CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 1
2.3 My story
Vulindlela area, it seconded Graham Beggs as a community worker there in 1978 (Cowley 1993:48). Because of the distance between Nxamalala and St Raphael’s Church in
Sweetwaters, the Anglicans living in Nxamalala met in the homes of local lay preachers, Mr Khumalo and Mr Khambule for morning prayers before St Gabriel’s, a small mud structure, was built with the financial assistance of that parish and the efforts of the community during the 1980s. Once a month they would walk first to St Michael’s and later to St Raphael’s for a Eucharist service. Today, the clergy conduct the monthly Eucharistic services at St Gabriel’s church.
My colleague, Rev Lincie Cele, after being a lay preacher in the area for many years, was ordained a community priest in 19938, and made priest-in-charge in 1996, the year I joined him as the assistant-priest in the what had been declared a “Development District” in the Diocese of Natal.
In this short history, the names of the male leadership are prominent. However, it is my contention that it is the women, who are in the majority, who have developed and sustained the life of these congregations. It is to their stories and mine that I now turn. I begin with my story as a way of foregrounding my autobiography and thereby socially locating myself in relation to those I work with. This is not to suggest any priority, but rather to give
recognition to the importance of my social location as researcher.
established himself economically by travelling around the Eastern Cape and later the Orange Free State with a small horse-drawn cart full of wares that he sold to farmers. Once he had finally settled in Ficksburg and opened a store, he returned to Lebanon to marry. My grandmother arrived in South Africa as a young woman of seventeen, hardly speaking any English, and the bride of an arranged marriage. My paternal grandparents came to South Africa from Lebanon not long after and settled on a farm, also in the Orange Free State. The families set about the process of enculturation into the existing racially stratified society.
When the National Party came into power in 1948 and rumours of a system of racial classification began to do the rounds, my maternal grandfather, a prominent leader in the Lebanese community, became part of an advocacy group that insisted on “white” status for their community. The government was unsure what to make of these “Syrians”, as was stamped in their passports. Finally, after resisting classification as “other Asian”, the lobbyists managed to convince the authorities of their “whiteness” on the basis of their Christian faith, despite the colour of their skin which suggested, including myself, otherwise.
The many generations of Lebanese South Africans that have since followed have enjoyed the socio-economic privileges that came with this racial classification. However, the colour of my skin did not let me escape the social discrimination that was so rife in South African society. Let me share an example that typified many of my childhood experiences.
When I was about seven years old, my mother took me on an outing to the Johannesburg Zoo. Having walked around for most of the morning, she offered to pay for me to have a ride on the pony. As she sat under the tree in a position to witness the whole event, I excitedly clutched the money she had given me and went to the booth to buy my ticket. The
bespectacled man behind the glass looked at me with a worried frown on his face as I stood on tip toes and held out the money. After a pause, he asked, “What nationality are you?”
Confused by this response to my request for a ticket, I hesitated and eventually responded,
“I’m Lebanese”. The frown grew deeper as he suggested that he “had no idea what that means” and therefore refused to sell me a ticket.9 By now thoroughly confused and
bewildered and without any idea that he was worried by the darkness of my skin colour, I ran off crying to my mother. Hearing the story, she marched up to the ticket counter demanding
9 At that time only white children were allowed to ride the ponies at the Johannesburg zoo.
to know what the problem was. On seeing my mother who is of fair complexion he quickly apologised and sold her a ticket.
For the rest of my childhood and teenage years I never again openly declared, “I am Lebanese”. I had learnt my lesson, from then when in doubt I affirmed that I was “South African”, which meant that I understood myself to be “white” in our racially conscious society. I lived in a white suburb, went to a white school, and played with white friends.
Yes, I was Lebanese. It was the birthplace of all four of my grandparents. But, from then on my Lebanese background was secondary, to be ignored, hidden, or grudging acknowledged as social situations dictated.
2.3.2 Adulthood and African identity
I had never considered myself “African”. That meant you were “black” and as my childhood experience at the zoo (and there were many other experiences like that) had taught me that if I was going to going to make it in this racially conscious society, I had to at all costs declare my “whiteness”! As I became older, internal conflict around my identity grew. On the one hand, I felt the need to deny my Lebanese inheritance because it suggested through skin colour that I was not “white”, yet on the other hand I did not have an “acceptable” Anglo- Saxon background that legitimated my “whiteness”.
