Wednesday-Thursday, 14-15 May 1986: A Racially-Biased School Competition

May 18, 12:00 noon, home of Woolfie & Irene Joffa, Bloemfontein 

On Wednesday night, my hosts, Woolfie & Irene, took me to a quiz sponsored jointly by the local Rotary Club and Perm, a building society (the South African equivalent of a savings and loan bank).  The quiz was a sort of trivial pursuit for secondary school students.  Three schools were represented:  CBC (Christian Brothers College), an English-medium coed school run by Catholic brothers but attended by students of a variety of faiths; Grey, a duel–medium (English and Afrikaans) boys’ school; and Oranje, an Afrikaans-medium girls’ school. 

If none of the students could answer a question, it was thrown open to the audience.  Being a pretty-good Trivial Pursuit player, I figured I’d clean up but many of the questions were about South African trivia (What was Lord Kitchener’s first name?  Damned if I know.)  However, when the students didn’t know the name of the founder of Salt Lake City, my hand immediately shot up:  “Brigham Young!”

“Correct.  Say, you sound like you might be from somewhere around there.”

“About 500 miles east of there,” I replied.  “Ek is ‘n Amerikaner.” [I am an American].  My response was met with laughter and applause. 

Left:  Horatio Herbert Kitchener (First Earl Kitchener) (1850-1916), a senior British Army officer and colonial administrator, was known for his scorched earth policy against the Boers during the Second Boer War (1899-1902).  

Photo source:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Kitchener,_1st_Earl_Kitchener

Right:  Brigham Young (1801-1877) led Mormon pioneers from Illinois to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847.  He founded Salt Lake City, Utah and was the second president of the LDS Church.  Photo source:  https://historytogo.utah.gov/brigham-young/

   

The two boys from Grey ran away with the contest.  Actually five schools had been scheduled to compete, but the students from Lekhutlong and Moemedi (both black schools) didn’t show up.  Woolfie and Irene commented to me that they should have at least had the courtesy to let the organizers know they weren’t coming.  But this is the way blacks are, they claimed. 

The next afternoon as I was returning from Lesotho in Tony’s Mercedes sedan, he and I got to talking about the quiz and the black schools’ no-shows.  He said that students from these black schools had attended a previous quiz as part of the audience.  I wondered if perhaps the black kids had been intimidated in part because it seemed that most of the questions dealt with WHITE history, literature, current events, and general knowledge.  Tony, an insurance agent and politically-reasonable fellow, agreed.  He had been involved with the organization of the quiz and said he complained to the people who wrote the questions that they needed to be more racially-balanced.     

After I got back to Bloem, Woolfie again brought up the black schools’ no-shows. I pointed out the problem of racially-biased questions.  He simply could not or was not willing to see my point, denying that the questions had a white bias.  Furthermore, he felt that including more black history questions, etc. would be patronizing.  He seemed to almost be looking at the issue as an either-or situation.  Now, Woolfie seems to me to be a relatively reasonable gentleman.  So if he feels this way, think how the average white South African dumb-shit would react.  Chalk it up as another example of lack of empathy for cultural differences.  Lack of understanding and empathy runs deep here, especially among older people. 

May 19, 4:20 AM 

This may be the first time I’ve woken up in the middle of the night after a dream and actually tried to put it on paper.  In my dream, I am confronted by Robert Blasi, a long-ago friend from Lippitt Grade School and Lockwood Junior High School in Warwick, Rhode Island.  Bob tells me that my writing is very self-indulgent, full of me…me…me…  I suppose he’s right. His sleep-inspired accusations probably came out of some thinking I did on a walk after dinner tonight.   Bob was a smart guy and, like me, a good student.  I suspect he settled down somewhere in New England with a successful career and is a devoted Italian-American, Roman Catholic husband and father.  And what the hell am I doing?  Forty years old and still searching for the meaning of life.  A rudderless ship wandering around South Africa writing words that few people, if anyone, will bother to read. 

Still, the kind of life I imagine Bob to be leading just doesn’t fit for me.  And life just isn’t the way I think it should be.  Perhaps I’ve never grown up but where is it written that I need to?  From Werner Erhard of the EST Training (yes, I got involved in lots of New Age stuff in the late 70s and early 80s), I learned to accept what “is”.  But it’s hard for me to accept what “is” here in South Africa and in this unjust and crazy world in general.  I used to think I could change the world, now I’m just trying to understand it.