Too white to be Coloured, Too Coloured to be Black: On the search for home and meaning

By Ismail Lagardien

Too White to be Coloured, Too Coloured to be Black is a hybrid narrative, blending memoir with social commentary and political analysis.Always in search of "home",  the book tracks Lagardien's vast experiences of a deeply lived life, always against a backdrop of "unbelonging" - first as a reporter in the turbulent 80s, to studying economics at the LSE, then achieving a doctorate at the University of Wales, to working as a speechwriter at the World Bank in Washington. A unique and brilliant read. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melinda Ferguson Books
• Release date: Mar 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781990973437

Ismail Lagardien

In the late 80s Ismail Lagardien worked as a reporter and photojournalist for the Weekly Mail and Sowetan. He studied at the London School of Economics and received a doctorate at the University of Wales. Today he's a leading political economist,  and writes for Business Day, the Daily Maverick and VryeWeekblad.  

Book preview

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This book is dedicated to Anwar, Fatima, Ayesha, Adam and my beloved Sara – the Lagardien family – who took me in and cared for me, sans judgement, for eighteen months during a period of absolute misery, confusion, defeat, mental and physical burnout, PTSD and a weakened immune system, following my resignation from Nelson Mandela University in October, 2017. My appreciation also goes to Lisa Ndlovu for her patience.

Lagardien self-identifies as a non-adherent of any credal expression of faith. Yet this memoir does allude to, albeit unintentionally so, a saying by St. Bernard of Clairvaux: Everyone has to drink from his own well.

By this St. Bernard meant that you should be guided by what you have seen and heard in your daily life. But drawing water from a well is also a communal event shared with others. Tragically, in Largardien’s life, it is the contagious nature of exclusion, premised on the false constructs of race and bigotry, that poisons and barricades societies’ wells, cauterising them from being locales of soul-nourishing inclusion.

He is told, not too far along the road into the New South Africa, that if you are not white or black, then you are nothing. The more physical expression of this desultory violence had been there from the moment he opened his green/grey eyes and the world saw how differently light-skinned he was. The Okapi, the folding lock-knife of township clevahs that Ismail carried in his jeans’ pocket was never raised in defence or attack. It was, I suggest, a rosary of comfort, a reminder to himself in a hostile world, moetie-kak-vattie.

Yet in all this, somehow and wonderfully so, tenderness survives. Ultimately why and by what means, only Ismail Lagardien knows. But what was once said of Billie Holiday certainly rings true of his life: If you can’t be free, be a mystery.

– Father Michael Weeder, Dean of St George’s Cathedral, Cape Town

Chapter 1

SO MUCH FOR MEMOIR WRITING

I always thought there was something wrong about memoir writing. I had the impression that writing a memoir was simply a case of so-you-have-nothing-worthy-to-talk-about-so-you-talk-about-yourself. It had always been drilled into me that you never talk about yourself and, worse still, should most definitely not say anything good about yourself. You shouldn’t brag. And, You shouldn’t show off. Then there was the one that hurt the most. The one that followed me for most of my life – especially when I had achieved something meaningful or noteworthy: Just because you have green eyes, and you’re white, you think you’re better than us.

Allow me a moment of reflection and explain how I have approached this memoir, such as it is. (I have been tainted by academia, so I often feel the need to present some explanation of how I approach a topic …) Throughout this book I will need the reader to indulge me as I weave between lines that may flow with pretences of grandeur, aspiring to the great aphorists who have influenced me, and interspersed with the bathos that is so characteristic of my own writing.

I sit now at my desk, a fan blowing cold air in my face. There are empty glasses and a blue file, beneath which is a plate, and a knife and fork (probably from last night’s dinner); there are two cups half filled with cold coffee, and packages of pills. There are pills everywhere in my home. Through the window, in the distance before me, are the grey sleepy slopes of the Overberg mountains. In a corner of my desk is the memoir of Eric Hobsbawm, behind me, on my bookshelves, are the memoirs of Mohamad Mahathir, the former prime minister of Malaysia, and of Raymond Suttner, once a respected member of South Africa’s ruling alliance and now an acclaimed independent and progressive thinker. Sticking out of the pile of books – I can’t read the spines because they face away from me – there is the biography of a coloured cricket player who, in the 1800s, the book records, was too black to wear whites, which I have started reading for another book project I will start on soon. I am, then, not as opposed to memoirs or autobiographies, as I may think. I have an electronic copy of Jean Paul Sartre’s autobiography, The Words, and the two-volume autobiography of Arthur Koestler, Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing. Clearly, I have been wrong all these years. Here I am, then, in a state of physical discomfort, writing a memoir, of sorts. Of sorts because, taken from Hobsbawm, I am not that interesting a person, nor am I exceptional in any way, but I have lived in interesting times. At the back of my mind is a nagging passage by Tolstoy in The Cossacks.

