Taking it Like a Man: narratives of dominant white masculinities in South Africa

By

Debbie Epstein

Paper given at the Australian Association for Research in Education

Conference, Brisbane

30 November-4 December 1997

Draft paper, do not quote without permission.

In 1906 Mehloka Zulu led a hopeless uprising in Natal, (the Bambatha

Rebellion) against the white, settler government. The uprising was

violently and savagely crushed. The Natal authorities cut off Mehlo ka

Zulu's head and took it into the prison, where it was paraded before

the black, male prisoners , in prison for a variety of 'offences ' , as

a lesson to them not to resist the authority of white settlers and the

British Empire. (Story summarised from Unterhalter, 1981)

---------------------

I will never forget this day in my life: the day my friend Sidney died.

I am twelve years old. I am a boy. I stay at Twilight Shelter with

many different boys. Others are bigger than me.

One night I did not have pocket money, so I decided to go to the street

to beg for money. On the street I saw Sidney. Sidney lived with us

in the Shelter. Sidney was older than me. He was a teenager. He was

with some white guys. They were beating him up.

I was very upset about it. I ran and called the childcare-worker to go

and help Sidney. But it was too late for Sidney. He was taken to the

Hillbrow Hospital. He died there.. (Kabayi, 1993: 51)

------------------------------

These two stories capture some of the continuities in the contexts

which shape and are shaped by South African masculinities and which I

hope to explore in this paper. The first shows how the history of

colonial occupation set up structures of racialised violence long

before the word 'apartheid' had been invented or the detail of its

legal aspects put in place. We see, here, the figure of an heroic male

leader of resistance to a white, colonialist, racist regime as well as

the implied figure of the upper class colonial/settler soldier, civil

servant, judge, or governor responsible for deciding on this medieval

styled performance, and the almost certainly working class man who

actually executed it. We see, too, those black male figures designated

'criminal', presumably resistant to the colonial regime (either through

their criminality or in addition to it) or there would have been no

felt need to parade the severed head through the prison! The story

also illustrates the point that South Africa has been structured in

racialised violence since before its inception. The defeat of the

Boers in 1902, and the Act of Union in 1910 were not the precursors to

a period of liberal British rule in which African, Coloured and Indian

people (to use South African terminology) made progress towards an

equality, which was cruelly snatched away from them when the

Nationalist Government was elected by white voters in 1948 (a story

which British, and maybe English-speaking South African, readers might

feel more comfortable with). Racial classification, hierarchy and

segregation, dispossession of the land, disqualification of black

people from voting and strict restrictions on their mobility, laws

against 'inter-racial' sexual relationships, wide disparities in

wealth, all enforced through military power, had been in train since

the earliest settlement of the Cape, and were well established in both

the British colonies of the Cape and Natal prior to the Boer War as

well as in the Afrikaner republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free

State. The years after 1910 intensified, rather than ameliorated this

situation.

The second, contemporary, story, continues the theme of white on black

male violence and the potentially short and brutalised life of a black

man, in this case no more than a boy, a 'street child'. It invokes

what has been labelled (though the label has been much contested) South

Africa's 'Lost Generation' (see, for example, Everatt, 1994), that

generation of urban African children and youth who received little or

no schooling, and who were at the forefront of the struggle against

apartheid in the 1980s. While the young people involved in the

struggle were not all male, the visual image (at least for those who

watched on British television news and documentaries) is of young men

toyi-toyi-ing to the graveside as funeral after funeral took place.

The gender of the childcare worker is not given, but the story does

raise questions of class: the children are part of a hugely

disadvantaged underclass which is almost entirely black; the childcare

worker is part of a professional middle class, differentiated in pay

and in the level of training received by colour.

On the face of it these two stories may seem to have little to do with

masculinities in schools in England, but I hope to show both

continuities and differences between the two countries through the

course of this paper. In it I will explore different themes around

masculinity drawing on examples from both countries to demonstrate the

connections and disjunctures which I perceive. In doing so, I will

draw on ethnographic and historiographic texts in the UK and on mainly

autobiographical and fictional writing from South Africa, as well as

reports to the government of post-apartheid South Africa, academic

articles. The issues which I particularly wish to explore here are:

versions of dominant, white, ethnically and class marked masculinities;

questions about violence and masculinity; and the part played by

homosociality associated with homophobia in the production of many

versions of masculinity. In dealing with these themes, I will refer,

particularly, to the part that schools plays as sites for 'masculinity

making' (Haywood & Mac an Ghaill, 1996; Mac an Ghaill, 1994). The

period I will be mainly concerned with is mainly the period preceding

the end of apartheid, but I will be using this to reflect on the

(desired) post-apartheid transformations and on what might be needed in

a post-apartheid, post-colonial pedagogy around masculinity.

