Amanda Gouws' column (11 March) on "being white" was as annoying as a recent article in the New York Times about Cape Town as a "...Divided City: Many Blacks See Echoes of White Superiority." The obsession with race amongst academics, politicians and the media belies their deeply superficial observations.
Gouws invokes race to legitimise claims of her own identity and ‘progressiveness'. Judging her readers' responses harshly, she falls into the very trap she accuses them of and is astonished at how personally attacked they felt; that their responses did confirm racial stereotypes about white people; that many white people are not conscious of how they offend; that they are indeed intolerant; and that when Simphiwe Dana complains about how unwelcome she feels in Cape Town, she is merely complaining about structural racism.
Gouws commits the cardinal sin as a columnist. She underestimates her readers' intelligence and resorts to insults when they do not agree with her.
Living and teaching in a white enclave and ivory tower in Stellenbosch, Gouws claims to know how black people feel about the Cape and implies that white superiority is the problem. For this she draws on the twitter-fest between Simphiwe Dana and Premier Helen Zille. The disaffection some black people claim to feel about the Cape is simplistic and rather irritating.
In this debate black foreign nationals, coloureds and Indians are simply invisible. No one ever considers talking to coloured people or other minorities to ask them how they feel about the new dispensation or the new "racial hierarchy" - a phrase used against me by a prominent black leader in a board meeting, when I raised questions about financial probity.
"The problem with you, Rhoda Kadalie" she scolded "is that you do not know your place in the racial hierarchy." Yes, there is a new racial hierarchy perpetuated by the new black elite. The abolition of apartheid reveals that whoever governs very quickly adopts a superiority complex and that this is not confined to whiteness. Coloureds are as alienated by their exclusion from the political discourse of nation-building, as are many others, and restitution for former District Six residents still eludes them.
When black people claim to feel unwelcome in the Western Cape, then I can make the same claim about how I experience Gauteng and its appalling cuisine, not to speak of its dingy hotels. I, too, do not see coloured people when I go to Gauteng and I too feel alienated let alone unwelcome when I visit; and I speak as much for my colleagues as I speak for myself. The point is: based on my experiences alone I dare not make generalisations about Gauteng.
Both the Western Cape and Gauteng demand that we understand the different socio-historical and political trajectories of these two provinces before we trade racial insults. It is in the Western Cape that influx control and the pass laws were most viciously enforced against African people. Resistance to these laws generated a series of organisations such as the African People's Organisation, the Non-European Unity Movement, the Black Sash, the Institute of Race Relations, the United Democratic Front and all its hundreds of umbrella organisations - and they all mounted massive campaigns against deportations, detentions and arrests of black people.
All of us in the Western Cape, white, black, coloured, and Indian were involved in that struggle. That is why the black middle class in the Western Cape is small unlike Gauteng where the industrial and mining revolutions attracted droves of cheap labour to the burgeoning metropolis. The anti-Cape hot air is a euphemism for being anti-coloured and a negation of their experiences as blacks, under apartheid!
This article first appeared in Die Burger
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