Yoon Jung Park

Most South Africans know what a coconut is – and I don’t mean the sort that grows on palm trees – but, to the older generation at least, the terms ‘banana’ and SABC’ are still obscure.

It took an American born Korean, living in South Africa and researching a doctorate at the University of Johannesburg, to educate us about that tiny but significant minority, the Chinese South Africans.

Dr Yoon Jung Park transformed the fruits of her doctoral research into a book making the story of the SABCs [South African-born Chinese] available to everyone, and a fascinating story it is too.

Most people have the vague idea that our Chinese population is descended from contract labour brought in to work the mines between 1904 and 1910: wrong. The over 63 000 contract miners were all repatriated to China.

There have been Chinese in South Africa – in the form of convicts and slaves – from 1652, almost as long as the European presence and although they never formed more than a tiny percentage of the total population they merited their own cemetery in Cape Town.

The trickle of Chinese immigrants – mostly contract workers and artisans – continued into the 1800s and it is from them most of the present population of SABCs are descended.

It was only with the promulgation of the notorious ‘Transvaal Experiment’ that Chinese labour became an issue: with the shortage of workers after the Anglo Boer War in 1902, thousands of Chinese were imported into the Transvaal.

Not only did they work harder and in some cases were more skilled than the locals but they accepted a fraction of the salary. Unskilled Transvaal workers, especially whites, regarded them as a threat and their very foreignness invoked fear in many South Africans.

While most countries were paranoid about the ‘Yellow Peril’ at the time it was only in the Transvaal that white citizens were empowered to ‘shoot or arrest any Chinese found outside the mining compounds.’

Indeed, the first industrial colour bars were formed to exclude Chinese from skilled labour – only later were these laws extended to include all ‘non white’ workers.

Yoon Jung Park goes on to describe how racism and, later, apartheid affected SABCs and how – through ‘quiet diplomacy’ on their part and lucrative trade ties between the outcast governments of Apartheid South Africa and Taiwan – they saw their status improve.

From ‘Shop Keepers’ ranked along with Indians and Coloureds they became ‘Fence Sitters’, Honourary Whites who could apply to live in white suburbs, attend white cinemas and sporting events, and even use white lavatories. No white vote though.

Today SABCs are almost uniformly ‘bananas’ – yellow on the outside, white on the inside’ – and, for the most part, they are English speaking Christians and fully fledged members of the Rainbow Nation.

However, in the last decade there has been a new invasion: the small community of South African Chinese, numbering less than 12000, has been flooded by a tidal wave of immigrants to such an extent that there are now over 300 000 ‘Chinese’ in South Africa.

These newcomers regard themselves as Chinese first and last and have not made much attempt to integrate themselves socially or culturally: are they settlers or mere sojourners? Time will tell.

Dr Yoon Jung Park is informative but hardly readable: she squeezes the juice out of fascinating material, presenting us with a dry, needlessly academic, narration. The skeleton of a good story is all there, it just needs a decent editor to provide it with living flesh. Wake up Jacana and make your books more accessible to the man in the street who is put off by enigmatic footnotes and anonymous quotes by the likes of ‘Mike, 36’.

Yet despite poor editing, ‘A Matter of Honour’ rises above the tedious: the story of this quietly industrious people is an inspiration and makes one hope that Archbishop Tutu’s dream of a truly Rainbow Nation is indeed possible.… (altro)