An acquaintance of mine recently built a house in Gauteng. Something was both interesting and worrying for the researcher and patriot in me when I visited the construction site.
At some point four teams worked on the house: a building team, a plumbing team, a tiling team and a painting team.
Noticing an interesting trend, I asked if the house owner had constituted the teams himself. It turned out that he had hired only the leaders of the teams, and the heads brought their own workers.
Being a patriot, the house owner went out of his way to look for a skilled black builder, an excellent black plumber, an amazing black tiler and a gifted black painter – all South Africans above 55.
Almost exclusively, these skilled black South Africans had two nationalities in their teams of artisans and labourers: Mozambicans and Zimbabweans.
The researcher in me was intrigued and the patriot was troubled. I began conducting a covert mini-study at the construction site, informally interviewing the South African black bosses and their foreign employees separately.
The findings of my mini-study are raw and unembellished. None of my interviewees knew what kind of work I do; they all shared their sentiments, beliefs and observations unsuspectingly.
When I asked the black South African bosses why they hired Mozambicans and Zimbabweans instead of their fellow citizens, the responses were almost the same. The bosses told me they had many years of working with various nationalities and had formed reliable opinions about their work ethic.
According to the bosses, black South Africans are lazy, mendacious, unreliable, prone to thieving, rebellious, obsessed with exaggerated human rights and generally abscond from work on Mondays due to babalaas.
Interestingly, even the foreign workers shared similar sentiments about South African workers, and therefore did not regret the fact that locals were unemployed. You could argue that Mozambicans and Zimbabweans are biased.
As a South African, I obviously did not like what I heard, but the researcher in me was disciplined enough to respect the views of my respondents. As someone who is generally informed, I had known of the existence of some of the perceptions I established from my informal interviews; but, I must confess, I have generally been dismissive of them.
I learnt a humbling lesson from my mini-study: the actions of ordinary people on the ground are more important than the opinions of high-minded commentators and politicians. The ordinary is more real than the sophisticated.
For a long time before my mini-study, I held the perception that it is generally white bosses in SA who harbour negative perceptions about black South African workers.
The findings of my mini-study shoved a humble pie into my reluctant mouth. I now know that there are no differences between black and white South African bosses when it comes to their perceptions about workers. Maybe more formal studies will prove me wrong.
The most worrying thing for me was the answer I got from the black bosses when I asked them the following question: “If you South Africans are not employing your fellow citizens, who do you expect to employ them?”
The answer was heartlessly straightforward: “All I am interested in is to do and finish my work, not politics.”
As someone who is familiar with the sensitivities that typically accompany SA’s public discourse, I found myself a few times at night asking the ceiling in my bedroom whether I should publicly convey the findings of my mini-study.
The rebel in me insisted that I must ignore the word of caution from my ceiling, that I must take a leaf from the stubborn audacity of the mirror, and let South Africans come to terms with their ugliness.
The question is not whether perceptions are correct. It is what gives birth to them. It is not whether we like what we see. It is how we respond to reality.
Here is the most haunting question: What are we South Africans going to do about the fact that we have lost confidence in ourselves?
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