Living together but staying firmly apart
Post-apartheid university students tend to form friendships with those who look and sound like them, writes Buhle Zuma
SEGREGATION and, in particular, self-imposed or voluntary segregation should catch our attention when they are found persistently among young people who have not had a lived experience of apartheid.
Social psychological observational studies conducted at the University of Cape Town have shown that students tend to group themselves into racial groups when they sit in lecture halls, dining halls, public spaces and tutorial rooms.
My recent PhD research sought to extend these studies in a qualitative way to pose the question: Which psychological and social factors and processes influence the formation of racially homogeneous or heterogeneous friendship groups among first-year students?
I found that UCT has become a contested space with regard to the issue of who belongs there and on what terms. An accent, often a proxy for other differentiations, is used as an “admission fee” for friendship groups.
In these everyday struggles and encounters in a variety of spaces, students by and large seem to associate with those who are like them in terms of various measures of identity.
Insights into this question are important if we assume that we are all committed to creating a society in which our differences — particularly those created and fixed by apartheid — are not a reason for divisions, whether acrimonious or not.
The focus on first-year students was deliberate because they must make friends in the new university context.
The study recruited 62 firstyear students in 2011 in the week they arrived on campus.
A few were recruited in each of four different residences and they in turn were asked to invite other students with whom they had started to build friendships.
After their first two weeks, the initial participants were asked to bring along other students with whom they had become friends in the short time that they had been at university, resulting in 17 groups of friends — of which only four groups were racially mixed.
These groups were then interviewed in March, June and September 2011 with the intention of understanding what influenced the composition of their friendship groups and how this composition actually happened.
Much prior research reports that race and class influence a particular phenomenon, but we are often not told how the process of influence happens. This study focused on both the factors and processes in an attempt to remedy this shortcoming.
How does it happen that firstyear students end up in racially homogenous or, in other cases, racially heterogeneous friendship groups at university?
In broad terms, and perhaps not surprisingly, the conditions of the home world in which students had been socialised significantly influenced the ways in which the participants went about making friends — and had done so even before they came to university.
Home world conditions include things such as the attitudes of their parents towards interracial relations.
As one participant said: “I guess also it’s based on how you are brought up. Like for me, my parents just said: ‘It doesn’t matter what colour, my son, you can be with whoever you want. Don’t let people tell you that because you’re black you’re very inferior. Do not apply it,’ and stuff like that.”
In contrast, another black participant said: “I think ... it comes from my parents and the way they’d say ‘White people don’t do this . . . white people
Some students felt that there were Zulu, Venda and Indian accents that had to ‘be put through the washing, the tumble drier, everything’
don’t act like that’. So, there’s this perception that . . . white is right, you know [group laughter]. And then, black people are kind of getting there, but we still have a lot to learn.”
These contrasting psychological eyes through which participants learn to see the world also both allow and constrain certain ways of being with others in the world. These are in a sense the different types of psychology that students bring into the university context.
There are, of course, other structural issues, such as the fact of living in physically seg- regated spaces, both in neighbourhoods and schools, that materially correspond with privilege and poverty.
All these structural and psychological issues are reflected in the types of friendships students make at university, where perhaps for the first time they come into contact with people who are from different home worlds than their own.
An accent emerged as one of the most important factors influencing the formation of friendships.
As one student described it: “People are more and more like [puts on an accent] ‘Oh my God’. Everybody talks like that ... we’re all like: ‘Okay guys, no, no, we’re not going to be like this.’ So when we are together we try to speak Setswana and not just Setswana, but the way that we speak it at home.”
In this case, accent is used as a criterion for both inclusion and exclusion.
What is rejected by these participants is not the English language as such, but what they described as the “UCT middleclass accent”, which is not a part of who they are and their home world. By insisting on speaking Tswana at UCT they are claiming their linguistic, cultural and ethnic identities as legitimate in this new context.
Similarly, some students from middle-class backgrounds felt that there were Zulu, Venda and Indian accents at UCT that, as one put it, had to “be put through the washing, the tumble drier, everything”, suggesting that such ways of speaking did not belong in this middleclass educational and cultural institution.
These examples illustrate how UCT becomes a contested space about who belongs there and on what terms and how accent is used as an “admission fee” for friendship groups. If one speaks Tswana as it is “spoken at home”, one is likely to be automatically perceived as an insider who has similar values and world views to others who speak the same way.
Similarly, if one speaks English with what is described as a “UCT middle-class accent”, one is likely to be more accepted as a friend by those who speak the same way than by those who speak Tswana or speak without the so-called UCT middle-class accent.
UCT is not one thing to every student or group of student friends.
Rather, it seems that students struggle with each other in often subtle ways to claim UCT as part of their own group identity, using resources and weapons of identity such as class, ethnicity, race, language and accent in complex ways.
It would be a mistake to view the issues raised in this study as exclusively UCT problems.
They take on a particular tone in the context of the university, but they speak more broadly of challenges facing South Africa as a society crawling through the mud of transformation and gazing at the stars for any hope of new and different ways of coexisting.
The study confronts us with a series of questions:
What would an achieved post-apartheid society look like at the micro-level of everyday intergroup encounters;
How do we build a postapartheid society when race, class, language, ethnicity, place, space and so forth were used as tools of division and we now seek to use them as tools of unity; and
How do we reconcile the “freedom of association” secured in the constitution with what we may deem to be undesirable voluntary associations such as racially homoge- neous friendships?
I have no answers to these questions, but I raise them here in the hope that we will grapple with them in our ongoing and uncomfortable transformation debates.
In the meantime, and in the hope of a better alternative, perhaps we can draw hope from our peculiar position of living together apart. At any rate, this is better than killing each other.
Zuma lectures in psychology at the University of Cape Town