Beyond the Boerewors Curtain: Identity and white English South Africans

In his blog Beyond the Boerewors Curtain Roger Saner asks an interesting question about Identity and white English South Africans

What also interests me about Apartheid is the white English role. Most English people in SA seem unaware that the British concentration camps were responsible for the deaths of 26,000 Afrikaner women and children. This is not a legacy to be lightly skipped over, and one that ties directly into one of the most thorny issues for English South Africans: identity. Who are we? We’re not British, although many of us hold British passports (or can get ancestral visas, or flee to the UK when we get the chance). We’re not Afrikaans, so therefore we’re not responsible for Apartheid (so I’ve heard from many English people). ‘Apartheid was something which the Afrikaners were responsible for, not us. We had no say. In all levels of government the only people who were employed were Afrikaans.’ So we withdrew from the public sphere and happily existed in the neutral space between oppression and oppressed, mirroring the behaviour of everyone else.

The last sentence rather begs the question. What do you mean “we”, white man? Just who is “everyone”?

In his book Ah big yaws? Rawbone Malong described the language, pronunciation and usage of White Urban English-speaking South Africans, WUESAs, or Woozers for short.

In a post on my other blog I queried the usage and assumptions of a certain school of church historians who have written about “the English-speaking churches” in South Africa. Is there such a thing as a Woozer identity?

I suppose that in a sense I’m a Woozer. I’m white, speak English as my first language, was born in South Africa and have lived in cities most of my life. But does that define my identity? In the year I was born a man called G.H. Calpin published a book called There are no South Africans. He was a nasty right-wing racist (I was later called upon to review one of this other books, which made that very clear).

I’ve been faced with the question at several significant moments of my life. I’ll describe some of them, going backwards in time

One was 25 years ago, during the referendum of the tri-cameral parliament, in 1983. I was visited by a National Party canvasser, who tried to convince me that the proposed tri-cameral parliament was a good thing. He stayed most of the afternoon. My objections were different from most of those he encountered, and it took most of the afternoon for him to grasp what I was getting at. Most objections he encountered were from people who did not like the idea of having Coloureds and Asians in parliament, even in separate houses. What he found difficult to grasp was that I rejected two principles that he regarded as so axiomatic that he could not conceive of the possibility of anyone questioning them: group rights and “own affairs”. And that related to one of the fundamental contradictions of apartheid.

Afrikaner nationalists liked to point out that nationalism was a good thing, and that it simply meant “love of one’s own” — and that is where “own affairs” came in. The problem for me was, what was my “own”? The “white group”? But what was it? One should have “own affairs” which meant one’s own schools, language, religion, culture and so on. But Nat policy was to have separate English and Afrikaans schools. If the theory of apartheid were to be consistent, then there should have been an “English” homeland, which ran its own affairs. But there wasn’t, of course. If there were, then the “white” group would be split, and could not outnumber the Coloureds and Indians, and the tri-cameral parliament would no longer serve its purpose of maintaining white Afrikaner Nationalist hegemony. For the same reason there could not be a “black” house fo parliament, because that would outnumber the whites, so the blacks had to be divided into Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana etc homelands. It was the old policy of divide and rule. As long as Afrikaner nationalists outnumbered all other whites (English, Portuguese, Greek etc), they could be coopted to boost the numbers of the white parliament, which Afrikaner nationalists would control. The moment one of the black groups outnumbered the white conglomerate, the racial arithmetic no longer worked. Chris Heunis resigned as Minister of Constitutional Affairs, and apartheid’s days were numbered.

But to the Nat canvasser it was inconceivable that I should not see my identity as primarily white. I didn’t want a tri-cameral parliament, I wanted one parliament, with one man, one vote. He said “But that has never worked anywhere.” I said “Look west”. That required more explanations. On our western border was Botswana, which in 1983 was the most democratic country in Africa. Admittedly it was a much more homogeneous population than South Africa. But I didn’t see why it shouldn’t work in a multicultural country like South Africa, and thought it was a lot better than having people of one culture telling all the others what groups they belonged to and what their culture ought to be. “Own affairs” was a farce, because the attitude of the Nat government was that “you will look after your own affairs, and we will tell you what your own affairs are”.

An earlier defining moment was the publication of A message to the people of South Africa by the South African Council of Churches, in 1968.

