South Africa in Contemporary Times
Author: Godfrey Mwakikagile
Paperback: 260 pages
Publisher: New Africa Press (8 February 2008)
ISBN-10: 0980258731
ISBN 9780980258738
Part III:
Post-Apartheid South Africa
BLACK PEOPLE in South Africa are now legally free. So are the Coloureds and the Indians.
Even the terms which were used by the apartheid regime to describe them are no longer much in use.
Black people never accepted the term “Bantu” which was used as a racial category to define them because of its derogatory connotations. They also rejected it simply because it was wrong. There is no such thing as a Bantu race.
Coloureds also have challenged the legitimacy of the assumptions articulated by the authorities during the apartheid era who used the term arbitrarily as a descriptive category to define them in spite of the differences among them in terms of racial identity.
But, in spite of their newly won freedom, the extent to which they will be able to translate that into reality will, to a large degree, depend on what whites do.
The democratic government which assumed power after the end of apartheid inherited a bureaucracy dominated by male Afrikaners most of whom, as supporters of apartheid, had no interest in implementing the policies of the new government aimed at achieving racial equality.
Many of them were racist diehards – and they still are – fully committed to the ideology of white supremacy even in the new dispensation of a multiracial democratic South Africa.
Therefore, much of the success, and failure, of the government's policies will depend on the cooperation – or lack thereof – from this hostile civil service and the rest of the white community, the vast majority of whom have only grudgingly, if at all, accepted black-majority rule.
It is common knowledge among many South Africans and even among foreigners that many whites, if not the majority, are unrepentant and don't feel they did anything wrong during apartheid. They have nothing to apologise for.
It is also common knowledge that black people have been more willing to forgive whites for what they did to them than whites have been in acknowledging guilt for the mistreatment and racial injustices perpetrated with impunity against blacks and other nonwhites during the apartheid era.
This intransigence by whites was also underscored by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which investigated apartheid-era crimes. As he stated on 18 August 1998, South African whites should be grateful black people did not seek vengeance and white people did not face retaliatory violence when apartheid ended.
He went on to say that whites should be more willing to seek racial reconciliation and demonstrate a commitment to building a just society.
Speaking in a radio interview in Johannesburg, Tutu criticised whites for defending white privilege at the expense of blacks and other nonwhites and for their unwillingness to bridge the racial gap across the socioeconomic spectrum.
He was ending two years of work as chairman of the Truth Commission when he made those comments and referred to a survey that showed 80 per cent of blacks believed racial reconciliation was possible, while only 20 per cent of whites, Coloureds and Asians, combined, believed that.
During the radio interview, Tutu said whites can not claim as many Germans did after Hitler's reign that they didn't know the truth about the persecution and extermination of the Jews. Yet the majority of South African blacks have been more than willing to forgive whites than whites have been willing to admit wrongdoing. As Tutu stated:
"It is an incredible thing that has happened, that (blacks) who still live in shacks, squalor and poverty, come to work in your beautiful homes, and they don't say 'We're going to murder all of you in your beds'....
I think that many white people can't actually bear to know that they got benefits and privileges (through apartheid). - (“Tutu Critical of Whites: Churchman Says South Africans Pout Over Lost Privileges,” in The Boston Globe, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, 19 August 1998, p. A-13)."
The National Party which instituted apartheid and ruled South Africa during that oppressive era never apologised; nor did the majority of whites:
"In recent years, (only) some Afrikaners have apologized for apartheid." - (The Boston Globe, Ibid).
Not only have the majority refused to apologise; whites still wield enormous power in South Africa, especially in the economic arena.
And statistics are staggering. Not only do whites still control the economy; they still own 75 of the land. Yet, they constitute only about 13 per cent of the total population, while blacks are in the vast majority, constituting 75 per cent. But they are virtually landless in their own native land.
All that has serious implications for the future of South Africa, whether or not the country will develop and survive as a truly democratic and multi-racial society without serious racial problems.
And it can. However, this noble goal is being held hostage in the laager because of the fortress mentality of many whites who feel, wrongly, that they are swamped in a sea of hostile blacks who vastly outnumber them.
But it is the unwillingness of most whites to help end racial inequalities especially in the economic arena, and their refusal to admit that apartheid was wrong, which poses the biggest threat to the future of South Africa as a rainbow nation where people of all races lives in harmony and without racial inequalities.
This siege mentality among many whites can only serve to alienate friendly blacks and radicalise a substantial segment of the black population – including a significant number of them in the ruling African National Congress (ANC) – and polarise relations among the races, especially between blacks and whites.
The result could be a populist rebellion led by groups such as the militant Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and the radical wing of the African National Congress in which whites are going to be the losers.