And he went on

Talking about himself

Not realising that this

was not as interesting

to the others

as it was to him.

This more or less sums up my approach. To the extent that this book is a memoir, it is not entirely about me. It is about the times I have lived in, my relationship with these times, how these times have conspired to make something of me, over and over again, and how I have battled to make something else of me. That it draws on the past is with full understanding that there is rarely a vantage point that is entirely reliable and sufficiently protected from criticism from which to reflect on things that happened many months or years ago.

In some ways, I live in a country that seems alien to me – which it shouldn’t be. I have been back in the country for a decade now, after more than two decades of being peripatetic, and away almost full time for 14 years, most of which was spent at the London School of Economics, at the World Bank, the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and universities in the Carolinas. When I stepped off the plane in the hard cold of Cape Town’s international airport in July 2011, I smiled to myself, and recited (under my breath) TS Eliot’s passage: We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.

It’s 2021. I am now a columnist and aspiring essayist. Aspiring because I am still working at it, and there are limited outlets for long-read essays that actually pay for what you write. It is, in part, the times in which we live; a time of economic hardship for the vast majority of people around the world, and when social media have reduced conversations between people to abbreviations and little graphics and images – emojis we call them – as a means to express how we are feeling or what we want to say or what we mean …

We are also in the middle of a global pandemic, the dreaded Covid-19 virus, and I fear interaction with people – any people and all people. This is the second attempt at writing a book over the past 14 months, or so. I was compelled to abandon an earlier book commission because I would have had to travel to various places across the country, interact with strangers and dig into archival material. Given that I have underlying conditions – haven’t we all? – I could not risk travelling, and anyway the country would go into lockdown in March 2020 and it became almost impossible to travel across the country, to cities, towns and villages, and to dig into archives.

The book commission was perfect in the sense that it was to have been about an issue I had become familiar with and would have forced me to draw on a range of insights and findings that required evidence, or at least substantiation. The main problem, besides the fact that according to my previous publisher, I had written the first three chapters in too academic a style, was that I had started investigations, found some fascinating bits and pieces, but needed to travel across the country to find physical evidence, interview people, and verify facts and information I had gathered. I abandoned that project in March 2020. I remain convinced, as I write this now, more than a year later, that given my battered immune system and a chronic chest affliction, the virus would have laid me down as it has so many people. Nonetheless, I may never get over the disappointment of that abandoned project, or look the publisher in the eye again. I know, however, that the sheer horror of exposing myself to the dreaded virus has, for almost a year now, turned me from someone who previously simply lived alone to being a recluse. Nobody is welcome in my life, or in my home. I explain these issues, especially my health battles as a part of the approach I have taken to prepare this manuscript.

And so I start, not at the beginning, as the King told Alice, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, but closer to the end. Looking back, from where I sit, here at my blue trestle table, with the whirr of the fan in my face and in my ear, my opening statement should be that I have tried to live an inconspicuous life, something like a neutrino travelling through a human body, too small to make an impact, and too small to leave a trace. I have nonetheless lived in interesting times. Times that have shaped me, and at times, broken me.

My life, at least the first 60 years of it, can be neatly laid over the apartheid period; how it took root, rose, how it began to disintegrate and how it was replaced with a more democratic polity. While these first 60 years make up the bulk of the interesting times I have lived in, the years that followed were more peripatetic. This book will attempt to lay out these historical and political passages, what they did to me and to my family, friends and community and how all of these would drive me away, always, in search of something to do with what they – the times and the people – have done to me, and how I have tried to give it meaning. What I have done in writing this book is let the act of writing take over. This act of writing often involves sitting down to write, never quite knowing where things will end up. One of the things that surprised me most is the place and role that photography has played in my professional life and beyond …

I was born into a particular family in the late 1950s and at a particular time, when the fount and matrix of apartheid were established and the future was taking shape. I was three years old when the white minority in South Africa unilaterally declared independence from Britain – not very different to the way the USA, that other settler colony, did almost 300 years ago, and Rhodesia would in 1965. I was there each time we had to move home because the Group Areas Act meant we (coloured people) had to make way for white suburbs. As an apolitical family, we simply moved from place to place with no resistance or explanation given. I was there in 1976 when high-school students around the country rose in protest against apartheid education. After that I drifted from job to job, holding down three jobs at one time, while I was building a career as a reporter and then a photojournalist, which placed me at the coalface of apartheid’s brutality and resistance throughout the 1980s. I was there in 1990 when toothless peons lined the sidewalks and filled the streets, waving flags of liberation when political leaders were released from Robben Island, and others flew in from exile. We came closer, soon after that, to the upheavals of the 1980s, descending into what was essentially civil war in the early 1990s.

