A Taste of Bitter Almonds: a challenging new view
from the ground on race, class, perdition and promise in the New South Africa
When Nelson Mandela took the oath as South Africa’s first
democratically-elected president in 1994, it symbolised the triumphal defeat of
almost three and a half centuries of racial separation since the original
corporate raiders of the Dutch East India Company planted a bitter almond hedge
to keep indigenous people out of ‘their’ Cape outpost in 1659.
The subsequent expansion of Dutch, Batavian, then British settler colonialism
over the territories that centuries later were forced by Britain to form a
sub-imperialist corporate entity called ‘South Africa’ has usually been
retro-projected as a simplistic tale of white-over-black – but this ignores the
multiracial nature of both the colonial elite and its underclass of servants,
soldiers and slaves. The dispossession by genocide at the hands of Boer,
British, Bantu and Griqua of the indigenous Bushmen – a term they themselves
prefer to the pejorative ‘San,’ meaning vagrant – has been airbrushed out of
the South African consciousness, as has the certain knowledge that all South
Africans, including the author, are racially interrelated, creating blind spots
that were viciously exploited by white, and now increasingly, black racist
nationalists with the rise in 2014 of right-wing populism.
The Mandela moment had deep global resonance and for a few years
thereafter the ‘Rainbow Nation’ was the world’s darling with the stories
produced by journalists signalling in a breathless flood the dramatic changes
of the transition – but in the world’s most unequal society, for the majority
of its people, being excluded from a dignified life remained the rule over 1994
to 2015, and a taste of bitter almonds remained. Some of the most obvious – yet
usually ignored – elements of continuity from the colonial, dominion and
apartheid past in the democratic era include the intolerable official burdening
of all young children by insisting on classifying them by race, the cynical
unwillingness of the political elite to adequately redistribute to the
hard-toiling poor the ill-gotten gains of the past especially land and
corporate wealth, and the weird mimicking by today’s town planners of
separatist apartheid urban geography. As one interviewee put it about his
racially segregated town in 2001, it is as if the ghost of BJ Vorster – the
prime minister whose regime invaded Angola and crushed the 1976-1977
Insurrection – still stalks the hills.
In the year of South Africa’s troubled coming-of-age, veteran investigative journalist and anarchist activist
Michael Schmidt brings to bear 21 years of his scribbled field notes to weave a
tapestry, employing veteran war correspondent Martha Gellhorn’s ‘view from the
ground’ technique: here in the demi-monde of our transition from autocracy to
democracy, in the half-light glow of the rusted rainbow, you will meet neo-Nazis
and the newly dispossessed, Boers and Bushmen, black illegal coal miners and a bank
robber, witches and wastrels, love children and land claimants. The themes covered
in A Taste of Bitter Almonds include
the self-exclusion of criminals and of the racist white right, the deadly divisions
of so-called faction-fighting and xenophobia (the latter more correctly
described as genocide), the tough experiences of social outcasts and gender
pioneers, the inequitable treatment of timber, asbestos, chemical and mining
workers and the sea-changes in organised labour, and the intersections of race
and poverty, and of land and identity – especially for Bushmen and the other victims
of robber-baron apartheid capitalism – under the African National Congress’
“national democratic revolutionary” state.
Controversially, Schmidt argues that the distorting
lens of the Mandela cult has allowed the continuities between autocracy and
democracy to go underreported and largely unchallenged, and asks why we seem
doomed to perpetuate divisions of race, culture, class, age, and gender. Yet
with most tales of our democracy focusing on what academic Patrick Bond called
the ‘elite transition,’ this book is a selection of journalistic back-stories
on reporting on the elephant in the room – the elite-poor class divide – detailing
the contest between what Landless People’s Movement activist Mangaliso Kubheka
described in 2004 as the helicopter-borne President Thabo Mbeki ‘coming down
from the skies’ to beg for his organisation’s votes, standing against whom was
the organic poor-class leadership of what Peter Dwyer of the Alternative
Information and Development Centre described as ‘the auntie in Chatsworth who
says “No!”.’
And yet, despite all the examples of shattered lives given
in the text, a bright thread of promise runs through it: for instance, it is
uplifting to note the iron resolve of black women sawmill workers to unionise
despite working for R11/month in appalling conditions, or that though their
feet are often in the mud, our Born Free youth have their eyes on the stars and
have achieved tremendous gains in fields as diverse as dance and astrophysics. As with the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which ordinary broken
crockery is repaired with slender seams of gold, not only restoring its prosaic
functionality, but elevating it to high art by granting it a new
beauty-in-brokenness, Schmidt argues that it is only by paring away the myths
of our transition and revealing the scars of our continuity, by integrating our
pain into our pride, that we can restore dignity to our extended family, all our
people, and rise above the damage of the past.
