beauty and undercurrent

i'm currently in south africa for family ties and to see whether we could live here. over the weeks, i started noticing how casually race entered ordinary conversation, at least in the family and social circles we were moving through. i've never heard so many labels used so freely. some were too crude to repeat. others were spoken as if completely normal.

we went to a new restaurant and were told that the manager was a black man. a mild example, but i kept wondering why his skin colour needed mentioning at all. elsewhere a domestic worker might be referred to by race rather than by name. it happened so casually that it could almost pass unnoticed.

then there was "those people." often followed by words i don't want to repeat. it wasn't only language either. a white waitress treated better than a black one. differences in tone, patience and respect that seemed completely ordinary to the people around me.

i've heard this phrase often: "i'm not racist, but…" my eyebrows immediately rise. it's a warning. i listen carefully, because what follows is usually what they believe.

what makes it worse is the assumption that i would be fine with it. because i'm white, and part of the family, i'm expected to laugh along and be party to it. i never joined in, but i often stayed quiet. that bothered me too.

i also struggled with how openly christian many of these same people were. i couldn't reconcile the two.

i was born in uganda and grew up in ethiopia with dutch parents. i was a privileged white child and i know that shaped what i saw and what i didn't see. my schools were multicultural and, as a child, that simply felt ordinary.

perhaps that is why the constant labelling in south africa unsettled me so much. difference wasn't just present. it was continually named, sorted and given meaning.

i spent many days cringing and saying less than i wanted to. sometimes i stayed quiet because challenging every remark would have meant arguing all day. but the silence came with its own cost. i could feel myself adjusting again, making myself smaller to keep the peace.

there is so much beauty here, often overwhelmingly so, especially the klein drakensberg mountain range i'm looking at right now. but alongside it i kept hearing the same bitterness. that things were better before. that something had been taken away. it came through in jokes, complaints, entitlement and in who was treated with respect.

living here would mean keeping some distance from much of the social life we've encountered. it would also mean constantly deciding when to speak and when to let something pass. that is fucking hard work. alcohol makes it worse. after a few drinks people become less careful and the bitterness gets louder.

i could challenge it. i could stay quiet. neither feels sustainable.

after a while i noticed what all that restraint was doing to me. i was tense, irritated and increasingly unwilling to be around people. eventually that would come into the studio too.

there is material here for the work, certainly. prejudice, resentment, denial, the things people say when they believe everyone around them agrees. but i don't want to turn somebody else's experience into material simply because i find it psychologically interesting. especially when i can leave.