ON CARE AND BEING MADE IN SOUTH AFRICA
MADE IN SOUTH AFRICA – IDENTITY AND CARE
Last week Saturday I had the honour of virtually presenting, to an Italian audience, my book “Made in South Africa: A Black Woman’s Stories of Rage, Resistance and Progress” at Book City Milan. The event gave me the opportunity to re-acquainted with my book which has now been out for just over a year. It also allowed me to share my thoughts as they emerge in my book on identity, memory and care.
In exploring the theme of identity, I shared one of my earliest memories that distorted my sense of self and identity. It was my first memory of ever coming into contact with a white person. It was the 1980s, living in what was then called Port Elizabeth with my extended family. I was accompanying my aunt to town. I was probably four years old. I was given the instructions to behave, not touch anything and basically not to exhibit any traits of a four-year-old. We would be trespassing onto white terrain. I knew town as the place where I would see with my eyes the white people I had seen on TV. As we were walking through town, I made the dangerous mistake of letting go of my aunt’s hand. I got lost in a sea of white people and for a brief second, I reached for the nearest hand I could grab to anchor myself. I grabbed a white woman’s hand. She looked down at me and quickly pulled away from me. The look on her face was one of disgust, affront and confusion. Then with much quickness and alarm, my aunt scooped me up. A feeling of transgression washed over me. Very complex emotions for a four year old.
That moment is embedded in my memory because that was the first time, I felt my inferiority. Our inferiority. I felt unwanted, detested and unprotected. That to some extent still remains a part of my identity having grown up black and a girl in South Africa. Soon I was thrust into an integrating world. The people I vowed to never touch again were now my classmates, neighbours and fellow citizens. Now we were all South Africans. Being South African is living on a spectrum from hate to love, from belonging to alienation and from darkness to light. Being South African means reaching out your hand and performing the labour of humanising the very people who made you feel inhuman.
On the theme of care, I shared with the audience how our Constitution attempts to move us from this uncaring past towards a more caring society. It does so most strongly with its opening three words, “We, the People.” The decision to begin our Constitution with the word “we” was made by the very people who were for so long unseen and uncared for by the law. “We” is also a potent reminder that we care for others not to the extent of their citizenship but because of their humanity. There is nothing more caring than thinking in terms of all people as part of the “we.”
Thinking of the “we” was further exemplified by the work of the Constitutional Court and more specifically clerking for Justice Cameron. I often recall the moment when he asked what my plans were following my clerkship. I told him I planned to work for a big firm, buy a beach house and to have a driver. He took off his glasses and said with a tinge of disappointment- “I meant what are you going to do for others?” What are you going to do for the “we.” That is the question at the heart of a constitutional democracy. It is not a question only posed to the government. It is a question posed to each of us. In any truly caring society, it is not about what one can get for themselves. It is about what you can do for others. By constitutional design we have a responsibility to each other. The four year old in me wants to avenge my own marginalisation by caring to rise to the call of our Constitution to be part of the “we” despite our historical fracture and alienation.
