Discussion Board 6

Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 34:690–701, 2014 Copyright © Melvin Bornstein, Joseph Lichtenberg, Donald Silver ISSN: 0735-1690 print/1940-9133 online DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2014.944836

“You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”: How Apartheid Was Lived and Learned on a South African Farm

Tessa Philips, Ph.D.

After apartheid ended, many White South Africans asked themselves, over and over, “Who was I during apartheid?” and “How did I learn to live in that way?” This article is an attempt to address those questions. In the first part, a personal example is used to illustrate a life lived during the heyday of apartheid. There was a great silence between the races about race. In the second part, I discuss that life and the nature of embeddedness from a relational, hermeneutic perspective with a self psycho- logical flavor. My doctoral dissertation, titled Race, Place and Self (Philips, 2007), was an attempt to examine the nature and influences over the years of different countries and contexts, and disentangle myself from the particular racialized beginnings that were uniquely mine. This article is one part of that journey.

I was born in South Africa just before the government decreed that a system of apartheid, a system of separate development of the races, should prevail. It was under the oppression of that system that I attended school and university, and married. It was what I knew, but my husband and I left the land where we were raised to try for a life elsewhere. I arrived in Sydney, Australia in 1977 and in 1979 began what turned out to be a 14-year analysis. As astonishing as it may seem today, my analyst and I never discussed what living under the apartheid regime meant to me. In fact, apartheid as a system, itself, was hardly ever mentioned. How did that happen? Although my analysis was not a casual affair, the relational hermeneutic approach had not reached the prominence within psychoanalytic thinking that it has today. Two of the many authors who exemplify a hermeneutic relational approach are Hoffman (2009) and Cushman (2011). This approach claims that the individual exists and needs to be understood from within his or her own particular social and cultural context. Even though I spoke about the landscape and people of my world, I never told it as a racial story, which of course it was. At that time I did not see it that way. All South African stories are racial stories. A similar silence or absence occurred when I conducted interviews as part of my research. My interviewees were unable to remember or focus on those shadowy racial interactions that were part of their young lives. I decided to use my own material and, although it was initially hard, to focus on race; as I wrote, memories poured forth.

Tessa Philips, Ph.D., is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Sydney, Australia. She is on the fac- ulty of the Sydney University Master of Medicine (Psychotherapy) Program; a Member of the International Council of International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology (IAPSP); and a Board member of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP).

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In the personal narrative that follows, I speak as one White who lived in South Africa during the years of apartheid. I do not speak for all White South Africans, nor do I speak for Black South Africans. Universal truths may or may not be embedded in this piece and, of course, there are as many views as there are people.

“YOU HAVE GOT TO BE CAREFULLY TAUGHT”

You’ve got to be taught

To hate and fear,

You’ve got to be taught

From year to year,

It’s got to be drummed

In your dear little ear

You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid

Of people whose eyes are oddly made,

And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,

You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,

Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate,

You’ve got to be carefully taught! (Lyrics from South Pacific by Rogers and Hammerstein, Logan, 1958)

The issue of racial prejudice is explored throughout South Pacific, most pointedly in this song, which was preceded by one of the main characters asking if racism was in the DNA. The author’s main point was that racism happened after you were born. Rodgers and Hammerstein were accused by a legislator of being a threat to the American way of life by justifying interracial marriage. They were determined to keep this song, even though they were accused of having a communist agenda. They asserted that it represented the sentiment they wanted to convey and it was going to stay (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You’ve_Got_to_Be_Carefully_Taught).

My hope is that, in this article, through what was once inchoate, a narrative will emerge, and that what I was unaware of at the time—the texture and feel of how ordinary Blacks and Whites engaged—might find articulation. This journey into a micro-history will uncover details of what was normal and usual, but in retrospect seems astonishing, in the apartheid era; the unspoken (and perhaps unthought) customs and courtesies and silences that enabled people like my aunt

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and uncle and my parents and me to go about the routine of our privileged lives, enabled by the system of apartheid, which we abhorred. How were we carefully taught?

