South Africa (read: "Seuth Efrreekeh")

For all you who have noticed that I haven't written in about a month, I have started about three or four blogs since then, and they all failed. It was pretty amusing. It seems that I may have exhausted my inexhaustible well of cooped up opinions waiting to explode out of me when I started this blog. But not to worry! I have quite a bit to talk about concerning this topic, so I’ve made sure that this one is long enough to make up for the last few weeks of absence.

Yesterday, I watched a documentary on KCTS called “Behind the Rainbow" with my father. I wholeheartedly encourage anyone reading this to watch the program, as I believe it was very well done. It woke up some dormant thoughts and sparked a multitude of new ones for me, which I must contextualize with a bit of a history lesson first (solely for the sake of contextualization and personal documentation), some of which I suppose might be a little dull for anyone not related to me. I'll start as far back as I know how to:

My grandparents were born into the third, fourth, and so-long-ago-they've-lost-count generations of European settlers in South Africa. They got there the same way most white Americans' ancestors got to this continent. I know specifically that my paternal grandmother's paternal grandfather was a German missionary and the same grandmother's maternal grandmother was English, but other than that, I haven't heard. My paternal grandfather was one of the many men of his generation coming from an agricultural family that worked harder than seemed possible to move up in society, get an education, and make something of himself. It was when he was in University that he met the aforementioned grandmother, and they had three children, all of which were able to get University degrees and two of which went on to get Doctorates as an impact of my grandfather's hard work. My maternal family history is considerably more concealed, but for the most part they were agrarian: indeed, my maternal grandfather, at 88 years old, still tends his small orchard of figs, peaches, guavas, avocados, tangerines and gooseberries, among others (all of which are delicious, by the way). All this to say that basically, I have a very similar ancestral background to one that might belong to the average American family. It simply happened to take place on a different continent.

My own parents, Theodore Johannes Dippenaar and Ilse Louise Mocke were married on January 9th, 1988. She had just turned 21 and my father was 27. At this time, my father was earning his PhD in Integrated Circut Design at the University of Pretoria, and my mother was studying at (what was then called) Rand Afrikaans University, beginning her Master's in Psychiatric Nursing in 1990. As newly-weds, they lived in a small house on Borzoi Street in Garsfontein, a suburb of Pretoria about half an hour's drive Southeast of the city. A couple years later, in order to accommodate for the family they planned to have, they moved to a slightly larger house with two empty, waiting bedrooms on Blackberry Street in Centurion, a small city about the same distance directly South of Pretoria and twice that distance roughly North of downtown Johannesburg. It might be of more relevance to note that none of this was more of an hour's drive from any one member of their immediate families. In 1991, my father finished his PhD and began to look for work. Little he found within the country had any remote connection to his specific line of study. As it was just becoming apparent to him that he would have to settle for something other than his ideal job, a friend, mentor and old professor of his (whom I knew as a child) offered him a job at a company called Nanoteq, which he recalls provided him with the most precise match in employment he could have hoped for: Microelectronic Engineering. He began his work there and my mother continued her studies. And then I came along.

I, Marié-Louise Dippenaar (named by family tradition after my maternal grandmother and my mother), was born on January 4th, 1994 in Centurion, Transvaal, South Africa, at Unitas Hospital (the largest private hospital on the continent), where my mother worked. She has only just completed her Master's when my father had the opportunity to work overseas in San José for half a year. So just as my mother finished her degree, they had their first child, and the country's political realm was radically changing, we became first-generation immigrants to the USA, moving into an apartment in Mountain View, California on April 2 of the same year, hardly 3 months after my birth. Two weeks later, on April 27th, 1994, Nelson Mandela was elected as the first Black president of South Africa. Sometimes I wonder if coincidences are really as coincidental as they seem.

