2.2. WHITENESS AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT
2.4.3. Whiteness in South Africa
2.4.3.2. Whiteness: The geographical space
The control of land has been important to whites since they first settled in the Cape in 1652. The planting of Van Riebeeck’s hedge of Wild Almond just a few years after the arrival of the first Dutch settlers is recalled by Sparks (1990). The purpose of this hedge was to set the white settlers apart from the indigenous inhabitants of the Cape. The intention was that the hedge would set in place a “…border behind which white civilisation might protect itself” (Sparks, 1990, p. xvii). The importance of being able to control land continued to be important to the Dutch as they set about marking and expanding their presence in the Cape (Giliomee, 2003). It was crucial also for the British after they had taken over from the Dutch and once the settlement frontier had begun to extend deeper into Africa under their auspices. It was once again an issue for the Dutch, as groups of frontier farmers moved into the interior from the late 1830s, to find land which was beyond the reach of the British (L’Ange, 2005).
Land was also at the centre of the South African War as Afrikaners and British fought over the control of South Africa. It also lay at the centre of the establishment of the Union of South Africa, since it was pivotal to the emergence of the new united white South Africa as designed by its architects. Land also excluded Africans from the new political arrangement, primarily through the Natives Land Act of 1913, the Natives Urban Areas Land Act of 1923 and the introduction of influx control measures (Giliomee, 2003).
Such segregation laws laid the foundations for later apartheid legislation which consolidated and extended the territorial base which had been laid. It was during the apartheid years that the Afrikaner Nationalists took the tribally based African reserves of the 1913 Land Act and ‘grew’ them into Bantustans which would be led to independence and so remove blacks from the South African political landscape (Lemon, 1990). None of the Bantustans had a chance of becoming economically viable and they simply served as labour reservoirs, their dependence on South Africa serving to further strengthen the hand of the Afrikaner nationalists (Lemon, 1990). In terms of this ‘divide and rule’ policy those in charge manipulated geographical space to grow their own
nationalism by removing that which threatened their own national identity (Ballard, 2004).
Africans who moved to ‘white South Africa’ were subjected by the Group Areas Act of 1952, to a host of regulations controlling where they could stay and for how long. It was considered necessary for whites to be able to live in neighbourhoods where they could feel safe and at home, well away from their uncivilised ‘others’ (Ballard, 2004). Africans, as well as Indians and coloureds, were confined to certain townships, the construction of which was greatly accelerated from the early 1950s. To accomplish the goal of people living in their own designated geographical spaces rigid influx control measures were enacted and there were many forced relocations of people, mainly Africans (Lemon, 1990; Ballard, 2004).
Whites took great pride in their cities and neighbourhoods and saw their cities, in particular, as centres of westernisation and civilisation (Ballard, 2004). Segregation laws were considered necessary to keep them that way. As they drew their local spaces into the sense of who they were, whites made the political assertion that the land was theirs and did not belonging to anyone else (Smith, 1990). Class divides amongst whites existed and the sanctity of private property was upheld, giving residential areas their distinctive characters (Lemon, 1990).
The four provinces into which South Africa was divided by the Act of Union (1909) (Fig.1) served as a further badge of identity, especially in the earlier years of Union, when the idea of ‘nation’ was poorly defined among white South Africans. The recentness of the political divide between the Cape and Natal, which had been British colonies, and the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, which had been Boer republics, was a major hurdle in this regard. With the passage of time a sense of growing white national unity could be detected, but even so, provincial pride continued to lay a strong claim to white people’s sense of belonging for many years, and so did the provincial distribution of Afrikaners and English-speaking South Africans (Malherbe, 1977). The Transvaal, for example, was a largely Afrikaner province, while Natal was in the main an English province, especially in the Durban area (Malherbe, 1977).
The Afrikaner nationalist project tried to blur the regional and local variations in the hope that national geographic space would take priority over people’s emotions. In the post- apartheid period local identity construction at the sub-national level has strengthened.
