The persona an oxymoron.
I know I’m not the only one experiencing this. We need to start talking about this; because we need to start somewhere. Do I think in isiZulu, my home-language, and write in English? Or do I think and write in English?
Having grown up in a middle-class family with parents who ensured you slept with a full tummy, and ensured you received the best education. Best education meant schooling within an environment with mostly white students and teachers, a conscious middle-class preference in post-apartheid South Africa. No matter how hard this is for our parents to admit. Our parents, pan-Africanist at heart, but the realities they experienced as children living in apartheid, children of apartheid. Their experiences, and the experiences they carry of their parents, my grandparents: These weigh heavy on them, and probably even on me. In spite of this, circumstances are such that I have not been pressured with the burden of studying as a means to provide for my family.
I went to an all-girls boarding school in the Midlands. The majority of girls in the boarding house were the daughters of white farmers; land-owners. In Primary, in Zululand, I travelled an hour a day to get to a Primary school where the children were mostly the sons and daughters of white farmers; again land-owners. My parents were the ‘then’ emerging black middle-class family. Evidently, me and these schoolmates came from different backgrounds but we were apparently being cultured the same by means of the Primary and later, high school Boarding rules, so to speak. These rules required me to best learn this language (English) so one day, I too, leave my parents’ house and provide for myself. English, for them, is their first language, to me it will always be an avenue for a better life. Unlike them, from as early as primary, English for me becomes an investment I can later use as capital for my own future.
In all my Primary schooling years, every Sunday afternoon my baby sister and I would make the journey to salon where our afros would be tamed into neat, presentable cornrows. When the situation demanded, wool was used, but it had to be black wool. I still remember hating Sunday afternoons. The sitting, the pulling, and the pain. At this age, you do not complain. How would I have articulated my complaints? Because I knew if my hair is not tidy I would get scolded at school. At that age, how would I have expressed the discomfort? It’s not like I was the only black school child who routinely did this.
Uniformity was stringent and the primary school shop sold all the items of clothing we had to attend school in. It was compulsory we all look the same (at least in terms of clothing, from the outside), with clothes bought from the old-lady at the shop, a farmer’s wife. I’m not exaggerating, it’s Zululand. I still remember her husband, he was a grounds keeper and spoke a lot of ‘is’fanakalo’ (broken isiZulu). This used to impress me. What! A white man who speaks isiZulu. It always intrigued, it was rare. English was compulsory for me, isiZulu wasn’t for him.
In primary we had to carry cooler boxes sold at the school shop, but my father bought my sister and I’s at a supermarket. They were bigger, and a very bright red. Ignore the fact that they lasted forever, and were strong (so we could sit on them while we ate); they were different, and you know what that means in primary school.
For some reason people are always of the assumption that in mixed-race schools the white and black kids get along and don’t see their skin differences. This is not the case, I’ve never had a white best friend as some may expect. Did I befriend girls of other races? Yes of course. But my closest friends were still the ones that were more like me and they were black. We were the weekend girls who were not ‘weekly boarders’ and only went home during school holidays; not every weekend. No one had to say it, we knew it was because our parents could not afford it; an unspoken reality. Unbothered, on Saturdays we’d play all the games we didn’t get a chance to play during PE (Physical Education), ushumpu, amathini, u-donki, umashigoshi ; just to name a few. Even the weekend boarding school meals were different; ‘heartier’ meals. Come Monday we’d go back to being basketball players, swimmers, hockey players, violinists and the meals would be leaner again. Monday dinner meal: an unskinned boiled potato, green beans and a slice of turkey.
During school holidays I’d be back at home, where mom made sure we were up by seven thirty AM because she didn’t want us to become like “ those lazy spoilt, model-c kids who slept all day”; there were chores to be done. Even though I have been going to multiracial schools since primary, at no point was I allowed to communicate with my parents, at home, in English. That language is for school and passing schooling so you can get into a good University. Its always had a purpose outside of home. It is not for home: “Kukhulunywa isiZulu la ekhaya (In this household only isiZulu is spoken).”
