It was Bryce Courtenay who wrote The Power of One, which was made into a very successful feature film. I just re-read his short story The Night Country about his growing up near Tzaneen. As a child, he was largely an observer of both Afrikans and Shangan cultures, because he was English. It is a fascinating tale.
He is rescued when his mother gets sick with malaria fever by a Boer. When this hulk of a man is robbed by one of his staff members, he calls in a Zulu shaman called the Monkey Man to interogate his staff. Using a divining technique, two perpetrators are identified. They are then beaten unconcious by the Boer in a way that is reminiscent of Sheria law - until they lose their right arms. The little English lad is the only one who can't stomach it, and who reminisces many years later that this is why he came to hate Apartheid so deeply, that he emigrated.
The Monkey Man noticed that the English boy ran out from the beating into a shed. He finds the boy and says "You are not truly of the amabhunu, the Boer, for you cry out for the wrong skin". He proceeds to teach him how to escape to The Night Country using one of his voodoo techniques. Later in life, the writer sees the technique as folk psychology and even figures out how the divining technique worked: "Fear had completely dried up the saliva in the guilty men's mouths. The pebbles they spat into the Monkey Man's little hand were the only two which were completely dry".
The interesting thing, though, is that the boy's status of "white Zulu" drove him as far away as he could get from his homeland. He just could not stay in South Africa under "a white man's god, a white man's truth and a white man's justice.
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Several images in this short story caught my attention. Because the storyteller is a boy, he gets away with describing caricatures, not true characters. When the Boer first appears, he is so big that the boy is sure he is the giant from Jack in the Beanstalk! The Monkey Man drives up to the farm in a shiny 1936 Buick, wearing a leopardskin, etc...
But what fascinated me was the alliance between Boer and shaman. Both wanted to show their authority - one over his staff, the other over his culture. What is never stated is that the shaman was also against stealing. He must have been succesful, driving a Buick. There was a kind of mutual respect in this, reminding me that even F.W. de Klerk recently raised eyebrows by saying that at its origins, some of the thinking about Apartheid was sound. People do have a right to self-determination. But wasn't the Monkey Man selling out his black comrades?
Another intiguing vignette is him teaching a voodoo technique to the boy he called a "white Zulu". A road map to The Night Country. This white English son rejects the white man's truth and justice and learns a lifeskill that he still values decades later in a far-away land. The Boer and the shaman had an alliance, but the boy would not abide Apartheid and practiced techniques that were called voodoo, which he came to recognize as folk psychology.
This story really resonates with me. At the personal level, I have recently joined an almost all-black team formed to run the CWP in our province. As an organization, C4L is neither black nor white - it is mixed. Unlike the new CWP co-host, which is black.
I am being thrust into similarly uncomfortable events. Some of what I see makes me want to run away and hide. I have come to see myself like a latter day Monkey Man - hired as a technocrat, because I do a good job. Because I stand for something. But I am collaborating with people who have little time for whites, perhaps because whites have been stealing from them for so long?
But I am not on that frequency. I believe that white South Africans are mission-critical to this country's future. I believe that a generation after the dawn of Democracy, it is time to soften affirmative action and return to a selection criteria based on Merit.
Above all I dream of there being One Team... but there are always two colours. Diversity and divisiveness are never far apart.
I am painfully aware as well, that it is unlikely that I shall ever call a South African woman my new partner. Whites who haven't emigrated already are so traumatized by the fear of being sidelined (or being saddled with a pale male, for at least whilte women are also classified as "historically disadvantaged") and black women who dare to relate to a white man face an unrelenting stigma in their community. It is the reverse of Sidney Poitier and Katherine Houghton in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Just like the parents in that film (Spenser Tracy and Katherine Hepburn) there is general disapproval of mixed marriages in black communities as well. Deja vu!
Thanks for your prayers.
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