LIFE ON THE FARM

My childhood times on the farm occurred long before the violence erupted. Those were the times when White children could roam around the farm’s dusty roads, safe and carefree. They were the years of the 1950s and 1960s, when the civil rights movements were emerging in America. The musical, South Pacific, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its racial awareness and at the farm, deep in the heart of apartheid South Africa, we children danced in the hot afternoons to its tunes, perhaps understanding, but not fully, and keeping silent about the lyrics of “You’ve got to be carefully taught.” In later years, farms were vandalized and White farmers were violently mur- dered in their homesteads. Although this occurred mainly in the Eastern Transvaal, there were incidents in the region of my uncle and aunt’s farm in the Orange Free State Province. By the time I took my own children back to the farm in the 1980s, which was the decade of the fight for liberation, the kind of safety I had felt there as a girl could no longer be taken for granted.

My parents, my sisters, and I visited my uncle and aunt’s farm regularly when I was a child. In the early 1950s, my uncle and aunt designed their house in the Cape Dutch style, with White- washed gables and a sandstone veranda running the length of its front. Sitting on a rise in the midst of gently rolling farmlands, the house captured long views all around. Several spectacular hills or koppies jutted out of this landscape, and the local village lay about five miles to the north. Set down in the middle of all this, my uncle’s farm was very beautiful.

My uncle’s father emigrated from Lithuania in the early 1900s. The pattern of Jewish migra- tion to South Africa, from the end of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, was very much like that to the United States. Most of the Jews were Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europeans fleeing pogroms in Lithuania. In South Africa, they found whatever jobs they could. Some ran general stores, and many moved into rural areas to farm. Jacob Cohen, my uncle’s father, first worked as a butcher’s assistant before saving enough money to buy his own piece of land that eventually grew to eight thousand acres. He became known, in the end, as The Potato King and has been described in a farming journal as an outstanding example of one who promoted progressive agri- culture. In 1928, in his busiest seasons he employed 600 Black workers, most of them women from the neighbouring country of Basutoland, which in those days was a British Protectorate. It became an independent state in 1965 and was renamed Lesotho. It was such a poor and arid country that the Black inhabitants flocked over the border into apartheid South Africa to find work. Attracted by higher wages and the company of their own people, many found their way to the Cohen farm (in 1969 there were 78 full-time employees and they lived on the farm with their families).

As soon as Mr. Cohen saw that he had moved to a good place, he went back home to Lithuania where a matchmaker found him a wife whom he brought back to South Africa. Mrs. Cohen was a wonderful cook and she taught her Black staff well. Out of her kitchen came all manner of Eastern European food: gefilte fish, taeglach, kreplach, kneidlach, and pickled herrings, piles and piles of it. In South Africa, such Eastern European food became known as Jewish food. Mr. and Mrs. Cohen spoke with Yiddish accents, had Yiddish humour, and to my mind always seemed to be kidding around. They were also fluent in Afrikaans and Sesotho. When they didn’t want the

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children to understand something, they spoke in a mixture of Afrikaans and Yiddish. When they did not want the Black staff to understand, they spoke in Yiddish.

Jacob sent for his relatives from Lithuania, who bought a neighbouring farm. They and their son were part of the extended farm family. There, in the harsh environment of the Orange Free State, the extended Cohen family was my introduction to European Jews in South Africa, a widespread immigrant group whose stories are told in many biographies (for example, Rosen, 2006).

It was the day before Christmas on the Orange Free State farm, and the clan was gathering in the mid-summer heat, because Christmas in South Africa falls in mid-summer. Every year at this time, my aunt, the farmer’s wife, was hostess to her two Johannesburg sisters (one of them my mother), their husbands, and their children. For two weeks, sometimes longer, we feasted noisily, were pampered by the large farm staff (all Black), took a great interest in the farm activities, and slept well until we dispersed and returned to Johannesburg’s suburbs. Because of this large staff, there was absolutely no need for any member of the family to work or even help with anything on the farm.

Although the car trip from Johannesburg, where I lived, was a long seven hours, we were singing by the time we reached the huge mine dumps on the southern outskirts of Johannesburg. Johannesburg sits six thousand feet above sea level on land that is said to contain forty percent of the world’s gold. The scattered mine dumps are actually crushed rock, and because the gold extraction processes were not very refined in those early days, the mine dumps glowed in the early highveld sun as we drove south.

