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Published: November 3rd 2006
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I have been living in Stellenbosch for three months now and the oak-lined streets, the mountains glowing orange with each sunset, the Afrikaans language that floats around the campus and fills the background of my thoughts—these features and a thousand others greet me everyday. Slowly but surely they have become the sensations of home, the everyday commonalities that I hardly notice but cannot imagine Stellenbosch without.
This process of Stellenbosch becoming my home has been marked by countless distinct experiences, snapshots that so clearly displayed the reality of this place. Yet I have time and time again deferred the responsibility of pronouncing and exposing this place in all its style and shame. Perhaps this is because I recognize my ignorance and I fear that my short-sighted judgments cannot do this situation justice—each new encounter unfolds for me just one more dimension of this complex situation called South Africa, the child of a history of anguish and injustice. I shrink under the weight of the task of unearthing even the first layers of this place. By articulating the injustice and the beauty, my personal reflections take on concrete form; these thoughts become pieces of reality in you, in your reading of them. And by naming these truths, I must at the same moment confront myself because I too, have a role to play. I am situated in the midst of these complexities, in this place I call home. In my everyday life, I have become a participant of both goodness and injustice.
The truth is, Stellenbosh is a fairy tale. It is a lie. It isn’t real. Sure, you can place your feet firmly on the pavement and the coffee will still burn you if you drink it too fast. Hell, you can even sit in a classroom, listen to a lecture, acquire knowledge, and get a degree. On the surface, it all seems real enough. But just because it’s tangible doesn’t mean it’s true. Nope, not so. In fact, the entire White South Africa is a complete artificial construct. If you look close enough, it’s not so hard to see.
Look a little closer. They cook my favorite pizza down at Bohemia, the local pub. They sweep my floor and clean my toilet. They froth the milk in my cappuccino. They plant those beautiful orange flowers I pass by on the way to class. They build the apartments and repair the roads. They patrol the streets at night so I’m safe walking home.
And when their work is done, they return to the township, to homes made of cardboard and tin. They have no toilet or floor to scrub. You can forget about the pizza and cappuccino. And safety and security in a township? Are you kidding?
And here is the dream, that somehow everything we see is rightly ours. And by “we” I mean, us whites, of course. Perhaps this is a hasty generalization but I’m just telling you what I see. Look a little closer.
And here is the reality, that this entire white South Africa rests on thievery. The place was usurped by colonizers. The fantasy is a design of apartheid, and it lives on in the material inequalities inherited from the past. Yesterday’s segregation by law is today’s segregation by access to resources.
This fantasy world is not ours and it never was. This entire world is built with resources we stole by people we enslaved. And the fantasy depends on inequality. The entire dream—in all its beauty—is infested with injustice.
The problem is, when the lie is all you know, you never question it. And this lie is an intricate one, embedded in the very structure of this society. Injustice seen in its true form pierces the conscience and destroys the euphoria of the fantasy. So the fantasy must be protected by a towering wall of ignorance and inexperience.
My time here in Stellenbosch is a testimony to force of this fantasy. My days are a recycling of forgetting and remembering. These injustices that I once saw so clearly have faded into the background with the mountains and the thousand other features of daily life. I have wrestled the evil of apathy that comes with a life of constant comfort. I have struggled to remind myself again and again of the true context of my life here.
Every Wednesday I go to Kayamandi Primary School in the township and I help a handful of cool kids with their English pronunciation and vocabulary. I joke with Lucky about being a gangsta and try to get Lulama to crack a smile. Sometimes I ask them what they are going to do to change South Africa. Before I know it the hour is over. I get back in the minivan and return safely to campus and go on about my business writing papers and drinking coffee. I have no idea where those kids go once the final bell rings. I don’t know what their houses are made of or what they eat for dinner. I don’t know if their parents tell them how much they love them, if they have parents at all.
And the fantasy depends on me not knowing. The fantasy is structured to preserve itself, so the wall is built in. The very structure of this place restricts me from the experience of everyday life on the other side of the fantasy, with all its tastes and smells and joys and fears. I am barred from that post script to this paradise.
I have no conclusion to these reflections. Any word of closure I might offer would be utterly insincere and altogether false. With no conclusion in sight, I publish these thoughts, compelled by a sense of urgency to fill the silence. To make some attempt at truth.
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ChristinJ
Christin Marshall
That was good.