Jenny Diski (LRB) on the “awfulness” of South Africa
In the LRB of 3 July 2008, Jenny Diski catalogues her encounters with various foul-opinioned South Africans, and expresses her disappointment at the fallen Rainbow nation (haven’t heard that phrase in a while…).
The ‘you can’t understand until you’ve lived there’ argument had kept me from visiting South Africa quite effectively. If being there would make me understanding about apartheid, I preferred to stay away. But now it had to be a very different place, 18 years after Nelson Mandela walked free from prison, 14 years on from the day when South Africa had its first democratic election. I was going to be there anyway – Cape Town was the end point of another journey – and I thought I’d spend a couple of weeks and look around; be a regular tourist in a place where minds had been changed.
(There’s more at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n13/disk01_.html)
Reading this Diary piece made me consider unsubscribing to the LRB for the only time I can remember. I’m not sure why. I don’t think of myself as strikingly nationalist (the 1995 Rugby World Cup made barely a blip on my horizon, if that’s a useful dipstick), and yet the whole article, especially its tone of going bravely against the flow of opinion about South Africa, irked me.
I don’t doubt that people did say the kinds of drongo things that she reports them as saying. But surely that’s hardly a surprise. Trundle off to the UK or the States (just two obvious examples), or even Australia, and you’ll encounter some real dyed-in-the-wool types who speak in derogatory and offensive ways about their countrypeople, or particular segments of them anyway.
So we’re hardly unique.
Not that that makes it ok, or even less irksome or shaming (because there is something vaguely shaming about her comments). Perhaps its the shaming aspect that made me consider no more LRB. Like the Jewish jokes that can only be told by Jewish people, perhaps it’s only those who live here who can voice displeasure and disappointment without raising my defensive hackles.
I comfort myself a little with the thought that most of the people Jenny Diski mentions meeting seem to be middle-aged and over. Don’t younger people, on average, have views that are less hair-raising?
I hope so.
And finally, maybe South Africa just didn’t boil her vegetables — not every place can, after all.
