Category Archives: on relationships

I don’t remember being a racist.

But I know that at some point in my life, I must have been. I don’t remember the words I used (if any), or the way I behaved towards people of a darker skin colour to my own (Did I treat them differently?) All I remember is this one time in broad daylight while I waited for my mother to pick me up from school a black man walked past me. My muscle’s tightened and my heart raced; I knew I should be afraid. But I didn’t know the reason.

The only piece of evidence I have of my racism is on a single page in my diary. There’s no date at the start of this specific entry. The handwriting is neat. The passage begins like any other passage from that period.

So much has happened since I last wrote. Lindsay and Debbie had a fight. And so Lindsay came to play with us. Then Lindsay and Debbie became friends again and she stopped playing with us.

Then I mention the date. Today is 6th June, 1993. Still, I don’t get to my point immediately. I narrate for a few lines. When I read it now it feels like I was discussing events that didn’t effect me. Finally, a page in, my handwriting explodes:

“HE’S DEAD. I’m sad. STUPID CAFFERS!”

I know plenty of non-South Africans and South Africans alike who will be offended at the ease in which I now type this derogatory term. Truth is, I’m appalled at my younger self. I doubt I fully realized what it meant. It goes to show that when you’re eleven years old you don’t really understand things but you repeat them all the same.

Today, I’m not a racist. But I could very easily have been.

I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1981. Apartheid was firmly in place but I lived in a wealthy suburb of Pretoria: Waterkloof Heights. I lived the type of life that most upper middle class children experience across most of the Western World. My father worked hard and we were well-off. My mother helped in the business and drove us to school, went to aerobics classes outfitted in a shiny leotard and a headband (This was the 80′s!) and was a member of the PTA. By the time I reached my eleventh birthday, I had been raised by two (black) nannies: Josephina and Emily.

Josephina changed my diapers and spoke her native tongue of Zulu to me. The first word I said was in Zulu. Emily came later. She washed my school uniform and vacuumed my room while I was at school learning to speak her native tongue of Sotho. Emily lived with us and her mother took care of her six children. They lived in the nearby township of Atteridgeville in a one room tin hut. Emily lived in a small room on the ground floor of our double-story brick house complete with four bedrooms, four bathrooms, swimming pool, massive garden and a thatched gazebo were we played snooker.

Emily had her own entrance. I would like to describe her room, but I have no memory of that. Did she have a bed? Or did she sleep on a mattress on the floor raised by bricks so the mythical Tokoloshes couldn’t get to her? She must have had a kitchenette and a bathroom because she cooked her meals in her house and didn’t use our bathrooms. I was curious though and I loved to eat the food she made for herself. In turn, she loved sharing her culture with me. We would sit side by side and she would watch me eat her pap –a kind of porridge made from maize.

But my thoughts didn’t stray further than our differences in cuisine. I never questioned that to be a mother and provide for her children, she had to be away from them to take care of another mother’s children. I don’t remember questioning anything because everything in my life made sense. All of that changed a little less than a year before the majority of the country were finally given their right to vote and the first black man would become president. On the day my father was killed, the country I lived in, that far away world outside my bubble, finally stormed its way into my life.

At around 5:00 P.M my father and two colleagues locked up the supermarket for the night. Three youths hiding inside attempted to rob them. In the process, my father was stabbed to death.

The youths were black. My father was white.

The next few days, weeks, months are a blur.

My school -all white teachers; majority white students- had not taught me how to mourn. But, more to the point, they had not taught me that our country’s laws were unfair. They had not told me about the blacks living in poverty across the highway, subject to some of the most brutal human right violations. They did not tell me that there was violence and hatred in the townships and they didn’t tell me that white policemen were killing black people. They didn’t tell me that black people were setting other black people on fire. They didn’t tell me that black people hated me because the colour of my skin represented the chains of their imprisonment. They didn’t tell me anything of value.

While I was becoming aware of this very real South Africa, the rest of my classmates still lived in their bubble. A few months after my father died, our school wanted to travel to Natal on a field trip. I refused to go.

“No way” I told Monica. “Do you know what’s happening there right now? The Inkatha Freedom Party and the ANC are killing each other! It’s dangerous.”

She looked at me like I was speaking another language.

“Nothing will happen to us.” she said. (And nothing did.)

“That’s what people say right before something happens to them.” I replied angrily. She walked away in a huff and our friendship was never the same again.

Looking back I think it was because she didn’t want her world to be shattered like mine had been. She was safe and comfortable in her ignorance as she should have been at that age. And me, all of 11, was trying to find a way to live knowing what I knew but not having the tools to understand it.

Looking back, this is around the time I even became aware of racism.

Local and international media made a big hoopla over the fact that black people would now be able to vote. I remember thinking, I don’t get it. Why weren’t they allowed to vote in the first place? I guess I understood poverty on some level. But I couldn’t see a reason for the huge difference. Why are most black people poor?

One day, I overheard Emily and my mother discussing the upcoming election. Emily told her that while she was scared to vote for Nelson Mandela, he had promised that all the townships would get running water and electricity if he won.

It was absurd to me that Emily’s twin girls, who were my age, had been living without water and lights all this time. My young mind couldn’t grasp the disparity. But…but…we’re the same age. Why don’t we have the same things?

Looking back, it was then, several months after a black person killed my white father, that I knew I wasn’t a racist. As much as my birthplace, my skin colour, the influence of my society and the cruel hand of fate, wanted me to believe that I should be, I simply wasn’t.