This has had the effect of allowing many old class and race divides to persist or resurface (Davies, 2009). The notion of the ‘rainbow’ nation, which whites find easy to identify with and which they use to market the ‘new’ country to themselves, allows for and, indeed, celebrates the diversity that comes from such local geographic identification. However, as Distiller and Steyn (2004) point out, the ‘rainbow’ concept is itself flawed since it invokes a politics of colour-blind multiculturalism which, as has been noted, fails to recognize and deal with structural inequality.
Ballard (2004) observes that in the post-apartheid period whites have embarked upon a number of strategies to mark out their spatial comfort zones at the local level. More liberally inclined whites tried an assimilatory approach which involved the reformation of
‘otherness’. A qualified acceptance was extended to those (the emerging middle-class) who would be like ‘us’, and the property market was seen as acting as the necessary filter. The problem was that the property filter failed when land invasions occurred or when informal traders simply set up their stalls in the Central Business District (CBD) or along suburban streets. Cities now became the antithesis of what they were held up to be during the apartheid years namely, spaces of western civilisation and progress.
Those whites who have become disenchanted with assimilation have joined others in looking for different ways of securing their spatial comfort zones (Ballard, 2004).
An increasing number of whites have ‘semigrated’ which, in the spatial sense, means that while they have remained physically in a democratic South Africa they have as little to do with it as possible. Some have moved to what they consider to be more congenial parts of the country, such as Cape Town. Others have moved into ‘gated communities’
or enclosed neighbourhoods where they create their own idealised residential and neighbourhood spaces on their own terms and thus restore their identity through boundary maintenance (Ballard, 2004).
Fewer whites have opted to integrate spatially with their fellow South Africans. They read the city as a cosmopolitan space which offers the opportunity to engage and learn about others. As they engage in the process old perceptions of ‘otherness’ fade and
“…the logic that a secure sense of self is dependent on an inferior understanding of others” becomes incomprehensible (Ballard, 2004, p. 65).
At the other end of this continuum of responses are those whites who have opted to preserve their white standards and security by emigrating to ‘First World’ countries such
as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Britain, countries which are seen to be dedicated to the preservation of the kind of whiteness to which white South Africans were formerly accustomed (Ballard, 2004). Steyn (2001) contends however, that emigration is not an option for many, noting also that many whites do in fact feel a strong sense of being committed to South Africa in some way or other.
It is apparent that many of the whites who have stayed in South Africa have elected not to engage in public life at the national level (Cilliers, 2008) and that choices in respect of where to live primarily, are a spatial manifestation of this (Ballard, 2004). I have come across nothing in the literature to suggest that whites in South Africa have, as many in Zimbabwe have done, escaped into the landscape (Hughes, 2010; Pilosoff, 2012). It does seem, however, that when white South Africans, who have been away from home for a long time, write about what they miss, the emotional pull of the landscape features prominently (Knott-Craig, 2008; Lundy & Visser, 2003).
Lundy and Visser (2008), and Cilliers (2008) feel strongly that white South Africans can benefit considerably by finding authentic ways of engaging in the national life of the country. They advise them to begin with the simple act of respecting and dignifying each person and learning more about people and their cultures. They need to allow themselves to learn that all countries are defined by their people and that people need the space in which their human spirits can flourish. Each individual can, even in the smallest of ways, assist in the creating of such space, but they first have to engage with their own personal journeys. Cilliers (2008) argues that an important starting point for white South Africans is that they need to embrace, not deny, the past.
In concurring with this, and expanding upon it, Delport (2005), as has been noted in chapter 1, makes the point that social transformation can only be built on individual or personal reflection and transformation. She writes reflectively of her own journey of reconstruction as a white Afrikaner. Using the theoretical construction of Nussbaum (2001) she explains that a journey of personal reconstruction needs, in the first instance, to be built around transforming the objects of our emotions, such as places or people or events. Individuals also need to change the way they are connected to the objects of their emotions, or in other words, what they think or believe about them.
