Rethinking narratives, both past and present
‘IT’S a goal, it’s a goal,” shouted Paulie. “No, it can’t be. The ball rolled over the goal post,” I retorted. The argument, whether it was a goal or not, shifted between Paulie and I for about a minute. It was our casual Sunday street soccer match and the outcome of the game was important, especially until the next match, the following Sunday.
The street was largely devoid of vehicular traffic. In those days, we used the ubiquitous milk crate to construct makeshift goal posts. These crates were also used as improvised wickets for a street cricket match. As the argument became heated, we decided we needed the intervention of our legendary Uncle Gona.
Besides being a respected elder of the community, he was also involved in the development of non-racial sports in Durban.
These arguments sometimes erupted, because winning was sacrosanct and prestigious. The soccer match and the outcome became the basis of lively debates and “hindsight” chronicles.
Teasing individuals and sometimes praising them was the mainstay of these anecdotes. One week you could be a hero and the next, a villain. It was a kind of Hegelian dialectic in action. No one wanted to be the villain and this led to serious contestation. We all expected an immediate synthesis to the “crisis” at hand.
“Let’s ask Uncle Gona, whether it was a goal or not,” I said.
Bespectacled and greyhaired Uncle Gona, dressed in his sleeping shorts and a vest, was sitting on the low-pitched porch fence of his home. His house overlooked May Street, which was located in the erstwhile multi-racial residential neighbourhood of Greyville, Durban.
As usual, Uncle Gona, eagled-eyed and with a proud pot belly, was busy reading the Sunday newspaper and listening to the weekly Indian programme on his transistor radio. There was no television at that time. He was simultaneously keeping an eye on the game and the safety of the neighbourhood children. As an elder, he always confirmed that he felt obliged to do so.
When we approached him, he said: “Guys, in all fairness, I was reading the newspaper and cannot truthfully vouch whether it was a goal or not. However, let’s spin a coin and decide the outcome.” But before he could spin the coin, he related a parable about social justice, tolerance and fairness. The spin of the coin was not in my side’s favour and because the goal was a match-decider, we lost.
Our side reluctantly accepted the outcome of the spin because as children of the community, we learnt to respect the wisdom of our elders. As we walked away from Uncle Gona’s porch, he quietly said to our team: “Remember, compared to friendship, winning is not important. You must always win the moral high ground. It will hold you in good stead.”
In later life, I realised the importance of the intrinsic values our elders had taught us through their stories and wise words, especially those narratives concerning social justice, tolerance and fairness. Indeed, they held us in good stead and helped in shaping our characters and that of our progeny and their futures. These narratives also informed us about the art of conflict resolution and the need to listen to the other side. There was no need for violent behaviour to craft a favourable response in a conflictual situation, as many of our youth, and elders, are prone to do in contemporary South African society.
Prior to the negative outcomes of the pernicious apartheid-structured Group Areas Act, Greyville, similar to other such neighbourhoods, abounded with community narratives.
They were hotbeds for new ideas and street-wise political and social education.
On Sundays, the streets of the neighbourhood were transformed into community recreation arenas. While playgrounds existed in close vicinity, people of colour were barred from using them primarily because of the Group Areas Act.
The tarred roads and streets became our playground and places of spectacle. They were our training grounds.
On Sundays, melodious Indian songs, rich in meaning, also permeated the walls of houses and flats in the precinct and poured out into the streets, blending in with the activity of the day. The streets of the old neighbourhoods were alive with gaiety and other social activities, such as our soccer and cricket matches.
Moreover, the vivacity of the Sunday street scenes transcended the objective reality of our political scenario and here, too, the narratives of our elders informed us about the importance of social justice. Apartheid had denied our basic human rights and human dignity. Police in vans patrolled our streets not to protect the community, but the evil system to which they were politically beholden.
Every now and then they would arrive, screeching the tyres of their vehicles, and we would all scatter in different directions, fearing for our very lives. Sometimes, in the chaos, we would leave our hard-earned soccer ball behind and they would take it with great delight. It was illegal to play on the streets.
Certainly, those were the days of our lives. We were thirsty for knowledge and at every possibility we greedily consumed it. These critical narratives contributed significantly in shaping our perspectives of a life worth living, especially for the betterment of all. They not only assisted in making sense of past realities, but also in orienting life in time, in a way that confers upon past actualities a possible future perspective. As such, these narratives serve to define an imaginable course of action for society, guided by the agency of historical knowledge and memory.
In effect, these historical narratives not only inform us about significant aspects and specific realities of the past, but can also be used to orient our lives in order that we can make sense of existing realities. These historical narratives are important. Even ancient cultures devoted much time and effort to teaching their children family history and intrinsic values. It was thought that the past helps a child understand who he or she is.
Sadly, present-day South African society, particularly our youth, has turned its back on the past. We live in a time of rapid change and prefer to define ourselves in terms of where we are going, not where we come from. Our ancestors hold no importance for us. We convince ourselves that they lived in times so different from our own that they are incapable of shedding light on our experience.
We constantly rationalise that anything from the past is outdated and irrelevant. Therefore, the past, even the relatively recent past, is, in the minds of most of us, enshrouded by mists and only very vaguely perceived.
Our ignorance of the past is not the result of a lack of information, but of indifference.
We do not believe that these historical narratives matter.
But historical narratives do matter. It has been said that those who control the past control the future. Our view of the past shapes the way we view the present and therefore it dictates what answers we offer to existing problems, now and in the future.
Finally, I return to the present. In the past month, we have had two important conventions dealing with the history and narratives of South Africans of Indian origin, namely a symposium to mark the end of indenture and the launch of a book, Asherville-Springtown People and Place.
The earlier publication about the history and narratives of Indian Indenture in South Africa, authored by Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, also added richness to the testimony of these important narratives, especially relating to the spirit and resilience of the Indian community.
In all these instances, the motif was to facilitate critical conversations on different aspects of the Indian community, with a view to forging a common non-racial society in the present and future South Africa. It is quite obvious that the Indian history relating its struggle for survival and recognition in a post-apartheid era has been informed by a fundamentally different experience of the colonial and apartheid systems.
To an extent, it has affected the life of the Indian community in a different way.
In the new dispensation, we need to grasp the magnitude of each other’s struggle and begin to move beyond the massive polarisation of the national psyche and embrace different perspectives and narratives of our past, in order that we can shape a new future of a multi-racial society in South Africa.
The historical narratives of the Indian community, is, but one such cultural perspective.
We need to celebrate the kaleidoscope of our diverse cultures if we are to build a collective history of our country. It would mirror Madiba’s vision of a true Rainbow Nation as there is unity in diversity.