Not White

Thursday night we decided to go out for some after dinner drinks on Seventh Street (a short walk from our guest house). Since Melville is a student area, there's a large variety of bars and clubs quite close to us. The first bar we went to was mainly white, with a quieter non-student clientele. Later in the evening we moved on to a second bar, which had a much more diverse selection of patrons. We spoke to quite a few people, and were generally well received although Harriet did comment that she felt like we were "The shiny white new toys" for quite a few of the men we spoke to.

While this was all good fun, the best part of the night came later. At around midnight, the majority of the group decided they'd had enough and wanted to get back to the guest house. Max, Mathilde, Alex and I decided to move on to a student club near our guest house.

Stones is a typical student bar, a room for dancing, a bar, pool tables and an outside balcony. Our main reason for choosing it was that it was still open at that time of night. I think we all had a moment of doubt as we walked in and found that we were the only non-black people there. We bought drinks and headed out to the balcony where we got talking to some of the local students from the University of Johannesburg, UJ. Despite our initial concerns, people were hugely welcoming and willing to talk to us.

It was a new experience to speak to people who've been through school successfully and are carrying on into higher education. The majority of people we spoke to were from middle class backgrounds, and many had attended white schools. A particularly interesting one was the Med Student who explained to me that despite her black heritage, she saw herself as an Afrikaaner. Given Africa's history, the oppression of Africans by the white Afrikaaners, the Soweto uprising in response to schools teaching only in Afrikaans, it was quite a bizarre notion to both myself and the other black student who she was explaining this to.

There is something quite refreshing about the fact that in South Africa it is acceptable to talk about race, given how inherently different we were to the club's usual visitors, quite a few of the conversations I had turned to the issues to do with race in South Africa. One guy was telling me about how in his family it would no longer be an issue of race, but one of adherence to family tradition and respect. How he would be quite happy to take a white girl home, as long as she was willing to show the proper respect for his parents, to help with cooking and clearing the table, as well as the crucial offer to make tea for his mother.

However, the most interesting moment in the night was when I was talking to someone about the division of races in modern South Africa, and he told me that I'm not white. Because a white girl would never walk into a black club and speak to locals the way I was doing. While I think it was meant as a compliment to me, it was also a hugely sad reflection on South Africa as a country.

On the whole, I had a fantastic night, I met some amazing people - students who renewed my faith in the country's ability to recover from it's ghastly history and move on into a brighter future, through their kind, reception of our group and their willingness to share so much about themselves with us.