Well, you can’t know everything
There are some things that feel imprinted on the DNA of the world, things everyone surely knows about, like 9/11, the Holocaust, the moon landings, the pyramids, dinosaurs, Paris, Marilyn Monroe and Shakespeare. And apartheid. Everyone knows about apartheid.
So there I was trying on a dress in a town in Ireland (a wedding dress, but more about that later) when the assistant asked where I came from. “From Dublin today, but I’m from South Africa.”
Wow! Was it fantastic growing up in South Africa, she wondered? I paused, remembering the blue kidney swimming pools; the vivid light; the rolling thunderclouds in a hot Transvaal sky, bicycle gangs; netball; bare feet, climbing across corrugated rooftops; eating sun-warm apricots direct from the tree.
“Well, yes, it was,” I said, adding pointedly, “for me…”
I assumed she’d know what I meant. I was a white kid. It was the ‘70s and ‘80s. I had my halcyon upbringing in the suburbs, while in the townships black kids were mowed down in the streets.
The woman cocked her head, confused. “It was during apartheid,” I clarified. She shook her head, uncomprehending. Thinking it was a problem with my Sefrican accent, I repeated slowly: “Apart-hate.” Nope.
So I tried to explain (in an ill-fitting white meringue) about the racial segregation; about the institutional oppression of black people. She stared blankly back at me in the mirror. “Nelson Mandela?” I finally said.
Success! She’d definitely heard that name before. Silly woman, I thought on the way home (still with no wedding dress); she was nice, but ignorant about the world. Only later I remembered the things I once didn’t know about her home country, like The Troubles; the 1916 uprising; the Good Friday agreement; The Famine, which decimated the population by a quarter; and about 800 years of oppression. Or even how to pronounce common names like Aoibhinn and Caoimhe.
I thought of all the other things I don’t know – the official language of Pakistan, a single song by Justin Bieber – and the numerous I hear and immediately forget, making me the weakest link on any quiz team. Because ignorance is subjective. And then there remain things that we all don’t even know that we don’t know yet.