I was there in 1994, and took a large gulp of the optimism, and saw tints of hope when the genuinely activist cabinet of Nelson Mandela and the initially astute leadership of Thabo Mbeki placed the country on a path towards deliberatively rolling back the injustices of the past. We were so optimistic at the time. In hindsight, it was a blinkered tolerance coupled with romantic idealism. We were deluded by reveries of non-racialism, democracy, justice for all, ethical, transparent and available governance. We rose in the early days of our democracy on a wave of moral authority and certitude. That dreadful history was behind us and yet another future beckoned me.

Then, in 1997, I went away – looking, searching, finding then abandoning, and longing – and by the time I returned in 2011, the separation from my family that started more than three decades ago had grown wider. My old friends were now grown up with their own children, and I was in a colder place than the one I left behind. I literally had no home to return to, and South Africa had lost all meaning to me. I spent the first five years following my return transfixed by the lava flows of maladministration, corruption, ethical breaches, indolence, slothfulness and senses of entitlement and selfishness, growing perversion of the ideas that we dedicated our lives to: non-racialism and justice for all. I saw the dégringolade of the organs of state, and the spread of poverty and inequality.

Now, a decade later, I felt the visceral effects of cruelty, racial exceptionalism, denial, race baiting and the politics of revenge. I stood on a landscape of smouldering battlements, and a society dangerously in conflict with itself. A society fighting over the spoils of a dividend that has not yet, and may never be, paid out. To the extent that I reached any firm conclusions, it would be that, lifted by the celebration of the collapse of the iniquitous system of apartheid, we reached a plateau within a decade; we broke down the old system, we were free, but we did not quite know what to do next. We were condemned to be free, as a wise Frenchman said all those years ago. The horror, at least in my mind, was that we were ultimately to blame for what we did with our freedom. We knew very well what to break down, but had almost mystical notions of what to put in its place, accompanied by mantric repetitions, recitations and incantations of passages from texts of liberation.

From that cold winter of my return in 2011, I descended from cautious excitement to tempered optimism, then bewilderment, disgust, anger, and crushing disappointment by 2015. Within three or four years of coming back to this place, everything I saw or heard in the first year was wrong. Almost everything I remembered about this place seemed wrong, or at best, lost in a mangle of memory – like a mountain of scrap metal ready for the smelters, to be forged into something new, something other than. I spent the better part of the first six years walking through the ruins of hope and optimism, of moral certitude and righteousness, and the promises of prosperity, of tolerance and justice.

I may have spoiled my vote in the 2014 general election, but I thought long and hard about voting. I wrote about it on the Thoughtleader pages of the Mail & Guardian and, as one critic replied, probably correctly, I overthought the act of voting. This is what I wrote:

Mediocrity, banality, ineptitude, corruption and debauchery cannot be expelled behind the polling booth’s veil of secrecy, but it can be shored-up. The way I see it, there is a greater challenge that one faces in elections, especially the one that approaches us; the belief that what we have is the best there has been, the best there is and the best that we ever will have. In this sense, the crisis of the next election is the crisis of memory; how it weighs on today, and maybe tomorrow. We are expected to look backward, while we live life forward. While there is nothing terribly wrong with that Janus-faced existence, it is a problem when we our acts and agency, our expectations and future are all tied to a memory that is prepared and packaged, like fast-food, and presented to us, uncritically … None of this matters, because it is no longer our own memories that matter. What matters is the memory, and the history, of the dominant group. As things stand, our history and humanity have, first, been redefined [then] replaced [by what the ruling-elite conjured] and we have a future … driven onward by falsity and bad faith. This numbing of the critical faculties is what elections tend to do to us. In South Africa, this numbing is applied all the way down, for the way in which the dominant group holds a powerful grip on almost all the institutions of society – from the state, to the electoral machinery, the legislature, academic institutions and, inevitably, it seems for, now, the popular media.

