“Our memories give us voice and bear witness to history, so that others might learn. So they might celebrate our triumphs and be warned of our failures.” – Mohinder Suresh
September is a bittersweet month for me. I associate it with loss, but it is also my birth month, and the month I started this blog in. It’s whiplash from the first to the last day, and I find this striking because that’s exactly what the month’s weather is also like in South Africa. Like it might start snowing while you’re sunbathing after a really bad thunderstorm. Halfway through the month we’re operating in trauma territory and I keep thinking, “I just need to get to the 22nd.” There is nothing significant about the 22nd (except Virgo coming to an end if you’re into that), but it feels like a pretty good date to start feeling good again. It is also the best time to, you know, grow up a little.
The easing of the lockdown means we can travel within South Africa for leisure and so we did. My family took a day trip to the beautiful Hartebeespoort region of the North West province to a safari park and went on a game drive. The drive up was nostalgic because when I was about 10 years old we went to an elephant sanctuary in the region and that, to date, is still my best memory of spending school holidays in Joburg with my cousins.
Our driver “Big Boy” was lovely and made the drive far more interesting than most safaris where you are bombarded with information about everything all the time. We sat at the back of the vehicle because coronavirus, but also because the rest of the seats were two-person seats and we wanted to huddle up together. We were obviously excited to be there because it was our first trip outside the city in over 6 months but it felt weird crossing the provincial border because a few weeks ago that was illegal. We took in the scenery, crossing the Crocodile River that I grew up hearing about from my grandfather and the terrain reminded me very much of Lesotho. These are the small details I never knew to notice as a 10 year old and it was interesting revisiting things I used to do as a child but with the eye and attention of a bigger child. We saw wildebeest, more lions than I had ever seen in my life, zebras, one ostrich, giraffes, wild dogs, hyenas, cheetahs, and two leopards; one of which was a black panther. I was that day years old when I learnt that “black panther” means any animal from the panthera genus as long as it’s black. So if you ever see a black lion, it’s a black panther! Sorry T’Challa.
After the game drive we went further into the province for lunch and entered white small town South Africa. The first place we arrived at was packed and as usual the only POC were the waiters, and we felt really uncomfortable and unsafe. So, we sat down to strategize and my Mme made the decision to remove us from that space because she has had to do that all our lives as a white woman raising black children in middle class South Africa. I quickly Googled “black people-friendly picnic spot near me” and we made our way to a small caravan park. There were no black people in sight and the Tannie at the ‘reception’ addressed us in Afrikaans and Mme greeted her in Sesotho because she is extra! We paid and drove into the park, which is on the Hartebeespoort Dam and we found a spot for our picnic and just took in the views and the calm. Around 2pm, a few Indian and black families arrived and destabilized the Afrikaner fisherman colony we had found at the park, and we were very happy about that.
The trip back home was a reflection on how we felt at the racist restaurant and at the Afrikaner fishing colony, what safari and leisure look like to us and our general feelings about the Caucacity in the outdoors. Since then, I have been thinking of what it must have been like in the late 1990s/early 2000s when we went on all these adventures as children, oblivious to the racism which I imagine was far more overt and blatant at the time. I am both sad for and in awe of every single member of my family -not only for braving through- for also setting the boundaries and making sure our experiences of the outdoors were the same quality as all the white children we played with. My first experience of racism was in the absence of adults when I was about 13 but I immediately understood what was happening because growing up in racially diverse households made it urgent for the adults to explain to us how the world would treat us and to teach us (while we were potty training) that we were not the problem. I can only understand my mother’s pain and anger that she was not there to shield me from a racist when I was 13 now that I, as an adult, saw my parent instantly feel my discomfort without me even saying anything and springing into protective mode.
I hope our (proverbial) children will never know what a “white” space feels like. I hope we (proverbially) will never be parents who are always on high alert ready to remove our (proverbial) children from racist spaces that make them feel unwanted and unworthy of personhood. I hope they will not be adults who relearn trauma every time they go back to the places we took them for their 2nd birthdays.
Views From The South 