Apartheid’s Corps Morcelé

Abstract

Peter Godwin’s (1996) memoir of growing up in Rhodesia in the early 1970s, Mukiwa, includes the retelling of a racist joke popular among white miners at the time. The joke, like so many of its time, takes the typical Afrikaner everyman ‘Van der Merwe’ as its point of perspective:

Van’s pissed out of his brain, weaving wildly across the road in his old Chevy … He smashes into a black man walking along the side of the road, and the black man is sent flying … Van carries on and after a while he smashes a second black pedestrian, who comes crashing through the windscreen. But Van still carries on and after a while he smashes into a third black man, this one on a bicycle, and the bike is badly mangled … [T]he case comes to court a month later: the first black is convicted of leaving the scene of an accident; the second of breaking and entering; and the third is convicted of riding an unroadworthy bike. (1996, pp. 194–5)