Thinking through ethnicity

'Ethnicity' is a highly contested term and there is, furthermore, a

serious danger of using it anachronistically or simplistically to

describe groups which would not necessarily use this concept

themselves. Avtar Brah (1996) argues that ethnicity should be regarded

as a set of processes through which relational differences between

groups are constructed and held in place. As such, they will differ

over time and in relation to socio-economic and political change, and

will also carry varying salience for different (groups of) people at

different times. Ethnic groups do not, therefore:

constitute a category of primordial ties. But this does not mean that,

under particular political circumstances, they cannot come to be

represented in such terms. Ethnic groups are both formed and exist

within and through discursive and material practices inscribing

economic, political and cultural modalities of power. They are

heterogeneous categories differentiated along a variety of axes such as

gender, religion, language, caste or class. (Brah, 1996: 164)

It is, therefore, with some trepidation that I choose to use the term

'ethnicity' to describe the kind of differences which I wish to talk

about in this paper. However, it seems to be the best available word

for the moment. 'Race' will not do, not only because it implies an

essentialist biological basis which I would reject (Barker, 1981; CCCS,

1982; Miles, 1982), but also because, in common sense, the word implies

a kind of homogenous unity of the categories 'white' and 'black' which

is misleading. Other words such as 'nation' and 'tribe' also carry

with them their own particular problems. 'Nation' connotes the idea of

the nation-state or aspirations towards one, while 'tribe' has been

used to indicate a kind of backward, uncivilised state . I will

therefore use the term 'ethnicity' to describe communities in the two

countries which see themselves as different by virtue of history,

religion and/or language.

Both the UK and South Africa include ethnically diverse communities.

In both cases, there is a relationship between the current ethnic

diversity of the country and, from different perspectives, the history

of the European colonisation of southern Africa. Differences, of

course, abound, not least that Britain was a colonising nation and

South Africa a colonised one. The wide diversity of ethnicities in the

UK is, for the most part, a post-World War II development as the

Empire, so to speak, came home and/or, in the words of the Centre for

Contemporary Cultural Studies classic exploration of 'race' and racism

in the British context 'struck back' (CCCS, 1982) , although it is also

important to note that Great Britain has always consisted of (at least)

four groups with claims to national/ethnic identities of their own

(English, Welsh, Scottish and the Irish) as well as including different

ethnic minority communities, such as the Jews and communities of black

people (for example in Cardiff and Liverpool) (Fryer, 1984). In South

Africa, in contrast, there were several different groups, with

different (though often related) languages, cultural and religious

practices prior to the invasion and settlement of white people

(primarily) from the Netherlands and Britain in the 17th, 18th and 19th

centuries and of people brought in as slaves from East and West Africa

and from the South-East Asian Dutch colonies (Unterhalter, 1995: 213).

Later 19th and 20th century migrations brought a range of ethnic groups

with their origins in Europe (for example, Jews, Greeks and Italians)

many of them drawn by the promise of opportunity largely premised on

the economic, social and legal subordination of black groups. It also

brought the introduction of people from the Indian sub-continent as

indentured labour as well as migrations from other parts of Africa,

especially to work on the mines.

The different histories of these various groups in the two countries

has, inevitably, given rise to different, but complexly related, ways

of constructing masculinities and femininities. In neither country can

it be said that there is one, monolithic version of white masculinity

and another, different, but still monolithic version of black

masculinity. In both cases, masculinities are constructed in ways

which are marked by a combination of class and ethnicity. Furthermore,

within any ethnic group there is a range of ways of being a man (or a

woman), from those who are heavily invested in the dominant ethnically

marked form to those whose identities are constructed in opposition to

dominant forms in a variety of ways (gay masculinities in all groups,

for example).

In this paper, I will focus on the two dominant, ethnically and

class-marked white South African masculinities , the English and the

Afrikaans. I have chosen to do this partly because I do not wish the

focus of this paper to be on black masculinities and violence (yet

again) and partly because the particular processes of racial politics

in South Africa (and in the UK) mean that other, subordinated

masculinities are, in part, formed in relation to those of the dominant

white group(s). It would be impossible, in the space of this paper, to

examine ethnically marked forms of masculinity in the same detail for

all groups. Neither is it possible in terms of the data available to

me, an English-speaking, Jewish, ex-South African exile/ŽmigrŽ, living

and working in London. However, this would be an important project and

is one which I hope to be in a position to undertake in future

comparative study of the UK and South Africa.

