We Are Not Such Things - Justine van der Leun Page 0,11

be scared of black people. It’s realistic.”

The people who said such things were not dropouts from the boonies. Rather, they were well educated and widely traveled: a lawyer, a businessman, a designer, a farmer, a small business owner. And they were decent people, too. The racists of South Africa are a kindly lot, who are helpful and resourceful, community-minded and polite. They’re a good laugh, fine company, and fantastic to have by your side if you’re in a pickle. These very bigots, many of whom I hardly knew, have driven me across the country, saved my dog’s life, provided me top-notch medical care, given me free room and board when I needed it most, generously hosted me in their homes, and cooked me meals. And they don’t just help other white people. I have seen them feed the poor colored beggars, even as they roll their eyes; offer free and compassionate legal advice to the very black people for whom they have previously expressed disdain; put their gardener’s children through school; and buy beautiful houses for their maids, complete with furniture.

Usually, when the racists know black people personally, they are capable of seeing them as individuals. But on a larger level, to them black South Africans seem to meld together with their inept, corrupt black leaders, into an indiscernible mass, a majority that is steering the country toward mayhem: economic free fall, widespread violent crime, a crumbling public healthcare system, a broken government peopled with cronies. It is this mass—not specific members of it—that is the enemy. Before the mass existed (or more accurately, when it was disempowered and hidden), white South Africans lived in a kind of utopia: agreeable dirt-cheap labor, all the fruits of a gifted land, beauty everywhere for the taking, lovely neighborhoods with open doors, and all the suffering contained behind borders at a good distance.

Once I asked Easy about a friend of his whose actions were inconsistent. What he said makes as much sense as anything: “He’s a human being. Sometimes he’s good, sometimes he’s evil. Sometimes he is comme ci. Sometimes he is comme ça.”

I met plenty of exceptional white South Africans, of course. I came to know a yoga teacher whose many boyfriends spanned the racial spectrum, and a corporate mom born into a conservative Afrikaner family who married a Congolese basketball player. I spent time with some of the old white freedom fighters, who remained as committed to racial equality and justice as ever. I hung around a bunch of my husband’s high school friends, well-off thirty-something men who were focused on their various apolitical endeavors, like creating a Burning Man–type festival in Africa or bringing Cape Town its first New York–style Jewish deli or attending ayahuasca ceremonies for spiritual healing. And I knew plenty of young white activists who worked with the country’s most disadvantaged, including a man fluent in the Zimbabwean tongue of Shona who had devoted his life to helping African refugees gain footing in a new land.

However, according to the wealthy white citizens I met at first, townships—the impoverished zones created by the apartheid government to segregate black South Africans—were the epicenters of the crime epidemic sweeping the country, the places out of which black badness oozed. During apartheid, people of color had little access to white areas, generally allowed in during the day to work but banned after close of business. Once the laws that controlled people’s movement had been dismantled, that violence spilled out, affecting whites as well as everyone else (though whites complained most vigorously, crime actually affected them far less than it did their dark-skinned compatriots). South Africa, with its soaring crime rate, was now among the world’s most violent countries, with a murder rate five times that of the global average. Every day across the country there were 502 assaults, 475 robberies, 172 sexual offenses, 47 murders, and 31 carjackings. Every day, 714 houses were burgled, 202 businesses were robbed, and 349 cars were broken into.

Instead of seeing these daily terrors as the result of tyranny, many South African whites came to associate them with the enduring swaart gevaar, or black danger. The threat of the swaart gevaar—the concept of an overwhelming and inherently bloodthirsty black majority that needed to be contained lest it consume everything in its path—had been used to persuade a white electorate to vote into power in 1948 the National Party, whose platform came to be known as apartheid.

I could see these townships, Gugulethu in particular, from the highway