In the past various Christian groups had criticised apartheid on the ground of its unjust implementation. The Message, however, attacked not merely the implementation and practice of apartheid, but its theory and ideology. It said that apartheid was far worse than a heresy, it was a pseudogospel.

Apartheid was a false gospel because it encouraged people to find their security in racial identity instead of in Christ, and it was therefore, from a Christian point of view, a form of idolatry. It set up racial identity as an idol. Christians therefore opposed apartheid not merely because it was bad in practice, it was bad in principle. It was based on principles and assumptions that could never be acceptable from a Christian point of view.

For me personally, that was not something new. The Message to the people of South Africa simply articulated something I already knew. It helped to clarify and reinforce things by finding terminology to describe them. Many people had believed that apartheid was a heresy. The Message went further, and said it was a pseudogospel, and explained why. It was a moment like the one when Elijah confronted the prophets of Baal. It challenged South Africa: if Christ is God, serve him; but don’t pretend to serve him when your real god is the idol of racial identity.

For me personally the defining moment came in 1960/61, when there was another referendum, on whether South Africa should become a “republic”, and did become a republic outside the Commonwealth.

It made me think about what it meant to be a citizen of the Republic of South Africa. The propaganda of the Republicans was that it would “unite South Africa”. They said that the Afrikaners put South Africa first, while the “English” had divided loyalties, with one foot in Britain, which many Woozers still spoke of as “home”, even if their ancestors had lived in Slouth Africa for generations. The Afrikaans word for Woozers was “souties”, derived from “soutpiel” — if one had one foot in South Africa and one in Britain, then another part of the body (in the case of males) must be dangling in the salty waters of the ocean in between.

But all this talk of “uniting” South Africa was going on simultaneously with talk of dividing it up into “homelands”. And what was a homeland? A putative place of origin that black people (but not whites) were told they belonged to, and could be sent “back” to. So what did it mean to be a citizen of the Republic of South Africa? That you should have no other homeland (if you were white), but that you must have another homeland, if you were black. Clearly, the Republic of South Africa was going to be a Mickey Mouse country, with an elastic definition of citizenship that could mean anything but actually meant nothing.

And at the same time I read the New Testament, where St Paul said “our citizenship, our homeland, is in heaven” (Philippians 3:30). So it appeared to me that it was a toss-up between citizenship of the Kingdom of Heaven and citizenship of the Republic of South Africa, and I opted for the former. Baptism, it appeared to me, was a naturalisation ceremony for entering the Kingdom of Heaven.

So what the National Party was urging me to do was (in the words of Leon Bloy) the renunciation of my heavenly birthright for the pottage of this sinful world.

Because I was baptised, I had more in common with a baptised black person than with an unbaptised white one. The National Party tried to deny the truth of that, and to say that skin colour was more important than what God had done in baptism, that Babel could not be overruled by Pentecost.

And for the same reason, I couldn’t get particularly particularly excited about being a Woozer, or see that as the core of my identity.

For a while I lived in Namibia, when apartheid was at its height, and many cities in Namibia had black “locations”. In terms of the apartheid ideology blacks had no permanent homes in the cities, and were forced to go and live outside the city, beyond the town limits. Many did not want to move, and in Windhoek the Hereros were told that they could even give the new location a name, if only they could go and live there, and so they called it “Katutura” which means “We don’t live here”. And every new location outside every Namibian town was called Katutura, even if the government called it something else.

In Herero, “tura” means to live in a place as a homeland, to have a home in a place. Yet this was a metaphor for the Christian life. Hebrews 13:12-14 shows that Jesus was in Katutura, not Windhoek, because it was to precisely such a place that the world pushed him, and as his followers, that is where we are. We are pariki, the Greek word from which the English word “parishioners” is derived, we live beside the house, not in it. In Afrikaans, we are bywoners, squatters, sojourners. This is not our homeland: katutura, we don’t live here.

