I grew up in Kewtown, Athlone, and gravitated to Alicedale, a more amenable and decent domicile, where I stayed up to my 21st year, the year I married my wife, Ruth.
She has since passed. Significant about this period of my life were the indelible categories designed by a section of the population who were in office at the time. The system that legitimated racial categories under the Nationalist Party is more lasting and indelible than a tattoo.
We had categories or spaces on official forms to identify our race. In other words, I had to tick all my boxes to confirm that I accepted the dubious appellation of “coloured”. The other boxes were for whites, Indians and blacks.
How we came to accept this derogatory category was nothing short of humiliating mind control – curricular management in education, placement of communities in unsavoury surroundings and a host of injunctions which included where we were permitted to sit, stand, lie, work or die.
How was it possible to sustain such an inhumane condition? Signage was one method. Another was a robust police force that acted as close to a mind-control force as one could get. Punitive measures for daring to act like a human were harsh.
We had the farce of a mixed couple caught in an illegal alliance. They were tried in separate courts. The white man was lightly reprimanded and sent home to mend his white ways. The black partner-in-crime was sent to prison for six months. Someone had overlooked the basic truth that it takes two to tango, as it were.
As for myself, choices after high school were limited to a selection process conducted at the few high schools in existence then. An inspector would conduct oral tests and select those whom he considered suitable to go for teacher training.
This draconian strategy did not help if you did not play along with these narrow-minded Calvinists. And the teaching corps was kept in line with financial or promotion rewards, as long as they stuck to the prescriptions of the Christian National Curriculum.
I was told as early as 1959 that I could forget about promotion because I was too forward-thinking. But that is another story for another day.
The point I am making is that those who didn’t get to train as teachers could get limited access to white universities using a permit system. If those options ran out, you ended up driving a bus, an ambulance or working for big corporations in the clothing or food trade.
You were lucky to land a “decent” job because whites were preferred, protected and paid more. It even went as far as white shop assistants putting on a hat which a coloured person wanted to buy. The laws were draconian, martial, inhuman, degrading, dehumanising and all the other words that described an unshakeable rule that white was right.
While this column won’t waste time arguing the veracity of that spurious half-truth, it does point out the demeaning conditions we had to weather in order to be able and ready to revisit all those lies with a view to contriving a county where all are equal and free. But we know what we got.
Our very tormentors were invited to sit down to pen a new dispensation, and with devilish cunning and know-how in the art of duplicity and daylight robbery, they have retained the four racial categories to justify the pathetic state we are in.
But where does it leave us? Coloureds move to white areas, as do blacks. Whites don’t reciprocate by similar gestures of generosity, empathy or just plain good intent. No, they practise an exclusivity which could be called hegemony, or the latest label, “Caucasity”.
This means the inability or willingness to admit that taking or expecting the best just on colour (in this case white) is as legitimate as Holy Writ. Despite this, I still believe we can achieve a turn-around that will be of benefit to all. Is this a pipe dream?
I think not. Justice and fairness will – in the end – prevail.
* Alex Tabisher.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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