In a society where everything is framed in eternally fixed categories of black and white it is impossible to imagine change, or any social progress for that matter.
The extensions of these categories are, of course, the fixities of right and wrong. But people can change.
A few years ago, one of my students wore a T-shirt with a clever line: “If you haven’t changed your mind in 20 years, you haven’t learned anything.”
As with most axiomatic statements, they conceal many subtleties, and realities. Consider the following. I thought sexism was wrong 20 years ago, and I haven’t changed my mind.
The same goes for racism. I found it loathsome two decades ago, and still do.
I doubt that there is anything that will change my mind any time soon.
But let’s rewind by another 20 years, or even further back.
When I was a child, say at the age of six or seven, I was immersed in a tradition where women (my mother, in this case) had fixed roles in the household, and in society.
For instance, my mother had to give up her job as a seamstress in a factory after she had the first of seven children.
For the rest of her life, she cooked, cleaned the house, and cared for her husband and children, while my father went to work every day.
As a child, I was taught to speak only when I was spoken to. If I did anything wrong, I received a beating. It seemed normal, almost natural.
But it was not.
By the time I was in my twenties, I had new ideas about the social standing of women (inspired significantly by a fantastic book, The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir).
As a child I grew up playing “cowboys and Indians”.
I eventually became a pacifist, and recognised the horrors of violence against children.
I also learned about the genocide against the indigenous people of North America, the “Indians”.
It was no longer fun to play cowboys and Indians.
By the time I was 10 or 12, I had a friend who was very dark-skinned and, well, I am very fair-skinned with green eyes.
Among our friends, we exchanged some of the most hurtful insults – all based on our skin colour.
My friend’s grandmother, herself an extremely darkskinned person, called him “kaffertjie”.
Another friend was called “coolietjie”.
As a child, I was beaten up many times because I had a fair skin. I was called “amper baas” “wit vark” “whitey”.
I recognised, later in my teens, that which I considered to be “normal” as a child, was simply wrong.
I did change my mind and behaviour.
Unfortunately, others do not, they are simply very good at concealing prejudices. Others are simply emboldened.
When we look across the globe there are frightening trends towards racism and intolerance.
Donald Trump has emboldened white supremacists – and apparently AfriForum ...
Brexit has emboldened antiimmigrant sensibilities.
In Hungary, Viktor Orban has given new life to Fascism, and takes great pride in being “illiberal” and opposed to multiculturalism.
Everywhere there are movements who wish to return to imaginary or actual periods when people were racially or ethnically “pure”.
This retreat to “purity” is evident around the world, from Pakistan or Myanmar to South Africa, where we seem bent on erasing all “foreign” influences or protecting “our own” – forgetting the vitality and cultural dynamism that emerges when people from different parts of the world come together and create new communities.
It’s quite astounding, actually, when one hears that, say, a Xhosa person, or an Indian, or an Italian, or a Malay, or an Afrikaner, or a Pakistani is expected to marry and have children only among “their own”.
Forget for the moment scientific evidence that in-group reproduction can result in occurrences of recessive traits, reduced biological health and inherited disease.
It’s useful to bear in mind that fresh scientific evidence emerges constantly. The evidence on in-group breeding may yet change.
What about individuals? We have to make room for errors in our own judgement, accept that we, as people, can change.
The moral, here, is that we may want to break with the habit of assuming good people can’t be bad and that bad people cannot be good.
What recent revelations in The Lost Boys of Bird Island has suggested, is that political and military people, those god-fearing people who ran the country until 1994, were actually quite vile and cruel.
The moral high-ground they assumed concealed deep pathologies.
The lesson we can draw from this is that we may want to look deeper into our past, and confront our demons.
Violence against women, children and people of other races is not “normal”.
I learned that at a very young age – and it changed me forever.