Such radical transformation of South Africa will, of course, inevitably lead to white flight including many whites with needed skills. They have, in fact, been leaving in significant numbers since the end of apartheid.
There is no question that the country will suffer a brain drain. But that is the price probably the majority of blacks are willing to pay to end racial inequalities and give concrete expression to their newly won freedom.
And it is a price imposed on blacks by whites; for, while legal apartheid has ended, the racist mentality which created that monstrous institution still exists. And while black majority rule is now a fact of life, many whites, if not the majority, are nostalgic about “the good old days” when the finger-wagging president, P.W. Botha, defiant as ever even when his regime was under siege and on its way out, bluntly stated on 18 August 1988 in his speech at the National Party's annual congress in Durban:
"As far as I'm concerned, I'm not even considering the possibility of black majority government in South Africa." - (P.W. Botha, quoted by the Independent, South Africa, 19 August 1988).
History proved him wrong. Less than six years later, black majority rule became a reality, although the majority of whites did not want that to happen. That is why they supported apartheid through the years since it was instituted in 1948.
It is true that in an all-white referendum in March 1992, white voters gave F.W. De Klerk, the last white president, the mandate to proceed with constitutional changes which would lead to racial equality under the law. But that is not because they had, all of a sudden, undergone change of heart and accepted blacks as equals. People don't become saints overnight.
Whites in South Africa had simply resigned themselves to the inevitability of black majority rule because they couldn't do anything to stop it. As Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere once said, “throughout history, all nationalist struggles have had one end: victory.”
In fact, President de Klerk himself and his colleagues did everything they could to sabotage the process leading to the establishment of a multiracial democratic government in which blacks would be in the majority. He sought, instead, an asymmetrical kind of power-sharing skillfully disguised as democratic under which the white minority would retain their dominant position in society by having veto power under the constitution.
Therefore it was no surprise that even after the triumph of democracy over white supremacy, whites opposed to black majority rule resorted to subterfuge to sabotage it; a point underscored by President Nelson Mandela in December 1997 in his farewell speech as head of the ruling African National Congress (ANC).
And as de Klerk himself stated in May 1997 in his testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the overall programme of “separate development” of the races – euphemism for apartheid, hence racial oppression – was justifiable. His only concession, which was lukewarm at best, was that only some aspects of apartheid were morally wrong. As he stated:
"The underlying philosophy of separate development was to bring political freedom to all South Africans through what many would call partitioning, which is exactly the policy that the whole world now supports and accepts as morally justifiable for Israel and Palestine....
I argue that constitutional goals of that policy were theoretically – and while it remained a practical possibility – morally justifiable."- (F.W. De Klerk, quoted by Lynne Duke, “South Africa: De Klerk's New War – The Former South African President Draws Fire for Battling the Country's Truth Commission,” in The Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, July 28, 1997, p. 18).
It is such moral posturing in defence of apartheid which fuelled sentiments for a volkstaat – a separate state carved out of multiracial South Africa – among many whites who resented living under black majority rule.
In the new state, white separatists would continue to practise the old policy of apartheid.
The majority of whites did not support that. Or they simply abandoned the idea as a practical impossibility. But a significant number of racist diehards went on establish a racist outpost called Orania.
In fact, the predominantly black government which, under Nelson Mandela, assumed power after apartheid ended, made room in the new constitution for the concept of a Volkstaat (people's state), thus giving legal sanction to the establishment of Orania or any other enclave seeking some kind of self-determination along those lines.
The concession to whites who believed in that was intended to make sure that no one was denied any rights as long as the enjoyment of those rights did not interfere with the rights of others.
The enclave of Orania, in a remote part of the Northern Cape Province, was intended to be a white homeland reminiscent of life under apartheid for whites when they lived in their own separate areas sanctioned by law.
Although there were blacks and Coloureds in the area, they were not allowed to live or work in Orania.
It was a magnificent dream for racists, yet fraught with danger in terms of survival as a viable community. Total separation from the rest of South Africa would be impossible.
Yet they remained persistent in pursuit of their dream. According to a report by Barnaby Phillips, “South Africa's 'White Homeland',” on BBC:
"On a bleak hill in the midst of the vast Karoo desert stands a statue of Hendrik Verwoerd.
A former prime minister of South Africa, few people remember Mr Verwoerd kindly.
He was known as the "mastermind of apartheid", a determined exponent of the theory that South Africa's different races should live apart, and that the white minority should be in control.
But in the tiny community clustered below the hill, Mr Verwoerd's memory is cherished.
This is Orania, a town populated exclusively by white Afrikaners, who have withdrawn from the modern South Africa, and are now trying to build their own, racially pure homeland in this harsh landscape.
Unwelcome publicity
Orania's elders say they are trying to protect a language and a culture which are under threat.