Apartheid may be dead in South Africa, but the struggle against the pseudogospel still continues. I joined the Orthodox Church, and in South Africa, as an English-speaking Orthodox Christian, I’m in the minority. Greek-speakers, or people of Greek heritage, are in the majority, and from some of them one sometimes hears the same racist sentiments that we heard so often in the apartheid years. One woman once said, “The Orthodox Church is not missionary because its purpose is to preserve Greek culture.” Non-Greeks are xeni. Hey, ho, I was born in South Africa, but I get called a xenos by a Greek immigrant. That puts me in my place. But actually it causes me to reflect that for both of us we are where we are in the church not because of birth or parentage, language or culture, not because of where we were born, or to whom we were born, but by a second birth of water and the spirit that makes us citizens of the heavenly kingdom.

Yes, racism is alive and well in the Orthodox Church. In 1985, when the first English-speaking priest was ordained in an Orthodox Church in Johannesburg, people came from other parishes, from far and wide, to shout “anaxios” (unworthy) because the Archbishop had dared to ordain a non-Greek, a xenos. Xenophobia rules, but it’s not OK.

Some mouth the racist slogan “Hellenism is Orthodoxy and Orthodoxy is Hellenism”, which is not merely a heresy, but apostasy. The Orthodox Church pronounced apartheid, or racism, to he a heresy back in 1872 (under the Greek name phyletism), but it still persists. Hellenism was anathema to Orthodox Christians from the time of the early church fathers. Hellenism today is the product of the secular nationalism of the 18th and 19th centuries, and is also a term for a neopagan religion. It has never been identified with Orthodoxy.

As an English-speaking Orthodox Christian, I like to worship in English, but I don’t want to see an “English” Orthodox Church, in the sense that there are Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches. I want to see a South African Orthodox Church. I do sometimes get a bit annoyed when Greek-speaking clergy insist that I must use bad English translations of liturgical texts, because, being Greek, they know what is good for the English. But I’ve known that sort of thing all my life, when Afrikaner nationalists told me what was my “own” and insisted on giving me an “own affair”. Most Sundays I worship with congregations that speak North Sotho (which seems to be one of the most difficult languages to learn: you can get courses in Greek, Russian, Zulu and Xhosa in bookshops, but not North Sotho). I enjoy the Liturgy in Afrikaans, often even more than in English, because there are not 25 different translations floating about, as there are with English.

But is there an “English-speaking” South African culture, a Woozer culture?

Not really. Not enough to form the basis of a distinct ethnic identity. Language and culture are linked, but English is a multicultural language. It is shared by many cultures throughout the world, and not only in South Africa. There was never enough of a cohesive Woozer culture in South Africa to demand a homeland. There was never enough of a group identity to which “group rights” could be applied. Rather, English-speaking South Africans belong to a whole range of overlapping cultural groups and circles, based on church, school, family, interest. Woozers who live next door to each other can find that they have nothing in common but language and geographical proximity. They have different friends, different interests, and might never meet and greet each other except casually and in passing. Woozers have never been a “volk”.

While some were chauvinist (my Cornish great grandmother insisted on calling her Afrikaans son-in-law Botes “Boats”), and despised Afrikaners and kept aloof from “natives” others were more laid-back about such things and even made up satirical songs about them:

When I’m walking down the street I must be careful not to greet
people of a different pigmentation
Lest the government suspect or the Special Branch detect
a dark affiliation
to a communist organisation.
(sung to the tune of The wayward wind)

Perhaps this Woozer rootlessness made it easier for me to let worldly allegiances sit lightly, as I’ve described above. It may have made it easier for some others, I don’t know. Since I was in my late teens I was aware of being a pilgrim, a stranger, a sojourner in the world, and am still reminded of it every time someone refers to me as a xenos.

And there is still the heresy, the pseudogospel, the apostasy of apartheid, racism, phyletism. A luta continua. Die stryd duur voort. The struggle continues.

Multiculturalism

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at the alt.usage.english newsgroup.

Don Phillipson, of Carlsbad Springs, Ottawa, Canada, asks:

Citations are requested for the first uses of “multiculturalism” by governmental officials or politicians in Europe (inc. Britain) and the USA, preferably with enough context to indicate the meaning of the noun (or adj. multicultural.)

My tentative thesis is that this word entered contemporary politics in Canada (Multiculturalism Act 1971) and was then taken up in Europe (by Britain and by other countries that operate in French, German, Dutch, etc.) where its meanings were different: and ultimately in the USA where meanings were different again, whence it returned to Canada to function in ways unforeseen in 1971.

