I have been to the Maselspoort Resort several times, mostly on university business but occasionally for the odd day trip with family and friends. The modest facility sits on the banks of the Modder River about 23km from Bloemfontein.
The resort has a conference centre, living quarters and swimming areas frequented by Free Staters in an otherwise dry and desolate province that lacks the abundance of entertaining holiday sites associated with the big coastal cities.
It is not surprising therefore that black and white would converge on the Maselspoort swimming pool on a hot Christmas Day this week. It should also not surprise that sharing the communal pool would from time to time lead to racial friction of the kind witnessed on a viral video-recording that instantly hit the national headlines.
At least three white men can be seen assaulting black teenagers in and around the pool. What allegedly triggered the incident was the white men insisting that the pool was for ‘whites only,’ a strange claim if true unless the attackers were post-apartheid Rip van Winkles who rose from a near three-decade slumber to find that separate amenities were a thing of the past. Or perhaps they were just part of that dying breed of garden variety racists that still stalk our campuses and communities.
Yes, they are still with us. My intellectual mentor, the clinical psychologist Prof Chabani Manganyi, used to often ask me this profound question during our time together at the University of Pretoria: “JJ, where do you think all these people went to after 1994?” He was referring in equal parts to whites who marched faithfully to the drumbeat of a racist government for the better part of a century as he was to those who necklaced suspected informers in the struggle against apartheid.
In the context of Maselspoort, these white men represent the leftovers, those whites who still believe that their skin gives them civilisational advantage over others, the evidence notwithstanding. How does a grownup appear to strangle one teenager while his accomplice submerges the head of another youngster under water?
This is the point Manganyi was making: we fool ourselves if we think that all white South Africans miraculously disinvested themselves of white supremacist ideas and became non-racial angels on the April 28 1994, the day after we voted for our first democratic government.
Now, some perspective. Most South Africans, white and black, have made and continue to make that journey of divesting ourselves of troubled ideas about each other. I sat for most of Tuesday at Battery Park on the edge of Cape Town and marveled at the way in which young (and older) South Africans from across our racial divides played together in this special facility (skateboarding, basketball, mini-soccer etc.) while some were clearly friends, lovers, and life-mates.
What’s the point? Living and loving and learning together despite the weight of history is a process and it takes time. Our progress will be uneven, and our hearts will often be broken. For every Battery Park there will be a Maselspoort in 2023 and for many more years to come. Our media will report with the necessary outrage on racism in swimming pools or university residences but will largely ignore the slow but steady progress being made in the broader society.
Most importantly, this progress is not something that will happen automatically and therefore cannot be left to chance. We have to work hard at making progress in race relations in every sphere of South African life from the company boardroom to the government department to the trading stores on the streets and, of course, in all our institutions of learning.
I still maintain that the best starting point for building Battery Parks and not Maselspoorts in our lives is your home. If all the people who came to your house for the festive season looked like you and pray like you and love like you then you are making very little contribution to social cohesion in our country. And yet the people shouting the loudest about the alleged atrocity at Maselspoort are, predictably, the politicians in our divisive parliament such as the ruling party that just appointed a top 7 who all look like each other.
We simply cannot fight the politics of exclusion in the swimming pool without fighting the demons of exclusion in our personal and familial lives. Battery Park, I discovered, is the consequence of design thinking that draws all our people into communal spaces to build better human relations well into the future of SA. It did not happen without intention.
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