Finally, they need to understand how they have been influenced by the objects in question and their thinking about them. This should cause them to reflect on where they
have been as they move into the construction of an inner reconciliation which is a prerequisite for individual reconstruction. Referring to her own experience, Delport (2005) records how such reconciliation has enabled her to move away from a preoccupation with herself and the narrow dictates of Afrikaner nationalism to a broader, more inclusive national identity built “…in dialogical rapport with others” (Delport, 2005, p. 222). She has come to see herself as being engaged in a collective national identity project in which she will only be able to really discover who she is in the transformed South Africa through her relationship with other South Africans. This would accord with Steyn’s (2004) ‘Melanise Whiteness’ strategy which has been alluded to above.
It is the contention of Nuttall (2009), as was pointed out earlier in this chapter, that as individuals struggle with their national identity formation in post-apartheid South Africa they need to come to a point where they are able to focus less on the notion of difference, especially racial difference, and more on the degree to which they are
‘mutually entangled’ with others in their interpersonal relationships, including those which extend across different geographical spaces. She explains that as people live out their lives they become naturally entangled in their dealings with each other. The Afrikaner nationalist project was about preventing racial entanglement. This was evidenced by the great lengths to which the National Party went to designate separate geographical spaces for the different race groups. Nuttall (2009) argues that if people can become entangled they can, since boundaries between people are not immutable in time and space, become disentangled. She believes that in the current dispensation in South Africa there is no reason why disentanglement cannot be foregrounded as a factor in identity formation and nation-building. It would be a move away from an overly strong focus on race (Nuttall, 2009). It was explained earlier in this chapter that identity should not be regarded as being fixed and unchanging but rather as being in a constant state of unfolding (Alcoff, 2003; Austin, 2001; Connell, 1987; Giroux, 1997b; Hall, 1996;
Kearney, 2003; McLaren, 1993; Mendieta, 2003; Wetherell, 1996). The case made by Nuttall (2009) is in keeping with this view of identity.
In pursuing her case, Nuttall (2009) cites examples of well-known South Africans who have gone out their way to disentangle from racist people. One is Joe Slovo, a white South African, who was also Jewish and who came from a poor background, who identified with black people and their struggle to the extent that he was fully accepted as black by blacks. Another is his daughter, Gillian Slovo who experienced her whiteness
differently. Living among whites in white geographical spaces, she was often scared that other whites would find out who she really was. She knew she was not white like them but tried, because of her fear, to ‘pass for white’.
Antjie Krog is another. She has felt the evil of what white Afrikaners, including members of her own family, have done to their ‘others’. Yet she cares for Afrikaners and feels a sense of belonging with them and being geographically tied to them. At the same time however, she is repulsed by them and feels a strong affinity with those who were their victims, to the extent that she dedicates her book, Country of my skull (Krog, 1999) to every victim who fell prey to abuse from an Afrikaner. Whilst not denying her Afrikaans background, she has disentangled herself from many Afrikaner individuals and has begun to allow a new self to emerge, an identity which is connected to an emerging new collective identity in South Africa.
Edwin Cameron is also cited for his memoir Witness to AIDS. He is a white man from a poor home, who is a judge and lawyer and who is also HIV/Aids positive. As a white man he has access to the privileges of whiteness, especially as a professional person.
Yet he comes from a poor home and his whiteness is pitted against a condition which is more usually associated with being African. He completely identifies with his fellow Africans HIV/Aids sufferers, yet he distances himself from ‘them’ since he stresses that he became infected through a single sexual encounter. His text is clearly dialogic but, as with the others cited here, is instructive of the nature that entanglement and disentanglement, and I would add, dis-identification, can assume. The key is that people can to varying degrees find new linkages and possibilities of being.
These cases show how people whose whiteness has been constructed in a society based on racial dominance have tried to deal with being white in ways that make it clear that it is possible to find different ways of being South African as people learn to craft new ways of learning to live together. It is significant to add that people need to want to engage in a new nation-building project.
