Last weekend we were in Joburg and visited the Apartheid Museum. This was my second visit  to the museum  and quite different from the first. This time I went through it a lot faster and it was helpful to get the larger overview. Earlier on in the week Doug, one of the staff members, took us through a simple diagram which helps to explain behaviour.

He drew an iceberg and labeled the bit sticking out of the water, "behaviour". These are the visible things we can see. At the bottom of the iceberg is "worldview" - the way we see the world. In between are "beliefs" and "behaviours". I've found this is helpful way of understanding the ways in which people behave and why.

It was interesting walking around the Apartheid Museum with this in the back of my mind. Some of what was shown was on the worldview level: the Afrikaner belief of being God's chosen race, their search for freedom through the Great Trek, the inequality inherent in the Euro-centric worldview (from colonisation to theology), Hendrik Verwoerd describing Apartheid as "good neighbourliness".

Then some of this was evident at the behaviour level, as worldviews collided: the fear by whites of black people - which drove Apartheid, the rebellion of young people in Soweto because Afrikaans was forced on them as their new language, the state of emergency declared from 1986 - 89, the inability of the government to make any proactive decisions until F.W. de Klerk released Mandela and unbanned previously banned organisations...

My interest is specifically in the worldview of the white people at the time (and now), and the ways in which it has changed (or not) over the last 20 years or so. I can't speak much for Afrikaans people, but my impression is that - by and large - they seem to be bewildered by the turn of events. Even though their origin stories are about finding freedom from an oppressive government they seem(ed) unable to apply that insight to others when their own government became oppressive. They didn't become open to "the other" and instead of finding ways of living together, chose to believe that if this country were democratically run, they would be killed en masse. This fear may not have had to be the truth, but because they believed it they made it true (see the widespread violence in the 80's, where the only way the opposition could bring the government to the negotiating table was to make the country ungovernable).

Which is why it was so remarkable that even when "the other" had the chance to kill their oppressors, they didn't (see the time around the 1994 elections). This is a realisation which instantly breaks the understanding of black people as the uneducated, the uncivilised, the savages bent on blood. This is a realisation which many (most?) white South Africans have chosen to ignore.