At the forefront of the project is Carel Boshoff, a grandson of Hendrik Verwoerd and an eloquent spokesman.
Mr Boshoff argues that he and his fellow Oranians are not trying to re-create apartheid, they are seeking to protect Afrikaners' values
Orania is built on private land, bought by Mr Boshoff and colleagues at the beginning of the 1990s.
During the past decade people here have done their best to stay out of the limelight.
But the recent announcement by the South African police that they had arrested about 20 Afrikaners allegedly involved in a plot to overthrow the ANC government has brought a wave of unwelcome publicity to Orania.
South Africans are once again curious about hard-line Afrikaner nationalism, and the potential threat it poses to the new, multi-racial democracy.
South Africans are once again curious about hard-line Afrikaner nationalism, and the potential threat it poses to the new, multi-racial democracy.
Escape
South Africans are once again curious about hard-line Afrikaner nationalism, and the potential threat it poses to the new, multi-racial democracy.
Mr Boshoff vehemently condemns the use of violence, but he says the government must address the concerns of anxious Afrikaners.
"By just ignoring them, the present ANC government would be doing exactly what the past National Party government did when it labelled ANC activists as extremists," he says.
Many of Orania's 600 residents say they have come here to escape the violence and crime which are so prevalent in modern day South Africa.
Amongst them is Ina Smit, a pensioner from Johannesburg, who is a firm believer that white and black people should not live together.
"I feel that they have to stay on their side, and we on our side, because we have a different culture," she says.
Orania's museum is a shrine to Afrikaner history - glass cabinets are full of old muskets and rifles, and pride of place is given to fading photos and maps depicting the battles of the Anglo-Boer war.
The museum curator, Kokkie de Kock, has lived in Orania for five years.
He told me that those Afrikaner leaders who negotiated with the ANC to transfer power to the black majority are "traitors".
When I asked him whether he considered President Thabo Mbeki to be the leader of South Africa, he paused, before saying "no comment".
Opposition
The South African parliament is now considering Orania's request that it would be granted its own municipality.
I drove 40 kilometres up the road to meet the black and coloured communities who live in the neighbouring dusty and poor townships, to try and gauge their attitude towards Orania.
One young black man said to me: "We think they are racists. It's true that some of them are trying to reach out to us, but most of them are racist."
Another man agreed. 'I don't think they should have their own land. In South Africa today we are all trying to live together, and that's very important to us.'" - (Barnaby Phillips, “South Africa's 'White Homeland',” BBC News, Africa, 22 November 2002).
But Orania continued to fade through the years. Ten years after the end of apartheid, it was easy to drive past the town without even noticing the small enclave which considered itself to be the heartland of the Afrikaner with a dream of establishing an independent homeland for whites.
All that remained was a dream. As Carel Boshoff, founder of Orania and son-in-law of late Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd said in 2004 when he was 76 years old:
"If South Africa stays peaceful, if no conflict breaks out, then I do not think I will see the realisation of a Volkstaat in my lifetime." - (Carel Boshoff, quoted in “10 Years On, Orania Fades Away: South Africa: Decade of Freedom: News24, South Africa).
Even after more than 10 years since apartheid ended, there were Afrikaners in Orania and elsewhere who continued to cherish their dream of establishing an Afrikaner homeland. Others were more realistic. The new dispensation, of post-apartheid South Africa, was irrevocable.
They had to learn how to adjust to it and find other ways to articulate their desire for self-determination. According to a report, “Orania, White and Blue,” published in one of South Africa's major news papers, Mail&Guardian:
"It must be the only South African town still presided over by a statue of Hendrik Verwoerd, out-and-out believer in white supremacy and the architect of apartheid. Eleven years after South Africa’s first all-race elections, Orania seems, more than ever, to be lost in a time warp.
The eerie feeling of stepping back into a bygone age pervaded last week’s conference on Afrikaners’ right to selfstandigheid (independence), which was staged in Orania’s community hall -- next to Verwoerd’s heroic bronze. It was accentuated by the fact that most of the delegates from the Northern Cape town are in or past their middle years.
Among the intellectuals who attended -- including academic and businessman Jakes Gerwel, former opposition leader Van Zyl Slabbert and former Unisa principal Marinus Wiechers -- there was little enthusiasm for territorial separation. Some of the hundred-odd delegates called for solutions to Afrikaner selfbeskikking (self-determination) in ways other than through a volkstaat. Suggestions included a “cyber-government”.
The sapping of Afrikaner identity, culture and language in the new dispensation, and the sad reality that Afrikaners have not embraced their rights to independence under the Constitution, were tossed around in inconclusive debate. A resolution calling for legislation to be prepared for Parliament, making the self-determination of different South African communities possible, was adopted.
