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For this student, the term first conjures up “shredded pieces of copied images and mystic tales from memory banks and silver screens” in which she sees “black ladies with big thighs, big bums and big naked breasts hopping up and down on the beat of drums and rusting beads”. In a poetic way she describes how she “dream[s] up stories of the ‘African people” as one with each other and one with nature”. She hears “tales of ancestral spirits, curses, initiations, lobola and the importance of elders”. But, she further notes, “[t]hese images and tales, however, seem to reach me in languages I don’t understand and as pictures I constantly view from the outside – a tourist on my own southern tip of Africa”. These thoughts, for her “remain only for a brief moment; as the tales we tell our children, but never really believe ourselves”. That is because “what comes up on second thought on thinking ‘black’…is a little more of the every day mix of seeing and perceiving”:

I now see the black woman washing the white women’s sheets. I see her walking, not driving. She has a steady gaze. I see her providing for several kids. I call their father anonymous. You don’t respect her or any of her kind. I see thousands of shacks. I hear no running water. I feel the distance between my neighbourhood and theirs. I fear rape. I read AIDS everywhere…I see myself as African – but not understanding or always trusting the symbolic language it so crucially demands.

For another Afrikaner female student, when she thinks of African culture .what comes to my mind are things far removed from my Western culture. Rich images of cows, beads, cloths, paint and animal skins are conjured up when I allow myself to ponder on the notion of African culture.

To another student, the term “African culture” should not be an “existing term at all” because it “seems to be a convenient umbrella term for the countless cultures existing in all of the 47 (sic) countries of Africa”. In her view, there should rather be terms such as “Rwandan” and “South African” cultures.

An Afrikaans student who was “born in Africa…spent my whole life in Africa”, who has “never left the continent”, and does not “really have any particular desire to, either”, observes that “[i]t would probably be easier to write 5 000 words on American culture or British culture than writing 500 words (or even 250!) on African culture”. The student says his ignorance “is not a reflection on the importance of the respective cultures (American and British), but rather a result of media saturation”. The topic “African culture” confuses him because “[f]or many people African culture traditionally refers to black African culture” prompting him to ask: “Does this mean that this pale native is only somewhat African? Surely, African-ness can’t be linked to skin colour.”

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