Apartheid

I went to the Apartheid Museum the other day, which is a really good way to recognize the absurdity of racialized laws, and also a good way to make you feel that your own country has its crap to deal with, but hey, you're not South Africa, and that's gotta count for something.

Honestly, a lot of the stuff at the museum just brings home how awful American segregation was because there are so many parallels, and somehow you can get so outraged at other people's flaws and forget your own. That way lies madness, friends. And self-righteousness, which is the same thing. So I'd be in the museum going "They separated out the black children and gave them inferior educations--that's AWFUL! Oh, yeah, we did that too." "Look at how they didn't allow people of color to choose where they lived and they paid them less...wait, never mind."

But the craziest part was that when they assigned race to people after the apartheid era began in 1948, and you had to carry a pass book that said your race and where you were allowed to live and work, etc., so much of it was arbitrary that people could, and did, successfully appeal. "I'm not colored, I'm white" and then they'd win. By the way, the prize is getting to be human.

So speaking of colored, that was one of the three main castes under apartheid: white, colored, and Bantu , or black. Colored was the in-between caste: people of mixes origins. While they had nominally greater rights than blacks, they still suffered discrimination, relocation and most of the other ills of apartheid, and were a significant part of the liberation struggle. I've heard it suggested several times that the colored are the people who have suffered the most psychologically, although perhaps not materially. Under apartheid, they were too black to be white, and now that the ANC is running things, they are too white to be black. It's like having a whole social class of mixed-race kids, and they never know where they belong.

Father Terry--you will remember him, children, as the priest who *didn't* arrange for me to meet Desmond Tutu--is colored. He married a white woman when that was still illegal. I believe in order for it to be OK--and this is where we truly see the absurdity of the race laws--she had to voluntarily give up whiteness and become colored. Incidentally, can you even imagine what a weapon that could be in a marital spat? "I gave up being white for you and you can't even walk the damn dogs?" Wow.

I went with him yesterday to drop off some donations to a parish in Khayelitsha, a township outside Cape Town. He was talking about the parish priest, who is black, and the great work he is doing, and then added "He's a great chap, but he's said that colored people have no culture, so I really want to kick his arse." Now, aside from the fact that people saying "arse" is always funny, and that he said it somewhat in jest, there was an undercurrent of hurt there as well. The apartheid government did a really good job of pitting tribe against tribe and black against colored, and they are still reaping the whirlwind.

This country is beautiful and wretched, with such big problems and such vast potential. Like all of us, I suppose.