7-8 April 1986: My Intro to Everyday South African Black-White Relationships
8 April 1986, 7:30PM, Urmson Family Home, Lombardy East – Johannesburg, South Africa
Having grown up around golf courses as the son of a country club golf pro, I found it interesting to learn that Bill Urmson and his two sons, Neil and Tony, are avid golfers. Yesterday afternoon, Mavis and I picked up Tony and two of his chums after they had finished a round at Modderfontein, a course owned by a huge dynamite factory on the northeast side of the city. The fairways appeared a bit dried out after the summer although the greens looked verdant from irrigation. Tony reported that the greens had been cut against the grain that morning which made them tough to putt. School kids are having a two-week Easter holiday right now, so the boys are on the course nearly every day. Tony shoots in the high 80s (very good for age 14!) while Neil seems more interested in rugby (the white South African national “insanity”) and cricket. He has won several cricket batting trophies. Tony and Neil remind me of American boys in the 1950s and 60s when I was growing up. They are very polite and quite capable of carrying on intelligent conversations with adults. Also, unlike my experiences with their American contemporaries of the 1980s, they actually listen to adults, ask good questions, and don’t interrupt. Of course, I can’t understand half of what they and their friends are saying as they talk ten miles a minute with heavy British South African accents and use a multitude of local slang expressions.
The big event of the
day at the Urmson home was Tootles giving birth to five puppies. Tootles and “husband”, Naughty, are cute
little brown and white terriers (some breed I’ve never heard of).
Family life in the evening often centers on the rather large screen color telly, with the family as often as not watching the Afrikaans-language station as the English one. The family is bi-lingual although of English descent. At English language schools (which Neil and Tony attend), Afrikaans is required from primary school on and vice versa for the Afrikaans schools. And, Neil and Tony are also learning Zulu at school – many white students are now learning an African language.
In some ways, life is reminiscent of Southern Pines, North Carolina (including the mild weather) where my family lived in the early 1950s, and where I attended a segregated kindergarten and elementary school. The family even has a maid and a gardener. But this new maid, Cecilia, is very different from the one employed by my dad’s boss, the head pro at Pine Needles Country Club (where all the players were white and all the caddies were black, of course). Mavis’s mother (“Granny”) reminds Mavis that blacks like Cecilia who come from rural areas in the native homelands are not able to distinguish household goods and their uses. Concepts like setting the table are foreign to them as they are used to sitting on the floor, legs crossed, and eating with their hands. The staple of their diet is mealie pap (a corn meal mush similar to grits – I had some yesterday – bland but not bad).
Mavis refers to Franz, their elderly black gardener, as their charity case. He supposedly has become slow and decrepit with age, so they bring in a bright, young black fellow every Wednesday afternoon to help him out. The young man works as a “butcher boy” the rest of the time. Mavis feels they can’t let the old gardener go as he needs the money and wouldn’t be able to find any other work at his age. Actually, I watched him work yesterday, and he seemed to be doing a good job. And Cecilia pressed my shirts very nicely. Maybe most any domestic help would seem great to me – you know how we Americans always complain that you just can’t find good help anymore, so what do we know?
Yesterday morning when I walked into the kitchen, Cecilia solemnly greeted me with, “Good morning, Master.” I had been prepared for this sort of thing from my readings about South African society, but it still seemed very strange. “Most white American men would be very uncomfortable with a black person calling them “master”, I explained to Granny. “Black American slaves called their owners ‘master,’ and most of us want to distance ourselves from the injustices of slavery.” Granny understood but said I mustn’t think of it that way. “Yes, I guess it’s just the custom here,” I acknowledged, after Granny pointed out that “master” was merely a term of respect. Still, it felt weird later on in the day at the supermarket when Granny asked the black lady behind the meat counter to “give the Master a piece of biltong (a chewy beef jerky and the staple of the Afrikaner Voortrekkers in the 19th Century) because he hasn’t tried it yet. (I found it quite tasty.) Maybe no superior-inferior inference should be drawn from terms like “master”, but I feel the word itself has negative connotations that cannot help black-white relations. It sets people apart and, if anything, blacks and whites don’t need language that divides them. These are very nice and well-meaning people I’m staying with. Yet “master” seems to symbolize an unhealthy, condescending attitude of whites towards toward black South Africans. And this attitude keeps resurfacing when, for example, Mavis gets impatient and short with the young black man operating the pump at the petrol station because she feels he is talking too loud. I know I’m being judgmental and that’s something I wanted to avoid. Actually, I don’t mean to be moralistic – it’s more of an observation.
I discussed the “master” issue with a chap at the local Rotary Club meeting last night. He had been in the Rhodesian Army for twenty years and felt that calling someone “Master” was just like an enlisted man saying “sir” to an officer. Okay, I get the point. But in the U.S. Army (I was a reservist for six years), at least “sir” has to do with rank and the responsibility and achievement it symbolizes. Here, it’s always a black person calling a white person by a title of respect and that feels “racist” to me.
Like Mavis with her gardener, however, I get the sense that many white people here genuinely care about the welfare of their black workers. Granny spoke about the fine “boy” (another term that bugs me) who worked for her and her husband for years on their farm in the eastern Transvaal. He had been their cook and always prepared excellent meals and took care of the kitchen without the least bit of supervision from her. After Granny’s husband died, she eventually sold the farm and moved to town. Her cook returned to his native Malawi (about 1000 miles northeast of here). Granny always writes him and sends him money at Christmas. He doesn’t read or write but has a friend read her letters and then dictates his responses. This year Granny received no response and is concerned that he may be ill or dead as he was getting up in years. She intends to write the teacher in his village to inquire about the cook’s health.
Last night I told Mavis and Granny about my friend Chris Mohr’s birthday party in Denver last November. He had a variety of South African wines at the party, and I asked where he had found them and why he happened to choose South African wines. Chris explained that the wine was really cheap – the liquor store had greatly reduced the price because no one was buying it. “Americans seem to be boycotting South African products,” I explained. Granny and Mavis were furious because they felt Americans had no understanding to the situation here. Americans are protesting apartheid but apartheid has been abolished, they said. While many aspects of apartheid are disappearing, it certainly hasn’t been abolished from what I’ve seen so far. For example, I considered taking a bus today after I had jogged several kilometers over to the post office in Edenvale. There were plenty of busses passing my way, but they were for non-whites only.
Rather than argue with Mavis and Granny, I expressed some agreement: “I wouldn’t mind Americans boycotting South Africa if they had taken the time to understand the situation,” I explained. “But most of them know very little of what’s going on here. They simply decide that it’s ‘in’ to protest something, so they do it. And Americans don’t stop to think how much economic and political power we have and how serious are the potential ramifications of our often hastily conceived actions, whether in Latin America or South Africa.” I suppose that’s part of why I’m here. This is a fascinating situation, a fantastic opportunity, and a fabulously intriguing country.
Comments
Post a Comment