This time, I came to South Africa to research a book that would shed light on changes over the past twenty-four years since the first democratic elections in 1994. I hoped to learn more about the experiences and perspectives of a group of 15 black South Africans from the Soweto townships outside Johannesburg. I have known them since they were young adults in 1998, when they joined the Joint Enrichment Project (JEP), a youth-development organization promising them job skills and personal development. Today they are adults with children of their own (four of them are in the photo above, taken this June).
By the time they completed the project in 1998, they had experienced a shift: they had moved from feeling “stuck in-between” to feeling as if they were “in transition” in a rapidly transitioning South Africa. My dissertation (2000) documented and explored that significant discursive shift, but I didn’t have the longitudinal perspective to know what practical difference it might make in their lives, socio-economically or psychologically. Hence my return trips in 2002, 2009, and now again in 2018.
Most of them have experienced incremental, positive material changes: most are employed (in varying kinds of formal/informal work), one has acquired social housing, most have indoor toilets, they all live on paved streets, two have bought their own homes in Soweto, some have built additions and are renting out rooms to tenants. Yet despite these advancements, they share the feeling that change has come too slowly, and their lives are not as different from 1998 as they had hoped. South Africa remains a vastly inequitable country, plagued by racialized poverty, high crime, and unemployment.
As I branched out in my fieldwork this year and talked with former staff from the JEP, a bigger story emerged —one tied to broader shifts in the country. The JEP shut its doors in 2008, but fifteen staff members whom I also knew as young adults in 1998 are now doing incredibly interesting development work in their own right. All of them trace the work they are doing now to their time at the JEP – similar to the youth participants, it was a touchstone time for them. As our conversations continued, I began to see that the book I am researching is a hidden history of the Joint Enrichment Project, including voices and stories of both former youth participants and staff.
The idea of a hidden history is somewhat parallel to Mark Sanders’ notion of a “secret history” in Learning Zulu: A Secret history of language in South Africa, a book I have read and re-read over the past few months. For Sanders this secret history runs parallel to, or underneath, the chronological history of a language, the official story. What Sanders does in his book is illuminate the meanings – social, emotional, historical, political, psychological – associated with learning isiZulu from different positionalities. Besides himself (a white English- speaking South African who grew up under apartheid), these include early European missionaries, immigrants from other African countries, white farmers, and even native isiZulu speakers in high school. Like learning any language, learning isiZulu is not simply a matter of learning vocabulary, grammar and syntax. Learning isiZulu is, inevitably, to position oneself within a complex historical web of race and power. The "secret" resides in those personal positionalities.
Reading Sanders’ book has revealed an uncomfortable truth for me: This hidden history I am now telling about the JEP is also part of a secret history for me personally. It is a secret history about my own coming-to-terms with my positionality as the daughter of a white English-speaking South African who left the country in 1951 on an engineering scholarship, never to return to live here. My privilege in the world owes much to the wrongs that were done to black people in South Africa, solidified into law in 1948, just three years before my father’s departure while he was still in university, but steadily building as he was growing up in his isolated boarding school environment. It’s complicated, but it’s undeniable: my being here today, my being able to book a plane ticket, take a sabbatical, even plan to write this book – all of it ties back to that history like an invisible umbilical cord.
Both my parents were first-generation immigrants to the US, albeit white college-educated ones. Even before the National Party came to power, my father had the white government in South Africa largely to thank for his privileged status. I am a product of that privilege.
I return to South Africa again and again to seek understanding, yes. But also as a form of personal reparation, to find and create my own South Africa that will defy the old model, turn it on its head. That will somehow forgive me, my father, the sins of my ancestors. My grandfather Capt. F.A.P. Perrow (Percy) for instance, whom I never knew, but who wrote a brief newspaper article about his solo trip by motorcar from Cape Town to Johannesburg in the early 1900s. In this charming but somewhat self-congratulatory article, he says he "stopped in towns along the way" and complains about "the number of gates encountered" that made his journey challenging.
Well, about those gates along our journeys. Again it's all relative. As Philemon said to me the other day: "There was the struggle, and the elections. But did we or didn’t we achieve freedom?"
My father probably lived in something of a bubble. After his mother died when he was eight, he was sent away to boarding school in then-Rhodesia. Later as a university student in Cape Town, he was on an island of white privilege which would have seemed normal and unproblematic. Privilege seems problematic only when it’s seen as relative.
Quiet, brilliant, and reserved, my father engaged reluctantly with politics or social issues. It would have been completely possible for him to bury his head in his studies, and come out with a scholarship to work in the UK, unaware of the social implications of what was happening in SA. I shouldn’t blame him personally for not engaging with social issues in SA, but somehow I have.
But perhaps this is an unfair kind of blame, which hindsight allows. He was inhabiting a world that had been built for him, that allowed him to wear blinders to bigger social ills, to focus on his own advancement. I mean, losing the mother you love and being sent to boarding school at the age of eight? Harsh! And he would have had no tools to critically engage with a broader socio-political reality. The black power movement and the anti-apartheid struggle were still things of the distant future – it would be my cousins, the children of my generation, who would become ANC members and activists as they were conscientized in the 1960s and 70s. And his Rhodesian boarding school certainly would not have been teaching a critical history of southern Africa.
My father died in 1982. He didn’t live to see Mandela released from prison, or South Africa's momentous transition to democracy. He wasn't at our Soweto wedding party in 2002 (this photo).
I return to South Africa, to Johannesburg where he was born, in hopes of finding something of him, of understanding and forgiving him for becoming a passively racist South African living in the US. I return, trip after trip. I conduct research at a youth development NGO. I value my relationships with the participants and staff that span two decades. I want to create a reality that is different. This is my secret history, and it is at once shameful, hopeful, and impossible.Again and again I reminded of the privileges afforded me by the color of my skin, my native language, my passport. I have a safe and comfortable place to stay, a rental car, a data plan for my phone, a job to go home to. I am waived through traffic checkpoints.
But I also am the beneficiary of something bigger, something my father would probably have found curious and ill-advised. I’m the beneficiary of the love and caring of my township friends. I’m the beneficiary of being an adopted daughter of many Mamkhulus (grannies). I’m the beneficiary of feeling like a person, not just a white person (because that identity persists), when I am in Soweto. I didn't know how important these things were.
I consciously knew none of this in 1997 when I applied for Fulbright funding to do my dissertation field work in South Africa. I had curiosity, fueled by my passion for teaching alternative education GED classes at the San Francisco Conservation Corps, but I experienced it as largely intellectual passion about the meaning of learning in differing socio-cultural contexts. Yes, I wanted to learn more about where my father had come from. But the full realization of the deep emotional drive to connect with my father and forgive him came late, very late, long after his death.
Maybe, just maybe, my father would have seen his South Africa differently, bigger, through my experiences and my relationships. It makes me happy to think so.
What would my ancestors say? There are times I wish I knew how to communicate with them directly, the way Thabo does with his. I hope my ancestors are talking to Thabo's ancestors, to Lungile's and Isaiesh's and Philemon's and Loveley's ancestors, and that some reparation is happening in another dimension that I’m not privy to. Because maybe together, as they watch our friendships unfolding, our ancestors can lend support to real social change.
That’s my secret South African history.