A few nights ago I suffered a bout of insomnia. I kept thinking there was someone in the house. At one point I was convinced the bathroom window had just been forced open. I stood at my bedroom door wondering what to do. Should I confront the intruder or just go back to bed and pretend nothing was happening? I doubted if I could intimidate him in any way; he was more likely to laugh at me, a skinny little man, standing shivering in the cold, wearing tight blue thermal pj’s. As it turned out, there was no one in the house. But on the same night our neighbours were broken into, while they were awake, and the ensuing commotion must have disturbed my sleep.
Nobody wants to read another tale about fear and violence, and this isn’t one, but there is a sense of obligation, when reading these accounts, to bear witness, to sympathize with the victims, and condemn the perpetrators. However, condemnation turns so easily into prejudice, and when the victims are family members or friends the change can be seamless. And when people become fearful, injured pride can easily lead them to become hateful. At a restaurant recently, I watched a black waiter who, while serving a white family, became so intimidated that he was started to shake and stutter. The sneering, angry looking mother had so much expectation of incompetence that it became reality.
Then, while visiting a local business, filled with white customers, a black man entered to hand over an order written on a piece of ragged cardboard. There was a hush, and suppressed laughter, as the man kept his head lowered and mumbled an explanation. Afterwards, the owner, who I knew to be liberal-minded, laughed along with his customers - I was flabbergasted that such a scene could have occurred in his store. There is often a gap between our beliefs and our actions - our challenge is to find ways to close it.
Walking a long road towards a campsite near the Kwa-zulu Natal / Free-state border recently, it was interesting to note how my speed decreased as I relaxed, and as my body tried to conserve energy. And I remembered driving with a successful businessman in his smart car; he looked at people walking slowly to work saying, ‘See how lazy they are - look how slowly they are walking.’ It never crossed his mind to think how far they had probably already walked, and how little their destinations promised them in the way of job satisfaction. And at a campsite, someone saying, ‘there is no excuse to be poor’—he had never experienced real poverty. Often prejudice is a result of differences in experience in combination with a lack of empathy. Hitchhiking home to Pietermaritzburg, I stood at an intersection for a while, watching as cars drove past me—white faces studiously looking in other directions. How to be invisible: ask for help from strangers. Soon enough, a black man in a beat-up bakkie offered me a lift. The bakkie had a steering problem—at slow speeds it would start to veer in different directions. As we made our way home in the hazy winter afternoon, alternately weaving or speeding, we talked freely, and I felt part of the burden of fear I was carrying lift.
The mental failings, which characterize the prejudiced in our province, and globally—the widespread nervousness and fear, anger and hatred, aversion and scorn—are overcome through contact with people who are different; through cultivating a sense of equality, with the realization that we have a common potentiality; through the understanding that we all experience the same problems and sufferings associated with beings who love, and lose those who they love, who wish for security and peace, but are deprived of it.
