Waving around the old SA flag and perceptions

I have been wanting to write another blog on the fascinating phenomenon of perception for some time. Khaya Dlanga’s recent blog on banning the old flag was a good way to ground it in a controversial, hotly debated example of perception.

I sympathise with Khaya’s impassioned request for the banning of the old South African flag. But the use of the flag is all a matter of perception and such a banning, in all fairness, should result in a domino effect featuring a reduction ad absurdum.

My first thought as I read the article? Yes, I respected Khaya’s gut reaction to seeing the flag at a sporting event and how he associates it with a terrible past. I think it was silly and irresponsible of that person to wave the flag about. But it has brought up an important debate on perceptions and what some condemn and others condone. For example, why is it that Khaya has not written an indignant response to Zuma and Co’s “Bring me my machine gun?” chant, (perhaps he has, I stand to correction) which, just going by the gleefully chanted words and accompany dance routine, endorses, nay, celebrates violence and suggests military rule or rule by force?

Then, and here is the reduction ad absurdum and the result of the perceived need to ban the ou vlag, then surely one would have to ban the communist flag and its resplendent association with oppression and butchery in Russia and China, to mention only two, then, by the same token ban the communist party in South Africa along with that saccharine word “comrade”? As we all know, under the tender administrations of Stalin and Mao alone, countless millions were slaughtered whilst the commie bastards tried to make communism work. (I dislike it when people trot out exact figures on the wholesale figures of the massacres; they are lies, no one knows the final, devastating figures. It somehow gives a controllable neatness to deciding on a precise tally. It was completely out of control! Bloody commie lunatics! Destroyers of life and limb!)

In the context of Khaya’s call for the banning, I find it quite sobering that all the ANC and SACP supporters do not question banning certain emblems like the communist flag and that machine gun song which represent wholesale human slaughter and nor do these appear to be of any concern to Dlanga at all. Perception, perception, thine name is delusion or denial.

Those commie emblems mentioned above, and the ANC machine gun song (not a commie emblem) do not nauseate me either, but the fact that they are “okay”, including communist ideology and words like “comrade” in the context of Khaya’s call for banning the old flag is somewhat disturbing. Truly, to quote the great Czech writer Milan Kundera, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”.

By coincidence, just before reading Khaya’s blog, I had just shot off a reply to Richard P. on my blog “Discrimination and Intimidation” about how some bitter, chip-on-shoulder type South Africans still fly the old flag in New Zealand. I left it at that and just assumed he would infer what that meant, or rather, how flying the old flag is perceived by me. I thought it was self-explanatory. It is not, I now realise. What did I think would be clear as to why they were still waving about the old flag? It represents, to some older ex-pats in New Zealand, a symbol for holding onto and mourning a bygone, glorious Boer Republic, their identity: something they were unable to let go of even though they had left South Africa and thus put the country behind them. Such maudlin irony, and surely any self-respecting boer would want to wave the vierkleur, as many Afrikaner Nationalists did not like the old South African flag? The symbol is backed up by a parochial attitude. Having been to New Zealand I found the mindset of those particular ex-South Africans to be bitter and destructive. They think they are better than others and give the good saffers in New Zealand a bad name.

I digress. I have been wanting to do a piece on perception for a long time. It is just uncanny how people can perceive events, the old flag waved at a sporting event, the way a woman smiles at me and so forth. Is she coming onto me? My twinkly blue eyes? No, she just does not quite know how to point out my fly is open.

I thought when people laughed at me in China they were being mocking because of my past, schoolboy conditioning, but they are actually delighted, even incredulous, to see a foreigner, still a rare species in many parts of China.

John Milton was dismayed when people related to and loved his Satan in Paradise Lost. Not quite what the passionate Christian poet had in mind. Samuel Richardson was also horrified when people felt that his poor victim, Clarissa, in the epistolary novel of the same name, was a naughty seductress, and not a rape victim of the dastardly Lovelace. All perception, dear fellow. As Lawrence Durrell puts it in the last sentence of Justine, “Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”

As I sometimes feel the need to write lessons in Shanghai that make people aware of cultural differences and perceptions and that what we see often just contains our own baggage (the debate on the ou vlag being an example), I came up with the following example for adult Chinese English language learners. Please go though the following simple exercise, dear reader, on heightening our awareness of how our perceptions are not the facts. Try forgetting you know it is an exercise on the deceptions of perceptions. My students are completely unaware in the beginning:

It is very late at night. A full moon is shining down on the street. Jack and Bill ease open the door to the house. The lounge is dark. Inside the lounge are a sofa and a coffee table. On the coffee table are some large dolls. Against the wall is a broom. There are two bookshelves, two lamps and a waste basket. There is a small dog sleeping in a basket next to a suitcase. The two men are hoping to get to the TV room on the other side of the lounge. They do not want to make a noise and wake anyone up. They have brought a piece of juicy meat with poison in it for the dog.

1) Who do you think Jack and Bill are?_______________________________________

2) What are they doing? __________________________________________________

3) Bill says to Jack, ‘hey, be careful of that rake.’ Jack knows it is not a rake, but he knows what object Bill is talking about. What object is Bill talking about? ______________

4) Bill, while watching Jack, knocks over a lamp, but as it falls, Jack catches it. Bill says, ‘put it on the box’. Jack knows it is not a box, but understands what Bill means. What does Bill mean? _______________________

5) Jack tosses the meat into the basket and the dog wakes up. But the dog attacks Bill. ‘Hit it with that statue!’ says Bill . Jack knows it is not a statue. What is it?____________

6) He hits the dog and the dog falls down. Bill says, ‘now put the stupid animal in the bucket’. Jack knows it is not a bucket, but he knows what it is. It is a ________________

Just then…

Just then one of the bookshelves slides open and there is a light beyond. Bill realises it is not just a bookshelf; it is a big _________ that looks like a bookshelf. There are two women standing there, very angry. One of the women says, ‘Jack and Bill, as your wives, we are very disappointed that you have come home from that office party so late. In fact it is two AM in the morning. Will you please explain yourselves?’

7) Who did you think Bill and Jack were in the beginning of the story?

________________________________________________________________________

8) Who do you think they are now? _________________________________

9) Why did you think they were thieves? (Your perception of them was that they were thieves.) ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

10) Which man owns the house?_____________

11) Why do you think that? (Two reasons.)

_____________________________________

So what does perception mean, in your own words? Give examples of misperceptions from your own life.