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Whither Malay culture in South Africa?

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Ismail Lagardien is a writer, columnist and political economist with extensive exposure and experience in global political economic affairs. He was educated at the London School of Economics, and holds a PhD in International Political Economy.

I am waging a low-intensity war to preserve an ethnicity, and a set of cultural markers that I don’t particularly care for. Kinda. I know that sounds absurd, but indulgence is begged; some sense may emerge by the end of this article. Let me situate this ‘war’ in a larger context before bringing in my personal beef.

Among all the changes of the past 20 years, the good, the bad, the money, and the witches’ brew, one of the things that has struck me as rather curious, and mildly unsettling, is the slow deterioration of the Nusantaran markers and influences in what has traditionally been called the ‘Malay’ community in South Africa. I must hasten to add that I perpetuate no ethnic or racial identity. I do, however, appreciate the multiplicity of cultural, ethnic and linguistic influences that shape South African society. President Thabo Mbeki expressed this most eloquently in his ‘I am an African’ speech.

In what was probably the last great speech by a South African president, Mbeki said:

I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still, part of me. In my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came from the East. Their proud dignity informs my bearing, their culture a part of my essence. The stripes they bore on their bodies from the lash of the slave master are a reminder embossed on my consciousness of what should not be done.”

Within a decade of that speech, which could have been epoch-making, the country began what seems like an unstoppable slide into systemic lawlessness. This is accompanied by an almost terminal decline in governance, and the provision of public goods and services. Contiguously, the histories, the cultural life worlds of those whom the ruling party has redefined as ‘outsiders’, seem to be under threat. Not all of which, it should be said, is a direct result of government policies; some may be a reaction based on perceptions. We’ll get to that, later.

On the part of successive post-Apartheid governments, most especially since the end of the Mandela period, there seems to be a belief that in order to assert South Africa’s identity as an African state, the country has to follow the transformation trajectories of other African countries. The way Zambia embarked on ‘Zambianisation’, rather unsuccessfully, it should be said, and Zimbabwe with ‘indigenisation’, the results of which are yet to be fully known, South Africa has embarked on ‘Africanisation’, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it has some rather problematic unforeseen circumstances.

Briefly, the Zambian project never quite took off. In a speech delivered at the opening of a factory on 2 June 1974, the slow pace of Zambianisation especially concerned President Kenneth Kaunda. Kaunda said: “In some instances the time-span involved for Zambians to take over and exercise their full responsibilities have been deliberately elongated. Clearly this kind of approach is anti-Zambian, wasteful of resources and it has to stop. Trained Zambians in all sectors should be encouraged to take up their proper places in the management of the affairs of this society.”

The Zambian government remains at work on Zambianisation – 51 years after independence. South Africa may well be in for the long haul. Anyway, one of the unfortunate outcomes of South Africa’s Africanisation is in the cultural realm. Axiomatically stated, I believe one has to take responsibility for all the unintended consequences of our actions. A drunk does not intend to kill a pedestrian on the drive home, but when he does, he is brought to justice… I hope that works as an analogy of sorts.

Now then, well-meaning and far-sighted as the process of Africanisation in South Africa may be, one of its unintended consequences may be the loss of some of the rich cultures that were brought to this country, and those that rose, autochthonously, notably in Cape Town. Some of the earliest ‘non-Europeans’ were brought as exiles and slaves from the Nusantaran world, which stretches from Madagascar eastward across the East Coast of India and South East Asia, and then north to the Philippines. They planted deep roots and grew along with the region over 400 years – almost always as a subaltern.

Back to the future. Elements of the Africanisation process entail raising the primacy of indigenous cultures, which is necessary and important, and by extension diminishing the importance of ‘non-African’ cultures and traditions. Along with abandoning the ‘European’ cultures because of their relation to colonialism, minority cultures, what some may describe as ‘hybrid’ cultures that emerged from the contact between colonial subjects and indigenous people, are being treated as ‘non-African’ imports and need to, therefore, be removed.

What this means is that a culture that is rich, and varied – that was so pithily described by Mbeki – is allowed to stagnate. Again, this is not necessarily a problem; cultures and languages rise and fall, some simply die off and are never heard or seen again. Some minority cultures, out of fear of being overtaken by dominant ones, sometimes seek refuge elsewhere. This brings me to the Malay community in South Africa…

Four or five years ago I wrote a brief blog post about the way that most people in the Malay community (I will drop the quotation marks for ease of reading), no longer used words like Terrima Kasi’ (thank you, in Malaysian), Puasa (the act of fasting during the month of Ramadan), Labarang (a colloquial Malay term for Eid) and replaced them with Arabic phrases like ‘Shukran’ (thank you), and Iftar for the old Malay term, ‘bukkah’ – which may or may not be purely Nustantaran, but very much part of the Malay lexicon in South Africa. I have had a lot of time to think and consult with a spectrum of people on the matter. There may well come a time when the remnants of Nusantaran influences among the Malays of South Africa all but disappear.

My ‘war’, then, is to constantly use the old Malay words and feign ignorance when people talk about a ‘janazah’ – I actually found out only very recently that it was Arabic for a funeral. When I meet family and friends I insist on using the word kan’Allah, another colloquial term with deep roots in Afrikaans, for please, and terrima kasih, the Malaysian and Indonesian term for thank you.

How on earth, then, did this come about? Based on discussions with several people, there are two things that help explain this retreat into an Arabisation of culture in South Africa. One has to do with internal dynamics, and the other with external; the two go together, it seems. Some Muslims, the Malays in the coloured community, believe they are under threat, and that they face the same fate as during Apartheid. I don’t necessarily buy into this, but many people in this community believe they were not white enough during Apartheid and now they’re not black enough. The safe option, they believe, is to retreat into an ethnic or cultural identity which gives them, at least, the perception of unity and strength. Enter Islam, and the rise in relative power of the Arab world.

Emboldened by these movements, people seem to be abandoning the old customs and cultures, those associated with slavery, colonialism and Apartheid, and reasserting themselves, or renegotiating their own identities to create a space for themselves in the new South Africa. It does not help that in Uganda Milton Obote sought to correct ‘imbalances’ between Africans and Indians in the country, and sought to marginalise that country’s Asian community. His successor, Idi Amin, simply expelled Indians.

Zambianisation included the expulsion of ‘non-Africans’, and in Zimbabwe, well, one scholar pointed out that ‘coloureds’ in that country were always considered collaborators, and beneficiaries of the old colonial system. Europeans dismissed coloured people as a marginal population and unworthy. In Zimbabwe, one research project concluded the coloured people of that country walked a tightrope. It stands to reason, I guess, the Malay community in South Africa, as part of the coloured community, have retreated into an identity that gives their lives substance and meaning. One question that remains is this: Why did they choose a Saudi brand of Islam? DM

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