Most obviously, as legislated in Canada in 1971, “multiculturalism” had nothing to do with race (skin colour) or with immigrants. (It was a strictly local response to Canadians of “other ethnic groups” who told the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism that, because their ancestry was non-French and non-British and they did not see themselves as either “English Canadians” or “French Canadians,” they were apprehensive that public anxiety about B&B topics should not mean they were “second-class citizens. The largest language groups voicing this concern were German, Polish and Ukrainian: i.e. the people were all “white” and mostly Canadian-born.)

In Europe e.g. Britain, “multiculturalism” was associated less with long-recognized white “races” (e.g. Scotch, Welsh, Irish) but with first-generation immigrants from Asia and Africa i.e. “visible minorities.” In the USA “multiculturalism” was subtly different again, because there were new “visible minority” communities (e.g. from Korea and SE Asia) but also long-settled Hispanic and black communities. Most obviously, the largest visible minority in the USA was black Americans who had been settled in America for 200+ years and who had recently been engaged in the
Civil Rights movement, a significant social revolution.

Thus the “multiculturalism” associated nowadays with all-black US TV situation comedies is substantially different from that of (say) Turkish or South American
communities in Europe: and wholly different again from the concerns in 1971 of Canadians of Greek or Portuguese or Lebanese ancestry: and the word today in Canada is powerfully guided by American ideas based in demographic features that do not occur in Canada (i.e. the concept has completed a circle, during which its
meaning has changed.)

In order to test this thesis, it would be useful to have citations of the first official uses of the word “multicultural” in various places, e.g. Britain, Denmark, the USA, as well as current meanings.

My response:

I’m unable to give any “official” citations, though I’ll note any if I find them and report them.

A purely impressionistic observation (from reading newsgroups and other electronic forums) is that in South Africa it tends to be primarily descriptive (South Africa is a multicultural country) and multiculturalism is the state of being multicultural, whereas in the USA and UK it seems to be regarded as prescriptive, since many people seem to object to multiculturalism.

To this South African, at least, objections to multiculturalism sound racist, and a demand for a return to apartheid thinking, which was the idea that a multicultural society was highly undesirable, and that therefore different ethnic/cultural groups MUST be separated, and could not possibly live together, be educated together, or marry each other.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on the matter? What do “multicultural” and “multiculturalism” mean to you?

Notions of a white or black culture in SA are pure bollocks

Fred Khumalo at The Times: Notions of a white or black culture in SA are pure bollocks

Now let’s get to the issue of culture: black as well as white. Moving, as I do, in circles that include black and white people, I have not been able to ascertain the existence of a white or a black culture as such.

What I have been able to discern are individuals from various racial backgrounds, possibly saddled with the socialisation process from whence they come . Eugene Terre Blanche is white, but so is Nadine Gordimer. Do they have a culture that binds them? I doubt it.

Well said, Fred!

What goes to make up our culture? Our parents and extended family, our friends, our education, religion (or lack of it) and a general life experience. South Africa is, whether we like it or not, a multicultural society. I’ve noticed that there are some who talk as if “multiculturalism” were a bad thing, but the only way to avoid it is to go back to apartheid, and that is a failed ideology.

The theory of apartheid was based on the concept of “own affairs”, and one of the goals of the apartheid education system was to inculcate “love of one’s own”.

The question is, what is “one’s own”?

According to the apartheid theorists “one’s own” was based on skin colour. You had more in common with people of the same skin colour than with those of different skin colour. The problem was, it simply isn’t true, as Fred Khumalo points out. Nadine Gordimer has very little in common with Eugene Terre’blanche. And interaction with people of different cultures changes one’s own culture. We interact with people from many different cultural groups, and they overlap in different ways, and we feel closer to some than to others. The more common experiences we share with people, the closer we feel to them.

Many years ago, when I went to study in Britain, I wasn’t prepared for the culture shock I experienced. English was my first language. In school and while growing up I had read books published in Britain, and about British people — novels, poems, and plays. I felt that these were part of my culture, and so it was quite a shock, when I actually got to Britain, to find that the pictures in my head when I read the books did not correspond at all to the reality. There was so much that seemed utterly alien.