Orania’s population of 600 does not suggest South Africa’s 2,5million Afrikaners are lining up to demand their own state. The dorpie stands in semi-desert terrain, 160km outside Kimberley, and is not renowned as one of the country’s economic hubs. Where will the jobs come from?
Built on private land, it is ruled by residents. Forty Afrikaner families bought the dilapidated town for R1,5-million in December 1990 and have since added more land to extend the borders of their Utopia.
The independence fantasies of Oranians find strange outlets and festivals to celebrate Afrikaner holidays. The local kerk (church) bazaar issues its own currency, the “Ora”.
“We are for Afrikaners; people who speak Afrikaans and who want to preserve the Afrikaner culture,” resident John Strydom told the Mail & Guardian last year. “If you want to live here, you are welcome, as long as you subscribe to Afrikaner culture.”
Carel Boshoff, Orania’s 77-year-old founding father, admitted at the conference that he had envisaged 60 000 residents after 15 years. Boshoff and his followers once dreamed of a volkstaat stretching to Namaqualand and the West Coast, but the patriarch has pretty much accepted that this will not happen in his lifetime.
Other Orania pioneers do not take such a long view. Sam de Klerk told delegates that time was running out for Orania’s ageing population.
The problem is Afrikaner pragmatism. Boshoff’s grandson, Carel Boshoff IV, commented that, instead of striving for an independent volk that would contribute to a better country, today’s Afrikaners had decided to seek a place in the sun in a greater South Africa. In the new South Africa, he lamented, Afrikaner identity had undergone a transformation. “What was once a resolute community that demanded respect has now developed into a loose bundle of individuals that totter between nostalgia and opportunism,” he observed.
But Boshoff conceded that Afrikaners could not be expected to embrace the ideology of selfbeskikking if its advocates did not adequately analyse South Africa’s structural power shifts and political developments.
Wiechers told the conference that Afrikaners should look to cyberspace as geographical independence looked more and more unlikely. “For such a virtual government, all interested parties and bodies could draw up a constitution,” he said. “Membership and appurtenances could be recruited on a voluntary basis, ‘voter registration’ undertaken, party politics organised, elections held, virtual government bodies such as Parliament and executive organs elected, budgets calculated and taxes imposed.” Wiechers also argued that Afrikaner unity would never be achieved, and that Afrikaners “had to accept each other in all our variety”.
One of the few coloured people at the conference, Gerwel was concerned about the dangers of racism in any separatist enterprise. He said there had to be space for cultures to develop independently, but without racism or creating divisions in the country. Not only Afrikaners had the right to self-determination. Gerwel added that it would be difficult for Afrikaners to create a territorial volkstaat, but that they might achieve autonomy in other ways, such as through community-driven development.
Asked whether the African National Congress was sympathetic to the volkstaat cause, Gerwel said the ruling party “was apprehensive about ‘bantustanising’ South Africa again, because of what happened under apartheid”. One of apartheid’s fatal contradictions was whites’ desire for political control while retaining access to black muscle power. At least Orania cannot be accused of such hypocrisy, it is “Boer or bust”, with no black labour allowed. Here whites do the dirty work themselves, whether cleaning toilets or building a house.
“Afrikaners have forgotten to do certain jobs because they think it is beneath them,” the elder Boshoff told delegates. “They sit in front of the TV while others do the jobs they don’t want to do. In Orania, we believe in self-employment. We do not have the right to enslave anyone else.”
Just how far Orania is from its dream of a far-flung, populous Afrikaner state is highlighted by the modesty of its current political programme -- and the fact that it has had to petition the ANC government to achieve it. It wants its own independent municipality, instead of falling under a larger district council. And it is waiting for a Cabinet ruling on the issue.
It boasts that it is that it is one of the Northern Cape’s few solvent towns. 'Our residents pay their bills,' proudly proclaims Prinsloo Potgieter, Orania’s elected mayor. 'We are truly self-sustaining.'" - (Yolandi Groenewald, “Orania, White and Blue,” in Mail&Guardian, 1 November 2005).
Opposition to the establishment of a democratic government under a predominantly black leadership was so strong among many Afrikaners that it was not inconceivable that some of them would want to have their own independent homeland separate from the rest of South Africa which was ready to embrace the new dispensation. And that's exactly what happened.
The result was Orania, the heart and soul of Afrikanerdom in the new South Africa. It was an anachronism in the new dispensation but evoked feelings of nostalgia among many Afrikaners and other whites who missed “the good old days” when the country was under apartheid.
And these are some of the elements who are a major stumbling block towards racial reconciliation even today in the new South Africa.
It was a tragedy that the Truth Commission failed to achieve racial reconciliation, mainly because of opposition to what many whites considered to be a witch hunt by the commission.
