What We Read: Country of Our Skull
This past week I finished Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard and began Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull––a gift from my father in an effort to “cram as much knowledge as possible into my brain” while he was here (his words). It’s difficult not to compare Krog’s work to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which is still fresh in my mind after reading it last summer. Arendt covered the trials of Adolf Eichmann, the supposed mastermind of the Final Solution, for The New Yorker in the early 1960s, while Krog reported on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on behalf of SABC beginning in 1996. There are glaring differences in the circumstances––the former, a trial, focused on condemning a man who had been in hiding for years, the latter, a mix of amnesty applications and victims’ stories, aimed towards revealing the true nature of Apartheid and moving forward together as a new nation––but obvious similarities abound in the atrocities committed, the nature of cultural oppression, and the persecution of a group for something as frustratingly benign as skin color or religion. Arendt was a Jew who fled Hitler’s Europe, Krog is an Afrikaner reflecting on the implications of sharing the culture which birthed Apartheid.
I think about how my grandparents left an increasingly anti-semitic Eastern Europe for a pre-Apartheid South Africa, how they must have been reminded of the treatment of the Jews when seeing blacks forced to carry passes, progressively and deliberately stripped of their rights to buy land, work in skilled professions, or live in certain areas. I feel the inherited guilt of being a white South African descendant of a wealthy farmer who toiled his fields and benefited while Apartheid reigned. I listen to my father’s stories of frustrated opposition to the racist regime, of his parents’ collective sigh of relief when he left the country for a medical residency in Chicago, of his few friends who stayed.
After my parents’ divorce, South Africa became a haven for me. I moved with my father to Johannesburg when I was thirteen and lived there for three years. I will always be grateful for how it sheltered me during a difficult time in my life, but now, a current of unease rests beneath the surface––do I have the right to love a country when my relatives reaped the benefits of its darkest hour?
Before each interview, I explain the background of What We See and why I chose to work in South Africa, my roots here, and the indescribable hold the country has on my heart. Yesterday, Naima, Mayra and I talked with three young women who live in Khayelitsha, a township of Cape Town. Verbal abuse aimed at their sexuality is a daily part of these women’s lives, even more so they are targeted for working for Free Gender, a prominent LGBTI activist organization. When I ask them, would you ever consider leaving South Africa?, each one responds with a determined No. One of the women, Pamella Mhlawuli, explains: “This country is home, it’s difficult to leave your home. You understand, you came back.”
I pause, confused that Pamella may not be talking to me, but she is, and I mumble back a response as Mayra and Naima continue interviewing, everyone seemingly unfazed. Said so casually, without a second thought, Pamella could not have understood what it meant to me for her to say those words. I came back. That she didn’t see me as an intruder, that it was possible in her eyes for me to have some legitimate claim to this beautiful country, so much so that it draws me back again and again, that the mix of white skin and South African heritage did not automatically disqualify me from loving this land––For that fleeting moment, a weight, that I had not even been fully aware of, was lifted.
I have come to recognize that that weight on my shoulders should exist, not as a load too heavy to bear but as one with just enough substance to remind me of its existence and push me ever forward. I am aware of my past, of South Africa’s past, of how they intertwine, but I also know that I have agency over my relationship with South Africa in the present. I have chosen to work on my project here, a project that I hope will benefit the community but also enrich my own understanding of Cape Town. My experience here will add to my personal history with South Africa; knowing where I have come from, where South Africa has come from, gives me the power to move forward towards a richer relationship with this country that is so close to my heart.