There must be something about my face. People want to talk to it. My sister’s been told she has resting bitch face, and I seem to project a benign resting Labrador face. My face and I are quite fond of minding our own business (quite unlike the aforementioned sister, who once joined a passing police chase with her skadonk of an Opel, because she wanted to get in on the action).
But this doesn’t seem to deter the weirdos who wander my way to spew unsavoury opinions. It got me wondering (in the voice of Carrey Bradshaw): “Do I have a face that emboldens casual racists?” Or, more urgently, “Do I have a face that implies that I have full control of my stabbing arm?”.
This is really only a problem in South Africa, where there exists no unwritten law that speaking to strangers is a social faux pas. That’sa Norwegian thing, and I used to hate it, but after the last few weeks in Cape Town, I yearn for the bliss of not knowing what the fucked-up members of the public might be cooking up in their irrational minds.
The First Strike: Home Turf
I’ve been back in Cape Town for two weeks now. On my first day back, a distant family member blurted out, mere minutes after greeting, that Black people (yes, all, I checked), are inherently self-centered or selfish.
Now hey, I see you with your hand in the air, itching to point out that I may be a little confused there, identity-wise. Am I not, quite clearly, Black? Correct. And Very.
But Ye Old Apartheid Shoppe always had a solid, and gloriously bitter, selection of nonsensical identity categories to be issued with, and I got “Coloured”, which explains nothing and a lot of things, and makes talking about one’s culture to non-South Africans pretty awkward and amusing. I spent some time chastising the family member, and wrote it off as an anomaly, because for sure I haven’t heard people speak racist shit so brazenly since the late 80s/early 90s.
Strike 2 – Who the Fuck is Driving This Thing?
Next, the Uber I ordered on another windy Cape Town night (is there any other kind of Cape Town night?) got real awkward real fast. The driver, my age and also “Coloured” like me, picked me up around midnight and by 00:02 I was ready to cancel the ride. I think the rant he used all of his Uber stars on was inspired by the lights in the street going out: loadshedding; and he relieved himself of some strong feelings about how garbage this country is because of the ANC.
Now hey, I’m all for ousting abusive and useless governments. They’ve been running the country with the the planning and discipline of a colony of Tasmanian Devils (which doesn’t exist because they’re fucking anti-social and self-serving and CRAZY). And as someone who doesn’t have to endure the daily struggle of the average South African, I keep my ignorant mouth shut. But the consistent racially-charged way in which this man delivered his diatribe was what made me gag and start looking for exits from his rickety Toyota (side note: everything was an exit, the vehicle was held together by willpower alone. What happened to Ubers being all shmancy? I used to feel like royalty, now I’m lucky if the window rolls down and the seatbelts work).
He also did a clever thing when I started to grumble, by saying that he could tell I was one of those idealistic, lefty Coloureds who lived overseas and didn’t know what it was really like back home. Ooh, right in the guilt-sack. I think it’s bleeding, a little. I spent the rest of the ride mopping up the mess of my chaotically-constructed ego, trying to prove I was not some kind of Jenny from the Block, when I really should have just told him to shut up and stop being a racist fuck. His complaints made sense, his racism did not. My naivete really showed, though, in my surprise that this was happening at all. I’ve been home every year, it’s never been this open. Did the loadshedding blow a fuse in whatever forcefield that was holding all this racism at bay?
Strike 3 – She Just Started Ranting In the Middle of the Soda Aisle
One windy (fuck this wind!) afternoon I was mooching around the soft drinks section at my local Checkers. A woman, also Coloured, no more than ten years my senior (and therefore unable to coast on the ‘I am from a different tiiiiime’ excuse) started a conversation with me by pointing at the giant Coke Zero I hoisted into my trolley and told me how much weight she’d lost when she drank that stuff. Uh-oh. Unsolicited body-talk. Yay. Then she waved a tiny bottle of regular coke in my face and admitted that she gained it all back after switching back to regular coke. Uh-oh, person who answers questions nobody’s asking. Make it stop. All I wanted was my Coke Zero fix.
I nodded, half-smiled, and shrugged in a, “Well, whaddayagonnado” kind of way, and started to back up and away from the fridge.