Resentment of the Truth Commission among many whites and their refusal to accept and help build democracy in the new South Africa prompted President Thabo Mbeki to say that whites are afflicted with -
"(a) carefully calibrated amnesia about what our society has inherited from the past....The hatreds and animosities of the past will not go away unless the truth is told about what happened." - (Thabo Mbeki, quoted by Lynne Duke, “South Africa: De Klerk's New War – The Former South African President Draws Fire for Battling the Country's Truth Commission,” in The Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, 28 July 1997, p.18).
The refusal by the majority of whites to admit the evils of apartheid and the wrongs perpetrated by them and by the government in the name of justice went all the way to the top of the nation's leadership when the country was still under white-minority rule.
President de Klerk told the Truth Commission that the torture and murder of apartheid opponents was not part of the regime's policy; and that during all his years in government, he never was a party to any order to carry out or condone such abuses and atrocities. He went on to say that if they ever took place when he was president, he was not aware of them.
It was a flat denial which was contradicted by the testimony of his subordinates who said it was de Klerk himself who authorised the murders of anti-apartheid activists when he was president.
Yet de Klerk maintained that he was surprised just like anybody else was when he learned the scope of the abuses. When the Truth Commission officials confronted him with a government document showing that he was present at a cabinet meeting in 1986 at which a decision was made to create a security force that would “eliminate” enemies of the state, he flatly denied that “eliminate” meant “kill.”
The chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, said de Klerk's testimony – his outright defence of apartheid and flat denial of all the murders and torture of anti-apartheid opponents – made him want to cry.
Still, de Klerk remained unperturbed. Instead, he filed suit against the commission saying it was biased against him and other whites in general, and insisted in his testimony:
"I am telling the truth. If the truth doesn't suit some people's view, then surely I can not start telling an untruth to satisfy demands of my opponents." - (de Klerk, ibid).
The African National Congress accused de Klerk of deliberately trying to undermine the reconciliation process in a country divided along racial lines.
South African Anglican Bishop David Russell, who visited de Klerk after his testimony before the Truth Commission, described the former president as having -
"a tragic lack of insight into the inherent wickedness of apartheid." - (David Rusell, ibid).
But an even bigger tragedy was that the majority of whites felt the same way he did. Therefore his denial, hence defence, of the atrocities perpetrated under apartheid was a sentiment he expressed in his capacity as the collective conscience of most whites.
He made that clear in an interview in his response to Bishop Russell's remarks, saying that what Russell and others require -
"is that I must say the National Party, with regard to all its policies, was inherently vicious. "- (de Klerk, ibid).
In response to complaints by whites about the activities of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Constitutional Court Justice Richard Goldstone (a white himself), who at different times headed South African and Bosnian as well as Rwandan human rights investigations, had this to say:
"I get a little bemused at how many white South Africans adopt the attitude in private conversation: 'Why are we opening all these wounds'?
My first comment is that the wounds haven't closed. Most of them are septic and have to be cleansed." - (Richard Godlstone, ibid).
Even a catalogue of the wounds inflicted on black people – as well as on Coloureds and Indians – by apartheid is not enough to jolt the conscience of such whites. They want to forget the past and even contend it wasn't that bad after all, forgetting that the past is very much the present and the future. And as George Santayana reminds us: “Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
It is therefore worth remembering that the wounds inflicted by apartheid run so deep that it will be a long, long time – probably generations – before they heal, if at all. This is analogous to what happened in the United States where the wounds inflicted by slavery have not yet healed more than 140 years after the slaves were freed following the Emancipation Proclamation.
The healing must take place. And whites must repent. They supported apartheid, and they benefited from apartheid. And they still reap benefits from the legacy of apartheid.
They must acknowledge all that and admit collective guilt. Otherwise South Africa will remain a nation divided along racial lines, mainly because of the refusal by most whites to confront the past and make amends for the devastation wrought, with blacks being the highest on the casualty list.
Black people suffered the most from racial oppression and exploitation during apartheid. They also suffered the most from poverty, malnutrition, disease, unemployment, lack of education and housing as well as medical care. And they still do.
The gap between blacks and members of other racial groups in all those areas was unconscionable. For example, Coloureds earned twice as much as blacks did. And here is a partial list of the brutalities of apartheid against blacks in one of the richest countries on earth, barbarities which still haunt post-apartheid South Africa:
By 1970, 22 years after apartheid was instituted in 1948, wages for whites working in manufacturing and construction were six times of what blacks were earning. And white mine workers were earning at least 21 times as much as their black counterparts.
In fact, in 1971, black mine workers earned less than they did in 1911, as Leonard Thompson has documented in his work, A History of South Africa (see p. 195). Other researchers have documented the same fact. They include Laurine Platzky and Cherryl Walker in their study, The Surplus People: Forced Removals in South Africa.
