A few months after the April 27, 1994 election that ended apartheid in South Africa, I was at a Johannesburg craft market waiting in line to pay for a purchase. A white woman swept in front of me with the item she was buying. I was initially speechless. My voice came back as she finished her transaction and turned to go.
“And you’re not even going to apologize for barging ahead of me like that?” I asked.
Her eyes widened.
“Well, not if you’re going to demand it,” she said, sounding affronted. Then she hurried away.
Seriously?
I actually felt bad for putting her on the spot. It’s human not to want to make other people feel bad. So I understood the impulse to make excuses for whites that reporter Eve Fairbanks found among many of the Black South Africans she interviewed for her new book, “The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning.”
In one passage in her deeply researched and fluidly written book, Eve tells Dipuo and Gadifele, who had been anti-apartheid activists as teens, about Christo, a white countryman. As a young conscript in the apartheid regime’s army, while on a mission ordered by officers he knew to be ignorant and paranoid, Christo shot and killed a homeless Black man he mistook for someone plotting to bring down apartheid.
Christo briefly faced murder charges, but the military eventually swept the killing under the rug. He went on to college, then law school – opportunities Dipuo and Gadifele were denied because apartheid for generations robbed the majority of South Africans of educational, political and professional resources. He later opened a private dormitory where he steeped white university students in an almost evangelical exceptionalism born of whites’ belief they were the rightful stewards of the land, and in a mythology based on the travails Afrikaners – the name descendants of Dutch settlers claimed for themselves _ faced as they fought the British for control of the tip of Africa during the Anglo-Boer War.
Eve writes:
Christo, I said, was the kind of soldier who barged into their houses at night and demanded that they rat out their parents and siblings. I told them how upset Christo became after black liberation, even though his murder charge got dropped and he was given a material chance to start over.
I thought they’d mock him. Instead, they fell quiet for a minute.
’I mean, this country is beautiful,’ Dipuo finally said. ‘Yes, the whites wanted to be spiteful, and to make sure that they damaged things so that the ANC inherited a country that had fallen apart. But to just give up a country they believed they had made beautiful? To give up their power? To give up such beauty? To give up everything they had worked for? I don’t think it would have been easy. Some of us still are not very warm towards white people,’ she said frankly. ‘That is black people’s truth. It’s nothing personal. But I am trying to imagine things more, now, from a humane point of view _ I’m a human being as well, I am warming up to the idea that it must not have been easy for them.’
‘They were in concentration camps,” Gadifele cut in, referring to the Afrikaner’s predicament after the Anglo-Boer War. ‘They replicated them in the townships. They replicated their own pain. But first, they were in concentration camps, watched by policemen and not given food. So, I sympathize with them. Because they, too, have gone through their own pain. And young guys in the military _ nineteen, twenty. The things they were made to do in the early ‘90s were ruthless.’
‘I’m imagining your friend had to go through counseling,’ Dipuo said. ‘Having been forced to witness all that killing and to kill.’
Gadifele said, ‘Your friend must be a torn-up man.’
’A twenty-one-year-old,’ Dipuo said, ‘is really just a child.’”
We are so often inclined to think a conversation about race is about our race, about how the conversation makes us feel. Dipuo and Gadifele were able to listen to the story Eve told about Christo, not put themselves at the center, not presume that what they were hearing from another's perspective couldn’t be true because it was not their perspective.
Even a generation after apartheid’s end, Eve found little reciprocal empathy toward Black South Africans among the white South Africans she interviewed. It is as if they fear what kind of actions they would have to take, what ideas about themselves they would have to surrender, if they identified with Blacks and acknowledged the weight of the past. Some resist forgiveness when their Black countrymen and women offer it, telling Eve that that gives Blacks the moral high ground. Puts whites on the spot.
Christo is haunted by his military experience. But, no, he did not turn to therapy.
Christo studied at the University of the Free State, the institution I visited as I researched “It’s a Black-White Thing,” my 2014 book about race relations in post-apartheid South Africa. Christo once ran the University of the Free State dormitory that later was at the center of a controversy in 2008 that both Eve and I describe in our books. White students at that dorm _ named for F.W. Reitz, an Afrikaner nationalist who was a prominent political and cultural figure in the late 19th and early 20th centuries _ made a racist video to underscore their opposition to sharing their campus home with Black students. The dorm was closed as a result, which is why Christo later opened his private student residence.
In the wake of the Reitz video scandal, the University of the Free State appointed its first Black rector, or president. In my book, I relate a conversation I and that rector, Jonathan Jansen, had about the anxiety he sensed among white Free State students:
‘Any talk of the past gets them so uptight. No matter how you present it, no matter how empathetically. No matter the fact that you talk about the Boer war, not apartheid only. They get so uptight.
‘And it’s because of all the other things happening around them. The sense that affirmative action has taken away their place in the sun. The fact that they feel they’re being attacked by political voices all the time. The fact that they have heard their fathers talk about land being taken away without compensation. There’s a vulnerability that becomes particularly acute when the past gets mentioned. They think it’s accusatory.’
The reaction is nuanced. Some students, black and white, do enjoy the ‘difficult grappling with the past’ that Jansen encourages. And when those who are less comfortable ask him why he insists on the conversation, he has a carefully thought-out answer: ‘We talk about the past always being present. I give four or five examples of how, even though we tried to get out of the past, it keeps showing up.’ Like the way the Reitz video showed up.
Then, Jansen asks his students, ‘Now, don’t you think it’s a good idea to learn the skills – emotional, psychological, intellectual, spiritual – to be able to deal with the past in such a way you can imagine a different future?
The conversation will sound familiar to anyone listening to America’s current culture war debates. It’s tempting to draw parallels to South Africa today and the United States at the end of the Civil War or the start of the civil rights movement. But in South Africa, a region’s indigenous majority has shaken off the rule of a minority descended from colonizers. That minority cannot monopolize the telling of the past in the way white Americans have for the generations in which they have been the majority. It is only now, as the United States approaches the demographic moment of becoming majority minority, that our conversations are becoming more inclusive. And, seemingly, more fraught.
It’s a moment that has me wanting to re-read "Beauty's Gift," a 2008 novel by the Black South African writer Sindiwe Magona. "Beauty's Gift" often is described as a story of the way AIDS has torn through South Africa, but it also reckons with navigating from the past to the future. In “Beauty’s Gift,” one of Magona’s young Black women characters has the audacity to suggest to an elder that his generation should have left better traditions to hers.
To my mind, Magona’s point is that all we can do is try to mold out of what we inherit something better to pass on to our children. I heard an echo of that in American poet Amir Sulaiman’s message this Juneteenth, the holiday marking the end of slavery in the United States: "You will be someone's ancestor. Act accordingly."
South Africa has been celebrating April 27 as Freedom Day ever since its first all-race elections were held on April 27, 1994. This year was only the second that the United States celebrated Juneteenth as a national holiday.
“Great nations don’t ignore their most painful moments,” President Joe Biden said this Juneteenth. “They confront them to grow stronger. And that is what this great nation must continue to do.”
Eve, author of “The Inheritors,” is a white American. I, author of “It’s a Black-White Thing,” am a Black American. We both have been asked what lessons America can draw from South Africa. As if a country could be a neat story with a moral at the end. I can only say that South Africans are still telling their own story, just as Americans are. Many in both countries are having conversations, telling stories, sometimes even putting one another on the spot, in hopes of finding their way to a better future together.