My parents wholeheartedly intended for the whole "America" thing to be an extended business trip, and nothing more. At first, anyways. They didn't sell the house on Blackberry Street, they didn't bring much furniture over. They even left the dogs with my grandmother- we were coming back. But on Thanksgiving of 1996, an American company called Microchip bought a large wing of Nanoteq, a wing in which my father happened to work. Their headquarters were, and are, in Phoenix, Arizona. There was no longer a job to go back to in South Africa. Taking into account how lucky he had been to find the job he had in the first place and the likelihood that he would have to settle for a much lower-paying job if we returned, the assumption had become a relatively grim-looking option. Furthermore, as I understand it, the common belief among the White population in South Africa at the time was that the fate of the country was one of impending doom. (I suppose this view hasn't necessarily changed in the sixteen years since we've left.) There was a whole new kind of institutionalized racism rising through the BEE (Black Economic Empowerment), and the political scene was in an extremely frightening state to the average White person (I'll explain in a moment why in a bit more detail: the blog threatens to take a lengthy tangent that I'd rather save for later). Wealthy, educated white men began to move out of the country because they could no longer hold their position, and those that remained struggled to find jobs at all because of the color of their skin. Black men and women, more often than not with substantially less education and experience in the field, began to get the jobs previously held by Whites solely because they were Black. It didn't seem like moving back would be such a great idea anymore. So it was on Thanksgiving of 1996 that my parents decided to stay in the US, and to move with their little girl and new (American) baby boy to Chandler, Arizona, instead of back to Blackberry Street.

I grew up distant from South Africa. Living in Chandler, my father's colleagues that had taken the same path he had provided me with several second-generation Afrikaans-speaking kids like myself to play with. My mother cooked South African food. Once we'd moved to Seattle in 2001 we would drive up to Canada to go fill the car with groceries at the South African store there. My parents have even made the effort to pay the freakish prices of airplane tickets every year or two so that we've been able to have some semblance of a relationship with our grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, some vague semblance of an identity on the Family Tree. But let's face it, neither I nor my brother can express ourselves nearly as well in Afrikaans as in English, we know no one but our family and the children of our mother’s friends, and neither of us have had any substantial first-hand experience with the average daily way of life. Sure, I've lived there for a month or two at a time at least every other summer my entire life, but this doesn't amount to much when it's for the purpose of vacation as a child. This general ignorance has bothered me increasingly more as I've grown older. I struggle to find words to express the intensity of my desire to grow some type of ethos behind my nominal (as well as assumed) national identity. I've always imagined this must be sort of what Zionism feels like.

Now, to return to the original prompt for this rant: yesterday, I watched a documentary on KCTS called "Behind the Rainbow" with my father. It was especially interesting because every minute or two it got interrupted by either me or him for explanation. It's funny how even the most objective sources, like this program, still have their biases, still fail to show the terrorism the ANC was founded on. I occasionally tell the story of how Nelson Mandela nearly bombed my uncle's house, for the sheer joy of seeing people's shocked looks and hearing them ask if I'm sure I’ve got the right guy. My father paused this clip at around 2:30 to comment that he remembers at that time the ANC being comparable to some type of cross between the KKK and Al Qaeda. He shook his head as he recalled a time in 1975 (coincidentally when he was my age, I just realized) when the newspapers depicted gruesome scenes of violence and vigilante conflict. The African National Congress was a terrorist organization planting bombs in churches, blowing up civilians officially for no reason other than to threaten the government. People tend to overlook this, now that 'freedom' has been achieved. No doubt about it, the Apartheid government had its flaws. There was certainly injustice. But it wasn't blind, unjustified, brutish anti-Black racism. It had its reasons.

Allow me to go on my Apartheid rant before continuing. Firstly, I'll relate the following scenario always used to explain the cultural mindset to me: a black man watches the white man walk up to an ATM, stick a little plastic card into a slot, punch a few numbers into a keypad and pull money out of it, with which he buys bread for his family. The white man drops the card on the sidewalk accidentally while he walks to his car. The black man proceeds to pick it up and walk over to the ATM. He sticks it in the little slot and pushes numbers into the pad just like the White man did, but no money comes out. Why is this? Because of racism, he says. Because of Apartheid. The Black man is being discriminated against. (I have recently learned that this is, in fact, a true story, and that the "White man" was actually my mother on a shopping trip at a mall).

