Richard Pithouse, SACSIS
The road from Port Elizabeth to Grahamstown winds past one
luxury game farm after another. John Graham, a British soldier, drove the Xhosa
people off this land, the Zuurveld, between 1811 and 1812. His soldiers burnt
their homes, destroyed their crops and killed any man that resisted.
It was John Cradock, the governor of the Cape Colony, who
had given Graham his orders. Cradock had some experience in these matters. He
had crushed anti-colonial rebellions in Ireland and India before being posted
to Cape Town. In 1812 he reported to the British cabinet that the inhabitants
of the Zuurveld had been forced across the Fish River with ‘a proper degree of
terror’. Just over two hundred years
later, and twenty years after the end of apartheid, neither the degree of
inequality in Grahamstown, nor the manner in which it is racialised, can be
denied.
Racism is rooted in the deep structure of our society. It is
also rooted in the ways in which our own country is connected to social and
economic forces with a planetary reach. It is deeply etched into everything
from the distribution of land, to how our press understands the idea of the
‘international community’ or what counts as academic sophistication in our
universities. It is not undone by the simple act of people treating each other
with respect. It will not be undone until political and economic power are no
longer racialised.
But none of this means that the way in which the flow of day
to day bourgeois life in a town like Grahamstown is constantly poisoned by
racism is trivial. The assault from everyday racism is relentless. Last week a
young white woman working at a sushi restaurant casually and publicly observed
to a customer that her electric fly swatter was useful for street children as
well as flies. The week before that a student, a young white woman, mentioned
to her white doctor that she was moving to Durban. He immediately assured her
that he would find her a white doctor in Durban so that she didn’t end up in
what his sick mind imagines to be the inherently lecherous hands of an Indian
doctor.
Before that an estate agent, bringing a potential buyer to
see a rented flat, asked the black woman who answered the door if she could
speak to her boss. It didn’t occur to the estate agent that the white man she
could see inside the flat was the women’s husband. Buying a second-hand desk at
a local shop to furnish the same flat meant that an old white man arrived with
two younger black men who he openly racially abused as they struggled to carry
the desk up the stairs. In Grahamstown even an act as ordinary as buying a loaf
of bread can require an encounter with the sort of moronic view of the world
that reads Zuma’s flaws in racial rather than personal and political terms.
The town’s university, Rhodes, has a principled and
progressive black leadership but this has not inoculated the institution
against everyday racism. A young black woman in her thirties, in the first days
of a new job, went to the library for the first time. The librarian flatly
refused to believe that she was a staff member, suggesting that she was lying.
White colleagues, imagining themselves to be enlightened feminists, often
assumed that her father was a domineering man and that the university was a
site of new freedom for her. In fact her father, born into poverty, worked very
hard to be able to send his daughter to university and, when she got her first
degree, advised her against marriage on the grounds that it oppresses women.
Some of her colleagues assumed that she, from a family with
two professors on her mother’s side, was new to the university environment and
offered their support in the manner that one would speak to a child about adult
matters. While taking her scheduled break during the invigilation of an exam a
white woman rushed over and berated her in the overbearing and contemptuous
manner that white people adopt when they assume the right to police the
behaviour of black people. The constant experience of racism has led to her
having panic attacks every time she has to return to Grahamstown after the
holidays. After the long years of unpaid commitment required to make an
academic life she has started looking for jobs, any job that can get her out of
a space in which day to day life requires either constant rage or constant
mutilation of the self.
Off the record it is not unusual for academics and
administrative staff at the university to say the most vile things dressed up
in what they imagine to be a weary cosmopolitanism. There was, for instance,
the white woman who began a conversation with a white colleague recently
arrived from Durban by saying that he must have been so happy to get out of
Durban. Stunned that anyone could imagine that life in a provincial backwater
like Grahamstown was preferable to Durban he asked her why she held this view. ‘It
must have been such a relief to get away from the Indians’ she replied. When he
protested she tried to back down and, as what she imagined to be compensation,
offered the view that ‘Indians have such a colourful culture’.
Then there was the white man, who thinks he’s a Marxist,
who, in a private conversation after a seminar, ascribed corruption in the ANC
to Indian people simultaneously reinforcing two colonial stereotypes – one
about the cunning Indian, the other about the child like African.
Racism is also written into the public discourse at the
university although of course here it is always implicit. It is not unusual for
academics to have no sense at all of being intellectuals in Africa or the
global South and for Africans to only appear in their research and teaching as
a problem, a problem to be investigated with intellectual resources drawn from
the white North.
Sometimes it is the people that identify as activists who
say or do the most outrageous things on the assumption that identifying as an
activist gives them a pass on having to take racism seriously. Human Rights,
the Constitution, feminism and socialism are all misused to reinscribe white
power and to place it in a relationship to Africa and Africans that is framed
in terms of an enlightening pedagogy rather than enduring domination.
Yet despite the ubiquity of everyday racism the biggest
controversy on campus in recent years has centred around a grotesque and
consistently dishonest attempt to misuse the struggles for the full equality of
women and gay people to legitimate the colonial occupation of Palestine. In
some cases it is clear that the desire to ally with a central thrust in the
ideology of contemporary American imperialism, an often murderous project that
continues where Graham and Craddock left off, is rooted in a commitment to
asserting the authority and legitimacy of the white West over the rest of the
world. Israel, like Zimbabwe, becomes a proxy for debates about South Africa
that cannot be openly prosecuted here.
