Reasons for reactions, learning helps bridge cultural divide

HANDS up if you mastered a skill that is now completely useless.

I’ll go first, I speak fluent Afrikaans.

If you are a regular reader of my ramblings, you know I migrated from South Africa to Australia.

I lived in Durban, Kwa-Zulu Natal, a province known for its large Indian and English speaking South African populations.

Indian because the English brought them over as indentured labourers in 1860.

Don’t shoot the messenger, it wasn’t me or my family and I find forced labour abhorrent too.

As an aside, they banded together and built clothing manufacturing empires, now 80 percent of Durban is Indian owned.

Afrikaans was a compulsory second language, we had to learn how to read, write and speak it.

It was so important if we failed, we’d be held back a year until we improved.

Coming from an English speaking family and with a British mother, Afrikaans wasn’t something I enjoyed.

It seemed pointless, when would I use it?

I excelled in English as a subject and found Afrikaans easy to master.

When I studied journalism, my first placement was far from Durban.

It was in Tzaneen, a town in the Mopani district of the Limpopo Province and a 10-hour drive from the English enclave I was accustomed to.

The newspaper was owned by an Afrikaans family and most of its articles were written in the Afrikaans language.

I was employed to provide English content and Moses Nwankwo provided indigenous content.

We shared a desk in a small room isolated from the Afrikaans journalists.

They spoke predominantly Afrikaans in ‘their’ newsroom and I soon realised we were set apart intentionally.

The region is peppered with large farms and very few of its residents spoke English.

Afrikaners have a culture of their own and many aspects to it are different to English and black South African cultures.

At this time and in Tzaneen, many white people were outspoken in their far-right ideologies.

Moses couldn’t speak or understand Afrikaans, so I translated some of the more verbose conversations that drifted into our little office.

Yes, they spoke about us and no, it wasn’t always pleasant.

Some of the town’s councillors refused to have anything to do with us.

I was a ‘Brit’ and Moses, well … he was black.

I discovered my ‘useless’ second language came in rather handy in our team of two.

It was also my first experience being discriminated against.

I would be denied interviews not for what I knew or didn’t know, but because I was English speaking.

I realised I’d done the same to some extent, made judgements based on emotion and with zero facts.

I asked Moses about his family’s favourite meal.

Growing up in an English household my family’s celebratory meal was roast lamb, Yorkshire pudding and roast potatoes.

Moses said his family bought a large cow head, it cooked slowly in the oven over several hours.

As a boy, he’d hang around the kitchen all day hoping to get first dibs of an eye and part of the tongue.

The head was seasoned and as it roasted, his whole house was filled with a mouth watering aroma.

He spoke of how the head was placed in the centre of the table and family and friends broke off pieces, filling plates and eating it with putu, a maize mixture with a consistency similar to mashed potato.

I’d seen large cattle heads inside freezers at butcher shops.

I wondered how they were prepared and eaten, now I knew.

While at those same butcher shops, I heard white folk tut tutting at the ‘disgusting things’ on display in the freezers.

I told Moses how my brother and I were tasked with picking mint leaves from our mum’s herb garden.

I explained how we chopped the leaves into tiny pieces and added dark vinegar to make mint sauce for our roast lamb.

His reaction was similar to mine on hearing he fought siblings for a beast’s eyeball.

Ewww!

Moses and I did many jobs together.

I helped him understand Afrikaans and he translated the African languages for me.

We were sent to cover union marches and unrest, I never once felt unsafe with him by my side.

One time I was given a heads up some trouble makers were planning to rob me. I made a swift exit.

I asked him all sorts of questions, like the time there was newsroom chatter about how loudly African people speak.

‘Why do black people seem to shout at each other on the street and not talk in a normal speaking voice?’ I asked him.

He explained in his culture talking softly meant you were telling secrets.

‘We talk loudly to show we are not hiding anything’.

When a large chain store had its grand opening in town, people queued up for miles waiting for doors to open.

Moses came to work late and annoyed.

‘Why do all these white people act like I am going to rob them?’ he asked me.

‘I was in the queue, just waiting and they pull their bags close to their bodies and give me such dirty looks’.

I told him African population were higher than European and unfortunately the majority of crimes committed in the area were by people with darker skin.

He understood my point of view and I saw how these reactions affected someone with zero bad intentions.

I have lived in Australia for many years now and while Afrikaans is useless here, I carry something with me that is priceless.

React with knowledge not ignorance, there’s a lot of unhappiness in the world because people don’t take the time to understand culture and language differences.

Perhaps bull eyeballs are delicious, or maybe they’re not.

That’s the one thing I’m not willing to find out, I’ll take your word for it Moses.