Reading that again now, I understand why I was criticised for overthinking. The critic should have added that my prose was unnecessarily obscurantist. And so, in writing this memoir, I tried to avoid the wilful obscurantism of academic writing. I learned as a journalist that all writing should be part of some kind of activism (primarily to find and protect the truth) and inspire or help the public make better decisions about their future. These days I write simply to put food on the table. Nonetheless, within a few years of coming back to South Africa I was filled with resignation and a loss of all hope for the country’s future.

Everything I thought I had known about South Africa all those years ago, when I was a journalist and after a two-year spell in the Mandela administration, all notions of belonging, of home, dissolved inexplicably. As I sit down to write now, I feel nothing, care very little, with only a mild sense of guilt about how we, all of us in South Africa, destroyed our country, and how we failed the promise of a democracy with justice for all, and prosperity, safety and trust among all. All those promises are in that mountain of metal, ready for the smelters. The promises are in the junkyard, ready to be recycled.

And so all notions I had of being home again dissolved deeper into the past. The past was now all dates and times and events somewhere in a different place, existing only in the deepest recesses of my mind. The present was an abattoir where everything I believed and thought I knew was slaughtered and shredded and forced out in a mixture of bright and brown blood, slime-congealed clots, and a putrid stench that resembled something that was once alive. I watched this reeking mess trickle daily between cold grills of gutters and storm-water drains, and in the toxic run-off from that mountain of mangled metal. Our history was in that mangle; the personal was now flowing with the public mess.

Indeed, at the best of times it was impossible to tell the difference between the private and the public. Above ground, in public, was Honoré de Balzac’s bourbier, a mire, a swamp, and below the sight line there were organisms desperate to leave the ville souterraine and make it in the swamp as sushi kings, politico-millionaires and predators, the unforgiven and the innocent all living in a fetid muck. I kept thinking how it could have gone so wrong after those days of great optimism; after Nelson Mandela and his comrades were released from prison and when politics became normalised in South Africa. We cast the darkest of shadows over ourselves and have none to blame but ourselves.

Here, now, in 2021, it is not outrageous to say we have crossed a moral threshold; an event horizon from which there is no return, no redemption and even less forgiveness. Guilt and innocence, accountability, and the vaguest sense of humility have traded places with avarice, greed, senses of exceptionalism and purity, threatening pogroms against people considered to be non-African. How short and how shallow our memories have become.

All of these are part of the structure and text of this book and unfold over successive chapters. On these pages I will reveal no secrets. Actually, I have none that would be titillating in the slightest. There may be one or two that will go with me to my grave, but I have no saucy stories about making U-turns under the bedsheets. The bald head is genetic. I also have no desire to spill any secrets or share stories about other people, unless they deserve to be called out for their duplicity and disingenuousness. There is, also, this thing called trust. At this point the reader who is interested in salacious details of an ordinary life may well turn elsewhere. What I will say is that – spared, thankfully, from the slaughter among Europeans during the First and Second World Wars – I was born in the decade after the second European war, and I have lived in some of the most exciting, and often the most brutal times of the twentieth century. In moments of delusion I imagine what life would have been like in a Parisian brothel during the belle époque, when the arts flourished and great masterpieces of literature, theatre, and especially the visual arts exploded like fireworks in the night sky. I have but one life situated in one time. That is what this book is about.

At the best of times, especially during a 15-year period as a journalist, I simply did the best I could with what was given to me. Early in that time I worked on a construction site, as a stevedore (as a teenager), I sold things, and worked in a car wash and a bookshop (where else?) while trying to make it as a reporter. Where, then, does one start with a memoir? Every life starts from nothing. This seems as fitting a place to start as any. That is where I should start, but before I do so, there was the horror of an ordinary day in South Africa.

Chapter 2

JUST ANOTHER DAY

As I sit down and write these early lines, I am shuttered in my container home 600 metres as the crow flies from an exclusive beach that I have visited only two or three times in almost two years. The sea can be deceptive sometimes, especially for someone who cannot swim. I am recovering from spinal surgery I had barely a month ago, and maxillofacial and dental surgeries I have had since October. I am unable to do much more than sit and write for an hour or two at a time. The painkillers make me drowsy, and force me to lie down for hours at a time.

I should probably explain …

It was a normal spring day. I was on my usual shopping drive along a country road from Kleinmond to Pringle Bay – a couple of coastal villages due east of Cape Town across False Bay and further east along the southern Atlantic as it breaks on the craggy shore. The road from Pringle Bay to Kleinmond is nondescript. Unless you like the sight of boulders stacked one on top of the other,