WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
When identity is reduced to having a utility bill, it is no wonder that the masses call for the fall of everything, writes Keyan Tomaselli
AT the height of the everything must fall protests late last year I picked up a Canadian professor from the airport. His first reference to making sense of a very strange South Africa was to invoke Trevor Noah’s The Daily Show: “When South Africans are collectively angry, they sing and dance.”
This anecdotal insight underpins multicultural expert Handel Kashope Wright’s key theoretical insight in developing innovative and specific African cultural studies as being about “bodies that do not belong” (in the West). Wright originally hailed from Sierra Leone.
On my vehicle being searched and my passengers frisked on our daily entry to the University of Johannesburg campus, the private security guards always addressed Handel in Zulu, then in Tswana and then, in desperation, Sotho. When they got no response in any of these languages, I revealed Handel’s Canadian citizenship. How could a black man not speak Zulu? Did he not know who he was? For me, the significance of the encounter was this question: “Does Wright really have a body — or perhaps language — that does not belong anywhere?” Is he rendered thus stateless — a kwerekwere (foreigner)?
Peter Sellers once played a bungling Indian actor accidentally invited to a lavish Hollywood dinner in The Party. A fish out of water, Bhakshi blunders about observing people in embarrassing situations and unintentionally causing minor damage to fittings and fixtures. He is yelled at: “Who do you think you are?” I once felt like that when I tried to cash in a 20-year investment. The company claimed that my John Hancock bore little resemblance to my earlier scrawl. Clearly, I did not know who I was and I had to prove my bona fides by signing and providing all kinds of certified documents to convince the company that the investment was mine.
But few South Africans have these items — utility bills, bank statements, fixed street addresses. That’s the flaw with BEE legislation. Only those with verifiable documentation can invest and participate in the formal financial sector. No wonder the masses are calling for the falling of everything.
Where Wright made notes on how his identity was being constructed for him by the security guards (who were looking for petrol bombs), Bhakshi’s response was: “Where I come from, we know who we are.” It’s disconcerting when a faceless manager tells me that I am not who I know I am, because he thinks that my signature is “different” — photo IDs, fingerprints and DNA aside.
Wright himself learnt that he was positioned as “African” and “black” when he first arrived in Canada as a graduate student. Till that time he thought he was just human. When I have worked at African universities and with black and African studies centres in the US, I have been assumed to be black, because of the nature of my academic activism rather than what I look like. Only in South Africa am I irredeemably “white”, or a “body that does not belong”.
Ian Player and Johnny Clegg, among others, are inducted as “white Zulus”. Why are Tswana speakers with accented Zulu “othered” as “not African” by the Durban Zulu-speaking rank and file? Afrikaans is considered indigenous by the First People. The first known Afrikaans script is in Arabic, emanating from the Malay slaves brought to the Cape. Is speaking Zulu without an accent the key to ethnic adoption? How does one then tick the form asking about “race” (for statistical purposes)?
The roles that we know that we are playing are often demonised as “belonging” somewhere else. Identities are constructions; they are not cast in stone, pigment or language. Most of us would like to construct our own identities rather than having categories assigned to us by bureaucrats and ideologues — we don’t like being told where to belong. In the US, selfidentified Irish, Italian, African, Chinese and other hyphenated Americans are all overwhelmingly patriotic Americans. They know where they belong, even as they identify and behave differently.
As Trevor Noah asks: Why are South Africans so insular?
Blackface, whiteface, purpleface, Trekkie faces (Klingons, aliens of all kinds): man, Al Jolson must be mystified at what goes in South Africa. Trevor Noah, please come home, we really need you, and Leon Schuster needs some help. We all need some help.
This is an edited version of an article first published in Wits Review, April 2016. Tomaselli is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Johannesburg
The roles that we know that we are playing are often demonised as ‘belonging’ somewhere else