She got the hint. Turned right around and started to move her own trolley in the opposite direction. Sweet relief. I thought to myself, maybe she wasn’t so nuts after-
You fool! She wasn’t leaving, but making a neat little 3-point turn with her plastic trolley, and in seconds she was barreling right toward me, while I was caught between her and a display of Coke Zero, the cursed drink that started all of this.
“You’re not FROM here, are you?” she bellowed as she descended.
She was smiling very genuinely when she lobbed this question at me, and I couldn’t marry the malicious words with what appeared to be not-so-malicious intent. Still, rude. In response I started proving my local creds by telling her every neighbourhood I’d lived in, and was about to list family members and point her to historical slave records, when she interrupted to say that I just seemed like someone who lived abroad, and that she meant it as some sort of compliment.
Oh. Whut.
-me, Checkers, 2023
She ferreted out that I lived in Norway, and began to gush, saying she would do anything, ANYTHING, to live in Europe. I said it was alright, I guess. It was, she insisted, so much more sophisticated, functional, and just wasn’t AFRICA. She hated Africa, everything about it. She didn’t want to live here anymore.
I fully get that people are currently frustrated in South Africa, and the 15 minute countdown to the next loadshedding session wasn’t helping. But I felt a little affronted that suddenly we were chucking over fifty other countries under the bus too. And with zero regard for my own mental wellbeing, I took the fucking bait and asked her exactly which parts of Europe she wanted to live, and which parts of Africa had pissed her off that much?
All of it. Ah. Thank you, yes.
And she’d lived in-? Yes, of course, she’s never stepped foot out of the fucking Western Cape. So… all parts of our continent were interchangeable…? I started to ask, but she had her retort locked and loaded: She had some kind of gripe about “shitting and pissing on the side of the road” which I had to give her points for for being a totally unexpected answer. I had not ever heard of this as a problem in our own country or any others, so far. Odd to imagine a river of piss and shit running almost 10 thousand kilometers from here to Cairo though, without there being some kind of show or Buzzfeed listicle about it. I didn’t have the heart to tell her what 4am on the street on any Saturday a few paces from Oslo’s most happening night clubs was like, and I also didn’t think she could handle what I saw beside the tram line Berlin on New Years’ morning in bright light of day. I knew a lost cause when I saw it, and feigned interest in some frozen pizzas across the aisle. But she wasn’t done.
“Oh yes, I’d do anything to go to Europe. We’re Europeans, you know. Originally.”
Screech. Even my trolley with its wonky wheel quivered and went silent as I stopped, mid-turn.
“Excuse me?”
I don’t know if my Labrador face changed into some other, much scarier creature, or if the look of a Labrador about to rip your face off is possibly scary enough. But she got flustered, and started saying that, well, they were unfortunate circumstances, how we Coloureds came to be, of course, but, you know, we were Europeans, really, you know, by heritage, and like, not like these, you know, Africans.
This sort of…broke me.
Again, I am conscious of the fact that South Africans, right now, are STRUGGLING. Jesus, life is just hitting them time and again with difficulties. Insane power cuts, the prohibitive cost of basic necessities, soaring crime and violence, no damn safe spaces for women, and gross, gross inequality (I won’t talk about how it was to live in Sea Point among all the super rich White folk who were massively oblivious to inequality, because this piece is about my struggle right now with racism within my own community).
Perhaps, because of how much everybody is struggling, the racism is no longer something to keep behind closed doors or to confess into a secret diary. It’s coming unsolicited, shameless, and masqueraded as a legitimate response to our current poor governance.
Boy did I feel stupid. I looked at the sticky pieces of my shattered bubble that lay around me and opened my mouth to speak. Nothing. I watched this seemingly ordinary woman, who has every right to be frustrated by the government, choose to hop over all her legitimate complaints and attach herself desperately, and ineffectually, to the gods of her mind whom she thinks she is descended from. In five minutes she engaged a complete stranger in some kind of desperate prayer to those who enslaved and raped and robbed her other ancestors, to come and beam her up and remove her from this world of apparent aliens.
“I’m not racist, you know”. She really said this. I was incredulous.
I felt as though I was part of this problem, because I wasn’t doing enough to dispel her falsehoods. Perhaps I was afraid of appearing to be what the Uber driver had accused me of the other day: an out-of-touch person with the privilege to go somewhere else. More, I was just wildly trying to imagine something that could cut through clear nonsense and make any kind of impact at all.
