CHAPTER 5: EMPIRICAL MATERIAL AND ANALYSIS
5.2. Identity, Race, and Culture: Passing? Faking? Fitting?
5.2.3. Fitting: Hybridity, Entanglement, and Loss
people he should act like them and, as disturbingly seen in the quote below, he believed that most black people were “thieves”.
(B)lack people are thieves, (…) most of them, but not all of them, that’s a generalisation, and it is like saying that all white people are racists.
levels of wealth, status, and the opportunities attached to different economic strata of society, and how education legitimated and facilitated her acceptance across a diverse range of people.
I think it coming here to university makes you recognize the different levels of society more, like the wealthy, the not so wealthy. You get here, and you make friends with people, but you don’t know where they come from. You find out that some of your friends are very wealthy, (…) like you realize some people can do this stuff but you can’t. And coming here makes you realize there are those levels, like you may fit in with those people because of your personality, but then there is still the difference between like you and them. Like their parents are really out there making the money.
They can afford for them to be here, you know that sort of thing. But you really have to, need to work to be here. You doing something to better your family’s life, and some people are here just because their families can afford for them to be here, maybe they want to be here. Or maybe their families just want them to be here and get a degree.
Maybe when they get their degree they’ll want go work or want to go travel and do whatever they want. But me, I’m pretty much going straight to work. (Zama)
The quote below illustrates how leaving home encouraged Zama to be more aware of the
“traditional” role she would have had in her family had she not met the Smiths. She held a gendered understanding of Zulu culture and equated her engagement with Zulu culture to taking on more responsibilities at home:
(M)ost Zulu girls, when you get to a certain age, you start helping your mother around the house. But I was like always busy at like hockey practice, athletics practice, horse riding on the weekends, so I never really did any of that. I didn’t have time. Now, since going to university, I’m at that stage where I have responsibilities at home. I need to help my mother with the cooking, the washing, and (my brothers). I’m sort of a more at home type person. When I’m at home I understand how things at home work, I understand that you can’t, live this extravagant life. (…) It is like I’m now starting to learn the way of life that I should have always had, in terms of like what my life really would have been like if I hadn’t been with the Smiths. (Zama)
Similarly, James found that growing older had allowed him to find a sense of appreciation for his
‘cultural background’:
In terms of cultural background I have always been exposed, quite a bit, and my dad has almost sort of taken that side, every opportunity he gets to throw me into the whole cultural thing − with both hands, it has been quite interesting. (…) It was almost a little neglected by myself in my younger (…) So, ja from that aspect I’d say I have improved a lot in the last couple of years, I think that just comes from age though and from realizing a whole lot of stuff.
Zama and James’s positive association with leaving home and their personal growth and development are sharply contrasted with the negative experiences and social exclusion Themba and Gugu continue to experience. While James and Zama were able to continue living in the social settings and circumstances they had grown familiar with, Gugu and Themba were forced to relearn
and re-establish within themselves the ‘norms’ of their new communities. Both constructed their lives in the township to be diametrically opposed to their life in the suburbs. For example, Themba equated his life in the Martin’s home as “the good life” where he was surrounded by “trees, birds, fresh air” and, as seen in the quote below, the township was seen to be a negative and hostile space:
(T)here was still fighting and shooting, stabbings, there were a lot of things I saw all the time, it’s real, when you hear things about locations its real, rapes, not being able to go out of your house at 6 o’clock in the evening. My whole high school, primary school life I was locked up when I used to get home to the township and the only time I would leave the house was with my mom or gran.
