Mind you that my friend is British, she has been the bane of my life and the mentor in my career. I trust her fully and she has been the most honest person I have ever met. So with that statement coming from her I felt a rush of rage singe through her lips when she said it. I could almost understand where she was coming from.

All my life I have been taught of the injustices against the people of color and how we were treated unfairly. In a way this history of ours in South Africa has become part of our identity. When someone from another country has to look at an African Desi we are seen as people of the struggle, the sugar cane labourer, the domestic of the British Raj and we have generations to go before that global image is eradicated from the train of thought.

But coming back to the point I was making, have we allowed history to inject a new modus operandi into our general daily life that if a white person has to show normal social responses that we immediately see it as being racist? Should we be told at a night club to leave that we immediately see it as being racially discriminatory? It appears so.

At some stage it is our defense; to be previously disadvantaged in the present times we hold on to that aspect of our Asian lives to make them (the Raj) remember what and where we come from? I was ashamed at that point to realize that just maybe my friend was right? I then had a rush of emotions that hit me a few seconds later bringing back vague images of the Special Branch raiding our family home looking for my uncles that were part of the MK Movement, pictures of my grandmother the domestic worker that took care of her British employees children in Tugela.

What is my justification for being who I am? Am I and you the African Desi reader at fault to use the justification for a White persons response that we use the the Race Card on situations that bring our aggressive retorts and situations?

I’m still pondering this ….. why? Well, like most of you we were all Apartheid Babies, we were brought up to believe that the White person was a superior race that had power over us, then we had the likes of Gandhi, Mandela, Hector Pietersen, Nadine Gordimer and many others around the world and in South Africa that fought for freedom from injustices against Black, Coloured and Indian people.

1994 hailed a new period in my life, I could walk in the Workshop knowing I’m finally an equal, my domestic grandmother could use the same seat on the buses as a White person, my aunt could sit at the front for lectures at University of Durban-Westville. My father could finally earn his position in his company and stand as an equal to a White person.
I wonder, how far does the psychosis extend? Is it malleable and to what extent? Is it eradicable, or does it persist in your soul like racism against people of colour – which has some similar traits, but is, in my opinion, slightly qualitatively different today because of the greater emphasis on fear of violence rather than fear of impurity. You could give this a materialist or historicist reading about the state of African White and South Asian cultures and societies, since blood purity is extremely important in racism against Black people, but that’s not my interest here.

I’m more interested in that I’m deeply, deeply sick, and now I no longer have the excuse that I’m not in the social environment in which the sickness can take further root and create havoc in my personality and result in participation in social systems that are regressive. The danger is the passage from “predisposition to” to “full-blown membership in” racism.

For now, I am content to sit on my ass and ponder how I am sick. At some point, I may want to do something more proactive about it — remove myself to another society where class and caste are not so fundamentally intertwined, or assist myself in becoming a more decent person by uncovering various tactics to get better, or some other thing.

I can’t, though, use the advice that a friend of mine had given me about White people in the South Africa and how one should approach them: “that’s their sickness–let them worry about it”.