Everyone was racist. The times were racist. The world was racist, writes Denis Beckett.
Putting the phone down on the chemist, Thokozane, I had a rush of Seffrica High, the satisfying glow of belonging to a place so rich in human wealth.
There was nothing dramatic about the exchange. This guy wasn’t at my regular pharmacy (which itself is excellent on Seffrica High). I’d met him for 20 seconds.
He’d phoned a follow-up, a workaday untangling of a small glitch. He’d supplied all the efficiency that a client hopes for, together with that slice of extra warmth that Africa is so good at, conveying that sense that he is fulfilled by having fulfilled his customer’s need.
As usual, it crossed my mind that I’ve lived through the time that no one imagined a person like this in a job like that, least of all in white suburbia.
Then, even the dreamiest of dream outcomes were about “the blacks” and “the whites” relating politically.
There was no foreseeing the sheer normalness that would thrive whenever it peeked through the dead weight of pathetic politics.
It’s funny, all the heat now about “you whites were racists”. Not that that’s untrue, but that it’s a piffling portion of the whole truth. Everyone was racist. The times were racist. The world was racist in direct ratio to how fearsome your own race issues were.
As usual, too, I thought of Robert van Tonder.
In days that I ran a little publication with the theme song that South Africa was one country and South Africans were one people, Robert was closely associated with the opposite idea.
Robert had a favourite word, “mengelmoes”, meaning a mess, a dog’s breakfast.
For him, apartheid was a pale form of separation.
The real thing would be not just a separate country for Afrikaners, protecting them from Englishness, but another separate country for Boers, by which he meant descendants of the Great Trekkers, a different volk from those wussy Cape Afrikaners.
Robert abhorred my magazine for seeking the mengelmoes, and was keen to correct the error of my ways. I enjoyed his upfront manner, and that I never heard him say anything coarse about other-colour people.
That was funny too. In many quarters it was standard to be snotty about the blacks and snotty about the right-wingers as well. Here was Robert, ultra-right in his demand for fences but snotty to no one.
He was a newsmaker supreme, mainly for his Taalstryd, Language Struggle, for equal time for Afrikaans. He ran a micro political party. He owned a gigantic swathe of prime Transvaal - what is now Cosmo City. He wrote books on political humour.
One day we had 10 people for lunch at our historic if crumbly office in Fordsburg - editors, politicians, authors, etc, proudly multi-complexioned. Nine were wearing blue blazers. One was awaited. We sipped drinks, revelling in each other’s company.
In burst the last guest, bustling, punchy, notorious Robert in a green blazer.
For shock, this moment takes awards. If one Establishment guest had walked out, I bet all nine would have followed, but no one did.
Two hours later everyone was gobsmacked at how cogently and civilly he’d advanced his case that ethnic states were the wave of the future.
He was right, too, on that. What was then the USSR is now 22 ethnic republics. To oppose the ethnic division of Israel/Palestine is as shocking, now, as supporting the ethnic division of South Africa was then.
But he was wrong deep down. His fences would have stunted us where the mengelmoes enriches us.
He was unusually morally honest. I suspect that someone like him, exposed to the upsides of today’s fullness, might have switched sides totally.
* Beckett is a writer and journalist. His Stoep Talk column appears in The Star on Mondays and Fridays.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
The Star