Made in South Africa: A Black Woman's Stories of Rage, Resistance and Progress

By Lwando Xaso

Like so many of her generation, Lwando Xaso came of age alongside the beginnings and growth of South Africa's constitutional democracy. Her journey into adulthood was a radically different one from that of earlier generations, marked by hope that changing perceptions would usher in a new and free society.
Made in South Africa – A Black Woman's Stories of Rage, Resistance and Progress, is a vibrant collection of essays in which Lwando examines with incisive clarity some of the events that have shaped her experience of South Africa – a country with huge potential but weighed down by persistent racism and inequality, cultural appropriation, sexism and corruption, all legacies of a complicated history.
As a young lawyer intent on climbing the corporate ladder, Lwando's life's direction was changed by a personal experience of the oppressive capacity of a supposedly democratic government when it unjustly fired a close family friend and mentor from a senior government position. She found herself on his legal team and the turmoil the case created within her led her to further her studies in constitutional law, and to pick up her pen and share with a wider audience her views of what was happening in her beloved country.
Her outlook was further shaped by her experience of clerking at the Constitutional Court for Justice Edwin Cameron, which deepened her respect for the South African Constitution, and what it really means for a resilient people to strive continually to live up to its moral and legal standards.
Lwando's writing reflects her unflinching resolve to live according to the precepts of our groundbreaking Constitution and offers a challenge to all South Africans to believe in and achieve 'the improbable'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tracey McDonald Publishers
• Release date: Oct 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781990931680

Book preview

MADE IN SOUTH AFRICA

A Black Woman’s Stories of Rage, Resistance and Progress

LWANDO XASO

First published by Tracey McDonald Publishers, 2020

Suite No. 53, Private Bag X903, Bryanston, South Africa, 2021

www.traceymcdonaldpublishers.com

Copyright © Lwando Xaso, 2020

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-990931-67-3

e-ISBN (ePUB) 978-1-990931-68-0

Text design and typesetting by Patricia Crain, Empressa

Cover concept by Lwando Xaso

Cover design by Milk Studios

Cover compilation by Tomangopawpadilla

Digital conversion by Wouter Reinders

For my parents – Eleanor and Thembekile Xaso.

Thank you for giving me the space to chart my own course

and for always trusting me.

And thank you for paying my school fees.

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

IMPRINT

DEDICATION

FOREWORD BY EDWIN CAMERON

FOREWORD BY CHERYL CAROLUS

PREFACE

RAGE

SOFT SERVE RACISM

REVISITING SEPARATE BUT EQUAL

TRUTH IN JEOPARDY AS PAST RECEDES

REPARATIONS – APARTHEID’S OUTSTANDING DEBT

ON ZAPIRO’S RACIST ART

PENNY SPARROW AND RACISM

ON THE ALIENATION OF COCONUTS

ZUMA MUST FALL MARCH

ANGER AND TRANSFORMATION

WHO IS ENTITLED TO TELL WHAT STORIES?

GREATNESS IS IN SERVICE

THE RISE AND FALL OF GREAT MEN

RESISTANCE

ACTIVE CITIZENRY AND THE POWER OF THE VOTE

THE WEIGHT OF A LEADER’S WORDS

RAISING THE BAR

THE WOMEN OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL COURT

TEMBEKA’S BOOK LAUNCH ADDRESS

MANDELA TRIBUTE

BEYONCÉ – A LAW UNTO HERSELF

THE MEANING OF SERENA

EXCLUSION AT THE TABLE

NEW YORK AND THE INDULGENCE OF LEARNING

PROGRESS

LESSONS FROM SIERRA LEONE

ON DIE STEM – WE CANNOT UNCHOP A TREE

BOOM SHAKA – THE CONSTITUTIONAL PIONEERS

FROM LAW TO MAKING A MUSEUM

ON QUESTIONING THE USEFULNESS OF PRISONS

THE PARALLELS OF HISTORY: 1976 TO FEES MUST FALL

OBAMA AND MANDELA

MANDELA THE LAWYER

ON BEING UNWORTHY OF THE SPACE ON THE LETTERHEAD

LIFE AND LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19

2020 – A LIFE’S MOSAIC

LESSONS FOR CHANGE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

STAY IN TOUCH WITH LWANDO XASO

Being South African is not for the faint-hearted or the fragile. It is a strong and determined state of mind – it is believing in the improbable. It is being challenged and frustrated to your wits’ end but still finding a reason to smile. It is believing that no matter how dark the day, the sun will shine again – it has to. South Africa has ballasted, steeled, chiselled, moulded and prepared me for a life of rigour.

