Kharnita Mohamed and Mohamed Seedat reflecting on Traditions 2: Everyday Lives of African Men, held in Ethiopia on 28-30 November 2011

Here are the anthropologist Kharnita Mohamed and community psychologist Mohamed Seedat reflecting on Traditions 2: Everyday Lives of African Men, held in Ethiopia on 28-30 November 2011. Kharnita Mohamed is a researcher at and Mohamed Seedat is the director of the University of South Africa's Institute for Social and Health Sciences (ISHS). Part of the project Changing Traditions, Traditions is a travelling biennial pitso of the Programme of Traditions and Transformation (PoTT) within the ISHS. Kharnita Mohamed and Mohamed Seedat are being interviewed on their impressions of the pitso and the debates that took place by peace scholar and psychologist Shahnaaz Suffla of the University of South Africa-Medical Research Council's Safety and Peace Promotion Research Unit. Mandisa Malinga edited the pictures. 

Why South Africans don't get the question of the coconut

In this interview Kharnita Mohamed of the Programme on Traditions and Transformation at the University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health talks of why South Africans don’t get the question of the coconut. The interview followed her piece, 'I see coconuts everywhere!' (http://transformingtraditions.blogspot.com/2011/11/i-see-coconuts-everywhere.html). Why do we not get it? Because, she says, the politics of someone like Lindiwe Mazibuko, the new Democratic Alliance parliamentary leader, whatever they are, will get tainted by her black body that sounds wrong, lives wrong, dresses wrong, affiliates wrong, because she is thought to be a coconut. She says the idea that if you are black (or white) you ought to sound or look a certain way and live in a certain place is unfair, cruel, limiting besides its wrongness. She says we must love coconuts. She says we should get over the lies of whiteness and blackness, otherwise we are continuing the tradition of policing racialised boundaries and so reproducing apartheid ideologies.That's what she says.