An open letter to black South Africans

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I hope you will continue to engage with your white counterparts, even if they irritate the heck out of you, writes Max du Preez. Dear black South Africans. No, I’m just joking. No white South African in his right senses would attempt to write an open letter to black compatriots in reaction to the many open letters to whites by blacks. Last week one such open letter by Ntsiki Mazwai went viral. Now that I have your attention, perhaps I could share a few observations across the divide.

While most writers of open letters to whites seem to think they represent all black South Africans, I must warn you that I’m not a “good white” and can’t pretend that I’m writing on their behalf.

If you asked me to describe who I am, I would say father, husband, writer, social democrat, South African and African – hell, even rugby fanatic and classical music fan – before I came to “white Afrikaner”.

My skin is pale and I’m happy to face my baggage as a white South African.

I am a descendant of French, German and Dutch people who came to Africa between 1652 and 1690. I also have a smattering of Indonesian slave and Khoikhoi genes, but I don’t remember my father bragging about that.

So, let me stand up and say: My name is Max du Preez and I’m a white beneficiary of 350 years of racial oppression. Glad I could get that out of the way.

I hope you will continue to engage with your white counterparts, even if they sometimes irritate the heck out of you.

Columnist TO Molefe protested at the weekend against the “expectation that black people must be the ones to extend the olive branch and exert the effort to unteach white people the racial ideologies into which they were socialised”.

I get that. Forget the “olive branch”, but please don’t stop helping whites understand your sensitivities and frustrations, if only because it will make our country a better place to live in. Because white South Africans aren’t going to go away. Most of those who wanted (and could afford) to emigrate have now done so. You’re stuck with us, I’m afraid.

Which brings me to my first bit of advice.

If you want to write an open letter to white people or engage them on their views and attitudes, please, before you push the send-button, delete the references to whites being intruders, foreigners, Europeans, settlers or colonialists.

Ntsiki Mazwai wrote an insightful blog, but I suspect most whites didn’t read further than this: “My dear white people, you are not descendants of this land called Afrika. … You are the children of Elizabeth, Hitler, Bismarck and others that built their legacy on stealing lands and making people slaves.”

Perhaps we’re a nasty bunch, but we’re local nasties. Racists, maybe, but home-grown racists.

The overwhelming majority of us can trace our roots to this country two or three centuries back. Europe is as foreign to me as it is to you. If you start off telling whites they don’t belong here, you can’t expect any conversation.

It would have been so much easier if our ancestors never came here, or came and left as they did elsewhere in Africa.

But those of us alive today didn’t make that decision. South Africa is not Ghana or Ethiopia. History dealt us a different hand. I’m happy it did.

You’d be relieved to hear that’s just about my only advice.

Our transition from apartheid to democracy was so seamless that many whites simply continued to live in their comfortable bubble of whiteness.

Too many whites think that relinquishing political power was all they needed to do for them to continue as before.

And when you voice your anger at the continuing inequality and other legacies of white domination – and when the government screws up – they seem to think they now have a licence to express the racism they always had in their hearts.

Please, these people need to hear your clear and uncompromising voices.

Sometimes, though, take a good look at these reactionaries and see the human being behind the vitriol.

Most of them are not driven by notions of white supremacy as much as by fear, ignorance, insecurity and often an inferiority complex, all mixed in with shame and guilt.

This is especially true of the tribe I was born into, the Afrikaners.

Material comfort doesn’t always entirely make up for the uneasiness of being a member of a tiny, resented minority. I’m not offering this as an excuse, merely as an explanation.

One more thing. White South Africans, just like black people, are not one homogeneous group with one world view. And they’re not all rich. Only a few thousand of them own farmland.

Some are even decent human beings.

* Max du Preez is an author and columnist.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.