Making Love in a War Zone: Interracial Loving and Learning After Apartheid

By Jonathan Jansen

Can racism and intimacy co-exist? Can love and friendship form and flourish across South Africa’s imposed colour lines?

Who better to engage on the subject of hazardous liaisons than the students Jonathan Jansen served over seven years as Vice Chancellor of the University of the Free State, in South Africa. The context is the University campus in Bloemfontein, the City of Roses, the Mississippi of South Africa. Rural, agricultural, insular, religious and conservative, this is not a place for breaking out. But over the years, Jansen observed shifts in campus life and noticed more and more openly interracial friendships and couples, and he began having conversations with these students with burning questions in mind.

Ten interracial couples tell their stories of love and friendship in their own words, with a focus on how these students experience the world of interracial relationships, and how flawed, outdated laws and customs set limits on human relationships, and the long shadow they cast on learning, living and loving on university campuses to this day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookstorm
• Release date: Mar 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781928257400

Jonathan Jansen

Prof Jonathan Jansen is a leading South African educationist, commentator and the author of several books including the best-selling 'Letters to My Children'. He is the former vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State, where he earned a reputation for transformation and a deep commitment to reconciliation. He is married with two children.

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asterisks.

INTRODUCTION

Making love in a war zone

‘You are in deep, deep trouble,’ said the policeman as he shone the torch into our faces. I was livid and had already rolled down the window of my white 1.3-litre Toyota Corolla for the predictable harassment. He seemed to be enjoying the moment of discovery, the flashlight darting around the inside of the car as if there was some incriminating material hidden from view. I knew why he was there and what made it worse was that he should have known better. He was a black man (he would, I suspect, insist on coloured), this Cape Town policeman who had become part of the system of harassment against his own people; in the young policeman’s simple mind, he was just enforcing the laws of the country, with the perverse thrill of catching an interracial couple together.

We knew how this would start and we knew how it would end.

‘Where are you from?’ the officer asked, pointing at me. This line of questioning seemed to be standard operating procedure for apartheid’s enforcers of the Immorality Act, a most convenient way to avoid asking the more obvious question: ‘Why are you, a black [he would say coloured] man, and a white woman in the same car?’ Spineless, these people, and my anger built.

‘Retreat,’ I mumbled the oddly named area of the southern suburbs. Apparently the name had something to do with Rommel’s troops in nearby Muizenberg during the war; I never quite got the whole story. Of course it was patently clear from my dark skin I was not really the target of the interrogation.

The torch kept flashing around the car. Suddenly it settled on the face of my fiancée. Before he could ask the predictable question, she said ‘Athlone’ while staring straight ahead. A moment’s silence. No catch for the young enforcer to boost his standing when the boys got together to discuss the night’s arrests.

‘Okay, you can go,’ he instructed. Place of residence and subtlety of accent instantly told him this was not a white girl.

You never quite got used to the abuse. For our honeymoon we decided to drive from Cape Town to Durban for a few days of relaxation after the normal busyness that goes with weddings. We stopped at the Spur in George for dinner. While I was locking the car my new wife went ahead to secure seats at the popular steak joint. But George was not Cape Town; in fact, it was the area where apartheid’s bulldog of a Prime Minister, PW Botha, held his constituency.

My wife was welcomed and seated and a few minutes later I came to join her. I was blocked at the entrance.

‘Whites only,’ said the bemused kid at the door. I made my usual BC (Black Consciousness) speech with finger pointing and all, and then we left to continue driving through the night after collecting some eats at a shop in nearby Knysna.

This kind of harassment became routine for us as a dating and now married couple, but it was nothing compared with the thousands of people whose lives were destroyed by the separation of families and the denial of love. I would discover some of these tragic family stories in The Section 5 Chronicles, an archival research project for this book in which I invited members of families broken up by apartheid’s race laws to deposit their stories. Section 5 refers to that section of the Population Registration Act (5), which allowed persons to change their racial identities based on ancestry, appearance and acceptance by the community. These three extracts from the archive are illustrative of the pain and confusion caused by ripping families apart by virtue of the race-classification laws of the time:

EXTRACT #1

I well remember when it became a law in South Africa that every citizen had to register for an identity certificate stating if you were white, coloured or black [the Population Registration Act]. Growing up in District Six in Cape Town, it was a happy time; the colour of one’s skin did not really matter until this law was introduced. I remember being given a form that was meant for whites by the photographer. He must have taken me at that time for being a white teenager. I returned it and asked for a form meant for coloureds and was duly registered as a Cape Coloured.

