Bridging the racial faultlines
dbeckett@global.co.za
ON MY way to meet Wilhelm Verwoerd it struck me that this was a unique person. His books reflect that. His surname carries baggage like no one else’s surname I ever heard of. For some people, whiteness or blackness or maleness or whatever carries baggage. For Wilhelm, Verwoerdness knocks all the other baggage into splinters, not that the competition is absent.
Wilhelm spoke yesterday to a gathering at the Blairgowrie house of my friend John. Arriving, I was struck again, flashback. Three houses away I once spoke at a similar gathering, unwelcomely.
It was 1985 or so. There were two big worries. One was apartheid, terrible thing, must be stopped, unreasonable Afrikaners, tsk… The other was “one man one vote”, terrible thing, must be avoided, unreasonable Africans, tsk. My case was that until everyone was an equal citizen politics would fight about citizenship. I was told this was treasonable ultra-Leftism. I wasn’t exactly “kicked out”, but shown the door.
Wilhelm is quite as gentle and earnest as his writings and his peacekeeping work suggest, and has thought his grandfather’s legacy piercingly far through, embracing the family man’s decency and morality while also embracing deep responsibility for the statesman’s wrongs
“A quarter of me,” he says, “is my grandfather’s genes.” Which has meant a life devoted to restitution. Would it differ, I ask, if grandpa had been Smit or Nel, a name unburdened by instant shocked association? He laughs. His maternal grandfather was indeed Smit. He has wondered.
But what exists has pluses. It’s been a stimulus to getting past barriers, to receiving and appreciating the generosity of black people, to putting vigour into coping with “the race faultlines, deep and wide and strong”. Working with people like fathers who still have Border War explosions going off inside their heads fulfils him in the richness of contribution.
So Wilhelm is about as simpatico a guy as you’ll find. And I wonder why I’m edgy. That the world is all about black and white? I explore this a bit, and get a somewhat abrupt response from a portion of the gathering. Out comes the fashionable new cliché, that a white person querying the race prison is saying, “Let’s move on, let’s all become race-blind.”
That phrase is to be mocked and disallowed, see. It’s taboo. Magically, as it’s exactly what the Great and the Good once fervently wished us to say, “Let’s move on and become race-blind.” Then, twice, my worry is illustrated, um, blindingly. Twice Wilhelm says to the sole dark person present: “I’m sorry to be speaking like this in your presence.”
I didn’t respond, not just because I, with another, was acquiring the status of insensitive boor that someone shouldn’t have invited. More that Wilhelm’s good intentions are so patent that to pick, pick, pick at them would be odious. And yet… Our common cause is looking for truth, a thing less likely to be found if some inputs are interdicted. Any inputs, let alone different routes towards a shared target.
So I reply now, saying I’d be ashamed to say such a thing, so race-imprisoned that it can’t see a human. Wilhelm’s way is opposite the too-common way – schmoozing the new racism while ministers etc are in earshot and dissing it when they leave.
To think half that 1985 gang up the road have probably emigrated. The other half bellowed themselves hoarse on Saturday. I’m sad I won’t be up for a dipstick reading in Blairgowrie 2053.