After a few months in England I read a novel by Richard Hughes, A high wind in Jamaica. It was about children of English parents brought up in Jamaica, and I wrote in my diary:

But one thing clicked, and is very true to my own experience. The children are captured by pirates, and then are rescued, and eventually get to England.

The children’s bewilderment lasted. London was not what they had expected, but it was even more astounding. From time to time, however, they would realise how this or that chimed in with something they had been told, though not at all with the idea the telling had conjured up. On these occasions they must have felt something as St Matthew must have felt when, after recording some trivial incident, he adds ‘That it may be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet so-and-so.’

And it suddenly clicked, like a blinding flash. I know exactly how St Matthew must have felt. This afternoon, passing along on the bus a little way out of Oxford, after reading about the Jamaican vegetation, I looked out of the window and contemplated the English variety. I suddenly, for the first time since I have been in England, realised that this vegetable entity at the side of the road was a hedge! It was something I had read about in books, accepted without understanding. A hedge is a neatly trimmed row of bushes that goes round a garden, in my conception, in the image conjured up by the telling. I just could not associate it with this untidy alien thing along the side of the road — a hedge!

And soon after that I read Laurens van der Post’s book Venture to the interior, and found myself repelled by his European outlook. Even though he had been born and brought up in Africa, he thought of himself as a European, and approached Africa (in this case Malawi) as a European might. I had never been to Malawi, but I felt that van der Post’s approach to it was alien. And I became aware of my Africanness. There were many cultural differences between me and my fellow-South Africans of different races, religions and cultural backgrounds, but we grew up under the same sky, and I had more in common with them than I did with any of the English people I met in my first six months in England.

I worked for London Transport, driving buses, based at Brixton Garage, where about a third of the bus crews were English, a third Irish and a third West Indian. They all spoke English, but when they talked among themselves I couldn’t understand a word they said.

Thirty years later I went to Kenya to do some research for my thesis and spent a couple of weeks at the Orthodox Theological Seminary on the outskirts of Nairobi.

There were students there from many different parts of Africa, and I found the cultural interactions fascinating. The West African students gravitated to me with their complaints. They were suffering from culture shock, and I could sympathise, remembering my own experience in Britain 30 years before. I think they thought that I, coming from southern Africa, would find East African culture as alien as they did. But I didn’t. I found East African culture similar in many ways to Southern Africa.

On one occasion we went to the funeral of a priest’s father, and the funeral service was conducted under a tarpaulin erected outside the house, and the priest’s father was buried by the cattle kraal. It seemed just like funerals I had attended in rural Zululand and I felt right at home. Though there were some differences, they were minor, and not alienating. And the feast afterwards was very similar, and also similar to a visit I had made a few months before to a Russian dacha.

On another occasion we went to a service in a rural church, which had been built by the congregation, with wattle and daub walls and a corrugated iron roof. Again, it was very similar to rural Zululand, as was the lunch afterwards, which the West African students refused to eat, very rudely, I thought. That stuck me as un-African. They lacked ubuntu. Even if the food is unfamiliar, rejecting hospitality like that is a no-no in African culture. At least that’s what I thought.

Of course one of the biggest things in culture shock is food. In Kenya, the staple was ugali, boiled mealie meal, which was somewhere in between phuthu and bogobe — the last two being different South African versions of the same thing. West African food, it appears, is entirely different.

In Zululand there was a convent of Anglican nuns, and an English sister came to join them. They followed the same rule, wore the same habits. Language was a difficulty, but the English sister could cope with that. What the English sister found most difficult to cope with was seeing fresh milk being brought into the convent, and no one being allowed to drink it until it had gone sour.

At the seminary in Nairobi they had Ugandan food twice a week, and I found that almost as difficult to cope with as the West African students did — stewed bananas and peanut butter wasn’t my idea of real food, and I think even the Kenyan students found it offputting.

On the whole I was quite surprised at how much at home I felt. But there were cultural differences. I was quite surprised that Kenyans seemed able to utter words like “Bantu” and “tribe” without embarrassment.

In South Africa the Church Unity Commission had once produced ecumenical baptism certificates, that could be used by all the denominations that participated in the CUC. Anglican clergy in Zululand refused to buy them or use them, because they had the word “Bantu” on them — one of the CUC denominations being the Bantu Presbyterian Church, which was printed at the bottom in small type in a list of denominations that recognised the certificates.

