Colourless whiteness in post apartheid South Africa: Zakes Mda’s ‘ecological citizenship’ in The bells of Amersfoort

Abstract

Racism, by nature, is intricately bonded with migration; the first takes its evolution from the other, after a locus is established for the construction of the „self‟ and „other‟ binary. The South African experience, in its uniqueness, is best illustrative of other melting cultures globally. However, under such dispensations, while the people in the minority were transposed and made subservient in a new location, the migrated few in the South African case conquered, dominated and subjected the majority to servitude. Race, therefore, formed a centrifugal element in the coexistence of all the racial groups, defined by segregation and exploitation. As the vituperations against this trend best explain the literature in apartheid South Africa, the emerging order in post-apartheid literary engagements has promised a difference. One reflection of such development is the blurring of old racial defining lines as found between Tami and Johan in Zakes Mda‟s The Bells of Amersfoort. This paper, therefore, seeks to examine the formation of what is best illustrated by Helen Nicholson‟s concept of “ecological citizenship” (2005:33) in a character, Johan, who is ancestrally Dutch, but whose inclination is now to the scapes of South Africa. Given that this dramatic world could be taken as an “as if” of the South African situation, therefore, the paper seeks to argue that „whiteness‟ is fast being threatened in the new South Africa, based on the preparedness of each individual to submit him/herself to the antics of “ecological citizenship”.