Peter was getting more agitated as he tried to explain why his home town of Jane Furse was threatened with some kind of inscruitable disaster. It was the winter of 1988 and we were in one of the black homelands of South Africa, called Lebowa. Peter was one of my students back in Johanessburg, and he was taking Santu, a newspaper and documentary photographer, Matthew another student, and me, on a tour of his hometown, far, far from the Johanessburg in which we normally met. Jane Furse is an odd name for a black town, but it had grown up haphazardly around a hospital founded by a white South African philanthropist called Jane Furse Memorial Hospital.
Peter felt that we did not fully understand the catastrophic threat to Jane Furse. It seemed to be a relatively peaceful place. Lebowa even had one of the better, or at least less bad, homelands government, because it allowed the banned opposition to operate on its territory.
But here in Jane Furse what troubled Peter was the large number of small sticks no more than a foot high, planted in the ground around the town, that sported red strips of cloth that fluttered like flags. These had been planted by construction crews of the Department of Cooperation and Development.
This was the department of the South African government that dealt with African affairs, and it treated the homelands as though they were foreign countries and as though it was providing development assistance. One strange aspect of the Department of Cooperation and Development was that it tended to attract the most idealistic of young Afrikaner bureaucrats who still wanted to work within the apartheid system. In other words, some branches of the government were violent and brutal; some were exploitative. But Afrikaners who really believed that South Africa could help the black areas "develop" often ended up on Cooperation and Development. They even had a word for this kind of new Afrikaner -- the "verligtes" or "enlightened" ones.
Jane Furse had been scheduled for a good deal of development assistance and these little flags seemed to be evidence of an upgrading that was being carried out.
Peter asked us to climb one of the very tall, rocky hills -- called koppies -- that dot the South African countryside and that surround Jane Furse. Only when we got to the top of the koppie could we grasp what so upset Peter. Only from there could we see the pattern of the sticks and flags.
Some idealistic Afrikaner bureaucrat had carefully laid out streets and residential blocks for Jane Furse as an improvement over the haphazard dirt roads and sturdy houses, with their gardens and cattle enclosures, that the people over many decades had constructed. From the top of the koppie, we could see that the roads were planned to run right through gardens, right through front doors and out back doors, over wells, across stores. In fact, it took us climbing this mountain
to achieve the god-like perspective of this unnamed, faceless bureaucrat, who could sweep away homes and lives with the scratch of his pen.
That was the day that I truly understood what power was. Somewhere in Pretoria was an idealistic young Afrikaner bureaucrat who had decided to "improve" Jane Furse. The only problem was he had never visited the place. It was an abstraction to him and he had planned the town's improvements without knowing anything about the people, their houses, their roads, their gardens or the cattle kraals.
Yet no one could deny the reality of this plan. In fact, the plan, the imagination of this bureaucrat was more real than the reality of the people and stuctures of Jane Furse. Black people were not just subjugated in South Africa; they had an unreality, a lightness and inconsequentiality compared to the plans and dreams of white people.
Ever since then, I have noticed this phenomenon -- that white people not just in apartheid South Africa, but here in America, and well-meaning liberal ones as well as racists -- don't necessarily bother to truly grasp what they are talking about when they debate policy about African or African American people. Their dreams and fanatasies, in turn, are more real than our realities. It happens here in America, whether we are debating public housing, crime and punishment, welfare reform. White people have a certain imagination of how things are and who black people are, and that imagination is more real than the reality, because it is on the basis of imaginary black problems and ghostly black fantasy people that benefits are given or taken away, buildings are raised or demolished, people are punished or forgiven and power is exerted.
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