One day I was told by my dad that I could no longer visit Grandmother as they had been classified white. The sadness of this was that my Uncle Dennis [white] and his father [Pa Grainger] were both working for the City Tramway Bus Company. Pa was working in the bus sheds while Uncle Dennis was a bus conductor. When Uncle Dennis was asked about ‘the Grainger working in the shed’, he said he did not know him. Now soon to be 82, I have only this one regret that a law was passed that divided and destroyed families.

EXTRACT #2

My family was affected. My mom’s father and his family had themselves classified white. My brother and I never knew him. My mom stopped talking to him because he would not allow her to bring us to his home. She could pass for white but we could not. My grandmother said his decision to become white broke up their marriage. It still makes me sad thinking about it.

EXTRACT #3

I know someone from East London. They were sisters in an orphanage. The one was adopted by a white family and eventually married a white guy, and followed that path. The other sister was adopted by a coloured family and then married a coloured guy. Sadly, when the coloured sister traced her white sister years later, she did not want anything to do with her. She even denied being her sister. Very tragic.

If you lived in the Cape you would hear such stories all the time of live-in and married couples being torn apart in the more tolerant communities around the city centre because one of the partners was dark-skinned and the other lighter-skinned. Loving family relationships were broken up because of the Population Registration Act (which required that you register your racial group) and the Group Areas Act (which determined where your racial group lived).1 You would hear of suicides – somebody hanged herself, another threw himself in front of a train. People went off their heads as the children were taken away, some with the father, others with the mother based on whether the one group appeared white and the other black to some witless official.2 It is a pain that endures to this day beyond the dramatised accounts of well-known individuals such as Sandra Laing or Trevor Noah.3

‘Racial passing is an exile,’ writes the historian Allyson Hobbs, ‘sometimes chosen, sometimes not.’4 As in Hobbs’s country, the USA, in South Africa there are still families who are not reconciled after one side of the family ‘passed’ for white. At first the white side of the family simply did not want to lose the status and privileges of being drawn on the lighter side. Passing for white meant better schools, functioning hospitals, fancy restaurants and your own cemetery. It also meant shorter lines in public facilities, green parks and uncongested municipal swimming pools. Then there was the status thing – you were respected, you could order people around, you were not like them. You clung for dear life to this status but that meant denying your family, walking straight past them on the streets and in the malls. The last thing on your mind was the stunned looks and the unbearable suffering of your own blood. Those who saw the gap applied for reclassification; few were denied, according to parliamentary records, and the largest annual migration in status was from coloured to white. You made it. ‘No longer coloured but white’ read the government’s Hansard parliamentary records in its annual reports on reclassification.

Apartheid now past, the white side of the family is embarrassed. Many privileges fell away and whatever you might have accumulated by virtue of racial advantage now seems less important as you are targeted day after day in the media and on the streets for your whiteness. Guilt, which was always there, now stalks you. But pride is more powerful than conscience. And so you retain your distance and pretend that nothing happened. As the end of life nears, or because some child or grandchild stumbled on something from your darker past, and insists on knowing what happened, there might be some reconciliation. That kind of coming out is rare.

The black side of the family will pass through life in bewilderment. ‘How could they do that? I saw that relative in the street and she walked right past me.’ Expletives might follow but deep down there is pain, resentment and anger. ‘We just wanted to talk. Nobody is asking them to become black again. We are family after all.’ I have been part of such discussions in my home in the Cape so often that the pain of those words still registers within memory. ‘We just wanted to talk.’5

Skin still matters not only when it comes to interracial dating and marriage but also especially when it involves lighter- and darker-skinned members of the same classified group. It cuts across the races. Dark skin is bad. What will the children look like? What will people say? The legal prescriptions and social preferences of the apartheid past reach down into the democratic present. It still influences choices of families and couples even though there are no longer flashlights shining through car windows or officials peeping into bedrooms to detect illegal couplings.

‘You seem to have an obsession with that,’ said the Chairman of our University Council when I told him about my research for this book. I sensed his ever-so-slight irritation with the subject, and that this must have been a discussion among his white friends and community. ‘Why would the Rector keep raising these issues of race? And this racial integration in the residences thing. Let’s just move on. Students will sort it out among themselves.’

As we sat down for our regular breakfast together, I realised that I respected my Head of Council too much to tell him what I was really thinking. ‘No, I do not have an obsession with racial intimacy among students. I am in fact studying an obsession.’