Proper English Gentlemen

Robert Morrell's (1994a; 1994b) work on the white secondary boarding

schools for boys in Natal traces the production of South African

English-speaking upper class masculinities through processes of

schooling in which schools were set up to resemble, as closely as

possible, the British public (that is, private) school. As he points

out, these schools (in both countries) 'offer little possibility for

alternative masculinities to emerge' (Morrell, 1994a: 62). In both

cases, the schools value 'manly sports' (like rugby , invented at and

named after one of Britain's most prestigious public schools) and

exhibit strongly hierarchical orderings which serve to 'toughen' the

boys (Tolson, 1977). Christine Heward's (1988; 1990; 1996)

descriptions of formations of English public school masculinity

resonate strongly with those that Morrell gives of South African

boarding schools. In both places, hierarchy was put into place (and

held there) through a combination of age (exaggerated by the use of

prefects), academic success (though preferably without revealing any

tendency to work at it) and sporting success. Although strongly

competitive, both required 'loyalty' (to the school, the team, maybe

the class), a degree of homosociality (although too close friendships

were to be discouraged) combined with a performance of homophobia even

while same sex relationships (especially between older and younger

boys) might be countenanced with a degree of equanimity.

An important part of the formation of masculinities in elite schools in

both countries has been the place which violence, often in the form of

organised bullying, has occupied. Such violence can be teacher-pupil

or pupil-pupil and is supposed to be suffered in silence, the very

silence often being the mark of a 'real man'. Morrell , for example,

quotes Victor Stiebel's description of corporal punishment:

The procedure for pre-lunch beatings was traditional. As soon after

school as it was known that a culprit had been sentenced , news flashed

across the bush telegraph, most of the boys gathered in the quadrangle

...

I heard him trying out his canes, and the vicious noise, as doubtless

he realized, was the most unpleasant part of the business ... After six

of the best ... Alfie ceased from his labours and I stood up. His eyes

were shining and he looked pleased with himself. 'I say, Stiebel,' he

said, 'you took that very well.' ...

After a beating it was the privilege of one's dormitory mates to

inspect the damage. (Stiebel quoted in Morrell, 1994a: 69-70)

The ability to stand up to a beating, to 'take [it] very well' defined

one's manliness. Reading this quote, I am struck by its homo-erotic,

sado-masochistic feeling. The ritualised spectacle of the beating

appears to have been titillating and the clear pleasure taken by 'Alfie'

in delivering it, 'trying out his canes' to gain the maximum impact

from the fear of being beaten and then from the beating itself is

obvious. At the same time, not 'taking it like a man' is seen as

feminised, 'sissy, and, by implication, homosexual. It is important to

note, here, that the expulsion of same-sex desire and the return of the

repressed in the homo-erotic pleasure of the punishment, are not

mutually exclusive but part of the same dynamic.

L.P. Hartley explores inter-pupil bullying in the first chapter of The

Go-Between:

It was my second term at school; I had never been unpopular before,

still less had I been systematically bullied, and I didn't know what to

make of it. I felt I had shot my bolt. All my persecutors were older

than I was and I couldn't possibly gather together a gang to fight

them. And failing that, I couldn't ask for sympathy. It was perfectly

correct to enlist supporters if action was to be the outcome; but to

confide in someone for the sake of confiding, that simply was not done.

All the other four boys in my dormitory ... knew of my trouble, of

course; but not one would have dreamed of mentioning it, not even when

they saw my scars and bruises , perhaps least of all then. Even to say

'Bad luck' would have been in bad taste, as suggesting that I was not

able to look after myself. It would have been like pointing out some

physical defect. The law that one must consume one's own smoke was

absolute, and no one subscribed to it more whole-heartedly than I.

(Hartley, 1958: 15)

I will return to the theme of violence throughout this paper. For now,

it is sufficient to note that the ethos of the British public school is

steeped in the kind of violence which found expression, too, in the

colonial/settler governments of the Cape, Natal, and, later, the Union

of South Africa.

It is not only South African elite boarding schools which are modelled

on the British/English public school. My memory of English-speaking,

white state schools in Pretoria in the 1950s (the Pretoria Boys' High

School attended by my brother and cousins, and the Pretoria Girls' High

School attended by my sister and myself) is of extraordinarily similar

formations. Both these schools did have boarders from the rural areas

of the Transvaal, but even for day students (who formed the great

majority) there were hierarchies based on sport (rugby for boys, hockey

for girls), age and academic success , differently inflected for boys

and for girls , and, in the boys' school, violence was inherent in its

organisation, structures and quotidian practices and relationships.

So, too, were that telling combination of homosocial, homo-erotic and

homophobic practices, though possibly in somewhat less extreme forms.

