White SA struggles with African identity
Fran Blandy Johannesburg, South Africa
28 January 2007 07:28
Generations too late to be classified as Europeans, white South Africans are fighting for the right to be seen as African amid doubts about their loyalty, fuelled by a growing white diaspora. In the 13 years since the demise of the apartheid regime, which relegated black people to a second-class status, about 400 000 white people have voted with their feet and deserted the Rainbow Nation -- usually for Anglophone countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Britain.
But while hundreds of thousands have chosen to shake off their African heritage, the five million white people remaining in South Africa battle conceptions about the purity of their motives in the fight to be classified as African. Political analyst Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, who was a prominent figure in the anti-apartheid movement, refuses to fill out census forms in which he would have to identify himself as either African, White, Indian or coloured.
This is too reminiscent of the racial classifications of the old regime, he feels."There are some black people who would vehemently deny a white person should be an African," he told Agence France-Presse, adding he wants to rid the term of its deep ideological, philosophical content."I am African because I live on the African continent. Where would I go if I had to leave?" These days, many white South African women don African fashions and there are those who vow to stay in their beloved country, happily adopting the "Proudly South African" concept.
On the other end of the scale are those like the three members of civil rights group Afriforum, who feel legally entitled to be included in a black economic empowerment deal offered by their insurance company, which offers extra profit benefits to "Africans, coloureds and Indians"."It is about being treated as a first-class citizen in the country of your birth.
We have lived for centuries in South Africa and have grown to love this country," said Afriforum CEO Kallie Kriel. Afrikaners are descended from the Dutch settlers who arrived in South Africa in 1652, while the British arrived in the latter half of the 1700s.Bushmen had lived on the tip of the continent for thousands of years, and Bantu-speaking people lived there for hundreds of years before the settlers' arrival.
Racial conflict through the centuries saw white people exercising racial superiority over black people, and it is these centuries of advantage that empowerment policies hope to turn around.In a country that equates being African with colour, students who feel stripped of their identity have gone so far as to paint themselves black to press home the point they want to be seen as African."We do not believe that it is necessary to paint ourselves black in order to be Africans, but we still did it as government has, during the past few years, equated African identity to being black," university students wrote in a letter to President Thabo Mbeki in October.
Van Zyl Slabbert is disturbed by empowerment policies describing "black" as a generic term for Africans, Coloureds and Indians.Xolela Mangcu, a prominent academic who initiated a discussion on identity in South Africa, said some of the methods employed by whites were cynical."This should not, by both black and whites, be a process of trying to manipulate identities so you can get a piece of the action; it should be a process of real identification with the culture and history of the place," he said.
Van Zyl Slabbert argues he is African "because my president told me so".In his "I am an African" speech, delivered at the launch of the country's Constitution in 1996, then-deputy president Mbeki said: "The Constitution whose adoption we celebrate constitutes an unequivocal statement that we refuse to accept that our Africanness shall be defined by our race, colour, gender or historical origins."Mangcu feels white people are intrinsically African, although their experiences have differed from black Africans."Of course they are African, to the extent that this is their world, they have forefathers who go back hundreds of years here and that by itself is how normally people in other societies would define identities."However, he added: "The experience of being African has been vastly different between whites who oppressed and exploited people and blacks who were on receiving end of that." -- Sapa-AFP
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