During the apartheid years, all the miners were Black. Because Blacks were unskilled, mining was a steady source of work for them. The Colour Bar Act, passed in 1926, decreed that non- Whites could only be employed as unskilled labor. It was originally designed to counteract the force of any economic advantages enjoyed by the non-White community who outnumbered the Whites by ten to one. This act eventually became the catalyst for the formation of the African National Congress of which Mandela became the leader.

Along the way, we passed Blacks, often with packages balanced on their heads as they walked. Little children, some also with their belongings on their heads, waved and shouted and we turned around and waved vigorously through the back window as we sped past. Did we know they were walking with their possessions because they were poor? I noticed, from the corner of my eye, that my mother’s lips were drawn in a taut straight line as she looked down, as though she could not bear to notice. I now wonder whether expressions such as those displayed by my mother were signs that I understood, even back then, about the unequal lot of Blacks and Whites, something about not looking and not saying.

The first night at the farm, after a large, noisy meal, the family gathered to wrap Christmas presents for the farmhouse staff and to prepare gifts for each person who lived on the farm. Although I hardly knew it, in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, this was a feudal farm. The Africans on the farm were not slaves; they were employed, received wages, were not owned, and were free to come and go as they pleased. But their lack of choice is what calls up images of slavery. The oversupply of Black labor, as Berghe (1971) points out, was created by job reservation and the poor education of South African Blacks. It served to limit job choices and prospects, forcing the vast majority to tolerate what were often less than optimal conditions. Although some Blacks lived reasonably well, most were poor and none was really free. The disproportionately large number of Blacks to Whites is one of the features that made South Africa and the system of

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apartheid unique. It is important to remember that one of the major differences between the United States of America and South Africa in regard to the treatment of Blacks was that, in South Africa, Blacks comprise up to ninety percent of the population, whereas, in the United States of America, Blacks make up twelve and half percent. The Help (Stockett, 2009) portrays racial life in the American south that has many parallels with South African apartheid, but the discrepancy in numbers represents a significant difference.

Around two hundred Black people lived on the farm during the 1950s and 1960s. At least one member of each family was on my uncle’s payroll, receiving, in return for their labor, fresh meat and corn meal and accommodation. Although their wages were higher than on neighboring farms, they still earned very little. There never seemed to be a shortage of Blacks to help with tasks such as milking the cows, or dehorning or branding the cattle. There were special people to look after my aunt’s poultry, several women to sweep the lawn, water the garden, and tend the vegetables. My aunt tried to employ as many people as possible. She and my uncle exercised a kind of paternalistic care for the people who worked for them and lived with their families on the farm. Their obligations may not have included paying anything resembling free market wages, but there were obligations, and they stretched further than an owner’s to his workforce. They were more like those of a medieval lord to his serfs, as explained by Berghe (1971) and Murray (1992), who write that the feudal nature of this system was typical of that area at that time.

This relationship is exemplified by the way the families of the farm workers were housed in locations on the farm and by how they lived there. The locations were also called townships; there were three on the farm. In other countries, they might be known as shantytowns. None of the Blacks owned property. There was no possibility of that, because of the laws of apartheid. But they did not pay any rent. It was up to the owner of the farm to look after the inhabitants of the farm. This meant that my uncle provided for his workers and their families, who lived communally in locations, with building equipment, transportation to and from medical care, and weekly rations of meat and corn meal. Some, but not all, of the huts were made of brick. Whatever they were made of came from my uncle. Often the huts were makeshift. For example, they might have corrugated tin roofs held in place by loose bricks or stones, and there was no electricity supply. Open fires were used for cooking and heating and, as a result, a pall of smoke hung over the locations in winter.

I have a video taken at the one pump that provided water for a whole location. A group of little Black kids, smiling and laughing, dressed in ragged clothes and with long skinny legs, gathers round the dilapidated pump getting water. The oldest child can’t be more than ten years old, and he hangs off the pump handle, legs dangling down, and very small children squat around a metal pot into which a thin stream of water flows.

CHRISTMAS DAY ON THE FARM

The family breakfast took place in an air of extra excitement—anticipation of the big day ahead. But everyone managed to eat their fill from the usual lavish offerings: home-baked brown bread and homemade jams, white cheese strung over the stove in a cheesecloth from the day before, clotted cream, and then, of course, eggs of choice with polony. A glass of freshly squeezed orange juice sat at every place, and three different kinds of porridge were available, Maltabela, oats, and mealie-meal. (Maltabela is a brown sorghum porridge and mealie-meal is porridge made from

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corn—mealie being Afrikaans for corn.) Mealie-meal was the staple diet for many Blacks, and children raised on mealie-meal alone suffered a form of malnutrition known as Kwashiorkor, due to lack of protein.