*

This book is a study about a national obsession in South Africa that has its roots in the early days of Dutch settlement under the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) – the Dutch East India Company – in the 1650s but which continues to lay down a line that keeps black and white South Africans apart in acts of learning, living and loving. About this the research is unequivocal – that the desegregation of public places after apartheid, from open beaches to university classrooms, did not lead to the integration of racial groups; in fact, people continue to drift towards homogenous groups (their own race) when there is absolutely no reason to do so.6 Yet while the hard edges of learning and living together have been somewhat smoothed out since the end of apartheid, it is the mortal fear of loving together that still drives many South Africans crazy.

There are regional variations to be sure. You are more likely to see mixed couples in the cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg than in the more rural university towns of Bloemfontein or Potchefstroom. There are also distinctions within the bounds of racial, ethnic and religious community. You are more likely to love across the colour line if you are English-speaking rather than Afrikaans-speaking; or if you are coloured by designation rather than African; or if you are Christian rather than Muslim or Jewish or Hindu. There are class distinctions; you are more likely to love without boundaries if you are middle class rather than poor. And there are generational variations; younger couples are more likely to date and marry across lines of race and ethnicity than was the case with their parents.7

Within all these variations there are those individuals who break the trend, who stand out, who defy expectation and who love whom they like. Like my friends the Rajah family in Durban. The husband is Muslim, and he married a Hindu woman, while their Indian daughter went on to marry a Jewish boy. This is rare in South Africa or anywhere else in the world, for that matter. Theirs are, no doubt, stories of hope.

For the social scientist such stories are also puzzles for inquiry. Who are the people who defied laws (then) and who defy convention (now) to create these kinds of unions with all the costs involved? What is there within their biographies that might explain such daring? How do they make these decisions? How do they manage the often-severe consequences of their choices from within their own families, from peers and the reprisal of strangers? What, in other words, makes their loving actions exceptional rather than the norm?

*

For more than two decades I worked on university campuses in South Africa, from the University of Durban-Westville (UDW, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal) to the University of Pretoria (UP, Pretoria, Gauteng) to the University of the Free State (UFS, Bloemfontein, Free State). I started as a Professor and Head of Department (UDW), continued as a Dean (UP) and then took on the position of Rector (UFS). In all of those positions I thrived on the sheer joy of being able to teach, lead and live among undergraduate students. I had an open-door policy for students, and as Rector would regularly have these bright young people come through our home. We talked about their academics, their professional ambitions and, invariably, their lives on and off campus. I had the privilege of meeting many of their parents and even visiting some in their homes. In other words, I got to know these 18- to 21-year-olds really well.

It happened often, during a consultation with a student or in the course of a casual conversation somewhere on campus – the question of forbidden relationships. ‘What should I do? My father will kill me. Any advice?’ In Durban I remember it was not only about race but also religion: a deeply devout Muslim woman student had fallen in love with a Hindu student. She fully expected banishment from her home and community. The costs were high. Any advice? In Pretoria there was a memorable visit by an Afrikaans-speaking white woman student who was in love with a black male student. She feared that her family would find out. In the Free State it was a gay student in a relationship that not even her friends knew about. Two decades in higher education and little had changed. Students still struggled with relationships that did not conform to social expectations – you love within your race, ethnic group, religious community and sexual affiliation. Step outside of those boundaries and there are costs.

I have always been drawn to people who dwell in the borderlands;8 that is, those who live their lives straddling the boundaries set by society. They are frontiersmen and women, in one metaphor, or the miner’s canaries, in another.9 Baanbrekers is a beautiful Afrikaans word for pioneers. These are people who refuse to be defined by social norms or constrained by historical patterns of association. They take the risks as they come. They are not reckless but find their motivation in something deeper than habit and stronger than fear. How they live their lives evokes an intense intellectual quest to discover how they make sense of and survive the tests and turmoil of borderline living.

Border-crossing people are everywhere. The lone woman executive in a testosterone-filled boardroom. The working-class student in a flush private high school. The children in schools right on the border of South Africa and Swaziland whose social and ethnic selves are shaped by two national identities. The Muslims encircling a Christian church with their arms interlocked to prevent further burnings of these holy places. The poor white student who shares her daily loaf of bread from a giving organisation with a fellow black student before she takes home the rest to feed her baby.10

For the same reasons, I was drawn to young people at the University of the Free State who entered into border-crossing liaisons during my seven years as leader of this more than 30 000-strong student campus. I wanted to hear their stories up close and gain insights into their lives. So I invited each couple for a video-recorded interview. I wanted them together, interested not only in what each person in the partnership said, but also in how they interacted over the course of the interview. I watched how they corrected and redirected each other. I was alert to what surprised the one partner in what the other had just shared, and who spoke or responded to which questions. I listened for words they used to address each other, which stories would evoke stress or pain, and which would release laughter. I measured their degree of comfort with each other, as well as the gestures of body and speech. And I probed their sense of whether the relationship was meant to last.