By 1977, the unemployment rate among blacks was almost 30 per cent; an appalling figure.
But even the vast majority of blacks who were employed in urban areas and on white farms earned only a little, hardly enough to live on; while life in the tribal reserves, barren and overcrowded patches of land, was living hell:
"Throughout the Homelands, the land was eroded, people were deriving little income from agriculture, and over four-fifths of the people lived below the Minimum Living Level (MLL), defined as the lowest sum on which a household could possibly live in South African social circumstances.
In the white farming areas, most black men, women, and children worked for a pittance.
In the cities, the wages of some unemployed Africans were actually below the MLL, and unemployment was high and rising....
Two-thirds of the African population had incomes below the Minimum Living Level. "- (Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, Yale University Press, 1995, p. 202).
That's in a country where the standard of living among whites was and still is one of the highest in the world comparable to that of white Americans and whites in Western Europe. In fact, South Africa had the biggest income gap among 90 countries surveyed by a University of Cape Town economist in 1980.
The vast inequalities between blacks and whites spanned the spectrum. For example, there was extreme shortage of housing for blacks. In Soweto, a segregated township which had a population of one million by 1978, up to 20 people were cramped in a four-room house, almost all of them small, typical of black dwellings because of apartheid.
In Crossroads, a black township outside Cape Town, more than six people shared a bed – only God knows how; while whites lived in spacious homes including mansions for some of them. In fact their dog houses were equivalent to or better than black dwellings in poverty-stricken and segregated townships.
In the area of education, compulsory education was exclusively for white children who were also provided with excellent facilities, unlike black children who were almost totally ignored and overcrowded in extremely inferior schools.
The apartheid regime spent ten times as much on white students as it did on black students. Most black teachers were far less qualified than their white counterparts. But the gap extended into other areas as well.
Even black teachers who had the same qualifications as white teachers were paid far less than their white counterparts; and the text books they used to teach black students were written from a white perspective reflecting official thinking to uphold and justify white supremacy.
Segregation and inequalities in education extended to institutions of higher learning when the apartheid regime passed a law in 1959 barring English-speaking universities from admitting black students. All Afrikaner schools had, of course, always excluded blacks.
The “Whites Only” sign was probably the most conspicuous symbol of apartheid. It was put up everywhere to keep the races apart and dehumanise blacks more than anybody else since they are the ones who were given the most inferior facilities. They were also confined to the most inferior areas under oppressive laws enforced mostly by Afrikaners, the architects of apartheid who also constituted the bulk of the bureaucracy.
Not only couldn't blacks drink from the same fountain as whites – all racial groups had their own; they couldn't share anything else with whites, nor could the Indians and the Coloureds:
"From 1948 on, 'Whites Only' notices appeared in every conceivable place. Laws and regulations confirmed or imposed segregation for taxis, ambulances, hearses, buses, trains, elevators, benches, lavatories, parks, church halls, town halls, cinemas, theatres, café, restaurants and hotels, as well as schools and universities.
It was also official policy to prevent interracial contacts in sports: no integrated teams and no competitions between teams of different races in South Africa, and no integrated teams representing South Africa abroad....
Repressive laws barred the courts from inquiring into the ways in which officials used their delegated powers....To administer the laws of apartheid, the bureaucracy grew enormously....Afrikaners occupied 90 per cent of the top positions (while English-speaking whites filled the rest). The vast majority of the white bureaucrats were ardent supporters of apartheid....
White South Africans were as prosperous as the middle and upper classes of Europe and North America. Characteristically, they owned cars and substantial houses and apartments in segregated suburbs, with black servants.
The state provided them with excellent public services: schools and hospitals; parks and playing fields; buses and trains; roads, water, electricity, telephones, drainage, and sewage....
Public services for Blacks were characteristically inadequate or nonexistent. In the Homelands, women still walked miles every day to fetch water and firewood; in the towns, people crowded into single-sex compounds, leaky houses, or impoverished shacks.
Schools, hospitals, and public transport for Blacks were sharply inferior. Electricity, running water, public telephones, sewage systems, parks, and playing fields were rare." - (Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, ibid., pp. 197, 199, 200, and 201).
And that's not all. In a country with excellent medical facilities comparable to the best in the world; a country where a South African surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first heart transplant operation followed by several more through the years, all of them for whites; it is almost unbelievable that there were people who couldn't get medical attention and were left to die from simple infections the government could very easily have prevented by spending a mere fraction of what it spent on whites.
But it did happen for no other reason than that the people who desperately needed help and were left to die were black. In fact, in many cases, they were worse off than other blacks in the independent African countries which were among the poorest in the world:
"The African infant mortality in South Africa as a whole in 1974 was...worse than every country in Africa except Upper Volta - now Burkina Faso - and Sierra Leone....