By mid-morning, the 200 Blacks who lived on the farm streamed up the hill from their location toward the farmhouse. Only the essential services took place on the farm on Christmas Day—the animals had to be fed, the cows had to be milked, and the eggs collected from the chickens—but beyond that, the workers had the day off. When they reached the house, they sat in lines on the lawn outside the kitchen, chatting and making jokes. They were dressed in their best, but often ill-fitting and ragged, clothing. These were poor people. The women wore doeks or headscarves. I had forgotten, until I looked back recently at a video someone took on Christmas morning 1970, how many of the workers wore traditional Lesotho blankets, fastened in front with big safety pins even though it was high summer, and we were dressed in light cotton shorts and shirts.

Soon the Blacks filled the yard and sat waiting. When my uncle, who was known to them as Morena (chief), came out a hush fell over the group. Then he offered them all the compliments of the season and handed out the presents. Each man received a khaki drill shirt, a pair of trousers, and a measure of alcohol. My uncle joked and said something in Sesotho to each person who came forward. We kids and a few of my uncle’s close helpers gave the presents to the women and children. It was embarrassing, exciting, and exhilarating all at the same time. The little kids, often with runny noses and in worn adult clothes rolled up at the cuffs and hanging off their shoulders, were pushed forward by their older siblings or parents, issuing urgent instructions in Sesotho, to receive in an outstretched hand a packet of assorted sweets, which we had wrapped the night before. As each woman’s turn came to get a small article of clothing she would call out her size. Each would clap her hands together and hold the left hand out for the parcel, placing the fingers of the right hand on the left wrist as she did so. For a while afterward, little groups formed as all compared gifts, the children keeping an eye on us, while the overexcited dogs were kept at bay. To us, from Johannesburg, it felt very strange, even though we had been part of this ceremony at the farm for as long as I could remember. I remember being silently annoyed with my mother as she hovered uncomfortably in the background. Her discomfort was an unwelcome reminder that all was not right. Gradually the knots of workers unravelled; the crowd broke up and the workers and their families went back down the hill along the dusty road. We then returned for morning tea that was served by Maggie, the maid, outside on the front veranda.

We would then have a swim in the pool before lunch. Some of the Black children lingered near the house, clutching their candies, and watching us from a safe distance with wide eyes, ready to run if one of us got too close. Some of the small children had babies tied to their backs with blankets. We dived, splashing and shouting, into the clear pool. And they watched.

“Please come in for lunch,” my aunt called after a time from the stoep, “We want to get finished early so the staff can go to church in the afternoon,” and in we all trooped, full of the morning’s activities, but empty enough, again, to partake of a full three-course Christmas lunch. There was a lot of laughter. There were jokes and protestations, groans about the amount of food and “oh, one piece more won’t hurt!” from my aunt as she piled up the plates. The staff came in with trays to clear away.

The piece de résistance was the rich, dark Christmas pudding served with brandy butter sauce and farm-made ice cream and water ice. The Christmas cake had been carefully baked so that just about everyone found a silver tickey (a threepenny bit), buried in the moist sweetness, but there was only one silver charm for the luckiest person, who could then make a wish.

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So there we were, a big Jewish family enjoying a traditional heavy midday Christmas meal, in the middle of a baking hot summer’s day in the Orange Free State, surrounded by poor Black laborers and their families. It was disquieting, but not strange; we had learned to live with the discomfort. It was what we knew.1 In a recent conversation, Lew Aron asked me if we celebrated the traditional Passover meal at the farm. The contradictions at commemorating the freeing of the Jewish slaves from Egypt while being served by Blacks who were not really free lay buried somewhere in our consciousness. That experience is beyond the scope of this article, but is worth mentioning.