I’ll have to start all over again, don’t I? Please excuse how sporadic this blog is. (And please don’t quote me on the concretes of my history, as I’m getting the facts from Wikipedia and the narrative from a very vague feeling of a historical timeline I’ve gleaned from growing up in a South African family. My attempt is to make the narrative, written from my own perspective, less vague, not to write a textbook.)

In the 19th century, Europeans were colonizing Africa. South Africa was among these new colonies (a particularly reluctant colony, if you'll recall the story of the Boer War). The concept of the White Man's burden was alive and strong: there was a large population of White missionaries that had come to educate and minister to the Blacks, including a few of my own ancestors. They built schools, roads, bought land from Zulus with oxen and the like, much like in 19th century America, and everywhere else, for that matter. Conflicts arose, people were killed. Blah blah blah, that's how History tends to go. A funny piece I enjoy from 19th century history is that apparently the Zulus were unwilling to be slaves, so instead of going to war, the British started importing Indians to do the labor instead, resulting in a population of some 1 million Indians in Eastern South Africa today. In any case, I don't see any outstanding cruelty. It's not like they were commonly murdered upon failing to convert or annihilated with smallpox or anything absurd like that... It was settlement/colonization in the most humane way that those things can happen.

Pass Laws and Apartheid-like policies were first institutionalized in 1923. The idea was that keeping two (I’m referring to Bantu and Settler cultures, here; it’s true that there’s a great difference between the 9-something Bantu tribes in South Africa and between the Boere and English) cultures separate would keep petty wars from continuing. It was obvious that they were not keen on assimilating, so it seemed better to let the Black tribes do their own thing like they always had and not let them interfere with the stuff the Whites were doing, either. Naturally, there came the “luxuries” of “civilization” that were coveted by many Blacks (if a group of people sees another group of people they live amongst enjoying confectioned sweets and cars and refrigeration and… well, to be fair, more basic things than that, Western clothing and food, obviously they’re going to point at that and want it). This is where the documentary picked up. Segregation still prevailed, but Blacks were often employed by Whites, and they had to travel large distances for these jobs since they were not permitted to live among whites. Blacks were not allowed the same rights as Whites because they were entering into the White man’s world. Yes, this is wrong: it was discrimination based on the color of a person’s skin, and one could never guarantee that the skin color and the cultural hindrances came together. There was mandatory education, there were a ton of subsidies, and according to my father the average White paid (and pays) nearly 50% in taxes, but there was a lot of injustice and unfair discrimination (as there was everywhere else in the world; South Africa just happened to be 20 years later than the rest of the countries, but South Africa’s racist policies resulted in global economic sanctions on the nation [don’t even get me STARTED on those, it has a rant of its own. People say that the Apartheid regime was so horrible because the GDP was so low and the country was a nonexistent competitor in the global economy, but just in case you’ve all forgotten, almost the entirety of the world had stopped trade with South Africa. South Africa made all its own stuff: fruit, meat, grain, vegetables, toys, even gas, which was made from coal because the country had little internal oil. It wasn’t until yesterday that I began to understand how it all fit together: my father paused it when they were beginning to say that the Apartheid government collapsed because it had been pressured into change by the sanctions to tell me about all of the above. In this context, he reminded me that my Oupa Dippie (the aforementioned paternal grandfather) worked as a Mechanical Engineer for SASOL, which stands for Suid Afrikaanse Steenkool en Olie (or South African Coal and Oil), the petrol company that started in 1950 because oil could no longer be imported, and was incredibly successful despite its limitations] and an age of infamy) as well. But as I said before, Apartheid was very justifiable, even if it was certainly not morally correct: letting a ton of uneducated people with a completely different culture and set of values/assumptions enter into an organized society (that they did not even want on the continent) would not do the society much good. (If you need proof, go read up on Zimbabwe.) Especially when these people outnumber you 10 to 1.