As the participants were predominantly raised in white households the ‘lives of black people’ and what ‘being’ black could entail, was sometimes seen by the participants to be foreign from their own experiences and contexts. This was exacerbated by the minimal presence of black people within their everyday lives as the suburbs they lived in and schools they attended were predominantly white. The participants commonly indicated that their childhood circumstances had encouraged and amplified their disconnection from their parents’ cultural experiences and frameworks and that they had felt it was their personal responsibility to engage with their families’
cultural traditions rather than be taught them by their parents. Gugu was the only participant to actively explore her parental cultural background as a child:
When I go to my grandpa and my grandmother it is because I want to know how the life is, how, about the life of my, of my, of what, of what black peoples live with. Because I am not growing with black people I am growing with Schmidts. And I am wanting to know how they grow, because I don’t know. (Gugu)
As discussed above, Zama and James found exploring ‘blackness’ and ‘traditional culture’ easier and more interesting as they grew older and left home. In contrast, Themba’s and Gugu’s forced move into a township appeared to compound their negative perceptions of black cultures, lifestyles, and spaces, as well as their confusion of what ‘being black’ could entailed. In the quotes below, Gugu explains that she found her identity in her Christian faith, while Themba expresses his confusion with what black culture actually is:
I don’t believe the Xhosa culture. You see, like right now because I don’t know what is.
I don’t believe because I didn’t grow there. Then, even though sometimes like I pray, I believe in God and that he will answer me. Ja. I go to church. I am a Christian because I don’t do the Xhosa traditional, or any of that things (Gugu).
Sometimes I ask myself what is my culture? Obviously I am black, but black culture is so diverse. Westernised, Catholics, Christians, uShembe, they are the people who both practice Christianity and traditional beliefs. (Themba)
A seen above, Themba had hoped an essentialist understanding of what it meant to be black could help him find his black identity. Instead, he finds ‘black culture’ to be diverse, dynamic, and divergent. His description of ‘black culture’ aligns with Bhabha’s (1994) theory of hybridity and Nutall’s (2009) theory of entanglement. As discussed in section 3.4.1., hybridity refers to the interplay, interaction and influence of different cultures operating within a similar milieu. As Themba’s life is so starkly divided by race, their associated cultures, and their associated socio- economic status and opportunities, he is forced to search for essentialist understandings of race and culture despite his personal views being based on equality and justice:
I don’t see colour, you are Indian, you are black, you are white or you are pink or you are green, I see a person. I treat everybody the same. If you disrespect me I disrespect you. If you respect me I respect you. (Themba)
In contrast, James has never felt limited by race, culture or class because the educational and socio- economic opportunities he has received have allowed him to largely ignore or remain ambivalent about these constructs. This afforded him the possibility to construct his own identity outside of these limitations. He believes the ‘new’ South Africa has made this possible:
Obviously in terms of cultural issues I have never really had a problem there. South Africa, where it is now, what? 2010? Obviously that is sixteen years after the first democratic election. (…) it has never really affected me. (James)
Similarly, any limitations he did experience he explained as part of growing up, rather than in terms of race or class:
The whole being a son of a domestic, it didn’t really impact me at all. I just went along and did my thing. There obviously was a time when, there are times when you sit down and you realize “Oh, okay I can’t do this, I can’t do that”. (…) I have been fortunate enough, because I have never struggled really, until it comes to ‘varsity, budgeting and stuff like that. But that I mean is just a part of growing up, so I’d say, it has given me something to strive for, I’ll give it that much. (James)
The loss and isolation that Gugu and Themba associated with their lack of connection to ‘black culture’ and their inability to pass in white society fostered their Christian beliefs. All the participants had utilized Christianity during their childhoods as an important support structure that offered them community, companionship, acceptance and belonging they had, at times, felt was missing from their lives. James and Zama, who appeared to have large support networks, swopped their religious beliefs for ones based on personal values of kindness and respect. Zama described her faith as “fading” when she left home, while James “flirted away” from Christianity because he strongly opposed the “hypocrisy” he began associating with the church. As adults, Christianity continued to offer Gugu and Themba a framework of strength and hope through which they could understand and identify themselves.
I pray, I believe in god and he will answer for me. (Gugu)
The more I survive the more I believe in God, the more I get things and they get taken away from me, the more I believe that they weren’t meant to be. (Themba)