OUT OF DENMARK

Then, one year, when an outsider strayed into our midst, we saw the farm through different eyes. By this time I was at university and Klaus was an exchange student from Denmark. I had never been outside of South Africa and it was always exciting to have an international visitor. My mother had arranged for him to live with us during his visit. We brought him to the farm and he perturbed the equilibrium, shaking us out of our embedded blindness. By amplifying the contradictions in what was familiar to us, his visit unsettled an already unsteady stability.

Klaus was horrified by what he saw in the locations. It wasn’t as though we didn’t see the contrast between the opulent household on the hill and the huts three hundred yards below, where the occupants had no running water or electricity. It wasn’t as though we were not aware of the skinny, ragged children queuing for water at the single pump. It wasn’t as though we didn’t know about their meagre rations. We knew about all that and we could bear it. We understood the contradictions, we thought, but that was life as we knew it. That was South Africa. But Klaus could not bear, nor could he understand, the poverty of the Blacks and the inequity of it all. Nor was he bound to be silent. He confronted us. He confronted my uncle and aunt. But we all rose up against him, quietly but insistently. He was a guest and should not make waves, and anyhow we all knew about the inequalities but had learned to live with them, especially at the farm. It was all more complex than it seemed, we said. There was a whole history and politics to it. But to each other we whispered “Gone with the Wind,” in reference to the lifestyle of the film.

Wasn’t my uncle purported to be a generous and fair boss? Better than those other farmers down the road? Didn’t my aunt employ as many people as possible, and wasn’t she always giving handouts? The paternalism went with the territory, much like a feudal system. We were bemused by Klaus and his audacity, almost as though he was a naive but impetuous child. At the same time, we knew it was a lot more serious than that. It was more disturbing than any of us would admit to be asked to see our familiar, paradoxical world through a stranger’s eyes. It was shaming. For some of us youngsters, it was also secretly thrilling to hear a rebellious voice politely raised against the hegemonic orthodoxy we had outgrown. It was painful to feel implicated in a state of affairs we all opposed. Couldn’t he see we were against all this?

So Klaus got into some arguments, not earth-shattering, but arguments nonetheless, and in protest he slept for a night or two on the billiard table. But someone spoke to him and told him

1Suttner (1997) indicates that Jews behaved in similar ways to other White South Africans, in relation to race, at that time. This is not to negate other ethnic and religious differences.

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to stop. I don’t know which of the adults it was. I had the feeling it was my lawyer uncle from Grahamstown, Chancellor of Rhodes University, or perhaps it was my father, a man who spoke openly against the government, at least to us, but who, nonetheless, loved my uncle and aunt. These men, like all the adults in my family, like most of us, adhered, albeit with great resignation, to the laws of the land. And it was dangerous not to adhere to them. But in those days race and all that we witnessed about us on the farm was something like sex—we all knew it went on, but it wasn’t nice to talk about it, at least not at the farm.

DISCUSSION

To us children, the servants and farm hands took on the two dimensional glow of the noble peasant; it appeared as though they were always smiling, willing and eager to offer help, warmth, and succor. In fact, the oversupply of Black labour on top of the centuries of invalidation, lack of support, and protection by any government meant that Black workers attempted to stay attuned to and gratify the needs of their White employers. They were gestures of survival.

It was easy to overlook the desperate undertone, especially as it was not mirrored or articulated in any real way. Even so, an undercurrent of anxiety ran through my childhood idyll. I felt it then, though I pushed it aside. Now I recognize it differently. The silence around a set of irreconcilable realities enacted for me each Christmas at the farm, the disquieting not-saying about the inequities upon which our family’s extended happiness and prosperity depended, was so strong that it was like a contract specifically agreed upon. When an outsider like Klaus came to the farm, he was not bound by the shared implicit code we shared—not to react to what was before one’s eyes, not to speak about how what one saw offended one’s moral sense. He broke unspoken rules. He articulated the silence and he formulated what one had not known one knew. The shock I felt, together with others of my extended family, was not the shock of the new. It was the shock of breaking the silence of the unthought known (Bollas, 1987; this term was coined by Bollas to denote unarticulated experience) one suddenly knew one had always known.

