Fear and Loathing

He tells me his name is Pete. He hesitates before he says it, so I think it might be a simpler version of his name. Or maybe it's just that no-one usually asks.

Pete singled me out as soon as I left Arrivals at Johannesburg. I have too many bags, and clearly no idea where to go. He was by my side in a moment, offering to take me to the right terminal for my transfer.

He puts his hands on my luggage cart, but I don't let go. It's ok, he tells me, he can push it for me. After a few hundred yards I stand back and let him push it.

He's wearing a t-shirt that says PORTER, he has an ID card for the airport. But I am outside in the Jo'burg sunshine, with too many belongings to keep an eye on, too much money in my purse, and terrified of the poor black people all around me.

I wasn't afraid until I arrived. But thirty minutes after landing I'm thinking like an Afrikaans farmer.

It's not about the colour of skin. It's about having so much, surrounded by people who have so little. I understand, in those few minutes, what I couldn't from months of reading about the history of this country. It was fear that drove apartheid, fear of having what so many others need.

Everything about me seems ostentatious, unnecessary, undeserving. Rich. And Pete knows it. He's very polite, but I think he loathes me a little all the same.

Pete, who is not much older than me but who looks drawn and pinched in a way I will never be. Pete, who has to work weekends at the airport, to pay for his course in mechanical fitting. Or so he tells me.

I loathe myself a little too. For already being so on guard. For already being so cynical.

***********

On the connecting flight, I asked the Afrikaans man beside me if there were townships around the city.

What do you mean, townships? He says. You mean, where the black people live?

I struggled, not really sure myself.

No, I say. More like shanty areas. You know?

He doesn't give me much of an answer. I wonder how to read him. It seems defensive, a sort of weariness from always being on the defensive, always being attacked.

But I see them nonetheless. As the plane descends, skimming above the ground, there are suddenly crooked rows of corrugated tin huts crowded onto the bare dirt alongside the runway, rows and rows and rows. And it's there again, that same blank terror.

It's there too when my host asks me to lock all the doors as we leave the airport in her car. It's there in the clusters of barefoot black boys who stroll along the highway shoulder. It's there when I see that my new bedroom is on the ground floor, with a very flimsy-looking window. It's there in the panic-buttons along the university routes, in the squat woman who "minds" the cars on the main street for a fee, in the constant security presence around campus, in the reinforced locks on the doors and the warning posters all about.

My insides are eating me up. It's fear of black people, one part of me scolds. And a little bit of that is true - it seems different when the person on the street-corner asking for change is black. I am overwhelmed, intimidated by being white in a sea of black. Because there are no poor white people here, so it's alarming how fast you start to equate black with a potential threat.

It's a struggle to understand it, a struggle to be honest about it. I'm learning too much about myself. So far, I don't like what I'm finding.