During these school holidays, on Sundays, we’d go to a nearby township to attend church. There, you are almost glorified for going to a predominantly white high school. “ Uhlakaniphile fanele ube udokotela ( you are so smart, you are going to be a doctor),” they’d say. Or you’ll find the odd umkhulu wanting to constantly converse in English with you, in the presence of my mates who were attending schools in the township area. It used to make me want to hide. If my parents were within the vicinity I’d quickly glance at them, hoping to get approval as to whether I can reply in English or what! Awkward moments. It is at these awkward moments I learnt to just reply to umkhulu in isiZulu, and eventually he stopped pestering me with his English ‘outside of the school boundaries’. There were a couple of families like us in the church, those who, on Sundays, head to the township, to church. Some of their kids spoke English everywhere and anywhere; at church, funerals, weddings; in spaces where they’d only be black faces. I was not raised this way.
This is why when I started Varsity it confused me when I was fitted under this banner of ‘black kids who speak English anywhere, everywhere’. I couldn’t understand how, after my parents worked so hard for us no to fit in this category, how did it happen? Why were there fellow blacks who perceived as me ‘that black girl’ I fought so hard not to be? I respect the way my parents raised me and am very proud of it! It confused me.
University grew me up. It exposed me to the depths of people’s poverty and desperate realities. It is one thing to read the newspapers, and watch the 8’oclock news. It’s another to have a friend you live with at res ask you for food because she has no money for groceries. Or help another friend with her suitcases, as they take the earliest taxi back home ‘emafamu’ (rural area) because they have been financially excluded. How can I complain when a Durban student committed suicide just the other day and it did not make national news headlines? The student was refused a loan to study; not poor enough for welfare and not wealthy enough for survival. Such situations thereafter made me realize I had no reason to complain, I was being petty in the face of it all.
I also had to discover I had to live with the realization that the slight privilege that comes with being raised in a middle-class black family means you have to work even harder to prove yourself among black peers, from less privileged backgrounds, in the same space as you. It’s a truth we fear to articulate, especially the older generation with strong political affiliations. You must prove that you are not where you are because of the ‘twang’ you have when you speak English.
I also learnt to be empathetic towards my mates’ struggles, but to also not be apologetic of the choices my parents made to get me where I am right now; a PhD candidate, no wait: a Black, Female, PhD candidate in South Africa. We, the offspring of the first black middle- class generation of post-apartheid. For the #FessMustFall movement we stand as the ‘missing middle’; able to hustle registration payments for tertiary but now annual fees are too expensive because Model-C schools, and their demands, finished all our parents money. Who was sold dreams here? Us or our parents?
Our parents and grandparents fought for freedom, fought to rip the claws of apartheid from their being. Their victory gave us the opportunity to educate ourselves but how did they deiced to leave their former masters in positions to teach and tool us? Our elders have not taught us to fight like them, to fight like they did. Now, all we have are the master’s tools. Our elders have forgotten what their elders once forgot before them:
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” Audre Lorde
Statistics will shock you when you check how many of us actually get there, I mean get to PhD level and all. I had to learn that even so, I may still be viewed as a ‘sell out’, as one who got where I am because of privilege, the assumed black middle class privilege. I too wish I could tell of the sacrifices my parents have had to make for my education but I fear doing so will unintentionally make it seem like I make trite the dire struggles of others. I do not blame this finger-pointing at times, people are struggling, stuck in circumstantial cycles of poverty that are hard to escape. Then they ask the question: If you are black, how did you then actually escape this? Why are you here and some are there? Its these hard questions I have to face, whilst also facing the realization that the entire system in itself is rigged. Rigged by institutional racism that flashes its face repeatedly as I too try to escape it at every corner. I cannot complain, how can I when I know the depth of other people’s daily struggles? This means I am faced with the dilemma of either fighting it silently or risk being placed, with my peers, in the depths of poverty; with ‘English’ at mouth.