An interesting example of how lasting this state of illusion can be is to be found in the movie Wrong Side of the Bus (Freedman, 2010), a memoir of ex-South African psychiatrist, Sidney Bloch, who now lives in Melbourne. In the movie, Bloch, filled with remorse for living the life of a privileged White, revisits his past and guilt in Cape Town, the city in which he was raised and attended medical school. In one scene, hoping that his adult son might understand what it was like during the apartheid years, he takes him to meet the now elderly Black family nanny in her humble abode. The cameras are behind him as he knocks on her door, embraces her and, with tears in his eyes, lets her know how much he loved her and that she was always seen as an integral part of his family. She responds to this outpouring of emotion rather coldly, I thought, by pointing out how hard it was to be poor while seeing others advancing and progressing in life, just not those in her family.

As illogical as it seems, I wish I could hold the lens of nostalgia steady and keep my images and memories of holidays at the farm in the 1950s and 1960s as paradise, as halcyon days when Blacks and Whites lived cooperatively alongside each other; as happy times with smiling faces, Black and White, with memories of warm interchanges with lots of laughter, compassion, and tenderness. If I could, it would remain as my glue, an anchor for faraway places, keeping me together when I moved far from home. Unlike many White children growing up in that era, I

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had no memory of a personal Black nanny who functioned for me like a mother, but I did have the memory of the care exercised by, and the tenderness I felt toward, the Black servants on the farm, and those memories, those attachments, probably had similar qualities for me. Memories of the farm, the Black staff members, and my uncle, aunt, and cousins, kept me grounded at times of alienation and fuelled my inner fire after I migrated to Australia. Without the farm, I had no history. The memories became tainted and confused, a heady mix of nostalgia and trauma, love and beneficence, and hatred and envy.

These lessons and memories did not begin and end on the farm. Life at my local (all White) primary government school was a source of intriguing racial memories and lessons. The fact that it was all White might have been enough, but there was more. One of the lessons that comes to mind was the custom for each child to be given a small bottle of milk and a piece of fruit at mid-morning intermission. A note from home was required if we did not want to partake of this nourishment. We were told to “eat up,” as the poor little Black children in the township were not getting this food. What was learned from this complex message? That we White children were privileged, entitled, and superior in ways Black children were not? If we did not make use of our privilege, in this case by drinking the milk and eating the fruit, would it not be a good thing for poor Black children who lived in the townships?

Racial studies were taught to emphasize racial differences, for example of skin color and hair texture. Links between class and race were underlined and emphasized, links between superi- ority and race were demonstrated and lived in a million different ways. Historical or economic explanations were not foregrounded explanations, instead privilege and guilt was the pervasive unarticulated unquestioned default embedded position for most liberals.

All the Blacks in my immediate orbit were there for the purpose of service. On the surface, this was accepted by Whites and Blacks alike. I had no experience of any White people performing service tasks until I first journeyed out of South Africa as a university student on a boat from Cape Town to England. When the boat stopped at Las Palmas, the capital city of one of the Canary Islands, I was shocked to see White people sweeping the floors. It was a first for me.

Johannesburg, where I lived during term time, where I attended school and university, and the farm where I spent the holidays, were two different and almost contradictory worlds; I was part of both, inside and out, above and below, to paraphrase (Zeddies, 2000). Over the holiday breaks, I absorbed the culture of farm life, and during term time I was a student at a liberal university in Johannesburg. While there, I marched in demonstrations against apartheid and was a participating member of the National Union of South African Students, a vocal, visible and active antiapartheid group who took risks, often with dire consequences for its leaders. But even within that group, and other groups of activists, many contradictions existed. One seldom heard any suggestion of redistribution of wealth, power, and privilege. And while many activists were out protesting, scheming, and even discussing violence as acts of liberation, their children were being cared for at home by the ubiquitous underpaid Black nannies and their meals were being prepared for them by their teams of Black domestic staff. With time, the contradictions amplified by a reality, which included everyday brutality and helplessness associated with living in a police state, the racial discrimination and guilt and fear of a revolution, caused those of us who were able, to emigrate to other countries.

The injustice was all around us, but any feelings we might have had about it was forbidden talk. That we buried it in the back pages of our mental newspapers was yet another example of our sliced world.

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It could easily be assumed that, in my search to explain the confusion of envy and love and resentment, I would naturally turn to Kleinian based theories (Klein, 1975). The fundamental flaw of those theories for me is the idea those feelings are innate and universal. Like Rogers and Hammerstein, mentioned earlier, it is hard for me to believe these attitudes are in our DNA. But nor do I believe that they arise from experience alone. I have tried to show in this article that what is retained is what each individual brings to and makes of their experiences.

