Black Beautiful and Bad

We spent the last few days of our South Africa trip at the Rugby House... the center of University of Pretoria's athletic training facilities. UP, as it is known locally, had a historical significance in the development and entrenching of Afrikaner nationalism. According to Jonathan Jansen,

"The University of Pretoria was one of the key Apartheid institutions for higher learning and one that fulfilled its white nationalist duty with considerable fervor for more than 100 years."

This was a university that churned out loyal civil servants of Apartheid, and ministers of religion who could defend its racist regime on holy grounds. Its anthropologists assigned ethnic and racial sensibilities that aligned with white racist ideology; its sociologists justified the racial order of society; its political scientists justified Apartheid rule; and its historians "impressed Afrikaner nationalism on public understandings of the past." (Jansen) It turned out prime ministers, business moguls, judges and Springbok (Rugby) captains. Its training originated in English, but was soon taken over by the language of Afrikaner nationalism, Afrikaans. At the center of the university's emblem sits the ox wagon, the symbol of the Vortrekker journey that has taken on mythical proportion in Afrikaner history.

Desegregation at UP -post Apartheid- meant overcoming the fears and racist tendencies that had become a part of university culture. Jansen writes, "This was university change in the context of a country that was itself transforming dramatically in the aftermath of apartheid." This was a long and ongoing process. The desegregation and integration of UP in recent years, means that it has a vastly different feel and look today. Outside of the rugby and cricket teams, most of the athletes we saw at UP were black. Still, all of the service workers were black, all of the cafeteria workers were black, and there seemed to be an air of elitism among whites that was palpable. A group of white American students studying abroad at UP told us how white Afrikaners would speak to them in Afrikaans, as if to test their ethnic allegiance. The seperation among races at the University was so striking that our multicultural group, a group who dined and laughed together, and generally liked each other, seemed a bit of a novelty.



The unspoken tension was never more apparent to me than the day I wore one of my favorite tee shirts. On the front, the sillohette of a naked black woman with a Pam Grier, 1970's Afro... On the back, the words Black Beautiful and Bad.



As I walked into the cafeteria that morning, no less than 3 black women approached me and exuberantly greeted me with "I love your shirt." Others nodded in my direction, gave me clinched fists of solidarity, and smiled at me with their eyes. I felt like a super hero...

...and I wondered, if the blacks are this excited about my tee shirt, what will the whites, specifically the Afrikaners, think? Hmmm... well it didn't take me long to find out. I enjoyed my breakfast and the celebrity status my tee shirt granted me. It was almost time to leave for our daily adventure, and I needed to run upstairs and grab my camera. On my way down the stairs from the 3rd floor, a group of 4 young, blonde haired Afrikaner males exited the gym on the 2nd floor, and were perfectly positioned to get a bird's eye view of the back of my tee. What I heard next was a grumbling of angry words from one of them in Afrikaans. Some words sound the same in every language... so I slowed my gait, squared my shoulders, and stopped...

...complete silence now screamed in the space that was once inhabited by angry words... The silence sounded like, "Oh my God. I hope he doesn't speak Afrikaans."

...no movement... I slowly turned my head to see the 4 youngsters standing frozen about half way down a flight of stairs...



I glared at them... ...the smallest of the 4 then decided to walk past me. As I stared at him, he refused to make eye contact, his face contorted with anger and defiance. What was said? I'll never know, but as he scurried out of the door and the others waited for me to resume movement, it was obvious that he was the culprit. When I resumed movement, so did the group behind me. I told our group what happened after I boarded the bus, and Krystal noted, "It was probably the 'Beautiful' that got to them."

"I bet you're right," I said.

Written by Frederick A Hanna