Fictional, auto/biographical and academic accounts of elite schools in

Australia, New Zealand, Canada and United States all show significant

similarities to the model of the public school as well as some

contextual differences. It seems, then, that the hegemonic

masculinities of English-speaking South Africa, as constituted in and

through schooling, bear the imprint of what might be called a 'master

narrative' of what men should be and what schooling should do for them

based on the education of gentlemen in English public schools.

This is, of course, not to argue that the hegemonic English

masculinities which I have illustrated here are the only ones, even in

the constrained contexts of elite public schools. Morrell (1994a) and

Heward (1996) both draw attention to subordinated masculinities

developed within and against the dominant versions of the schools they

studied. In my own interviews with gay young men in England (Epstein,

1997), I had reports from some who had been to public schools about

their experiences. In one case, for example, the young man who had

attended a major public school reported hiding with his books to escape

bullying because he was seen as a 'swot' and a 'fag' , his overt

commitment to academic work and homosexuality being elided in the

culture of the boys at the school. Indeed, it could be argued that the

dominant group, those who exhibit hegemonic masculinities need the

presence of the Other, those who can be labelled as 'queer', 'fags' or

whatever the current derogatory words are. And the absent presence of

the Other in the form of the black man plays its part too, in the

formation of white, elite, heterosexual masculinities (Cohen, 1988;

Fanon, 1986; Morrison, 1992).

Die Ware Afrikaner: The Protestant work ethic and the Other

If English-speaking masculinities in South Africa can be said to be

steeped in the ethos of the elite British public school, transported to

South Africa and racialised in the South African context, then

Afrikaner masculinities have been shaped in the context of the

Protestant work ethic, imported from the Calvinist Netherlands and

made peculiarly South African. In some ways, it is easier (at least

from the UK) to analyse dominant Afrikaner masculinities through

reading auto/biographical and fictional accounts given by dissidents

from within the Afrikaner community and, for this purpose, I will be

drawing particularly on the work of AndrŽ Brink and J.M. Coetzee.

Growing up in Pretoria, I was familiar with the public face of

Afrikaner masculinities. The constantly retold story of the Great Trek

and the Boer War in school history, the glowering presence of the

Voortrekker Monument with its friezes of stony-faced Boer warriors

backed up by their long-suffering wives, the statue of Paul Kruger in

the town centre, all contributed to my awareness. Brink's novels about

middle-aged, often conventional, Afrikaner men, frequently farmers or

teachers whose masculinities are under threat, or on the point of

dissolution, provides a sustained imaginative exploration of these

particular identities:

That was his stock defence and solution to everything. If you go back

in our history. It was his subject, after all: he was one of the few

people I've ever known to be completely happy in their work. ...

To him, I think, history became a metaphor for everything he couldn't

understand about the world around him. And the day he was forced to

abandon his career and take over the family farm something began to

wither inside him.

(1978: 27, original emphasis)

That phrase, 'if you go back in our history' encapsulates much. The

salience of history in the construction of Afrikaner identity is clear.

Particularly important, in this respect, is the history of oppression

by the British and victory over various groups of black Africans led by

variously demonised chiefs and kings. The other pervasive theme of

Afrikaner identity is, of course, the relationship to, struggle with,

love and hate of the land. Here is Brink, again, writing about the

struggle to farm the land:

His father, who'd had to take over the farm of his wife's family in the

Free State. Not without a humble measure of success. Then came the

Great Drought of 'Thirty-three, when Ben was nine or ten years old.

They had to trek with the sheep, all the way to Griqualand West where,

according to the reports, there was some grazing left. A fatal

mistake. When the drought closed in on them in the godforsaken

district of Danielskuil, there was no way out.

'By that time I had some ewes of my own,' said Ben. 'Not many. But

every year my father had marked a few lambs for me. And that year the

first lambs of my own were being born.' He fell quiet for a long time.

Then, abruptly, angrily, he asked: 'Have you ever cut the throat of a

new-born lamb? Such a small white creature wriggling in your arms.

Such a thin little neck. One stroke of the knife. Every single new

lamb that's born, because there's nothing for them to eat and the ewes

have no milk. In the end even the shrubs disappear. The thorn-trees

grow black. The ground turns to stone. And day after day there's the

sun burning away whatever remains. ... Once you've been in a drought

like that you never forget it. Just as well Ma and my sister had

stayed behind on the farm. I don't think they'd have been able to

stand it. It was only Pa and me.' (Brink, 1992: 30-31)

The men, in this narrative, seem to be tough, hard-working, dour, with

tight controls on their emotions, which, however, always seem to be on

the point of explosion and/or disintegration. The women, at least in

this version of patriarchal imagination, are behind the men, loading

the guns, making the homestead on the farms, perhaps waiting for the

bad times to end. As with the elite English masculinities discussed

above, the feminine must be expelled and to feminise a man is to

disempower him, as is clearly the intention of Mandel in J.M. Coetzee's

Waiting for the Barbarians:

Then one day they throw open the door and I step out to face not two

men but a squad standing to attention. 'Here,' says Mandel, and hands

me a woman's calico smock. 'Put it on.'