FOREWORD BY EDWIN CAMERON

In 2011, Lwando and I were on an oversight inspection at a prison in the Northern Cape. In one of the poignant, plangent essays in this book, she recounts the intensity of that day. The discomfort. Her anxiety, a woman in a male prison. Her guilt about the emotions she was feeling not being ‘correct’. And her shame, at the thought that she might be too ‘fragile’ for the mission that took us there.

In this lavishly collected compendium of subtle insights and evocations, Lwando’s words recreate a rich world of ambivalent experiences, one in which she sometimes fluctuates between her reservations and fears – recognising that day, for instance, that our society, our institutions, had failed the people she met.

It is this Lwando – intense, pure and purposeful – that I met in my chambers at the Constitutional Court when she came for a clerkship interview. Her impact on me was immediate – alert, observant, anguished about injustice, but also intent on removing it.

Her visionary convictions, her intense but rigorously harnessed emotions, were evident from the first. I decided within a few minutes that we had to spend her clerkship year together. And we did. Our bond has not broken.

It was a bond illuminated, though not defined, on both sides, by our different experiences of race in a racially charged society. Lwando once recounted a story to me. She, a primary school youngster, travels across daily from Soweto to attend a well-appointed formerly whites-only school. In a conspicuous minority, black in a still-white school, she is invited to a friend’s home. A meal is served. The mother, well-meaning, patronising, freighted by racial and cultural assumptions, explains to her how to use a knife and fork, invites her to eat her pasta with her fingers.

I blush and quail at the thought. Why? Because of the freighting of difference that still so burdens us. None of us, or very few of us, are free.

A small incident, small enough to scar a tender child with marks that remain, with the weight of supposition, prejudice, privilege.

At the Kuruman prison, an encounter with two incarcerated people provoked insights that destabilised her understanding of suffering – which, until then, she had accepted as natural.

Instead, now, the prisoners were no longer simply attached to, merely defined by, the acts that led to their incarceration. They were the products of a social system that drew – perhaps grew – its ‘criminals’ with heavy disproportion from specific communities – black and working class.

Every introduction to human rights is, has to, be not only cerebral, but also emotional. Our intensest moments of conversion are affective. They are interior events that bring us closer to sadness, love and rage. Activism begins with a struggle between what we feel, sense, is unjust and the structures within which we’ve been socialised, that have taught us to normalise suffering as an unhappy reality. It is, necessarily, a destabilising baptism.

In South Africa, as with most things, suffering is distributed markedly unequally. Our laws and the activists who seek to use them are fighting subjugation and inequity that has had 400 years to entrench itself, to structurally embed our relationships with one another, and to spatially organise our communities.

As Lwando’s book goes to publication, South Africa is struggling with a global pandemic, and a national disaster. Countries around the world have closed their borders, our economy reeling, with millions going hungry, the sick sleep on hospital floors while mortuaries no longer have the capacity to house the dead. COVID-19 has exposed the fault lines in our communities and how deeply tenacious the precarity centuries of subordinative social planning have produced.

Social programmes that produce organised abandonment mean that the marginalised are assigned a disproportionate amount of the suffering. Despite regulations prohibiting evictions, local governments have bulldozed informal settlements and destroyed people’s homes.

Gender-based violence has risen by 500 per cent.¹ Black, working-class bodies have been sacrificed to the security forces’ violence in enforcing lockdown.

And, while COVID-19 has aggravated interpersonal and state violence, these harrowing realities are not new. For too long, all South Africans have learned to live in a state of normalised chaos. The circulation of suffering is so prolific that our emotional labour is reserved for exceptional spectacles of brutality. The everyday we largely ignore.

Our emotions don’t merely draw us to suffering – they bind together those who are moved to care about, to act on, suffering.

They build moral communities by mobilising individuals to challenge conditions of oppression together. Human rights, then, are not only steeped in emotion: they provoke us to produce space in which we can process trauma and emotion as a collective, and move to change the conditions that produce them.

