Apartheid flourished out of a belief that it was natural and because of an "emotional detachment" from its effects, the Apartheid Archive Conference heard on Thursday.

"I feel anxiety. In regard to apartheid I must of necessity speak in the voice of the bystander, beneficiary and also at times an agent of apartheid. This is not comfortable. However, it is a reality I must face," said Professor Gillian Straker in a presentation entitled: "I speak as a White".

Straker, speaking at the Wits University Great Hall in Johannesburg, presented a candid, self-critical perspective of her own experience of apartheid, in an attempt to understand how the system came to flourish. She posed questions about the "psychological mechanisms" which allowed it to continue and grow, what allowed its demise and how it was being maintained in the present.

The stories of white South Africans needed to be told, she says in the abstract to the paper presented, not simply as a matter of record or to address questions of collective guilt, but to understand the way whites came not only to internalise racism, but to express it.

The "institution" of the domestic worker

The system, which segregated South Africans along racial lines politically, economically, geographically and socially was allowed to flourish, charged Straker, because its effects on its victims "were dissociated from the consciousness of the perpetrators".

The apartheid regime presented the organisation of society along racial lines as a "natural order". She explained this through the "institution" of the domestic worker.

"It is an institution that in the most intimate of spaces laid the foundation for the easy acceptance [of] first and second class citizenship as a fact of life."

Straker described how shame, for white South Africans, was two-fold under apartheid: "At a social level shame was visited upon those who broke the natural order and treated black people as equals. At a personal level shame and guilt were experienced when dissociation failed."

This occurred when white South Africans became cognisant of the effects of the system on the victims.

"When the effects were acknowledged, complicity had also to be acknowledged and an unflattering self-image embraced," she said.

She added that while apartheid was a thing of the past, apartheid of the mind persisted.

"I have to acknowledge that there are times when I encounter racism within myself. I loathe and reject this and try to root it out. Nevertheless something has been laid down within me and inhibits me even as I endeavour not to house it," she said.

Straker said she was likely not alone in this feeling, as "racism was the environmental water in which many of us... have swum for many years".

She described how in her twenties she found a new way, contrary to the "natural order" presented, of seeing the world and how "crucial" it was that this new way of seeing the world was validated by others.

"Thus it was the case that both the registration of an alternative reality, and the public validation of this reality were implicated in overcoming the dissociation that allowed me to tune out the devastating effects of apartheid on those living next to me while continuing to be a beneficiary of its iniquities."

Straker is clinical professor in psychology and psychological medicine in the faculties of science and psychological medicine at the University of Sydney and a visiting professor at the University of Witwatersrand.

The conference - hosted by the school of human and community development and the faculty of humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand -formed part of the apartheid archive project.

Under the theme "facing the apartheid archives", the conference was the first step toward "remembering the past and interrogating its continued effects on current South African society".

The project is an international research initiative which looks at the experiences of "ordinary" South Africans under apartheid and the effects of those experiences on their functioning in society at present.

Sapa

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