It got awkward as I counted to ten in my head, trying desperately to access my happy place of unlimited caffeinated drinks and salty popcorn, and eventually she laughed and did a sort of “But I won’t keep bothering you” wave of the wrist.
What could I say?
“You are a joke?”, “Please stop talking to people?”, “I hope you do go to Europe, but it’s Northern Finland with its iffy relationship with temperature and sun” or, “I wish that you were doomed to watch the pretty lady in glitter pants take a shit on the sidewalk beside the Berlin tram on New Years morning every day for the rest of your life?” Jesus, Berlin.
But, all I could say before she turned, was:
“You really should know your history”.
I suppose I’m having a particular reaction right now in part because of the frequency of this kind of interaction I’ve had with people who thought I would be OK with their words, and because perhaps now I’m ready to stop running from this shit. I’ve been using an exploration of history as my tool of choice to work through this stuff. It is both humbling and empowering. It’s also helped me look directly at all the internalised racism and misogyny I wish to purge from my mind and body, and the woman in the store showed me how fucking deep that shit can go. God, I want it GONE. Maybe it doesn’t manifest exactly the same way, but with me, my rich, brown skin has always been coated in a suffocating veneer of shame. Nobody else can see it, but it’s there, blocking my pores and turning everything inside toxic. If this is the case for other people, then there’s a good chance their hatred is rooted in that shame. And to that, I can only recommend a good dose of history, and not the selective kind where were magical people from Europe gifted us with some of their blessed DNA along with a free trip across the world and some perks that only looked like perks if you compared them to how bad all the other Black people had it.
And this shouldn’t have to be said, but I have no gripes about Europeans or Europe (well, of course I do, I have gripes about everything), I’m just miserable about the picture that so many Coloured people have painted and repeated to my delicate ears of our blessed European ancestry and how that has been associated with some kind of giftedness or greatness.
YUCK.
Wait! A Silver Lining
Guys. My trip wasn’t totally horrifying, and in fact, it was possibly the most love-filled, heartwarming and optimism-inducing trip home I’ve had, mostly for reasons that involve my kid, which I can’t go into yet. I had some fantastic experiences in which people opened my mind and showed me generosity, even reflecting my own prejudice (I’m looking at you, guy who I thought was scary but turned out to be a hipster).
First experience: as we checked into our Airbnb in Sea Point, the hosts were there to greet us and they were kind, and charming and acted like they were hosting beloved family. To continue the theme I had been following earlier, the couple were also Coloured, and had much to say about the current state of things in South Africa.
They looked me right in the face and declared that, with all the loadshedding, inflation, mismanagement, etc. they remained, I can’t believe I’m saying this: optimistic. They weren’t wealthy property moguls who could coast by on endless income streams, just pretty ‘ordinary’ Capetonians, much like the other people I had mentioned earlier. Except that I didn’t have to navigate an obstacle course of racism booby traps when we talked, and so thanks to my interaction with them, I was allowed to feel hopeful again. I also don’t know their history but, based on their age, there’s a good chance they endured some shit us younger folk haven’t had to. Forced removals and the like. They’ve seen shit get better and worse, and they are upbeat about it potentially getting better again. Whatever their reason, I want to hold on to them as another example of the kind of South African that I might meet, who is possibly less vocal about their positive attitude than those with negative ones, and generally more respectful and unlikely to accost a stranger in a shop or cab to bark their opinions at.
Second: in a quick hangout with my intrepid friend Salegga and her wonderful niece, Ayesha, we got to talking about the heritage project they are starting in collaboration with other people passionate about reclaiming the history of Claremont and Newlands that was lost after forced removals, starting from the earliest removals of the area’s Black residents. Listening to them speak, and remembering the incredible talks by the likes of Imam Rashied Omar and Reverend Chesnay Frantz, I felt this giddy sense hopefulness. They’ve seen and endured shit, and here they are, ready to get together over koeksisters and sweet tea and keep our histories alive. They didn’t even mind a rogue atheist managing their archives.
There were a few more, mostly my family being funny and weird and awesome, but this damn rant has gone on long enough and I’m going to end now.
Thanks for enduring my rant. The end.