Mortality rates for both African and Coloured children aged one to four years old were thirteen times as high as for Whites. The principal cause of these exceptional infant and child mortality rates was inadequate nutrition. An Institute of Race Relations survey revealed in 1978 that 50 per cent of all the two-to-three-year-old children in Ciskei were undernourished....
The principal African diseases were those common in Third World countries (in such a rich and relatively developed country): pneumonia, gastroenteritis, and tuberculosis (TB). Apart from kwashiorkor, TB, which is closely associated with poor socioeconomic conditions, was the most important cause of severe morbidity and death for the African population....
Moreover, though TB was decreasing among Whites – whose children were routinely inoculated against – it was increasing among Blacks. Other infectious diseases included typhoid fever, typhus, measles – which was often fatal among undernourished children – and rheumatic fever....
There were also epidemics of cholera, polio, and bubonic plague, while trachoma was endemic in the northern Transvaal. Many mine workers suffered disabling injuries or contracted lung diseases.
In all these cases, the incidence was higher among Africans than among Coloureds and Asians, and far higher than among Whites....
South African society (under apartheid) was very different from the benign picture produced by the government's information services and presented by official guides to foreign visitors." - (Ibid., pp. 203, and 204).
All that leaves no doubt that the lives of black people meant absolutely nothing to the apartheid regime and to its white supporters who deliberately kept it in power as it openly advocated white supremacy.
Blacks were not only dehumanised, oppressed and exploited at will by whites; they could be killed by any white person on the flimsiest excuse or for no reason at all; with the murderers secure in the conviction that they would not be punished because of their white skin.
There was, for example, a tragic story reported in 1979 by Roger Mudd, an anchor on American television CBS Evening News, about a black man who was murdered, in cold blood, by a white man who did not have the slightest fear of being punished for his heinous act.
The white man sent him to buy a pack of cigarettes while the white man waited in the car. Unfortunately, he bought the wrong cigarettes. It was not deliberate; it was a mistake. And that cost him his life. The white man shot him dead on the spot.
When the case went to court, the white judge who presided over the “trial” fined the white killer five dollars. Case closed.
It was more than a travesty of justice. It was justification of white supremacy under which white people could do no wrong.
And then there were the confessions before the Truth Commission by some whites who routinely tortured and killed blacks when they worked for the apartheid regime. The only reason they came forward was because they were seeking amnesty, now that apartheid had ended and the white minority were no longer in power.
Nobody knows if any of them was truly sorry for the heinous crimes they committed against blacks. One of the most well-known was Dirk Coetzee, once commander of a ruthless hit squad, who admitted to doing “anything but legal police work.” And he served the apartheid regime well:
"His men rarely left a trace of their killings. Bodies were burned to ash; others have testified that the security police sometimes blew up bodies with land mines....
Even Coetzee's own black employees in the security police were vulnerable. One was killed because he asked too many suspicious questions.
'In those days,' Coetzee told the Truth Commission, 'a black man's life meant absolutely nothing. I don't know how I ever in my life would be able to forgive a man like Dirk Coetzee, if he'd done to me what I've done to them.'" - (Don L. Boroughs, “Will the Truth Set Them Free? Confronting Their Terrible Past, South Africans Seek Reconciliation,” in US News & World Report, 28 April 1997, p. 43).
That is only a partial list of the brutalities and atrocities of apartheid against blacks: from blatant discrimination to grinding poverty, rampant disease, torture and outright murder.
And that is the past which the vast majority of whites don't want to face or even hear about; a past they are responsible for, but for which they refuse to accept responsibility, only to perpetuate distrust between the races and even fuel racial hatred and help pave the way for some black militants or radicals to assume power in some sectors of society including some positions at the national level.
Many whites, still enjoying a comfortable life style apartheid built for them on the backs of the toiling black masses, obviously counted on the compassion and magnanimity of Nelson Mandela, a man of immense fortitude who endured more than 27 years in prison without bitterness towards his oppressors when he came out.
Whites think they will continue to enjoy this life style may be till kingdom come. But they are gravely mistaken. Mandela is not going to live forever. And the people who will lead South Africa in the coming years after Mandela is long gone – thus no longer on the scene to exert moral influence and help curb excesses of some leaders through moral appeal to them, if they want to listen to him – are not going to have as much patience with the slow pace of change and uncooperative attitude of many whites.
Even Mandela himself, in his farewell speech in December 1997 as leader of the ruling African National Congress, reminded whites of what may be in store for them.