'Why?'

'Very well, if you want to go naked, go naked.'

I slip the smock over my head. It reaches halfway down my thighs. I

catch a glimpse of the two youngest maids ducking back into the

kitchen, dissolving in giggles.

My wrists are caught behind my bank and tied. 'The time has come,

Magistrate,' Mandel whispers in my ear. 'Do your best to behave like a

man.' I am sure I can smell liquor on his breath. (Coetzee, 1980: 128)

Immediately before this episode, the Magistrate has been made to appear

naked and 'perform' for his tormentors. He is 'past shame', he thinks,

but then there is the new degradation of being made to wear a woman's

clothes. Although this is a small incident in a much longer

exploration of oppression and resistance and of defended and

disintegrating masculinities, it is a significant one. The magistrate

undergoes other physical tortures, but this moment, when he is told to

behave like a man while dressed like a woman, is the moment of his

greatest humiliation, At the same time, the liquor on Mandel's breath

is a hint of the torturer's defendedness against the psychic threat of

both feminisation and of the barbarians for whom they are all waiting.

Coetzee's barbarians, a metaphor for South Africa's black Africans, are

the Others on to whom paranoid fantasies can be projected:

The barbarians come out at night. Before darkness falls the last goat

must be brought in, the gates barred, a watch set in every lookout to

call the hours. All night, it is said, the barbarians prowl about bent

on murder and rapine. Children in their dreams see the shutters part

and fierce barbarian faces leer through. 'The barbarians are here!'

the children scream and cannot be comforted. Clothing disappears from

washing-lines, food from larders, however tightly locked. The

barbarians have dug a tunnel under the walls, people say; they come and

go as they please, take what they like; no one is safe any longer. The

farmers still till the fields, but they go out in bands, never singly.

The work without heart: the barbarians are only waiting for their crops

to be established, they say, before they flood the fields again. (134)

This fantasy was written into educational policies by the Nationalist

government. Even before 1948, Christelik-Nasionale Onderwys

(Christian National Education) had been devised in some detail. The

overwhelming motivation for developing these policies was to protect

the Afrikaans language and people from the Other in the shape of

English and Jewish South Africans, 'communists' and blacks. Brian

Bunting (1964: 194) quotes from a pamphlet published in February 1948

by the Institute for Christian National Education (ICNO) on this issue.

Here Prof. van Rooy, then chair of the Broederbond, explains that:

There is too much at stake for us to relax in the struggle. With the

use of our language as medium, we have not yet got everything. On the

contrary, we have got very little. Afrikaans as a medium of

instruction in a school atmosphere that is culturally foreign to our

nation is like sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. The true cultural

stuff is not yet there. Our culture must be carried into the school

and that cannot be done merely by having our language as medium. More

is needed. Our Afrikaans schools must not merely be mother-tongue

schools; they must be places where our children will be saturated with

the Christian and National spiritual stuff of our nation.

It seems, here, that the barbarian is truly at the gate. At the moment

of electoral victory (through white-only parliamentary democracy), the

danger of losing not only power, but deep-rooted identity is felt

intensely and the means of keeping it in place established in the

Ideological State Apparatus of the school (as well as through the

coercive arms of the state , the police, the special branch and the

army). Christian National Education (along with 'Bantu Education')

constituted the imposition of certain kinds of identity work in

schools. On the one hand, the white 'nation' which was to be made was

the Afrikaner, rather than the South African one, even though the

Christian National Curriculum was to be imposed on English-medium as

well as Afrikaans-medium schools (at least in those provinces where the

National Party was in control of provincial government). On the other,

the imposition of 'Bantu Education' in 1953 was intended, in Verwoerd's

(in)famous words, to teach black South Africans that 'there is no place

for [them] ... above the level of certain forms of labour' (Verwoerd,

cited in Bunting, 1964: 206).

The 'Christian' of Christian National Education was to be taken

seriously. It is unsurprising that homophobia was rife in both the

official and hidden curricula of schools under Christian National

Education, given the strong influence of Calvinist versions of

Christianity, and the concomitant celebration of monogamous

heterosexuality within marriage and revulsion from the deviant in

sexuality. And deviance was, of course, widely defined to include

heterosexual encounters (and, even more, relationships) between black

and white people as well as non-heterosexual forms of desire and of

sexual practice. Indeed, in the late 1960s, just as the UK parliament

decriminalised homosexual acts between men in private (narrowly

defined), so the South African parliament passed amendments to the

Immorality Act , the original purpose of which was to prohibit sex

between people of different 'races' , in order to strengthen

legislation against homosexual acts (Gevisser, 1994: 43-46).