Thus, as Lwando rightly observes in one of the pieces in this unforgettable collection, we cannot hold on to our outrage for too long. For it to be of use to our society it must be transformed into action.

Our shared anger at injustice around us brought us to shared convictions in search of hope. The Court is a memorial for people burdened by history and a space for those touched by violence to fight for a more just society.

I find hope, not only in the too-fitful and too-scanty progress we have made, but in the energy and passion of our young people. Their struggle against oppression is continuous.

As we cannot take for granted the progress my generation made in seeking to cast off apartheid, so we cannot make those gains our home.

We must be angered by what these gains have not achieved. We must recognise our disappointment in how long it has taken to mitigate exclusion and subordination in sometimes only marginal proportions.

But our anger is useful only when transmuted into solidarity, and when solidarity is transmuted into collective action, in determination to secure a better world.

Lwando’s essays start from a deep personal grounding, but always culminate in that determination. In doing so, they instruct, elevate and impassion us every time. Enjoy the journey that these pages will guide you through!

FOREWORD BY CHERYL CAROLUS

I AM MADE IN SOUTH AFRICA

Today, as the COVID-19 pandemic wreaks havoc with our lives and our livelihoods, as people throughout the world rise up against racism and exclusion, we are presented with a challenge, and an opportunity to claim our future on our own terms.

COVID-19 has stripped away the layers of pseudo comfort that some of us have wrapped ourselves in, hiding away from some dreadful truths about the world and the country we live in. The pandemic has brought to bear and exacerbated the challenges that our country was already grappling with. Our ability to overcome these challenges depends on whether we decide to embrace this as an opportunity to build the future envisioned by our Constitution.

Mine is a lucky generation. We have lived through many horrors which have given us the tools to deal with what is happening today. I am so grateful to have lived through the horror of the sixties. Even as an incredibly young child I was palpably aware of the fear of punishment for opposing the apartheid regime which ruthlessly smashed all resistance and marched ahead with the most brutal period of law making.

After the long brutal period of the 1960s I had the privilege of living through the 1970s. The struggle and aspiration for freedom rose again in the form of the Black Consciousness Movement. It was a time when black people reasserted their pride in all things that made us what we were which the ideology of apartheid tried to diminish. It was a rejection of all the ways apartheid tried to make us complicit in our own oppression. The power of the Black Consciousness Movement was to make black people whole again. It was important for me as a black girl child from a desperately poor black family to assert a positive identity for myself. I was not a ‘non-white’. I said it loud that I am black and proud.

We grew our hair into huge Afros, we wore African print and we ferociously read the works of African scholars, authors and poets. We turned our gaze firmly to the African continent and significantly reduced the influence of Europe in our thinking and self-identification.

We looked to Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, Kwame Nkrumah and Bessie Head. We explored notions of self-reliance. We defied the divisions of apartheid which separated us into categories of Coloured, Asians, Indians and Bantus. We also rejected the efforts to further divide the black populace into ethnic groups stripped of their South African citizenship and forcibly assigned to Bantustans which were the far-flung barren parts of our beautiful and vast country.

I lived through the explosion that was 1976. The people had risen again. The fear which defined the 1960s was broken. The military machine of the apartheid regime no longer frightened us. Some whites were standing side by side with us. They, like us, were of varying political orientations but we were united by our rejection of everything the apartheid regime sought to perpetuate. The violent suppression from the apartheid government is well recorded and poignantly captured in that horrible photograph of a traumatised Mbuyisa Makhubo running, carrying the lifeless body of Hector Pieterson alongside Hector’s anguished sister, Antoinette. The lives of these three young people were forever changed in a moment.

From 1976, the liberation movement found new strength and power. I am privileged to have seen the uprisings of the 1980s. The students’ movement of the 1970s rapidly gathered large-scale support from communities all over the country. New organisations sprang up with great energy and determination. It was a time for flexing the ‘people’s power’. The non-racial movement made an appeal to whites to also cast off the shackles of oppression caused by the ideology of white supremacy which denied them real humanity.

The non-racial women’s movement of the 1980s is where I came of age after the angry days of my youth. This movement offered half the white adult population, white women, a chance to identify with our vision for a different future.

