Crossing The Line

On Sunday morning, I woke up an hour earlier than I'd planned to, and lay there wondering if I should spend that hour in bed or go for a walk, running through a mental list of all the advantages the walk had over the rest. You'll be surprised to hear that I went for the walk! I went to my kitchen and looked out of the window at the spectacular view of the Constantia mountains and saw that the weather was perfect for walking - overcast, silver-grey, pending, and very, very still..... moody, mystical, magical.

I walked for just over an hour, in perfect tranquility, using the time to do some uninterrupted thinking, but also to breathe in the fresh air and feel part of the universe and the wonderfully unfolding spring season.

So where does someone like me take a walk, without having to drive a few kilometres first? The answer is simple: while I don't exactly live in a leafy suburb, thanks to the old apartheid system, I live across the road from one. Or, to be more specific, across the line. The grand plan of the apartheid government entailed grouping people geographically, to confine their activities and interactions to 'people of their own kind'. The railway line in Cape Town's southern suburbs divided the city along 'racial' lines, and to this day, these areas are still populaced predominantly by the original groups.

So, when we debate on the topic of how many generations it will take before South Africans start ignoring "race" or ethnicity, we need to bear in mind that many physical structures that were designed to separate, alienate and subjugate still exist, and serve as reminders, every day of our lives, of that part of our country's history. And even to call it "our country's" history is slanted, and serves to dilute the truth, because it's OUR history. It was about people. And we are those people.

And so, while I was walking in leafy suburbia, which is accessible but still inaccessible - because we are now at that stage of "our country's history" where access to and ownership of everything beautiful is determined by socio-economic class and not by colour - I thought about the fact that I had "crossed the line", in order to walk amongst fragrant pine trees. I thought about other ways in which I had crossed the line, that morning and throughout my life. I thought about decisions I had made that had been unpopular with my close circle, some of which I'd later regretted. I smiled as I thought about the ones I would never regret, as controversial as they may have been.

In the old South Africa, when people spoke about someone coming from "the other side of the line", it usually referred to someone from a different "race", but of course the loud, grimy railway line also presented a strong reinforcement of that divide. In the 1950s, when my mother was in her twenties, she and her friends were caught up in the National Party's "reclassification" of people, along so-called racial lines. She tells me how families were split in two, as the fairer-skinned ones, who could "pass" for White, accepted the label and all that went with it. Now THAT is something I will NEVER understand! You are born into a family, you have your parents and your siblings, and you are their close blood relative. A savage, dehumanising political system affords you, based on genetically-determined variables like the number of pigmentation cells in your skin and the texture of your hair, the opportunity to denounce them and your entire personal and social history, and live a lie,...... and you go for it! Huh?!!!

Now, to those people who crossed the line in that short-sighted, unfortunate way, I have a few questions that I've been wanting to ask for many years: how do you feel today? And what did you say when you were asked about which schools you'd attended, or where you'd grown up? And if everyone knew that you were from a "non-white" family anyway, who exactly were you fooling by living as an imposter? And how did you justify to yourself the conscious choice to live as part of the privileged minority, which thrived at the expense of the underprivileged masses, knowing that your own mother, father, sisters and brothers were on the receiving end of the bigotry of that very minority you had insinuated yourself into?

And so I concluded my walk, crossing the line once again, turning my back on the tranquil, leafy suburb (where, by the way, I'm quite ok with saying I would love to live, because my theory is: everyone deserves to live in such tranquil surroundings!) and walking the few blocks home.

I had achieved a lot: I had had some much-needed exercise, I had breathed in lots of fresh air, I had had some solo time, I had tossed about quite a few ideas, and I had crossed the line, in more ways than one.