SA’S mortal fear of loving together

THIS book is a study of a national obsession in South Africa that has its roots in the early days of Dutch settlement under the Vereenigde Oost-indische Compagnie (VOC) – the Dutch East India Company – in the 1650s, but which continues to lay down a line that keeps black and white South Africans apart in acts of learning, living and loving.

On this the research is unequivocal: that the desegregation of public places after apartheid, from open beaches to university classrooms, did not lead to the integration of racial groups.

People continue to drift towards homogeneous groups (their own race) when there is no reason to do so. Yet while the hard edges of learning and living together have been smoothed out since the end of apartheid, it is the mortal fear of loving together that still drives many South Africans crazy.

There are regional variations.

You are more likely to see mixed couples in the cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg than in the more rural university towns of Bloemfontein or Potchefstroom.

There are also distinctions within the bounds of racial, ethnic and religious community. You are more likely to love across the colour line if you are English-speaking rather than Afrikaans-speaking; or if you are coloured by designation rather than African; or if you are Christian rather than Muslim, Jewish or Hindu.

There are class distinctions. You are more likely to love without boundaries if you are middle class rather than poor. And there are generational variations: younger couples are more likely to date and marry across lines of race and ethnicity than was the case with their parents.

Within all these variations are individuals who break the trend, who stand out, who defy expectations and who love whom they like. Like my friends the Rajab family in Durban. The husband is Muslim, and he married a Hindu woman, while their Indian daughter went on to marry a Jewish boy.

This is rare in South Africa or anywhere else in the world, for that matter. Theirs are, no doubt, stories of hope.

For the social scientist, such stories are also puzzles for inquiry. Who are the people who defied laws (then) and who defy convention (now) to create these kinds of unions with all the costs involved?

What is there within their biographies that might explain such daring? How do they make these decisions? How do they manage the often-severe consequences of their choices from within their own families, from peers and the reprisal of strangers? What, in other words, makes their loving actions exceptional rather than the norm?

For more than two decades I worked on university campuses in South Africa, from the University of Durban-westville (UDW, Durban, Kwazulu-natal) to the University of Pretoria (UP, Pretoria, Gauteng) to the University of the Free State (UFS, Bloemfontein, Free State).

I started as a professor and head of department (UDW), continued as a dean (UP) and then took up the position of rector (UFS).

In all of those positions I thrived on the sheer joy of being able to teach, lead and live among undergraduate students. I had an open-door policy for students, and as rector would regularly have these bright young people come through our home.

We talked about their academics, their professional ambitions and, invariably, their lives on and off campus. I had the privilege of meeting many of their parents and even visiting some in their homes. In other words, I got to know these 18- to 21-year-olds really well.

It happened often, during a consultation with a student or in the course of a casual conversation somewhere on campus, the question of forbidden relationships. “What should I do? My father will kill me. Any advice?”

In Durban, I remember it was not only about race but also religion: a deeply devout Muslim woman student had fallen in love with a Hindu student. She fully expected banishment from her home and community. The costs were high. Any advice? In Pretoria, there was a memorable visit by an Afrikaans-speaking white woman student who was in love with a black male student. She feared that her family would find out.

In the Free State, it was a gay student in a relationship that not even her friends knew about.

Two decades in higher education and little had changed. Students still struggled with relationships that did not conform to social expectations – you love within your race, ethnic group, religious community and sexual affiliation. Step outside those boundaries and there are costs.

I have always been drawn to people who dwell in the borderlands – that is, those who live their lives straddling the boundaries set by society.

They are frontiersmen and women, in one metaphor, or the miner’s canaries, in another. Baanbrekers is a beautiful Afrikaans word for pioneers.

These are people who refuse to be defined by social norms or constrained by historical patterns of association. They take the risks as they come. They are not reckless but find their motivation in something deeper than habit and stronger than fear.

How they live their lives evokes an intense intellectual quest to discover how they make sense of and survive the tests and turmoil of borderline living.

Border-crossing people are everywhere. The lone woman executive in a testosterone-filled boardroom. The working-class student in a flush private high school. The children in schools right on the border of South Africa and Swaziland whose social and ethnic selves are shaped by two national identities.

The Muslims encircling a Christian church with their arms interlocked to prevent further burnings of these holy places. The poor white student who shares her daily loaf of bread from a giving organisation with a fellow black student before she takes home the rest to feed her baby.

For the same reasons, I was drawn to young people at the University of the Free State who entered into border-crossing liaisons during my seven years as leader of this more than 30000-strong student campus.

I wanted to hear their stories up close and gain insight into their lives. So I invited each couple for a video-recorded interview. I wanted them together, interested not only in what each person in the partnership said, but also in how they interacted over the course of the interview.

I watched how they corrected and redirected each other. I was alert to what surprised the one partner in what the other had just shared, and who spoke or responded to which questions. I listened for words they used to address each other, which stories would evoke stress or pain, and which would release laughter. I measured their degree of comfort with each other, as well as the gestures of body and speech. And I probed their sense of whether the relationship was meant to last.

What eventually emerged from these interviews were compelling stories about the entangled lives of young people born around the time of the end of apartheid.

They themselves did not live through the horrors of enforced separation or detention without trial or the banality of everyday apartheid.

These student couples came into their youth with no direct memory of the dark past but nonetheless carried the burden of indirect memory transmitted to them by parents, peers, schools and universities.

They hadn’t been there, physically, but they were affected in what they felt and knew about apartheid. The young people in this study therefore entered interracial relationships with their eyes wide open.

And yet they were determined to reach across boundaries regardless of the costs of trespassing social rules and conventions that continue to set the terms of affection and embrace in contemporary South Africa.

This is an extract from the book published by Bookstorm at a recommended retail price of R300. The author is a distinguished professor of education at the University of Stellenbosch and served for years as the vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State. He has a formidable reputation for transformation and a deep commitment to reconciliation in communities living with the heritage of apartheid.