Oppression

As I walked home with Mapula we encountered a young teenager carrying a coke. I jokingly asked for the coke as I am so often asked for all of my things by villagers. The boy said no because “I was white and had oppressed him.” Mapula attempted to explain to him that I was, in fact, not an Afrikaner but an American here to help. His lack of geographical knowledge made it pointless and he was still convinced, in the end, that I had oppressed him.

As I walked away I found the whole situation amusing; here was a child who had been a mere toddler when apartheid ended. He had no real idea of the oppression his parents had experienced, and so often it was his parent’s generation that so immediately accepted me into their community. I saw it as yet another of a multitude of excuses given to why things were the way they were for many of the villagers: always a sense of being stuck at the bottom rung with a million excuses lamenting limitations to move past this placement.