So dronk soos ‘n kleurling onderwyser
I struggle with understanding the word “decolonise”. And as time goes on I am understanding the practice of decolonising better, than assigning words to it. I don’t know how to explain it even to myself. I look up definitions and try and break it down into bite-sized portions. Decolonising is a life-long, generational, and will most likely be a process that has to continue for time immemorial. You cannot undo irreparable damage to societies, cultures, civilisations and identities in one swoop. Throwing resources around doesn’t help entirely either. The problem is we live in systems and geographical areas that have been set up by coloniality, and at the end of it all I feel like it should be all thrown down- but that isn’t a solution either.
I think in unpacking decoloniality we need to unpack ourselves, and the experiences that seem to shape us daily. A few years ago the company I worked for had their year-end function at a wine farm in Cape Town. When we talk about “acreage” this would be it. Rolling hills, vineyards and opulence behind the Cape Dutch architecture. You know mos when you see that thatched roof it is wealth and olde money- colonial money built on the backs of ancestry you have piece-meal knowledge of. The study of self really came a knocking that day. At the farm there is a little museum with a slave ledger. There I spotted a family surname. It didn’t surprise me because as a so-called Coloured under the apartHATE regime my ancestry is rooted in slavery. What shocked me was how disconnected I felt by it. I started asking my parent some questions. I knew her background well enough, but something felt and still feels missing.
My mother and father were child labourers. My mom was a “kindermeid” in the 70’s on a farm in Riebeeck-Kasteel. This term is a derogatory one that I only ever heard from other so-called Coloured people. It is supposed to mean nanny, but she was 10 when she started “working”. A child raising children. The “merrim” and “baas” I am told were good people blah blah. She was a child, a coloured child raising children in Apartheid South Africa. Facts and her way of life back then.
My father was a hawker as a child in Cape Town, I think from 12 years old. Most likely selling produce from the farm my mother worked at. I can only verify this age once I speak to my aunt, his only surviving sibling. They were 8 kids. My parents were contributing to an economy only ever and still structured to marginalise Black and Brown people forever, when they should have been in school.
I think alot about the wine industry in the Western Cape because their roots and wealth is built on slave labour. So much so that as of 2022 the South African wine industry contributes R55-billion to the local economy. When we speak about contribute? What do we mean? We know their are few farms making positive steps to reparations of some kind, but can we ever quantify what reparations means? This step was not without it’s own kak. Is white guilt going to be the continued narrative? How does that fit in with BIPOC visiting these farms and getting married there etc. We recently celebrated a birthday on one such farm we don’t know much about. It sparked a conversation about these farms and what next? What is the go-to? Can there ever be a rehabilitation we can all agree on? While we debate people get up and go to work at these spaces every morning, as they have been doing for more than 400 years.
These are the places that still have their slave bells; used on farms to call slaves to work. I made KAK joke once and probably rooted in the amaKlora practice of using humour to deflect. I mentioned to my friend so-called Coloured people go wine-tasting in groups of 8 or more for safety in case the “boere” wanna trap us to pick grapes again. Thing is people still pick grapes for minimum wage while living in deplorable conditions. Most farm workers will never have equity in an industry that is so vast it keeps trickling, like a lekker pinot noir on a wintry night. This is an economy that invented the “dop system”; the “baas” would literally pay the workers with cheap alcohol. This resulted in so many things we still experience today. In 2018 the stats were that more than a tenth of South African children had fetal-alcohol syndrome. Not to mention the kakkest idiom I have ever heard in my life about so-called Coloured people “So dronk soos ‘n kleurling onderwyser”. This refers to so-called Coloured teachers being the most likely to have an alcohol abuse problem. As time goes on these were never kak jokes, they were just kak en klaar.
I posed the question of decolonising because I don’t know the answer. I am problematising everything including myself. The grapes have been sour for a while. The status quo remains though. There is no industry that is not built on slave labour, expendable bodies beneath the superficial beauty of these estates. What still of indigenous people’s erasure? This is manifold and the berth as wide as all that land we go sip and baljaar on. But as long as the vines are growing so does the resentment.