Eventually it became apparent that Apartheid was not a practical system for that reason: it is rightfully, technically a black nation. No government which oppresses and denies basic civil liberties and citizenship to 90% of its people lasts for long. So Apartheid was dismantled and the floodgates of social service were opened to the people. Hospitals were overwhelmed by the expecting mothers and children under six receiving their free healthcare (a bit tongue-in-cheek, my father remarked here that my maternal grandmother would probably add that it was because they could now get away with “breeding” more children that there were so many pregnant women coming to the hospitals) and unemployment actually grew. Nevertheless, Nelson Mandela had come to the presidency, unchallenged by any type of opposing party or candidate. What I took from the documentary was this: that he was basically a well-liked, charismatic leader with very good intentions and a very balanced vision with little practical knowledge about how to run a country. His deputy head, Mbeki, who had earned a degree in economics at the University of London, seemed to do much of the economics, understandably, and as Mbeki was his successor, his social-capitalist policies (which had a strong taste of Western economic policy influencing it, based off of the little I know about Western politics/economics) continued until 2009. It was then that Jacob Zuma, with at least as much charisma as Mandela and education of a particularly capable rock (most American 13-year-olds literally have had more formal education than he has), became president. Taking into account that the voters had all long been pulled over to Zuma’s side with the ‘I’m-your-buddy’ face and his crazy ability to identify with his people, it wasn’t particularly difficult for him to win the presidency of the ANC. Seeing as the ANC was practically speaking the only large, believable political party at the time of the election, this man was elected, and is currently president of the greatest country on the continent. Please explain to me how it is healthy for the president of a supposedly-First-World country to stand in front of his people in a jersey, dancing like a drunken tribal leader and singing “bring me my machine gun”?! No, I don’t believe Zuma’s going to start genocide on Whites. That’s unrealistically stupid. But it shows the mentality of the government, it shows the mentality the mob that the government has won over, and it shows what pieces of history they are all clinging to. It’s frightening, even to me, sitting here some 10,000 miles away. Even to me, sitting in Seattle, Washington in front of my computer, it’s scary to hear second- and third-hand stories from family and my parents’ old friends every few weeks: crime skyrocketing in the cities to such an extent that the downtowns are starting to empty; city busses simply failing to show up to take people to work; murderers getting let off after year-long sentences because a murderer with more deaths on their name needs their cell. Why is this happening?

Well, I’ll say this: Edmund Burke had a point. Such a different system of government cannot be forced on such a radically distinct group of people. (I recall the clip from the preview: “They will tell you, ‘I can’t eat freedom.’”) Democracy simply does not work in Africa. Such a dramatic, rapid change in government could never have worked. There would always have been some way in which it would have gone wrong. All of you waiting to pounce on me with accusations of racism or something, with reminders to embrace “Multiculturalism” (BCFT, you better have caught that), think about this: the reason South Africa seemed to be improving under Mandela and Mbeki is because Mbeki had a Western education, there were rewards of all sorts from Western nations for the dismantling of Apartheid. No, I don’t know what kind of government I would install if I had the power to do so. Frankly, I don’t think anyone knows, or can know. It almost seems coincidence that the country has held up for so long. Now the Western influence on the government’s leadership has passed: I can’t help but wonder if the doom that’s been pending for as long as I’ve lived is now finding its time to come.

Yet at the same time, from my ignorance, my youth and my distance, I see South Africa brimming with potential, still miraculously hanging on to its sanity. I see a capitalist nation that despite its discrimination and heavy socialism and crime and corruption has not yet driven itself into chaos, as other African nations have. I see a vague determination to pick up and carry on, among Blacks and Whites alike, somewhere amidst the apathy I’ve grown accustomed to hearing of. If this is what I see, how much more lies under the surface? I, along with the rest of the world and the people of “my” country, can only hope to see the fruits of this something one day.