Some years back, the accompanying photo did the rounds on Facebook – an image of a grotesquely oversized puff adder, captured or killed somewhere in South Africa, seemingly dwarfing the man displaying it on a garden fork.
I got the impression it was the sort of thing that South Africans in Surrey and Auckland might enjoy showing their neighbours to illustrate the wilds of Africa from which they hailed.
On closer inspection, it’s not that impressive. A puff adder, sure, but its dimensions are distorted by its being held close to the camera, with the handler standing back. Perceptive viewers will note that the prongs of the fork look rather larger than they should, but quite proportionate for a normal-sized implement and a normal-sized puff adder. Looking at the shadow off the side, it’s clear that we’re not dealing with a mutant reptile, just a normal snake.
It’s not even photoshopped or manipulated. The shot was taken close to the snake, giving the exaggerated impression of size relative to its surroundings. It was just a matter of perspective.
Keep things in perspective, my parents would tell me in some of my darker moments. Making a fool of yourself at a school social, being excluded by the cool kids, doing poorly in a test, getting turned down by the girl you asked to the matric farewell. It all hurts, it all has its impacts, but as time moves on, we file all of it among our experiences, and if we have any sense, we learn from it.
And we understand that certain things loom larger and more consequentially than others – even if this is not always how it feels at any particular time.
Not that dissimilar from our national condition, really.
A case in point: Pretoria High School for Girls is once again at the eye of a racism storm. The centrepiece of this was a private WhatsApp group, comprising a number of white learners, in which “micro-aggressions” were “channelled”. For this, they were suspended.* The exact content has not been made public, although a few extracts have found their way into the public domain. This tends – to quote the education department’s statement (the Gauteng Education Department can reliably be expected to intervene expeditiously in a matter like this) – to depict the concerns expressed by some of their black peers as “insignificant”. The learners also express some concerns about the conduct of those peers towards them, a matter that has not garnered much attention.
All in all, this seemed to be a rather small infringement, if indeed it did in fact infringe any rules. Richard Wilkinson (he’s had more intimate access to the documentation than I) points out that the clauses cited in the correspondence to the implicated learners do not appear to exist in the disciplinary code. He also points out that some of those charged did not participate in the conversation and seem to have been indicted for simply being part of the group.
Bullying sentiments
There has also been video footage of a black learner expressing some bullying sentiments towards her white peers. During the writing of this piece, I learned that she has been suspended too.
So, incidentally, has the headmistress of the school.
Meanwhile, the media – legacy, online and social – has been aflame with this story. For the most part, at least from what I can see, this has taken the form of endorsing a dominant narrative that indeed racism runs amok at the institution and needs to be torn up root and branch. Reports abounded of this, through typically from behind the shadows. “Speaking on condition of anonymity…” And while accusations came thick and fast, these tended to be couched in vague, generic terms.
In truth, not many allegations to probe, and not many identifiable personalities making them.
Still, this was an “opportunity” to interrogate the bigger issues… As Melanie Verwoerd wrote in a finger-wagging contribution: “Many of the old model C schools still have an attitude of ‘us and them’. Either overtly or through acts of omission (i.e. changing school policies), they seem to say: ‘You are welcome into our (white) school, but you must play according to our (white) rules and abide by our (white) culture.’”
That’s quite a statement from someone who acknowledges elsewhere in the piece that her children were largely educated abroad, but to each her own. And she certainly wasn’t alone. The SA Human Rights Commission shook its collective head, bemoaning as “disturbing that these incidences continue to occur 30 years into democracy” – although going after racists seems to be a disproportionate part of its work, and one that it tackles with particular relish.
Racism. Let’s not blame the media for all this, because South Africans love a good racism story. Maybe because it references our history, and maybe because it hits our moral funny bones. Racism guarantees an audience, rather like a bizarre photo of a mutant predator.
But keep this in perspective. So far, all we have are a slew of allegations. The Gauteng Education Department, never one to be restrained in these matters, used the term “alleged” 11 times. At that stage, we didn’t know whether the allegations would be substantiated or found baseless.
What we do know is that this matters in different measures to different people in different ways. Keep the perspective.
Matters enormously
It matters enormously to those who have been charged with misconduct. Any adverse finding can have serious ramifications for their futures.
It will matter to those who might feel themselves to have been victimized – though from what I saw, from my own perspective the alleged offences were held to have been perpetrated against nobody specifically, and all sorts of people generally.
In all such cases, you can expect some histrionics in the various media that have invested themselves in the issue. That is, right before they forget all about it. What seems so destiny-defining today in South Africa often dissipates like a foul smell tomorrow. Even regarding racism: how many of us can remember just what Penny Sparrow or Adam Catzavelos said, let alone the supposed transgressions committed by Chris Hart?
How many of the touchscreen warriors who vented their outrage – OUTRAGE mind! – over the “cupcake” scandal or the “segregated” photo frenzies can recall any significant details? I’m sticking my neck out here, but I’m willing to say not many…
Perhaps it’s because in many of these instances, the charges proved to be without foundation, though I suspect something a little different is happening. The welling up of emotion in the face of the suggestion of racism says a lot about ourselves – the sense that one is “fighting” for something. This is as much a matter of people’s sense of their own virtue as it is about the actual issue. Keep perspective!
As it happens, racism is simply not an everyday occurrence, certainly not if polling evidence is any guide. Our survey last year found that just under 60% could not point to any personal experience of racism in the past five years. This matches fairly closely with the Institute of Justice and Reconciliation’s SA Reconciliation Barometer findings for 2019 (somewhat dated, but the last round for which this information is available). The SARB asked respondents how typically (always, often, sometimes, rarely or never) they experienced racist discrimination in a number of contexts.
Taking “rarely” and “never” as denoting a general lack of such experience, the SARB reports that 69% had not experienced it on public transport; 66% in social gatherings; 62% in recreational areas; 59% in work or study venues; and 60% in respect of commercial spaces. In each case, the single largest response given was “never”.
Grave disservice
The takeaway is that racism is not the daily fare of life in South Africa, and it does a grave disservice for us to act as though it is. Yes, it exists, but as one problem among many, and not the dominant one by any stretch of the imagination.
Also bear in mind that the Pretoria High School for Girls controversy relates to one school. One, with about 1,500 learners, according to the school’s website. This against a total of 2,061 public schools in Gauteng, with a combined learner count (in 2023, the latest numbers I have) of 2,281.492. (There are another 918 independent schools catering for 346,555 learners in the province.) Nationally, there are 22,511 public schools with 12,701,575 learners, along with 2,325 independent schools with 738,108 learners. Again, keep perspective!
Back to that photo. Looking at the shadow on the ground, it seemed to me that the snake was not that far from the handler. And given the relative size of the snake in the image, the photographer wasn’t all that far away from it. I hope he was certain that the snake was dead, since the puff adder is venomous, and apparently inflicts more fatal bites in Africa than any other on the continent.
With proper perspective comes caution. That snake might be dead – though perhaps not. Beware of that. Likewise beware of inflating controversies beyond their actual importance, or they too may prove to a have an endurance that our society can ill afford.
*After this article was filed, a hearing into the Pretoria High School for Girls matter found the accused learners not to have contravened any rules. The Education Department declared itself “disappointed” with the outcome. Remarkable, that. Some interests have a deep investment in mutant creatures being real, even after they’ve been proved a fantasy.]
[Image: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1720137004864541&set=a.1544158352462408]
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