Bookshop

I stepped into the bookshop that I had been to many times before, in a trendy part of town. Although it wasn’t the cheapest second-hand bookshop around, it was the only with an entire shelf of African literature (with ‘African’ loosely defined as anyone who was born in, ever spent time in or ever wrote about Africa). 

An elderly lady with white hair greeted me, asked me if I required assistance. ‘No, I’m fine, thanks!” I said as I made a beeline to the back of the shop, and started scanning my favourite shelf for any names that sounded even vaguely African among the supposed African literature.

“You didn’t cash up properly yesterday,” I hear her elderly raised voice, with a hint of tension.

“No, I did. I just subtracted the amount from the total for a book I bought before I cashed up.” It was a man this time, also white, by the sound of his voice.

Intrigued, I popped my head around the corner of the Travel shelf. A young-ish, tall and mildly unkept white guy was standing in the doorway, a woman of similar age and personal hygiene habits beside him.

“No, you read the p-code incorrectly. It should be 399,” says white hair.

“Actually, I rounded it up to 400. There’s no mistake.”

The conversation went on like this, with cash-up jargon that must have come out of the 70’s along with the ancient till, making the meaning of the conversation incomprehensible to me. What I did understand was the rising tone of the conflict, hidden behind a thin veneer of civility, and the stubborn refusal to back down by both parties. Old lady saw no problem in interrupting unkept guy, even just to say that he wasn’t understanding her.

“Cashing up can be such a mission,” says the young unkept woman during a moment of awkward silence. “I remember when I worked at [name any retail store here] I used to make cash up mistakes all the time!” I feel almost embarrassed at her desperate attempt to bring levity into the conversation. She seems desperate to leave, her spirit tugging at the arm of her partner, if not her body.

“I’ll bring the slip tomorrow. I think it’s still in the pocket of my other jeans,” says unkept man, finally relenting.

“I’m glad you didn’t throw it in the bin,” giggled white hair. “It’s so full and I didn’t feel like rifling through the rubbish!” Old lady got jokes.

The couple hasten out the door. Their retreat sounds some kind of horn of personal horror and sheepish surrender, as two other patrons of the store leave without buying a single book. But I’m made of firmer stuff. I stick around, unsatisfied with my empty hands that should have been filled with books.

Deep into scanning titles and authors for anything vaguely interesting on the Business shelf (yes, I was that desperate), I half-hear a young man ask for a book he had reserved. Casually glancing in the direction of the till, I’m surprised that he’s black, and immediately check my prejudice. Of course a young black man can be looking for a book, especially when he is the kind of nerdy, lanky guy I like with impressive dreadlocks.

“Aren’t you lucky! It’s right on top of the pile!” Old lady seems to think she’s being funny or something when she’s really not. Either that or she’s really bad at small-talk. “Ummm…hehe…could you pronounce your name for me? It’s very unusual.”

“It’s Tlo-tlo,” says dreadlocks, with a smile that doesn’t seem to quite reach his eyes. He’s been through this before, it seems.

“It looks almost Chinese! Hehe! Say it again?”

“Tlo-tlo. You can also pronounce it as if the T’s are C’s.” He’s definitely been through this before.

“Cloe-cloe,” she says, trying it out. “Funny spelling.”

“Actually, it’s a device I came up with.”

“What, you mean it’s made up?”

“Err…no. I mean the hyphens.” Presumably he had one in his surname too.

“Oh.”

Queue awkward silence.

Old lady rallies. “Just this book then? Do you have a loyalty card?”

“No.”

“Oh, well. It wouldn’t matter anyway. You have to spend more than R50 to get a stamp.”

“Oh.”

Throughout this exchange, both parties have a plastered smile that does nothing to convince anyone that everything’s ok right now.

I am trying not to cringe by the time I hand her the two books I found among all the J.M. Coetzee’s.

“Just these two?”

“Yes please.”

“That’ll be R103.”

I give her the exact amount of money, and she rings it up. “I have a loyalty card somewhere!” I say, as I spill several near-identical cards out of my wallet in search of the One True Card.

“Ok,” she says with a total and obvious lack of enthusiasm. Her face seems to drop when she sees I’m four stamps shy of my R100’s worth of free books. She stamps it and hands it back to me, with an almost hesitantly outstretched arm.

“Have a good day!” she says with that same plastic smile that seems to stretch from ear to ear and yet holds no warmth. Her smile seems to warn people, like a subliminal message that says ‘Please don’t impose. Please don’t ask for any kindness that you do not deserve. Please only respect what is fair, correct and just and don’t ask for overdue consideration. I am tolerant, of course, but empathy is too much to ask of me. I belong to a different time.’

Indeed. 

#RhodesSoWhite: At an untransformed Rhodes University, discomfort is a good thing

A version of this post appeared on the ACTIVATE! Change Drivers blog.