Afrikaans-medium high schools were less likely than the English elite

schools discussed above to be single-sex, especially in the more rural

areas. But whether they were single-sex or not, they provided much

opportunity for homosocial and homophobic bonding between men through

two main activities: sport (mainly rugby) and the cadet force. Matthew

Krouse (1994) describes school cadets in the following terms:

In white government schools, Cadets was scheduled once a week and

consisted of marching, a couple of classes of 'survival skills' such as

obstacle races and target shooting.

Once a week we donned khaki safari suits and marched on the rugby

fields. And then, at the tender age of 15, we were lined up in front

of a row of targets of silhouetted people and we shot them.

While shooting, the boys lay on their stomachs in leopard positions.

And if you were there, if this was the only world you knew, then you

too would have lain on your stomach. When the grim master walked up to

you and shouted, 'Lie down and shoot!', then you lay down and you shot.

Within schools themselves minor cults of heroism were nurtured. Prizes

were given to boys and girls who achieved merit in these fields. The

achievers were young people who expounded the values promoted by the

school. He who is handsome shoots well. He who is handsome stands for

the fatherland. People viewed the military uniform as an icon of

desirable male sexuality. In this way the white school's system has

bred the worst kinds of patriarchy; and it is here that one finds the

origins of white South African male sexuality.

Despite his mention of prizes being given to girls, Krouse is here

talking primarily of male ritual, male homosocial bonding, and male

homo-eroticism. The military uniform is an icon of desirable male

sexuality, but, writing as a gay drag artist in the army, there is more

to it than heterosexual desirability. The passage does not have the

same erotic energy as the one from Stiebel quoted earlier with regard

to elite English speaking schools, but it is there, not far from the

surface. In the same article, Krouse describes the licensing of the

camp, drag act in the army combined with serious homophobia. If, as

Parker et al. (1992: 6) argue, militaristic nationalism provides the

opportunity for 'the identification, isolation and containment of male

homosexuality' through the 'passionate brotherhood' of 'proper'

homosociality, then the compulsion on boys to take part in Cadets (and

rugby) can be read as being a way of policing the boundaries of

heterosexuality. It was also part of the institutionalisation of

violence in South African culture.

The account I have given so far of Afrikaner masculinities draws on

distilled versions of traditional, dominant Afrikaner identity as

revealed in fictional and auto/biographical writing. Judith Butler

(1990; 1993) argues that gender is inscribed on the body through

constant performance, suggesting that:

Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of

agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity

tenuously constituted in time, instituted in exterior space through a

stylised repetition of acts. (Butler, 1990: 140)

The version of Afrikaner masculinity which I have described continues

to be so constituted through the 'stylised repetition of acts' of

right-wing Afrikaners. The recourse to history referred to by AndrŽ

Brink can be seen to be embodied by these men, for example in the way

members of the AWB grow and wear their beards, Voortrekker style. The

uniforms they adopt connote the history of the Great Trek and of the

Boer War, and the guns they wield are real and can be/are used to kill

Africans.

This gives rise to the questions, 'How, then, did the image of

ex-President de Klerk with fist raised in salute, beside and

symbolically embracing Nelson Mandela, come to be a possible version of

Afrikaner masculinity? What other versions of Afrikaner masculinity

are and have been available, which allowed this to happen?' One answer

to these questions, is that the very disintegration so well described

by Brink and Coetzee provides the opportunity to be(come) differently

constituted as a man. This is precisely what happens to Coetzee's

magistrate, as is shown in his epiphany, when, after he has been

tortured and humiliated, he realises the import of his relationship

with the barbarian woman:

For I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure-loving

opposite of the cold rigid Colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells

itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh

winds blow. Two sides of Imperial rule, no more, no less. (Coetzee,

1980: 148-49)

Ben du Toit, in Brink's Waiting for the Rain also has a moment of

epiphany after he is set upon by angry black youths when he goes into

Soweto:

I wanted to help. Right. I meant it very sincerely. But I wanted to

do it on my terms. And I am white, they are black. I thought it was

still possible to reach beyond our whiteness and blackness. I thought

that to reach out and touch hands across the gulf would be sufficient

in itself. But I grasped so little, really: as if good intentions from

my side could solve it all. It was presumptuous of me. In an

ordinary world, in a natural one, I might have succeeded. But not in

this deranged, divided age. (Brink, 1992: 304)

Brink's first post-apartheid book, Imaginings of Sand (Brink, 1996) is

more optimistic than this. Told, for once, through a woman and largely

about women's relationships with each other and with men, it shows a

time, leading up to the first post-apartheid election, in which the

right-wing vigilante Afrikaner man is obviously mad, while the radical

women and the ANC members occupy centre-stage in close and optimistic

relation to each other.