We built the Mass Democratic Movement which was founded on inclusion. All people were given the option to join the majority in support of universal human rights. Young white men who were subjected to enforced military conscription decided to defy the apartheid regime. They formed the End Conscription Campaign which landed them in military prison for their refusal.

A pivotal date in our country’s history is 20 August 1983. This was the day when disparate organisations came together and formed the United Democratic Front (UDF) to oppose the latest attempt by the apartheid regime to divide us by establishing the Tricameral Parliament which would include ‘Coloureds’ and ‘Indians’ but exclude ‘Africans’. This movement found its strength in the unity and diversity of its constituent parts. Membership of the UDF could only come through one’s active membership in a grassroots community organisation that subscribed to non-racialism and non-sexism.

The opposition to apartheid grew and by the mid-1980s South Africa was ungovernable. The apartheid regime no longer had the power to intimidate or to govern. A political stalemate developed. Our country was on fire. The apartheid regime could not stop protests and resistance. We defiantly buried those of us they had killed even as they declared our funerals illegal gatherings.

Our people heeded our calls for mass strikes, boycotts and stayaways, despite the cost to themselves and their families. The ranks of our armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, grew. White supremacists started to build their paramilitary structures and they stockpiled weapons, set off bombs and attempted to assassinate our leaders, including Nelson Mandela. They could no longer rule us through fear. Death did not frighten us.

The ANC unquestionably held the strongest political sway among the vast majority of South Africans. The apartheid regime unquestionably had the mightiest military and security machinery on the African continent. Something had to give. Both sides recognised the power of the other side. Both parties knew they could not wrestle that power away from their enemy. They could have chosen to fight to the very bitter end, or else to negotiate an acceptable way forward. And so began a rather complex process out of minority rule and privilege, towards democracy based on non-racialism, non-sexism and inclusion.

It is unbelievable that I lived through the 1990s when our struggle for freedom led us to the table with our enemies on the other side. What is too often forgotten is that the negotiations were also a battlefield with many casualties, including the shocking assassination of Chris Hani. There were many moments when negotiations broke down, when we chose to walk away because the apartheid government was not negotiating in good faith.

The superior leadership capabilities of Nelson Mandela came to the fore over and over again. He was good at leading from the front but always conscious of never running too far ahead of his people. His superior humanity too came to the fore over and over again. He was a proud and sometimes downright stubborn man. Yet he seemed always to be able to pull back and to accept when he had not managed to persuade others in his organisation. He remained demanding of his opponents. He demanded good faith, transparency and accountability among many of the conditions required to make the negotiations a success.

Those at the table had to understand that the people on the other side of the table had defined us as their enemy. Some of us in the ANC were unsure of negotiating with the enemy but Nelson Mandela gave us perspective when he said: ‘You do not negotiate with your friends; you talk to them. You negotiate with your avowed enemies when you are in an intractable situation.’

We dearly and desperately wanted democracy to replace the fascism of apartheid. And finally, our superhuman effort, which had spanned decades, ushered in the Interim Constitution which guaranteed human rights including equality, dignity and freedom. The next milestone was the first free and fair election on 27 April 1994 where all people could vote. I will never forget the euphoria of that day – it was a dream realised.

The high point of our long journey was the inauguration of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela as the first democratically elected president of the Republic of South Africa. Not the first black president, but the first democratically elected president. That day the fighter jets of the apartheid military machine did a fly-over in salute and in honour of their new Commander in Chief. We ululated, we wept, and we danced.

Even in our darkest moments we dared to dream of freedom. Even though we dreamt of a new Constitution anchored by equality, justice and freedom, we also understood that having the best Constitution in the world guaranteeing us the vote was the prerequisite for freedom, but was not freedom itself.

Since the advent of our constitutional democracy we have stumbled and fallen along the journey to true freedom. Formerly brave, decent comrades became key figures in the most spectacular capture of our state and the agencies that were supposed to be central to the transformation of our country. Today, the disproportional effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on our most vulnerable people has laid bare for us the fault lines that persist out of the depravity of apartheid. It has also laid bare the damage caused by the plunder of our budding democracy by corrupt elected officials. The crass materialism of our elite has been detrimental to our growth as a nation.