But I lived in the “white” world, and I knew very little else. The only “African” people I knew were those who worked for my parents as domestic servants or gardeners. One woman, Rosie Tshabalala, began working as a domestic servant when I was eight years old. She was like a second mother to me. Yet, re-reading letters that I wrote to my sister who was away from home at that time, I had clearly adopted the racist values of the home in which I had been nurtured, even towards Rosie Tshabalala. When I arrived at the University of the Witwatersrand in the mid-1970s, I began to meet people from a variety of racial backgrounds who exploded my narrow world of black servitude. I began to make friends with those who
unashamedly declared their blackness.10
10 Throughout this study, I use this term “black” to corporately refer to those who were not classified
“white” by the apartheid government. The Black Consciousness movement adopted “black” as a positive self defined term that stood in opposition to the apartheid category “non-white” which defined blackness in terms of others (Frostin 1988:85-89).
This was the beginning of a tentative counter-exploration of my parents’ racist values, as well as a search for my identity as a second-generation South African. However, despite the political turmoil of that decade which was evident on the campus as sectors of the student body demonstrated on campus, invoking the ire of the police, my search did not move me into political action. Without being absolutely sure why this was so, it is perhaps best answered by the fact that my encounters with black South African students were largely within the structures of the Students’ Christian Association (SCA) which at the time adopted a conservative theological stance on active political involvement. Nonetheless, these
friendships opened up the possibility for me of exploring “other” ways of identifying myself in the South African context. At the very least I began to recognise and articulate my privilege as well as my culpability for the social injustices of our society.
After graduating as a social worker, I spent a few months travelling around the United States of America in 1980. While I was staying with a family in Houston, Texas, I was invited to speak on South Africa at a high school close to the Mexican border which was attended mostly by teenagers originally from Mexico. Having now recognised my complicity in apartheid as a white South African, I felt compelled to declare my identity to the classroom full of eager faces. So I stood up and opened my presentation on South Africa declaring, “I am a white South African who has enjoyed the privileges of that racially divided society”.
During the question time afterwards, the classroom exploded with angry voices demanding how I could possibly call myself a white South African when I looked just like them (in fact darker than a few of them). They went on, angrily outlining their experiences of
discrimination in the United States, and with outrage declared that given my skin colour, I
“had no right” to benefit from white South Africa. I confess to feeling shocked and at a loss for words. My understanding of being a “white” South African was being fundamentally
challenged. It seemed that it was not enough to declare my privilege. Skin colour identified me with the marginalised. This had never occurred to me.
A few years later in 1983 I was studying in the United Kingdom, and was standing in a queue in the American Embassy in London, waiting to apply for a visa to visit friends there. In front of me, a fair-skinned woman was engaged in a discussion with a man also waiting in the queue. Very quickly, I realised from the discussion, which I became more and more
interested in, that she was from Lebanon and was trying to enter the United States to meet up with her brother who lived there. Engrossed and intrigued in the conversation she was having about the situation in Lebanon, as I had never met a person from Lebanon before, (except for the occasional family member visiting South Africa), I was perhaps a little unaware as to how obvious my eavesdropping was. She suddenly spun around and declared,
“You are from Lebanon too, aren’t you?” With the same sense of bewilderment that I felt as I clutched my money and asked for ticket to ride the pony all those years earlier, I realised that I did not know how to respond.
This confusion of identity catapulted me into an active identification with those less
privileged than myself. Through a series of events, I became politically active in the struggle for justice in South Africa and increasingly chose to recognise myself as a South African African who is “not quite white’. For me, my chosen identity as an African reflects my desire to choose Africa as my home and place of location of my theology and life’s work. I have chosen to be shaped by “blackness” rather than by “whiteness” as I live and work in the post-apartheid South Africa. The history of my ministry during the last decade reflects this conscious choice and so beginning my work as a priest in Vulindlela was a logical step in this process.
My story would be incomplete, however, without giving recognition to the growing
awareness of the force of patriarchy in my life. My Lebanese ancestry has meant that I have grown up in an environment that was also strongly authoritative and patriarchal. My father was the head of the home and had the final say in all matters pertaining to our family. In looking back, particularly over my adolescence, I recognise that my own sense of self, separate from patriarchy, was being nurtured in the all-girls’ high school that I attended.
There I was elected to a number of leadership positions that encouraged confidence and independence separate from men. During my university years this independence grew.
It was at the time that I was untangling my confusion of racial/national identity, that I was simultaneously seeking out networks of women. My own understanding of how patriarchal forces shaped my life developed, as did my growing commitment to my African-ness. This process led me to a recognition that given the complexity of my identity in the South African context, I had to make a choice both in terms of how I constituted my identity in South Africa and where I aligned myself within the fractured women’s project. My choice
has been to actively seek to be constituted as a woman by women who are “other” than myself. This is a dynamic process. It is a constant engagement with women such as those I have been working with in Vulindlela who are re-shaping what it means for me to be an African woman with Lebanese ancestors who has grown up economically privileged yet socially discriminated against in the South African context. They continue to help define who I am as we work together.11 It is to their stories that I turn.