What eventually emerged from these interviews were compelling stories about the entangled lives of young people born around the time of the end of apartheid. They themselves did not live through the horrors of enforced separation or detention without trial or the banality of everyday apartheid. These student couples came into their youth with no direct memory of the dark past but nonetheless carried the burden of indirect memory transmitted to them by parents, peers, schools and universities. They hadn’t been there, physically, but they were affected in what they felt and knew about apartheid. The young people in this study therefore entered interracial relationships with their eyes wide open. And yet they were determined to reach across boundaries regardless of the costs of trespassing social rules and conventions that continue to set the terms of affection and embrace in contemporary South Africa.

*

The context for the study is the University of the Free State. It is the Mississippi of South Africa.11 Rural, agricultural, insular, religious and conservative, this is not a place for breaking out.

Amanda Kotze-Nhlapo had just returned from her first date with a handsome black man. At the end of a blissful evening, the young white woman leaned against the door of the family house in Fichardt Park and berated herself: ‘What on earth do you think you are doing? This is Bloemfontein!’ (emphasis her own).12

Interracial intimacies continue as a problem throughout South Africa. Here in the Free State heartland it feels ten times worse. It has to do with the long history of Afrikaner republicanism dominating the region since the days when some of the Trekkers set down roots in what would become the Orange Free State. These were men and women who fled the more liberal Cape with its favourable dispensation for slaves in the 1860s, staying behind in this central region of South Africa while others trekked further north to what would become the other Boer Republic, the Transvaal.

The agricultural sector has long dominated social relations in this part of the country. Established white farmers and impoverished black farm labourers encountered each other daily across a dangerous fault line for race relations in a region without major industries. The Free State escaped the liberalisation brought by the discovery of gold and diamonds on the Rand, to the north, or the flows of international traffic through the ports of the Cape, to the south. You could leave the small urban setting of the judicial capital of South Africa (Bloemfontein) and within minutes feel like you were in farm country, with wide-open spaces stretching endlessly towards the horizon. The so-called sophisticates of the more established cities would make Bloemfontein and the Free State the butt of jokes for its isolation, underdevelopment and particularly mean racial policies. It was the only region in which by statutory decree Indian South Africans (called Asians in the statute of the times) were subjected to a nightly curfew that disallowed residence in the province. No doubt this had to do with protecting the Boers from competition in the small and vulnerable economy of the Free State.

Outnumbered more than nine to one by black people in a rural agricultural sector whose fortunes were dependent on the vicissitudes of a drought-prone climate, the small white Afrikaans population would feel even more vulnerable to being marginalised and overrun in the small towns and cities dotting the wide-open landscape. Contributing about 7% to the provincial GDP, ‘agriculture creates more jobs than any other sector of the economy’,13 thereby drawing black labour and white farmers into an intense and unchanged dependency over many decades.

With that sense of power, isolation and vulnerability came a particularly virulent form of racism sustained over generations by conservative churches, segregated schools and a racially venomous mouthpiece, the local Afrikaans newspaper.14 That racism would often express itself in muscular form, led by men who found ready resort in weapons and who routinely abused black farm labourers. Every now and again cases of assault would make it to court in the democratic era with the sad, pathetic faces of overgrown men in tight khaki clothing standing head down in the docks for brutalising, sometimes killing, black men. This long history of the normalisation of racial violence and bigotry in the Free State has been captured in anecdote and research over the years.15 As is the history of complex intimacies.

There is a reason Zakes Mda’s famous novel, The Madonna of Excelsior, is set in the rural Free State. Here in Excelsior, a small town about 100 kilometres from Bloemfontein, white Afrikaans middle-class men came for their jollies. Businessmen, politicians and dominees (ministers of religion) sought interracial sex with black women until the news leaked and the police arrested the black women. Shame fell on the white men, punishment enough. At a time when laws forbidding such intimacies were firmly laid down by the apartheid government, sex between white men and black women continued as in other parts of the country.