The Maselspoort incident on Christmas Day put the country on red alert.
In the days that followed the incident and its wide reporting, black and white now more hesitantly, more cautiously, interact in public spaces.
At resorts, parks, beaches and restaurants, citizens from different racial backgrounds now more guardedly eye each other.
People now opt to interact only when unavoidable, so that at fuelling stations, in grocery stores and shopping malls, people speak to each other as little as possible, and then either hurriedly and business-like, or overly friendly and jovial.
Why? Not only did the violence of the incident and the raw anger of the public outcry leave South Africans emotionally charged, but it presented all the country with the following problem: If it could happen at an everyday place with everyday scenes of people relaxing at an open swimming pool, it must also be possible anywhere and everywhere else where black and white share public spaces.
Even worse, as a black person I am in real terms at risk of becoming a victim of racial violence and must be extra vigilant in the presence of whites.
And as a white person, I must carefully think about everything I say and do, because I am already suspected of being a racist and wherever I go, others watch me carefully for any sign of racism.
This is a country on edge, on red alert, not on formal grounds or due to matters of policy and law, but due to a mood of distrust that grips a society.
What makes this problem of the everydayness of the scenes where racist violence may ensue so sweeping, is that it makes the problem one of individuals and families, rather than of communities or a society at large.
It is the things that individuals do, and how families interact among themselves alongside different other families, that make up the everydayness of public spaces. This is so because public areas for relaxing are essentially open spaces without a pre-set agenda.
Any and everyone is welcome to arrive and set their own agenda, umbrella and have fun. The rules and regulations that determine appropriate behaviour also do not control the minute details of how people relax, even if they set minimum standards of respect, and with officials enforce them.
In a progressive society such as South Africa, public areas then essentially are open spaces where citizens are free to and will inevitably encounter and engage with difference. For this very reason, public spaces therefore also are the stage where the legacy of a divided history will present itself.
When free citizens may freely choose how they interact with diverse others in public areas, such spaces become destinations where the everyday confrontation with racism with which individuals and families struggle, surface and play out.
Defining public spaces in this way, makes them theatres where the past and the future of a nation are represented and performed – public spaces as symbolic spaces.
It is in the symbolic reading of incidents such as the one at Maselspoort that the second trigger for a nation on red alert emerges. Whereas the first trigger is the very real fear of citizens, that they are at risk of being involved in such incidents; the symbolic reading that people assign to the incident drives a wedge between black and white.
People think it says something about them as representative of a group, leading to comments such as, “We are not all like that”, and “We must deal with whites once and for all” – statements that show that new solidarities of racial distance from that past may take root, or be revitalised.
* Rudi Buys is the executive dean at the non-profit higher education institution, Cornerstone Institute, and editor of the African Journal of Non-Profit Higher Education.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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