I have been moved to write by this comment, posted on the Rhodes SRC Facebook page, by Alicia De Sousa:

“…It very clear that the name isnt gonna change. students came to rhodes knowing its name so why did people chose to come here if there was such an issue. if students have an issue with the name, move. I think this so called Rhodessowhite is huge generalizations to alot of people on campus and to be open beginning to piss alot of people off…How can one say the benefits go to the whites. We are all at university together, therefore WE HAVE BOTH BEEN GIVEN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY TO SUCCEED.. so why not do what we came to do and focus on our academics.. This has quite frankly been taken too far, creating an uncomfortable 'feel' around campus.”

This post, of course, although expressed with sincerity, is highly ironic. It is precisely because of attitudes such as this that the “uncomfortable” conversation has to be had about the whiteness of institutions. Alicia de Sousa is bothered because people are challenging her comfort at an institution specifically designed to cater to her needs and desires, and this is unpleasant to her. According to her, if you don’t like the institution built with public funds that caters to her and the 9% of the population that is like her, then you can go to any of the other institutions built exclusively to educate the (black) 80% of the population, none of which are ranked in the top 5 institutions in the country. Duh! Of course, the comments below the post (too many to count) shouting down poor Alicia and calling her names is not going to change her opinion on the matter.

I shook my head at her comment, and despaired a little for all the well-intentioned Alicias of the world. Her words, in caps, “We have both been given equal opportunity to succeed,” reminded me of an argument I had with a good friend of mine, back in my first year at Rhodes University in 2005. She was white, and had said something all the lines of, “I don’t see why everyone makes such a big deal of apartheid. Here you are, and here I am, and that fact that we’re both here means we’re equal.” My jaw dropped in disbelief. I couldn’t believe someone could say something like that. Having been raised by struggle activist parents, I took it for granted that every South African was aware of the glaring inequality between white lives and black lives in our country.

I could explain to her and others how my grandparents were forcefully removed to a township under Group Areas, or how, as coloureds, teaching was the only option for my parents to have a professional career, or how the odds were so stacked against the generations before me who lived through apartheid that my attending university at all is a testament to their hard work and determination that the next generation will be better off than the last. But that wouldn’t really be illustrative of my point. Because as hard as it was for my forebears, I am still much more “equal” to Alicia de Sousa and my first-year friend than many, and by “many” I mean upwards of half, of the student population at Rhodes University.

Coming from a middle-class home where I was raised to speak English, despite the fact that my parents’ mother tongue is Afrikaans, meant that the academic lingo required to write my essays was hardly a stretch for me. The fact that I came from a largely Western-cultured home meant that the food on the “Normal” menu option (as opposed to “African”, “Halaal”, “Fast food”, etc) wasn’t that far from what was considered “normal” food at home, nor did I struggle with a knife and fork. In addition, I am coloured, but I look mostly white, so my appearance was never an issue when I asked for customer service from the administrators, librarians, or academic staff. I never had to worry about owing the university money, as I knew my parents had all that sorted. Any money I made in my part-time jobs was for my own consumption, and I never had to send any back to family at home. My parents brought the first computer into our house when I was about 8 years old. I could operate Windows and MS Word, navigate the internet, and touch type by the time I was 15, thus researching and typing my university assignments was never an issue. I was raised to love reading, love libraries and books, and so knew how to use an index, knew the Dewey decimal system of book shelving, knew how to operate the software system that located where books are shelved. In addition, having been at a private girls high school on scholarship, I was used to navigating white spaces, used to changing my accent from the one I used at home in order to be accepted, used to being surrounded by people far more materially advantaged than I was and not feeling intimidated.

Working for Activate! Change Drivers, with participants from all walks of life, my heart often breaks for Lehlohonolo, who dreams of studying at UCT, Wits or Rhodes, but whose spoken English is heavily accented by his native tongue, whose written English is riddled with grammar, spelling and punctuation errors, and who struggles to find his way around a computer. Lehlohonolo is not stupid, indeed, he is innovative in his concepts, original in his contributions, and astute in his observations, and is eager to learn. But he will be graded as a failure by lecturers who won’t even bother to learn to pronounce his name. Without the advantages I had, and without supportive parents who understand the tertiary education system, the odds of him succeeding, regardless of how hard he works, are stacked so heavily against him in this, our free South Africa.

So yes, there is a need for the #RhodesSoWhite campaign. Whether the name is changed or not, to me, is not the point. The point is to make people uncomfortable by starting to question the way the institution operates, the multiple ways it excludes those who do not come from an extremely narrow set of conditions, the way we have normalised whiteness as the standard and hold everyone else to be judged by it.

The greatest form of inequality is to treat unequal things equally, so why do we continue to provide the exact same (lack of) academic support to those from advantages households and disadvantaged households and expect them to perform the same? It has been noted elsewhere that Rhodes offers pitifully few academic support programmes, and that the four-year extended programme hardly makes up for almost two decades of support middle-class students have received at home . It has been noted that seven out of 57 full-time professors are black at Rhodes , and so who is to be the academic role model to Lehlohonolo, to tell him that he, too, can achieve great heights in academia? Who is challenging whiteness at an academic level, objecting when a Politics course on The Politics of Africa is replaced by one on American Imperialism, as happened in my third year?

The conversation around meaningful transformation in our academic institutions is long overdue, and it goes so much further than a statue or a name.