Space, Place, and why Blacks need to know the difference

  The Internet is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. If you were to ask someone to point to the Internet, he or she would fail. Yet there can be no doubt that the Internet is in every big business, every academic institution, and many millions of households across the globe. I only point to this example because it begins to illustrate the dynamic relationship between space and place. If the Internet can occupy so much of our space and yet be in no particular place, then clearly the two homophones do not mean the same thing.

Let’s get into it. I’ve always had a fascination with the concept of space. I’m not talking here about the massive expanse of darkness and rocks that fills the gaps between the planets and the stars (although I was indeed a fan of astronomy in my early school days). I’m talking about the idea itself, the construct, and the thing(s) we’re supposed to think of when we hear the word ‘space’. I noticed that, for many people, of all races, it was used interchangeably with ‘place’. In other words, the two terms were generally seen to mean the same thing. But my keen sense of detail, coupled with a heightened awareness of words (a God-given gift I’ve treasured since grade 3), caused me to suspect from very early on that the connection was not so simple. I could not, however, find the words (ironic, right?) to express this. I could not explain to anyone why I thought the words ‘space’ and ‘place’ meant different things, let alone what the difference was, or why it even matters. All I knew for sure is that there was a difference and that, though small, it was significant.

During the course of recent months I’ve had the privilege of reading the intellectual musings of both Steve Biko and Mamphela Ramphele. In that same time period I was also afforded the opportunity of hearing a lecture by a certain fiery and highly controversial Andile Mngxitama (good luck with that surname my white friends). In essence, Biko and Mngxitama are advocates for the necessity for black people to redefine their blackness, to own it, and in so doing break the inferiority complex that continues to characterize black-white relations to this very day. What Ramphele does so simply but with striking clarity in her her autobiographical A Life is talk briefly about the idea of space. She points to the different aspects in which can begin to understand space; poverty, for example, is a clear lack economic space, while the expectation in the Apartheid era of every black graduate to be either a teacher or nurse points to a lack of intellectual space.

How do Blackness and space relate? Quite simply, I think that black people will only be truly free once they begin to (re)claim their space. What I am saying is that the end of Apartheid was essentially a giving back to black people their place. Prisoners were released from prison, and blacks no longer had to stick to certain parts of the country. “Place, place, place; hooray hooray hooray! We’re free!”, we must have thought. However, the second part of our transition must see us taking back space, economic, spiritual, and psychological space. I’m afraid this second part is yet to begin in earnest. Let me give you an example: recently I purchased a new phone and I soon had to take it back because of a defect on the screen. Instead of being promptly given a new one, I was given what eventually became a four-week excuse marathon before the phone was finally replaced. On one of the many occasions on which I went to check on the phone, one of the sales assistants quipped, “if you were white, they’d have given you a new phone immediately!”. When I thought about her comment later, it discouraged me to conclude that she was probably right.

You see, the black man is all over the place but occupies very little societal space: in the imagination of many a sales clerk, a white person is more significant than a black person, and therefore a white person is more likely to get better and quicker service. ‘Yes, the shop itself is full of black people (place), but the white person will probably pay more and be more polite (economic and psychological space)’. Can you see what I’m getting at? Can you see how, in the above scenario, the white person is afforded much more space, despite the occupation by the black person of the majority of the place? Suddenly, it makes sense that my white best friend with a matric certificate could get to a company and not only earn more than, but be given a senior position over his black colleagues, most of which had worked there for years. Though they have occupied that place as employees for a long time, they are no match for my best friend because his whiteness affords him psychological and economic space: he is seen as being more, and therefore earns more. It is not, as some people have wrongfully diagnosed, the other way around.

Sadly us black people perpetuate this limiting of space for each other. We have bought so much into the idea of Blackness as a limitation of social, economic, educational space that we believe it without realizing it. Hence many a South African wants to one day “travel to Africa”, not realizing of course that he/she was born in Africa. Do you see the disjuncture between space and place? Do you see that, although Africa is one place, it occupies a different cognitive space  in some people’s psyche as some remote patch of barren land that coincidentally has people with the same dark pigment? It begins to make sense, then, that the new Randela “looks like African money” (my gosh, how horrible are the new notes?). Surely it’s going to take more than a Forbes African rich list to address this.

Space, therefore, has to mean the capacity to exercise one’s freedom. We were given the right to claim freedom in this place, yet as we are being rudely awakened to decades after attaining democracy, the right to freedom and the capacity to exercise it are two different things. We have taken our place as the majority in our country. But Black man, it’s time to take your Space.