It is because I feel that experience plays such a large role that I favor a hermeneutic narrative approach to interpretation as it examines concepts like race, place, and subjectivity from within the contexts from in which they arise and exemplifies the belief that they are all inextricably related (see Cushman, 1994; Philips, 2011). Over the last decade or so, these views have become commonplace within contemporary relational and intersubjective theories which tend to support a hermeneutic approach. Yet, I feel that for some, like Altman, (2000), who also supports Klein, there are contradictions about what is innate and what is learned. The current emphasis is not so much on arguing for the role of context but rather describing how context and subjectivity have played out in different cultures, see for example the collection of papers (Brothers, 2013)

CONCLUSION

This article is a personal narrative, a phenomenological, rather than analytical, illustration of how one may be carefully taught to be loving oppressors in the environment of a big liberally-minded, caring family. At the same time, and even before we were entertaining Klaus at the farm, we teenagers were planning to leave apartheid South Africa and to make lives for ourselves in other countries. The line between victims, perpetrators, and bystanders blurs and shifts through time. Living in the trauma zone I have described took its toll on my close family and ripped us apart. That was one of the ways in which we were victims of apartheid. My sisters and most of my farm cousins emigrated and are now spread over America, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The older generation remained behind in South Africa. Being part of the Jewish diaspora themselves, they never uttered a word of reproach for our decision to leave them although they were bereft. They even encouraged us to leave.

I have lived in Australia for 37 years and the repercussions of that early life in South Africa still have an impact on me and my choices. For the first years in Australia, I was largely numb to my past. My determination to turn my back on South Africa and reinvent myself remained until the release of Mandela and the change to democracy and the advent of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission disturbed my equilibrium. All my suppressed feelings of love, hate, and guilt toward the old country and its people and who I was during apartheid burst forth again. My Ph.D. dis- sertation, “Race, Place and Self” resulted from these feelings. This article is an adaptation of one of the chapters, as is “Race, place and self” in the Experience of a Bystander (Philips, 2011).2

A trip to the Northern Territory of Australia during 2012 functioned as a catalyst that con- tributed to my resolution to become more involved with Australian issues, instead of focusing on

2This article explains how the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission cast a spotlight on political horrors perpetrated during the era of apartheid which led to Whites asking who they were during those years.

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my country of origin. Being up north reminded me that we have our own version of genocide and racial problems in Australia, a topic outside the scope of this article.

In Australia, less than two percent of the population is Aboriginal and the majority of them live in the Northern Territory. In the Eastern suburbs of Sydney, where I live and work, the demographic is such that I hardly see any aboriginals and am not confronted by racial suffering in any visceral regular way. It is easier to be a bystander in such a world. Australia’s legacy of genocide and racial trauma can very easily be out of sight and out of mind. As I mentioned earlier, I came to the conclusion that a contributing factor to the intensity of White South African guilt was the dramatic contrast of racial demographics, as in South Africa Blacks as Blacks outnumber Whites by ten to one, which of course affects the proximity to racial intermingling and living conditions.

To my astonishment, in what can only be called a strange coincidence of timing, shortly after my trip to Northern Australia, I received an invitation from Norma Tracy, CEO of an organization called Gunawirra, to be part of a project to create a model that will reach at least a hundred Aboriginal preschools with “art as a medium of healing trauma in the preschool child.” I accepted the offer to supervise the researchers who supported parents and teachers of the children. It was an opportunity to give back in accordance with my skills and training and experience.

Growing up in the system of apartheid has left me feeling uncomfortable about race, culture, and class. It is as though I am concerned about being too friendly, too distant, too patronizing, too uncaring. It is as if the cumulative effects of trauma, guilt, and even indignation have left me a little raw, and even though this has eased over time, it has not completely disappeared.

The examples and narratives in this work relate to South Africa, but the principles that emerge have far-reaching, even universal, implications. They apply to scars that are the legacy of being raised in an autocratic state. The ramifications of being a member of the White oppressing class by virtue of birth can never be erased, and issues of atonement, personal responsibility, culpa- bility, and guilt endure. My aim was to examine the feelings that endure, using the tools of my therapeutic trade.

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