Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon News

Lessons from "Erin Brockovich"
If tort reformers like George W. Bush had their way, greedy corporations like California public utility PG&E would still be poisoning their neighbors.
By Joe Conason
[03/28/00]

Vouchers and the law: The rebuttals
In Round 2 of a Salon debate on school vouchers, our experts exchange barbs.
By Daryl Lindsey
[03/28/00]

Vouchers and the law
Experts argue the constitutionality of the school reform movement's most controversial proposal.
By Daryl Lindsey
[03/27/00]

"Humanitarian cease-fire" in the war on drugs
A Maine sheriff wants the Legislature to let authorities dole out confiscated pot to people who need medicinal marijuana.
By Fiona Morgan
[03/27/00]

Black and proud
I'm white, but I told the census I'm African-American. Here's why.
By Michael Finley
[03/25/00]

Complete archives for News

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The next thing I did, numb and blank as if stun-gunned, was wash and dress for work, put lipstick on my bloodless face. Still numb, I headed out of the house to the subway, remembering, as I passed the bank, that I was flat out of cash. At the bank door, a panhandler stirred in his nest of newspaper to ask for change. I glanced down at him. He happened to be black. "Why should I give you anything," I thought, viciously, before I could stop myself. Inside the bank, as if in retribution, the machines were down. I went over to someone's desk, the manager's, I think. "May I help you?" he asked. "I need ..." I said. Covering my face with my hands, I burst into tears.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

So now "they" have -- have beaten, robbed, raped -- and where does that leave me? Since, as a child, I first began to be prickled by doubts about the way we were living -- "But why does the maid live in a room in our backyard and her children live somewhere else?" -- I've resisted my mother's racism, her birthright (and mine) as a white South African. Resisted it, often, in confused, inchoate ways indistinguishable from acting out, but resisted it nonetheless. I've spent years outing my mother as a racist so that I didn't have to be one -- though of course (see above) I am.

I left South Africa in 1978 because I didn't want to face long-term jail or house arrest, like so many of my friends, but the truth is I would have left anyway. You didn't have to do much to be arrested in those days: You just had to speak against apartheid, demonstrate against apartheid, write against apartheid, all of which I did, and was duly arrested for. (And then arrested again when I returned, 13 years later, as a reporter, to the wrong place at the wrong time: a large demonstration in central Johannesburg which the police broke up with machine guns and dogs.)

I left to go to graduate school. I left to read books, see movies, write without censorship, talk on an untapped telephone. I left because I wanted to put 10,000 miles between myself and my family. I left because I couldn't stand the guilt. I left because I could, because I have a document, dated 10/04/1973, numbered (0178) BUN 10047, that advises the reader, in English and Afrikaans, to "Please note that -- SHUTE, JENEFER PATRICIA, Identiteitsnommer -- 560711 0049 00 1, has been classified -- AS A WHITE PERSON." I left, brandishing my British passport, because I wanted to shed my South African identity like a skin. I left because I hated white South Africans, though I'm one myself -- which causes problems with pronouns, among other things.

All these years -- as an angry adolescent, as an anti-apartheid activist, as an exile separated from family and country for 13 years and as a writer -- I have labored hard to prove my mother wrong. I thought, finally, that I had -- that history had. But now, with the violation of my family, I see that she has, in a sense, been proved right. Right for all the wrong reasons, perhaps, or for reasons more complex than she could ever acknowledge, but nevertheless, in a sense, right.

So now I wonder, what does that make me? Wrong? How, I wonder, are my smug political certainties, forged during the anti-apartheid struggle of the '70s and '80s, going to accommodate the violent reality of post-apartheid South Africa? And if my mother and I could ever talk about this, what would I say?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

A few days after my mother's call, I managed, finally, to get Ben on the phone. He and Annie were staying at her sister's house, Annie under sedation but still crying all the time, unable to be left alone for a second. In a tone of grim composure, he narrated the whole story, the exact sequence of events, of which I'd heard only fragments so far, flashes, with dark, terrifying stretches of the unknown in between. Even though what he told me was heart-sickening, it was somehow better to know all the details, not to have to imagine them, as I had tried to do over several sleepless nights. Now all I had to do was assimilate them.

A few details haunted me, not necessarily the most brutal. It haunted me that, when the gunman first stepped out of the darkness, he yanked Ben's sweater over his head from behind, so Ben saw a face, a gun and nothing more; it haunted me that the robbers ripped the shoes right off Ben's feet, the wedding ring off Annie's hand. It haunted me that they branded the carpets with their cigarettes. And it haunted me that they kept asking Ben where his gun was, knowing no white South African household would be without one. (It was in his car.)

I had also forgotten that Ben is severely claustrophobic -- won't even enter an elevator -- and so, in being gagged and hooded, swaddled and bound, for several airless hours, he was, along with all the other terrors being visited upon him, making his own private trip to George Orwell's Room 101.

Two things pained me the most, though, two things that he said. In that same tone, measured but grim, he kept repeating, over and over again, that he could never have imagined such terror, "Just sheer terror, Jen -- being afraid, every single second, that you were about to die." He also, as he told his story, kept saying, almost matter-of-factly, to establish chronology, "That was before they raped Annie," or "That was after they raped Annie."

To hear those words coming out of my brother's mouth, referring to the woman he'd so recently married with such joy, cut me to the core. Those words made it all real, irreversibly real, allowed me to glimpse, like a parallel universe of pain, what the statistics must mean: 62 murders, 73 attempted murders, 136 rapes, 174 armed robberies and 606 assaults on an average South African day. On a single warm Johannesburg night.

Next page | If you become a victim, try to remember details