Time has passed since Mandela’s release in 1990 and the momentous first democratic 1994 election when long queues of voters, most of whom had never had this right, snaked for miles, often waiting patiently for hours to make their mark.
Yet in 2021 the struggle continues. The fault lines of South African society exposed yet again by the pandemic. The Constitution (1996), which emerged from the oppression of apartheid, seems ahead of its people, an ego ideal hard to live up to and by. Racism is not dead nor the divisions of class and gender. A black colleague at the recent South African Psychoanalytic Association (SAPA) conference protested: “Do we have to talk about racism again? Can’t we move on?” But it seems the deep traumata continue to reverberate , making necessary participation in inner dialogue as well as “joining conversations” in our communities. (White,2002)
On the eve of the conference , I happened to hear a radio documentary investigating the recent attack of two young poor male black workers by a family group of affluent Afrikaner white farmers. The farmers assumed that their relative had been attacked and formed a gang via SMS messages, chasing and rounding on the two black youths. They died as a result of severe beatings and subsequent transportation over rough ground in the back of a pick-up truck. The anguish of one of the men’s mothers (she too had been a farm employee) was palpable, along with her and my sense of despair, yet again, of the unfairness of the outcome. There was no charge nor acknowledgement of the murder; it seemed that an agreement was reached between the wealthy farming family and the police minimising the entire incident. The two workers, it emerged, had not threatened nor harmed the old white farmer but merely asked him for their unpaid wages. So we see the absence of the Law of the Father, as well as the return of the repressed in the sadistic hatred of the Afrikaner toward his black employees.
However racism does not exist only in such enclaves. It can be more subtle.With an expanding black middle class, the demographics of post -apartheid South Africa have changed in the past 30 years. Franz Fanon wrote about the wish of colonised black – skinned men and women to be white. Recently in my work in a pandemic township project, I had to re-confront some of my own racist thoughts and feelings- my fantasies about being black, my discomfort at being seen as a white expat living in the U.K, of black suspicion, rage and envy towards me. Racist issues are out in the open in a different way compared to the Rainbow era of Mandela and Tutu. Some view with resentment the fairytale of “rainbowism”- that all will be treated equally. Inequality continues with stark divisions within the urban townships, the haves and the have- nots, alongside extreme deprivation in rural communities. Xenophobia is apparent in some blacks calling other blacks “not South Africans”. Such sentiments fill South African born me, with disbelief and rage– Are we not all brothers and sisters on the African continent? In my mind I hear the voice of Robert Sobukwe, one of my heroes, who sacrificed his freedom for Pan Africanism. What is this new apartheid? Now there are different voices. And the inevitable return of the repressed university students damaging statues of colonialist philanthropic figures, and complaining that the curricula are “too European”. Are we again faced with our fear and intolerance of the Other? Is it too uncomfortable to abandon the safety of “not-me” and to work towards the sensibilities of “me-too”? (White)
Two new concepts , racial melancholia and exilic consciousness have helped me in my ongoing internal conversations. The racial melancholia of whiteness is the acknowledgement of one’s privilege, of the foundations of that privilege, of the cost to the other, and of the powerlessness to change that. Straker (2017) contends that such melancholia has to do with experiences of lack in regard to one’s own group, which is then amplified by the realisation of the impossibility of using the out-group to cover lack. As a white person one may beg to be black in some way, but that will never be. I have to reluctantly accept, again, that others in South Africa see me as Other and position me an expat, and that I need to own my exilic consciousness which has been defined by Said (cited in Burkhalter) as one in which one is “neither completely one with the new setting, nor fully disencumbered of the old”. A painful in betweenness, perhaps mirrored in the national consciousness.
References
Burkhalter, T. 2015 Imagining masculinities through an exilic consciousness. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 16,290-303.
Davids, J. 2021 IPA Podcast with Dr Harvey Schwartz on an Outreach Project during the pandemic in a South African urban township.
Straker, G. 2017 Wishing to Be White: Begging to Be Black. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 27 (1) 36-42.
White, K.P. 2002 Surviving Hating and Being Hated. Some Personal Thoughts About Racism From A Psychoanalytic Perspective. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 38, (3), 401-422.
