Post Apartheid Legacy

Coming to Africa, a topic on my mind was racism. How do people acknowledge one another based on race? Everyone knows about apartheid and the forced segregations of people. What is little known to the American public eye is the idea of race in the post apartheid era.

Recently I had a conversation with Vongani. It really didn’t have anything to do with race at the beginning. In fact we were talking about this girl that he liked. This is somewhat normal for Vongani. He is pretty open about who he finds attractive and so on. Anyways, I mentioned that if he liked her why not date her. He said no he could never date her and upon my enquiry as to why he said that she was Xhosa. Xhosa (pronounced Kosa…though the K is really a click…I haven’t mastered the art of its pronunciation yet) is an ethnicity of many of the black South Africans in the Cape region. Vongani is not Xhosa, but actually a mix of two other tribes. I still didn’t understand why he couldn’t date her. So what if she was Xhosa? He tried to explain to me that he wasn’t racist but tribalist. He wouldn’t date anyone that was not his own tribe. He explained that there are many customs within each tribe that he doesn’t want to negotiate that he prefers not to date anyone that is not of his own tribe. This is still a weird concept. I have had some friends whose parents have persuaded them to look for a mate within a certain ethnicity but for the most part I feel like there are so many caucasian people around me that it would be hard to find someone who wasn’t from a European American background. In that way ethnicity doesn’t even come into the picture.

Cape Town is a mixture of so many peoples. There are the blacks which include may of the indigenous tribes (Zulu, Xhosa, Banatu, and others that I cannot spell). Then there are the colored which I have think are the pacific islanders, Indians, Chinese, and so on. They were brought here with some of the slave trade when the Cape was a thriving port town. Finally most of the white South Africans are Afrikaans speaking. (I have since found out that calling them Afrikaaners is a derogatory word because it harkens back to their title during the apartheid. They prefer to be called Afrikaans speaking but most people still call them Afrikaaners) There is such a medley of people that were forcibly separated during the apartheid that for most I think that race and ethnicity are always on the mind.

I have also experienced a lot more more anti-Americanism than I anticipated to encounter. America is a big deal in the world eye. Many of my classes use texts that come from there and make comparisons to how the Americans do certain things. But also, the white South Africans have a severe resentment towards the Americans. I talked to Lane’s roommates about this feeling and they agreed that white South Africans are jealous of Americans. Americans don’t have the baggage of being the oppressors during apartheid. Black South Africans don’t hate them and actually befriend Americans whereas there is a lot of resentment still against white south africans. This is in no way all of the white south africans that I have met but it is just a generality that I have noticed. I think it has to do with post-apartheid legacies and people have not totally moved on. Most all of my classmates have lived through the apartheid and it is still fresh in people’s mind. It will be interesting to see how things develop and what I uncover in my investigation. I am not really sure how I feel about what I have heard and seen but it is definitely interesting and something that I wasn’t expecting.