So here we stand today. Somewhat battle weary. Somewhat scarred. And angry as hell too. Despite all this, I still believe. I believe our country can be fixed.

I am blessed to still be here in 2020. All these chapters in our history have made me who I am. I am made by South Africa. I am still part of the never-ending struggle for freedom but it is now time for Lwando and her generation to step up and lead with all the rage and resistance that frame her first book. My hope is for their rage, like ours, to be transformed into progress.

Lwando inspires me so much. She is an example of a younger person who is among the first beneficiaries of the fruits of democracy. She has grabbed the baton. She fights for her country. She embraces the spirit of her ancestors and our generation as she defines a space for herself today.

She is using the tools and framework of our revolutionary Constitution as a way to frame her place in history.

I give thanks to her grandparents and her parents who gave her a beautiful start in life with courage, resilience and love. I give thanks to the Constitutional Court and in particular to Justice Edwin Cameron who influenced her enduring commitment to constitutionalism and the rule of law.

I revel in Lwando’s strength as a modern feminist who has fought to be a woman fully in control of herself. I wish her and her generation much strength. Our task of destroying what we hated was relatively easy compared to the task that Lwando’s generation has, which is to build what they love because that requires immense wisdom, passion, compassion, and resilience. I think Lwando and her generation may just pull it off. They are of course Made in South Africa.

PREFACE

RAGE

When I was thirteen years old my grandfather, Skumbuzo Meshack Xaso, gifted me with a navy and silver Parker Pen for passing Grade 7 and for my acceptance into the high school of my choice. At the time I was not mature enough to understand this peculiar gift when all I wanted were the newest and latest sneakers. Today, losing this pen is my biggest regret.

I remember my grandfather telling me with a seriousness which I thought outweighed my achievement, how proud he was of me and that he prayed that I would do well in high school too. I was confused by his seriousness of what I thought was an insignificant moment; everyone completed primary school – it was no big deal.

What I did not appreciate at thirteen years old about my grandfather is that he was denied the one thing he wanted more than anything – a quality education. I later learned that my grandfather was taken out of school at exactly the age I was when he bought me the pen. He was the first-born of eight children and tradition demanded that as the first-born he had to start working as soon as possible in order to assist his parents.

Skumbuzo was made by a South Africa of almost a hundred years ago. He was born on 17 April 1921, the year that the Communist Party was formed, eleven years after the formation of the Union of South Africa and nine years after the formation of the South African Native National Congress, later renamed the African National Congress, a party he would support later in his life. The constitution which governed South Africa at the time of my grandfather’s birth did not recognise him as a human being entitled to all the rights attendant on citizenship. In the eyes of the law he was invisible, yet to his parents and community his birth had been prayed for and anticipated.

My grandfather was born free amongst his people, on a mountain top under the Transkei stars on a day ruled by the god of war. He was destined to be full of strength, vigour and endurance. It was in the stars that he would always stand up against what was wrong, tell the truth and fight for what was right.

As the first-born he was a pioneer. He excelled in school, stick fighting and in rugby. He played rugby on gravel and open fields. The speed and prowess of jersey number 8 was noticed and the sport offered him the opportunity to move from Tsembeyi, a village nestled in the mountains of the Eastern Cape, to Paarl in the Western Cape where he happened to have family, and then to Port Elizabeth. As talented as he was, for a black man of that time, the reality was that rugby was not going to put food on the table. He had to take on a number of jobs to be able to provide for his family back home.

Every aspect of my grandfather’s life was defined by apartheid era laws. It dictated where he would live. He settled in the Red Location, Ilali Ebomvu; as described by the museum of the same name, it was ‘the first settled black township of Port Elizabeth. It derives its name from a series of corrugated iron barrack buildings, which rusted a deep red colour. These were part of a Boer concentration camp in Uitenhage, just outside of Port Elizabeth and they were moved in 1900 to Red Location, where the first urban black families settled. It became a site of struggle during the years of apartheid. Many prominent political and cultural leaders were either born or lived in Red Location.’

Apartheid dictated the kind of work my grandfather had to do. He became a messenger for a law firm in Port Elizabeth. Despite not having had a formal education, he read all that he could get his hands on. I can still see him poring over every detail of The Herald newspaper whilst puffing on his Dunhill cigarette. Every person who met him realised his brilliance.