Never underestimate the power of the need to belong

With each passing day, within each one of us, deep inside what constitutes our perception of who we believe we are, there are raging — though often unexpressed — battles about our identities and belonging.

If the pursuit of all human activity is happiness — or, for the more reflective meaning — many of us have daily internal conversations about where to source or how to achieve this happiness or meaning.

The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham taught us that our motivation ought to be to act such that we produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number, but, in truth, such pursuits often bring to the fore more hurtful encounters with others who, in our diverse experiences, seek not to include but to exclude.

And in these exclusions, or experiences, part of our identities start solidifying. We describe ourselves as the excluded, the marginalised or queer. We feel othered. As a consequence, we are moved to deal with our social grievance. To borrow from British scholar Heidi Safia Mirza: “Located through your ‘otherness’ a ‘conscious coalition’ emerges: a self-consciously constructed space where identity is not inscribed by a natural identification but a political kinship.”

And therein lies our greatest ontological question about who we are, where we belong and why, sometimes, we feel so excluded by those who should be foregrounding our inclusion because of the power they wield in society.

Much of the senseless concatenation of events unfolding daily in our public sphere is about people feeling emotionally, psychologically and/or politically displaced. Some take extreme actions in return for a smidgeon of acceptability or a sense of belonging. Others resort to litigation.

This week, for example, tourism minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane told the nation she will, in court, battle AfriForum and Solidarity, organisations that interdicted her from paying out R1.2bn to black entrepreneurs in the tourism sector who qualify as part of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Stripped to its barest, the two organisations argue that white people too must get a piece of the cake because the pandemic does not discriminate according to race. 

Kubayi-Ngubane’s retort is that the sector is lily-white and therefore black people also want a stake in the tourism sector. They also don’t just want to be cleaners and cooks in hotels. It’s a crying need to be included, to shape identity within the sector and to belong.

Early this week, a learner from Cornwall Hill College, Singo Ravele, spoke about how she was told that her hair “is messy and it is not the Cornwall way”. She said her humiliation had evolved to anger. “I am angry that anyone would dare tell a child in Africa that their African hair is unacceptable.”

To say she felt othered is to point out the obvious. And a “conscious coalition” that Mirza spoke of is emerging, led by Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi. That our country, 27 years after the demise of statutory apartheid, must induce this sense of anger and exclusion is shameful.

Rejection can force you to form coalitions with people you disagree with just so you can deal with the source of your rejection

What was encouraging, though, was the sight of both black and white children hoisting placards together, sending a different message about their sense of identity and belonging to their parents.

Speaking on behalf of parents, Zibusiso Kganyago said to Ravele and others: “We are going to ensure that this becomes a school where you belong. We have heard your cries to learn about racism and not experience it. We have heard your cries of wanting your names not to be mispronounced.”

Elsewhere, former president Thabo Mbeki spoke for the first time in a while, about why his administration could not appoint Ace Magashule as premier of the Free State even though the ANC in that province had elected him as provincial chair. From Mbeki’s perspective, Magashule did not belong in the league of premiers.

Mbeki must, in the wake of fraud and corruption charges against Magashule and the ANC national executive committee’s decision for Magashule to step aside, feel somewhat vindicated. Magashule, on the other hand, so yearned to be accepted, to be affirmed, that he ended up, I imagine, trying too hard to please Mbeki’s successor Jacob Zuma’s friends, the Guptas, that he now finds himself in the dock. Being rejected can push you to a different extreme. Or, perhaps Magashule just so loved the Guptas he gave them his son, who stayed with them.

To not be needed, to not belong, has the potential to unleash resentment and, in politics, evolve into a whole faction, or force you to reconsider your options. Think of Phumzile van Damme and the DA. Think too of the period ahead of the much-referenced ANC Polokwane conference, and how a group of those deemed outsiders, the unwanted, became known as a “coalition of the wounded” as they rose up against Mbeki.

Rejection can force you to form coalitions with people you disagree with just so you can deal with the source of your rejection. Think too of how Western Cape judge president John Hlophe defied all logic in his attempt to get Constitutional Court judges to rule in Zuma’s favour. His need to belong to a faction has ended in tears.

In the end, whether it’s a girl who is too young to understand why her African hair is unacceptable to some on the African continent, or an Afrikaner middle-aged man who is set on stopping a minister from helping only black people in the tourism sector affected by Covid-19, or a former provincial chair of the ANC in the Free State who went overboard in pleasing his master’s friends in illegal ways that have now caught up with him, an insatiable need to belong sits at the heart of these actions.

The need to belong is intrinsic, irreducible, and, sometimes, it leads us astray. Often, though, the coalition and kinship that Mizra spoke of are necessary to help us fight for our own right to be and not to be othered.