learners or assume they will assimilate into the existing cultural status quo. Yet tensions created by race may not only be against blacks. In 2003 famous South African playwright Mbongeni Ngema wrote a song, aired on the media, criticizing Indians as exploiters of Blacks which fostered anti-Indian sentiment amongst blacks.
This prompted several leading Indian cultural leaders and scholars to react publicly. It took the personal intervention by former state president Dr Nelson Mandela with Ngema to have the song withdrawn and to quell the tension created. Further racial incidents have been reported in the media. A group of Indian teachers working in a rural school in northern Kwa Zulu Natal (which is a black community) were subject to vehement opposition and threats of violence by certain community members who wanted them to be replaced with black teachers (Daily News editorial, 2005; Mhlongo, 2005). Such incidents of suspicion and mistrust which seems to easily provoke black backlash, remains an obstacle to inter-racial harmony in South Africa.
Another category of concern in South Africa is the position of the "coloured" person.
Chijioke (1999) who is a person of mixed race parents - the so called "coloured" person, focuses on his experiences with race in Nigeria, South Africa and United States. He regards race as "an artificial construct, externally prescribed and imposed by social agreement, not self-determined and assumed by the individual who is 'of race' - "I am black because the society agreed I am black not because I chose to assume a black identity". However in South Africa, the coloured identity has "never been seen as an identity in its own right" (Erasmus, 2001: 17). The ambiguity of being marginalized between Black and White has resulted in several compromises and complexities in terms of political and cultural identity. These conceptions still persist today as many regard coloured people as having no cultural history from which to derive their identity, and many of the "coloureds" seek their religious identity as Christian or Muslim. Racial
comments against Coloured people by Roderick Ngoro , a black person who was the media advisor to the mayor of Cape Town, provoked the ire of Coloured people prompting a group of 20 Coloured clergymen to request the mayor for the dismissal of the said accused (Petersen, 2005).
Membership in a racial group may not be of choice but being categorized in a particular situation by oppression - an "ascriptive identity" - which means how members of a particular group are considered by others, in particular by the dominant group. That one's identity may be "problematized by external sources" was reported by Francis (2005) in his study of the experience of self-identification of Indian-White biracial young adults and the factors affecting their choice of identity. He found that for the nine biracial youths in his study, their identities were clearly not based on an essentialist notion of race. Race was just another part of a much more multifaceted picture consisting of gender, class, religious, age and sexual orientation identities. For these youth, there was no clear self-definition of race, self-reference being made either in ethnic or cultural terms, with race coming across as "elusive". The youth only became sensitized to issues of their race when attention was drawn onto it from outside sources, i.e. when others tried to categorize them into "rigid racial identities" by asking "What are you?"
In this regard, Gould (2000:433) examines the role of self-reflexivity or self-ascription in democratically and socially construed characteristics in the USA postulating that racism continue to persist within traditional ideas of democracy because it inherently has " a social ontology of individuals whose relations to each other are external" She argues for a reinterpretation of its norms in terms of "concrete universality", which regards
individuals as internally related to one another, which would eliminate the bias that democracy has towards one leading set of cultural characteristics (i.e. of the majority) in favour of a more multicultural democracy. One is aware that the structural dynamics in USA and South Africa differ, nonetheless in a more liberal model there would be liberty to form one's group identity with others and develop multiple group identities determined by a process of "self-ascription". These studies point to the arbitrariness of racial or other external classification.
89 His racial statements led to him being dismissed.
In the South African context at least, progressive steps have been made to accommodate the diverse cultural groups within the democracy. The "inclusive multiculturalism"
proposed by Gould (2000) is sufficiently accommodated within the South African Constitution for minority groups to practice and develop their culture and traditions, while there simultaneously exists a desire to celebrate the multicultural diversity of its citizens (Marschall, 2001).
What is significant about this for my research with the ISKCON devotees in South Africa is that even within the apartheid years, this organisation had a varied membership, and multicultural and non-racial collaboration. My proposed examination of the teachings, practices, activities and context is related to my critical question as to how and why the resident devotees of the ISKCON Temple of Understanding, Durban, in South Africa, who are variegated in term of race, culture and language, are able to create or re-create their cultural and religious identities as devotees. It becomes relevant here then to consider a definition of culture, and the influence of this on identity.