We are celebrating our third decade of Heritage Month and Heritage Day of the democratic era. It is a day when most South Africans get to feel all warm and fuzzy about the country. It’s a good thing.
Most of the time we think about heritage (and identity) in pre-democracy contexts. Some of us remember or imagine where we are from, where we belong, why we live in South Africa, and what all of it means to us individually, as families or groups.
Nobody should deny these privileges to anyone. Are we not all from somewhere? And thank goodness we’re all a mixture of something. I will never tire of repeating that South Africa belongs to everyone who lives here, with the caveat that we should at least be honest about history, state and society…
Identity politics is not necessarily a bad thing. It becomes dangerous only when it is used as a weapon or a device to cleave out exceptionalism, superiority or notions about being special people.
In general, people are free to scrutinise their family origins and passages and to independently make decisions about their identity as long as they don’t force their beliefs and values onto others, or imagine that theirs are the only ideas that are valid today and for eternity.
People are also free to choose their places of belonging or loyalties – up to the point where violence or subjugation are applied. Again, it would help if we remained honest about history, state and society. This applies especially to those people who are “colour-blind” – that most insidious form of racism and perpetuation of white supremacy.
As for trading homelands, it is unsurprising that someone like Elon Musk has fully adopted the US as his home. And that people who once enjoyed privileges in one place saw their privileges diminish, then swiftly relocated to other locations where their privileges would be protected (because of their identity), and again sent their children into the military.
I often reflect on the way that Salman Rushdie has traded homelands, so to speak. There is no comparing him with Musk (as a person); not in the least.
Rushdie was born in Mumbai (what was Bombay in “British India”) in 1947. He became a British citizen in 1964, and then a citizen of the US in 2016. In a typical US tradition, Rushdie has been described as an Indian-born British-American.
Apart from being an exceptional writer, Rushdie, who holds a British passport, was knighted for his services to literature in 2007, and currently has citizenship in the US while holding on to special rights extended by the government of India through its Person of Indian Origin policy.
It’s fair to say that Rushdie can claim any identity he chooses, and at any time that is convenient. I would probably do the same, except I would not make it alive in the US.
Rushdie once described Mumbai as “my lost city”. About three decades after leaving India for the UK, he wrote:
“Writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by an urge to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge – which gives rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost: that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.”
Looking for a home for identity and knowing oneself
I often think about “home”, about “belonging”, about my family origins, about race, admixture and history. I am coloured, with some outlandish genetic inheritance, and with about as much Inuit as African genes, and that’s fine.
I have also wondered how or when one decides to situate oneself in a place, a home and an identity, and whether, as Rushdie said, above, these things are almost always imaginary, invisible and products of the mind. Sometimes I think so…
Most recently I followed the Al Jazeera story of “America’s forgotten children: Amerasians – mixed-race children fathered by US soldiers – struggle with discrimination in Asian societies”.
The US has a history of promoting prostitution to satisfy the lust of its soldiers in East and South East Asia (also, lest we forget, of using chemical weapons against Koreans in the 1950s) and the West, in general, using the south of the Korean Peninsula as “a baby farm”.
An estimated 200,000 South Koreans were adopted by white people in the US and Europe (notably Denmark) over more than six decades. In very many cases the identities of Korean children were erased, and as adults, they now want to return to their homeland. One of the children who was adopted, Uma Feed, produced evidence that her adoption papers were falsified. She wanted the “children for sale” project of the west reversed.
“It should be a human right to know oneself,” she said.
This “knowing oneself” lies at the heart of identity and heritage. One story I have been following is that of Kim Kwon-si, also known as Simon Hokwerda, travelling back to his birthplace in South Korea after 53 years. Kwon-si was born to a black US soldier and a South Korean mother and was sent to the Netherlands for adoption when he was four years old.
South Korea’s racist and xenophobic laws (after the Korean War) forced single mothers to give up their biracial children. The US soldiers simply walked away, as they are wont to do after destroying a country to save it from itself.
When he was born, Kwon-si’s papers stated that he was an orphan, even though he had family. His journey to Korea was not only a search for his birth mom but also his identity.
Upon his return to South Korea, as detailed in the Al Jazeera report, Kwon-si said: “Now I understand that’s why I wasn’t rooted in where I grew up in the Netherlands. Not that that was a bad place, but it’s not... it’s just not my place. Now I feel like I came home – this is my place.”
How then, does one decide where one belongs? Kwon-si, having left South Korea at the age of four, felt right at home on his return to the Korean Peninsula.
My sense is that we actually belong wherever we want to, where we are most comfortable, and where we feel most welcome. This is, of course, quite naïve a statement. It ignores the way in which that most taken-for-granted (or not) thing, the passport, provides us with a national identity and denies us (some of us) mobility.
As for identity, if I – or any reader – looked back, say, 10 generations (about 250 years), I would find at least 1,000 ancestors. Dude, you cannot possibly know all of them!
The best thing about Heritage Day is that everyone can go home, have a meal and chill, a moan and a banter, forget about the actual or real identities for a day and, well… skibidi!
As for South Africa, this place we call home, I share Alexander Pushkin’s sentiments about Russia sometime in the early 1800s: “I despise my country from head to foot, but it makes me furious when a foreigner shares my feeling”. DM
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