Distiller and Steyn (2004, p. 7) argue however, that while race may, in years to come, start to count for less it remains a primary constituent of who South Africans are. They contend that if the “…historical and daily implications of race”, are to meaningfully be grasped, race as a category has still to be interrogated. To this must be added, that while it might be possible for whites to become disentangled from individual whites with
racist views, it is the contention of Lipshitz (1995), as I have indicated previously, that the nature of whiteness is such that it is impossible to become disentangled from it. I contend that what whites can do however, is to dis-identify with whiteness.
Nuttall (1998) has some harsh words for white liberal English-speaking South Africans who often speak of apartheid as having been an Afrikaner invention. She believes that liberals were in fact an indifferent supportive agency who murdered thousands of souls through their “…condescending platitudes” (Nuttall, 1998, p. 26). In much the same way, they are invariably the ones who currently have a foreign passport in the back pocket, with a ‘now they belong, now they don’t’ attitude. They need to own up, tell their story and begin the process of disentanglement so that they can begin the process of reinventing themselves. Nuttall (1998) believes that personal narrative has the potential to achieve much in this area and this is significant in the light of the nature of my own study.
The control and manipulation of geographical space has been integral to endeavours by white South Africans to secure their overall control of South Africa and its peoples since whites first arrived in the country. This was especially apparent during the apartheid period when the National Party manipulated geographical space to create the separate nationalisms which were so integral to their ‘divide and rule’ philosophy. In the post- apartheid period whites are manipulating space, understood in both spatial and metaphoric terms, in new and different ways as they learn to adapt to the new realities in South Africa.
2.4.3.3. Whiteness: The educational space
From the earliest days of white settlement in South Africa education has been used by whites to shore up white power and privilege. The earlier reference to Steyn’s (2012) notion of inverted epistemology has relevance, for education’s role has been characterised by strategies to omit and misrepresent knowledge. This will become apparent in due course.
Before the arrival of the British at the Cape, the Dutch had intended their children’s experience of school to prepare them for the pioneering roles they would play in opening up the country and making a success of their adult lives which would be largely spent in farming (Molteno, 1984). The few slave children who went to school were
prepared for the domestic roles they would fill as adults. Later, under the British, the character of schooling changed to accommodate a British worldview. Schooling was now intended to more aggressively prepare white children for a lifestyle appropriate to, and to help maintain, their racial superiority (Molteno, 1984). The British had themselves in mind in this regard, more than the Dutch, for they held Dutch children in low regard (Steyn, 2001). They marginalised the Dutch culture and language through their control of schooling (Giliomee, 2003). While British missionaries may have challenged some of the excesses of the British settlers as they rushed to establish their presence and superiority, much of the work of their mission schools had the effect of furthering the aims of the imperialists. This they did by their inculcation of such Christian norms as contentment, hard work, submission and acceptance (Molteno, 1984).
There was little direct involvement by the state in African education for much of the period of white domination and rule. With the onset of industrialisation, from the late 19th century, missionary schooling became increasingly important and played a significant role in the process by which Africans became proletarianised. The missionaries received life sustaining subsidies from the state and were obliged to do what they were subsidized to do which was, essentially, to prepare Africans for work as semi-skilled industrial workers. Africans were needed primarily to provide cheap labour and were in no way prepared for positions from which they would be able to undermine the well- being of whites (Molteno, 1984; Sparks, 1990).
Racial segregation in education and schooling was entrenched by the South African Act of 1909 which gave rise to the birth of the Union of South Africa in 1910 (Behr &
MacMillan, 1971; Malherbe, 1925). An elaborate segregation infrastructure designed to reproduce racial inequality was set in place (Christie & Collins, 1982; Molteno, 1984) with whites as the intended beneficiaries. African schooling continued to be marginalised and the arrangement by which mission schools continued to educate Africans, very largely in the lower school standards only, remained in place (Hartshorne, 1992; Rose & Tunmer, 1975).
The question of the missionary control of African education was vexing and in 1936 the Welsh Commission recommended a full Union Government take-over of missionary schools. Significantly, this recommendation was not acted upon at the time. What is interesting, not least for the purposes of my study, is that the Commission also