Note of Intent

I grew up in a ‘whites only’ neighbourhood and attended a school reserved exclusively for white men. The elitist school of my adolescence was based on an antiquated English public school system: military style discipline with constant humiliation and punishment that compelled us to be part of a group, and not to question authority. In fact, our school was preparing us for a future that was exclusively white.

Thankfully that future never came about. Apartheid is no longer in place and the privileges accorded to the white boys of my school are gone. But how do my white peers feel about the changes that have taken place around them and their loss of privilege? Most of them seem to have all accepted the changes (do they have any choice?), yet they still hold a certain nostalgia for the past. Many of them meet regularly at the old boys bar of the school: a “whites-only” enclave that has not changed with the times.

During the Apartheid regime, my high school peers did little to resist the Apartheid regime, which they knew was fundamentally wrong. Were we merely victims of propaganda or did we prefer not to face up to reality?

At school we were taught the story of the white man in Africa but the word apartheid did not appear in our history textbooks. National television was controlled by the state, and members of the African National Congress, who now govern the country, were called ‘terrorists’. The writings of Karl Marx were banned and it was illegal to possess a photograph of Nelson Mandela.University was a liberation from the indoctrination of my whites-only school. At university, I found myself in a class with black students who spoke of revolution and invited me to clandestine political meetings. I read ‘das kapital’, saw my first photo of Nelson Mandela, participated in political rallies and learnt how to toyi toyi. Everything my high school had taught me, was revealed to be a lie and the society that had been built on that lie was crumbling.

Today South Africa is portrayed as the rainbow nation, where white and black South Africans live together in total harmony. Can black South Africans really forget the crimes of the past? Can white South Africans transform themselves from the racists that they were taught to be? As grown men, do my peers still have the same values and passions that they had when they were young?