Similarly, Coetzee, writing in 1985 about interviews he did in

Stellenbosch with Afrikaners found that they:

do not conform to the reigning stereotype of the Afrikaner. They do not

speak contemptuously of blacks. They are not notably intolerant in

their attitudes, heartless in their conduct or indolent in their daily

life. They seem not to bear the worst marks of apartheid, a doctrine

and a set of social practices that scars the moral being of whites as

it degrades and demeans blacks. Whether they can be said to be

representative of their three million compatriots I do not know. They

all identify themselves as Afrikaners, but their allegiances seem to

lie as much with the broad South African middle class as with the

Afrikaner tribe. In this respect they are typical of the generation

born after 1948, a generation that, having grown up under Afrikaner

hegemony, can afford to be more self-assured, less belligerently

nationalistic than their fathers.

Coetzee touches on something very interesting in this last sentence.

The intensity of holding on to an identity as oppressed, the salience

of the history of oppression as the matrix for identity construction,

at a time when one is in a position of power (individually or as a

group), may be a key element in the performance of the hard, paranoid,

oppressive masculinities which Brink and Coetzee explore. For their

men, the moment of coming up against the system, because of a personal

connection and a resultant, sudden realisation of the injustices and

the violence involved in the practices of apartheid is both a moment of

disintegration and of reconstitution of a different kind of Afrikaner

masculinity as represented by ex-President de Klerk, one which is more

urbane and middle class, still connected to the land, but indirectly,

through family, and looking more to what is possible in the future than

to holding on to the past with passionate intensity.

Violence and masculinity

Bob Connell (1987: 158-63; 1995: 81-86) discusses crisis tendencies in

the gender order and the relationship between structures of inequality

and patterns of violence. As he points out, such violence is not

confined to male violence of various kinds towards women and children ,

but:

violence becomes important in gender politics among men. Most episodes

of major violence (counting military combat, homicide and armed

assault) are transactions among men. Terror is used as a means of

drawing boundaries and making exclusions, for example, in heterosexual

violence against gay men. Violence can become a way of claiming or

asserting masculinity in group struggles. This is an explosive process

when an oppressed group gains the means of violence , as witness the

levels of violence among black men in contemporary South Africa and the

United States. The youth gang violence of inner-city streets is a

striking example of the assertion of marginalized masculinities against

other men, continuous with the assertion of masculinity in sexual

violence against women. (Connell, 1995: 83)

In both contemporary South Africa and the UK, there are significant

concerns about the violence of (mainly) young, dispossessed men/boys.

The actual levels of violence are, of course, quite different.

Violence in South Africa far outstrips that in the UK and the degree of

concern expressed by the UK government and other public bodies may well

be a media-amplified response to some real increases in levels of

violence outside the home. But violence in South Africa is an every

day occurrence, much of it between men, but, even more, from men to

women (see, for example, Dangor, Hoff, & Scott, 1996; Wood, Maforah, &

Jewkes, 1996). This is not a new phenomenon, peculiar to the new South

Africa. Throughout this paper, I have referred to the ways that white

South African dominant masculinities have been (and continue to be)

constituted through a history of British imperialism and resistance to

it as well as through the racist power relations formalised through

apartheid. This history is one in which violence has played an

integral part and in which the gender order has been structured through

racism, misogyny, homosociality and homophobia.

There is much work remaining to be done in this area. This paper has

not, for example, fully explored alternative, subordinated white

masculinities and has not touched the range of black masculinities.

Questions to be asked in the future will include: how are the

masculinities of other white ethnic groups, for example, Jews and

Greeks constituted and what is their relation to dominant white

masculinities? how do men develop oppositional and/or subordinated

masculinities in the South African context? what are the relationships

between the different black, ethnically and class-marked masculinities?

how have all of these been constituted both through apartheid and

through the struggle against it? how are the discursive framings for

white and black masculinities changing in the new South Africa? and

what part does, can and should education play in all of this?

But not least of the political, academic and practitioner work still to

be done is that of developing forms of pedagogy and curriculum which

can challenge not only the racism of apartheid but the gender regimes

which was solidified by it which I have described here. In 1998 the

South African government is introducing a new post-apartheid

curriculum, Curriculum 2005. The new curriculum aims to change

dramatically the assumptions about curriculum that underpinned the

curricula of the apartheid era. It draws heavily on Australian

versions of 'outcomes based' education, aims to develop active

learners, who are assessed on an on-going basis rather than just

through examinations, able to engage in critical thinking, reflection

and action, and integrate knowledge and learning relevant to real-life

situations. The new curriculum stresses the importance of what the

learner becomes and understands for making a contribution to society

(South African, Department of Education, 1997: 7) and it is claimed

that Curriculum 2005 will be a tool for equity which will 'foster

learning which encompasses a culture of human rights, multi-lingualism

and multi-culturalism and a sensitivity to the values of reconciliation

and nation-building' (Bengu 1997).

