Racism, we have to deal with it every day

By Siphumelele Zondi

I was recently tagged in a tweet asking how long black people will complain about racism and blame everything on it. Whenever I engage a group of white people about racism, whether in the work place or social settings, there will always be those that would say racism is over and we should move on, sing kumbaya together and continue pretending that we are a rainbow nation that socialises together and with all its colours in harmony with each other. The same sentiments are often shared by many white callers of talk-radio stations when race is discussed. They would like us to discuss climate change, rhino poaching and crime but NOT racism because racism is supposedly over in South Africa.

Then there was a Penny Sparrow, oh no she’s unique. Then there was Nicole de Klerk, many would say that she is in the minority. I wonder if racists really are in the minority in the white community or if we say so because many don’t know and don’t realise that what they are doing is racism and it is wrong because that is just how they have been socialised.

As black people we face racism on almost a daily basis in South Africa. Sometimes it’s subtle and many white people would then tell you that what you saw is not really racism when it is. You learn how to spot it when you are black and are living in South Africa.

Here I have decided to document some of my experiences from when I was a child all the way up to adulthood. All of these took place in post-apartheid South Africa, an era that supposedly has racists in the minority.

My first experience of racism that I remember happened when I was 10 in a Pietermaritzburg private school. I was in Mrs Kotze’s class and I think I was somewhat of a marvel to her, I didn’t make sense. I was nothing like what she was used to. One day she said it: “I met your dad the other day and I told him to speak to you in English. You speak too much Zulu.”

When I was older, my father finally told me that Mrs Kotze had said I was too smart of a child to be speaking that much isiZulu. My father in his stubborn nature insisted even more that we communicate in isiZulu at home as English would come naturally since I spent more time in school anyway. I also realised that to Mrs Kotze, my Zulu language was too inferior to be spoken in her class, especially by someone she had identified as smart. Smart people should speak English, maybe Afrikaans, but never Zulu and she was going to let her feelings known to my father.

White South Africans would not see this as racism but it is. In this country we’ve learned to link intelligence to languages, not just any language but to those spoken by white South Africans who have their foundations in Europe. White South Africans are likely to tell you about how they are learning French, Spanish or Portuguese but never inferior African languages like isiZulu, Sesotho or even Swahili. In order for a black person to appear as intelligent to white people then they must speak English, not just anyhow but in a twang that is similar to that of whites and then they would really be considered intelligent and get told that they “speak so well”. “You speak so well” is a line that’s made me walk out mid-conversation in many instances as the focus would not be on what I am saying, but on the twang.

Racism didn’t stop in Mrs Kotze’s class as it continued to Mr Harry’s the following year. The day after a parent-teacher evening in school, Mr Harry asked me why my father had left early the previous evening. It’s a story I was to also hear about from dad when I was much older. Dad had arrived in school to meet with Mr Harry as per appointment. Mr Harry decided he was going to take longer than scheduled with the white parents who had arrived before my father and that meeting went into my father’s time and then as a result Mr Harry skipped my dad to attend to the parents who were scheduled for a time after my father’s. My father got angry and left.

When I was in high school Mrs Moffat saw another black boy and I running in the corridors and she called us to her office to find out why we had been running there. We were high school kids chasing each other as high school kids play, but not to school counsellor and English teacher Mrs Moffat. We were black kids running on the corridors of a school that was previously reserved for white children. Mrs Moffat probably remembered the late 1980s or the early 1990s before our kind was there, when the school only had white children.

After we gave her our story, we didn’t expect what followed from the school counsellor who should listen to pupils’ problems and assist them with advice even though there was no problem there as we were school kids who were playing as kids play. On that day, as she screamed at us, she said: “Do you realise that it’s a privilege and not a right for you people to be in this school? I can go to the headmaster right now and all you people can be expelled from this school.”

I was shocked as she was superior to us by virtue of being a teacher. I knew it was racist but I was scared of confronting her or reporting her because of her position. I was afraid I would truly get expelled if I said anything about it. Later my father would tell me that my brother would complain about Mrs Moffat’s racism. I would dismiss him and tell him that it’s because my brother is a fire starter, but I truly didn’t want him to get marginalised by the character who had threatened to get me expelled because I had been running in the school’s corridors.

It wasn’t my only experience of racism in high school. A boy in a higher grade muttered the word “kaffir” as he walked away after I had kicked him out of the tuck shop line when he had cut in front of me. I remember following him and asking him to repeat what he had said and he never did. Now this is a young man who probably didn’t remember a time when there was a white government, as I don’t, but someone in his environment had taught him that black people are “kaffirs” and should be seen as beneath black people. I guess he had also been taught that it is socially unacceptable to tell black people that they are beneath white people to their face hence his struggle to repeat the words when I asked him to so I could hear properly what he really thought of me.

Later when I was in university and looking for a flat to rent, I had a few incidents of agreeing on viewing dates until right at the end when I would say my name. I would insist on Siphumelele in full and as a result quite a few places would be “taken” in a space of a few minutes of them being available. I even remember one letting agent telling me that she didn’t want my whole extended family from the rural areas to move into the bachelor flat she was about to rent out to me. I saw that it annoyed my dad but 18-year-old me didn’t see it for what it was, racist. I was just puzzled by why she thought my family was from the rural areas when we are not and why she thought I would move an extended family in there when the lease clearly stated that only two people could stay in the bachelor flat.

Recently when I was looking for a place to buy, I asked one agent why the previous owners were moving out. The Afrikaans man told me that he didn’t know but believed that the extended family had moved in and the two-bedroomed town house I was viewing on that day had become too small for the owner. There was that argument again. My belief is that the argument comes from apartheid when black extended families were forced to live like sardines in four-roomed houses because that’s where the government had said they must live. White estate agents somehow have failed to read and understand the history of this country, as if the lack of space in townships wasn’t by design.

When I was dealing with another estate agent, I told her that I wouldn’t be buying from her because she repeatedly refused to say my name and eventually asked me for an easier name. I asked her how she would feel if I did the same and whether she didn’t see her refusal of saying African names as racist. She phoned me back later to apologise and said she now realised how that would be seen as racist as she too wouldn’t want someone else to ask for an easier name, I proceeded to tell her that I still wouldn’t be buying from her. That experience happened repeatedly with different Afrikaans estate agents. Some wouldn’t even ask for an easier name, they would just rename me Sipho. I don’t know why many white people don’t think that learning African names when you live in Africa is important and means you value and acknowledge the people with whom you are in conversation. You see them as equals whose identities are as important as yours.

These are just a few of my post-apartheid South Africa experiences of racism that I face on a daily basis. Sometimes I see it in shops when a white person is shouting and screaming at a black employee because the white shop owner doesn’t stock the product they want. I would often intervene and ask whether they would shout at the white owner of the establishment in the same way if they appeared.

White people tell us black people that we shouldn’t discuss racism because it makes them get in touch with their own racism which they have taught themselves that it isn’t racism at all.

Siphumelele Zondi is a senior producer and anchor of Network, a technology programme on SABC News. Twitter: @SZondi