There were some South Africans, of course, who did not share my embarrassment at the use of words like “Bantu” and “tribe”, and there were some for whom “Bantu” was for a long time the epitome of political correctness. But then I didn’t share their culture. They were not “my own”.

In a multicultural society like South Africa cultures interact and overlap and each of us has unique experiences that shape our culture, based on geography, occupation, religion, the schools we went to, the families we grew up in, the languages we grew up speaking and many more. And these not only shape our own cultures, but our perceptions of other people’s cultures as well.

Anglican introversion

Retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu told the BBC that the Anglican communion was spending too much of its time and energy on debating differences over gay priests and same sex marriages – a subject, he said, that had now become “an extraordinary obsession”. The crises in Zimbabwe and Darfur, corruption and HIV/Aids were not getting enough attention, said Tutu. To which one might add, for American and British Christians, such things as the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo.

In his blog Journeys in between, Matt Stone remarks that “Consumerism, pluralism, spirituality, collapse of Christian credibility and moral authority in the media and public discourse … don’t these issues deserve some attention? I don’t recall Jesus being that sex obsessed.”

The Anglican obsession with sex has led to some disturbing changes in the attitudes of the West. As one columnist put it

But the largest adjustments are coming on the religious left. For decades it has preached multiculturalism, but now, on further acquaintance, it doesn’t seem to like other cultures very much. Episcopal leaders complain of the threat of “foreign prelates,” echoing anti-Catholic rhetoric of the 19th century. An activist at one Episcopal meeting urged the African bishops to “go back to the jungle where you came from.” Not since Victorians hunted tigers on elephants has the condescension been this raw.

Perhaps these are not changes in attitude, though, but rather the multicultural mask being stripped off, and revealing the paternalism and imperialism that was there all along, and had been covered up, as I noted in an earlier posting in this blog: Mission is a two-way street… or is it?.

One of the Anglican blogs that appears quite frequently on blogrolls and is recommended as a good one is Father Jake stops the world. Yet when I read it recently it seemed to be almost entirely concerned with the internal politics of the Anglican Communion. There were older post on other issues, but now sexual politics within the Anglican Communion seem to be the dominant theme. The same seems to be true of other Anglican blogs, and I’ve seen it in other forums such as Usenet newsgroups. The sexual obsession seems to have rendered many Anglicans incapable of seeing anything else, and to have almost paralysed the Anglican Communion.

The "Cultural Protestant" Origin of Multiculturalism

A conservative blog for peace had an article on “Unitarianism, Modernism and multiculturalism are all Protestantism gone bad” with a link to 西儒 ─ The Western Confucian: The “Cultural Protestant” Origin of Multiculturalism. These bloggers attributed the origin of multiculturalism to “English Calvinism” and “New England Puritanism” respectively.

I made a comment:

Whereas it was the descendants of Dutch Calvinists who proposed the grand solution to multiculturalism — apartheid.

To spare us the discomfort of having to live in proximity to anyone whose ideas, manners or skin colour differed from our own, they simply bulldozed their houses and removed them to another place — a process for which the term “ethnic cleansing” was later invented.

Several people responded to my comment, but nobody seemed to “get it”. All were trying to find someone (other than Dutch Calvinists) to blame for apartheid. It’s easier to find a scapegoat than a solution.

But the bigger question is ignored. And that is the assumption that “multiculturalism” is “bad” or “blameworthy”. If the descendants of English Calvinists created the “problem”, why are the descendants of Dutch Calvinists “blameworthy” for trying to find a solution?

In South Africa we found that apartheid was a thoroughly bad thing, and that the problem it was intended to solve — multiculturalism — was not such a problem after all. And suddenly the rest of the world seems to have switched its view. As South Africa abandoned apartheid, Yugoslavia embraced it, with the help of Germany and Nato. And now, it seems, Americans are doing the same.

The question is not who is to “blame” for multiculturalism, but why do people like this “Western Confucian” and so many others simply assume that it is a Bad Thing?

I can agree that the English Calvinists contributed to it in America — after all, they emigrated there and created a multicultural society. But if their descendants think it is such a bad thing, then they should either return to their ancestral homelands, or learn to live with the multicultural society that their ancestors created by settling there in the first place.