However, despite the claims made by the Minister for the new curriculum

to be a tool for equity, it has been strongly criticised by the South

African Gender and Education Task Team (GETT). Participants at the

GETT conference in July 1997 pointed out that Curriculum 2005 had made

gender 'slip out of the door' and did not look particularly gender

sensitive. GETT's report to the National Department of Education

pointed out that unless Curriculum 2005 and similar key documents

explicitly mentioned gender, progressive and creative educators would

be isolated when they tried to introduce non-sexist and non-racist

education (Motala 1997: 11; GETT 1997).

However, neither the South African government, nor GETT, appear to have

taken seriously the problem of changing masculinities or the resources

which might be given, through a new curriculum (using the word

'curriculum' to include pedagogy), to boys and young men which they

could use to construct new forms of masculinity which do not buy into

the violence, homophobia and sexism I have described above. 'Gender'

in the new South African context, generally continues to refer only to

the subordination of women (as it does in many other places too).

'Violence' in the South African context is taken to mean the violence

of gangs, of individual criminal (usually young) men and of political

conflict (also usually carried out by young men). I would not wish to

underplay the importance of these forms of violence in post-apartheid

South Africa, but the emphasis on them to the exclusion of historical

formations of elite white South African masculinities through

homophobia, racism, sexism and violence has the racist effect of

locating problems of violence within the black communities. What is

urgently needed is to develop pedagogies/curricula which are nuanced

and flexible enough to address the different formations of masculinity

among different groups in the new South Africa. Curriculum 2005 will

need to pay attention to this.

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I would like to thank Elaine Unterhalter for her help with finding

South African materials for this article and her support and

encouragement over this and other work.

Compare, for example, the way that the British media describe the

genocidal civil wars of Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia as 'tribal'

and 'ethnic' respectively. Both are (rightly) regarded as terrible

events, but the explanations for those in the Bosnia and Serbia are

sought in the history of communist rule, while the situation is Rwanda

appears to explain itself by simple reference to 'warring tribes'.

Ironically, most of the Jewish were fleeing persecution, poverty and

oppression in Eastern Europe, but ended up as part of the dominant

white group.

Compare film versions of elite schools, such as those given in Dead

Poets Society and If , and other fictional accounts such as the

classic Tom Brown's Schooldays (Hughes, 1983) and The Go-Between

(Hartley, 1958 , this novel takes place during a school vacation at a

country house, but is premised on the gender and class relations of

elite schooling), academic accounts such as Connell et al (1982), and

Heward (1988; 1990) and autobiographical accounts such as those by

Moraes (1990) and Bailey (1991)

The Real (true) Afrikaner.

The Broederbond was a powerful, well-known, but secret, right-wing

Afrikaner organisation which permeated South African government

structures throughout the period of Nationalist government. Bunting

compares it to America's Ku Klux Klan. It might also be compared to

the Freemasons in the UK in its reputed power within the civil service,

police force and army.

Althusser's notion of the Ideological State Apparatus (1971) has been

much criticised for being simplistic and over-deterministic, but the

term does seem most appropriate in the context of apartheid South

Africa.

At the time, Hendrik Verwoerd was Minister for Native Affairs. He

later became Prime Minister.

It is one of the ironies of history, but also evidence of Foucault's

claim that power is productive (see, for example, Foucault, 1977; 1978;

1980), that 'Bantu Education' in its later forms was eventually such a

major contributor to the politicisation of young Africans, leading,

exactly 21 years ago (18 June 1976) precisely to the outcome to be

feared, the uprising of young black people in Soweto and beyond.

See and cf. Steinberg, Epstein and Johnson (1997) on other ways of

policing these boundaries.

For example, the Economic and Social Research Council is running a

major programme for research into violence , its causes, social

effects, and possibilities for its containment.

Much violence, of course, takes place in the home. It is difficult to

obtain good information about the prevalence of domestic and sexual

violence, part because, as is widely accepted, it is grossly

under-reported and partly because relatively few cases are followed

through to prosecution (Lees, 1997)

I am drawing, here, on a proposal by Elaine Unterhalter and myself for

funding for the South African Gender and Education Research (SAGER)

Programme currently under consideration by the UK Government's

Department for International Development.

Taking it Like a Man © Epstein 1997

Draft: do not quote without permission page