He delivered a strong message, telling them in no uncertain terms that there were many whites who were trying to undermine his government and that they should be prepared to make far greater sacrifices than they want to, in order to end racial inequalities and enable blacks and other non-whites to get their share of the economic pie.
Any leader who does not do enough to bring about fundamental change and improve the economic condition of the poor masses risks alienating the black majority who constitute the power base of the ruling African National Congress; a party that will most likely be in power for many years to come, if not in perpetuity.
Even before Mandela delivered his vituperative speech in December 1997 accusing some whites of trying to undermine his government, he had already taken the same stand a few months earlier following a wave of well-orchestrated killings which revived fears of a “Third Force” in South Africa led by white racists bent on fomenting chaos in order to discredit and oust black rulers from power.
At a funeral on August 3rd 1997 for five blacks killed in the village of Magoda in July (the victims were only among many others), Mandela said the deaths proved the existence of a concerted effort to undermine South Africa's fledgling democracy. He told hundreds of villagers who assembled on the side of a hill to bury the dead:
"We are not dealing with an individual or just a small group of criminals. We are dealing with experienced political criminals in command of huge resources – finances, weaponry, communications networks and connections at key positions.
We are dealing with a highly coordinated network of people deployed in state organs, such as the army and police.
They are driven by the desperate attempt to arrest the democratic transformation of our country and turn back the clock of history....
We want to know why and who decided to withdraw the security forces, especially the soldiers, from this area on the day of the massacre." - (Nelson Mandela, quoted by Suzanne Daley, “Wave of Killings Revive Fears of 'Third Force' in South Africa,” in the International Herald Tribune, 13 August 1997, p. 1; The New York Times, 12 August 1997. See also “South Africa After Mandela,” in The Economist, 2 August 1997, p. 28).
Testimony from court cases and statements to the Truth Commission provided a picture of past Third-Force activities in KwaZulu Province in which the former National Party government instigated black-on-black violence.
National Party officials did, in fact, admit that there was a special fund authorised by the cabinet to support the African National Congress' arch-enemy in the province, the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
And police officers testified that when they supplied weapons and provided other assistance to Inkatha members bent on assassinating African National Congress (ANC) activists, they were following orders from top government ministers.
Many experts believed that remnants of such a force survived the end of apartheid. They pointed to gun-running operations and paramilitary training which continued unhindered by the security forces which were still dominated by whites. As Mary De Hass, a social anthropologist at the University of Natal and publisher of a bimonthly newsletter on political violence, stated:
"Either they are grossly incompetent or key members of both the police and the army are continuing their well-established destabilisation strategies. "- (Mary De Hass, quoted by Suzanne Daley, "Wave of Killings Revives Fears of 'Third Force' in South Africa," in the International Herald Tribune, 13 August 1997, p. 1; Suzanne Daley, in The New York Times, 12 August 1997).
She said she believed the latter.
The "Third Force" probably extended beyond racist police and army officers who hoped that by fomenting black-on-black violence to "prove" that blacks were too violent to be trusted with government, or too incompetent to combat crime and maintain law and order, many South Africans would be persuaded to vote whites back into power.
But for that proposition to be feasible, blacks themselves who constitute the majority would have to vote for a return to the status quo ante; which was not only unlikely but out of the question.
Most of the blacks who had been victims of the violence instigated by the "Third Force" believed that they were caught up in that vicious cycle of killings because white extremists and their black henchmen were behind it to destroy black majority rule.
The victims included, of course, the people in the village of Magoda near Richmond, a town about 40 miles south of Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal Province where President Mandela attended the funeral.
And the destabilisation campaign continued, mainly in subtle and sophisticated ways in the bureaucracy which was still dominated by whites, in the white business community and in the media, to discredit and weaken South Africa's predominantly black government.
Yet that was the government which had been tolerant of the very same people who were trying to undermine it, despite some misgivings by some whites about Deputy President Thabo Mbeki and his colleagues and some of the ANC policies which even a number of critics conceded could not be roundly criticised because of the glaring inequalities between blacks and non-blacks. As R.W. Johnson, a white South African and former anti-apartheid activist and director of the Helen Suzman Foundation in Johannesburg, stated in The Wall Stree Journal:
"Deputy President Thabo Mbeki chairs the cabinet and runs the government; among the hundreds of officials, assistants and advisers who surround him is not a single white face.
Many nonblacks see the pressure for affirmative-action appointments within the state machine and the broader labor market as a sort of reneging on the ANC's pledge of nonracism....(But) in a way this was all predictable....
Even to complain about what is happening can sound churlish, particularly when whites, Asians and mixed-race 'coloreds' enjoy an average standard of living incomparably higher than that of blacks.
In fact, the black electorate, which the ANC promised 'jobs, jobs, jobs' in the last election campaign, is experiencing an unemployment rate between 25 and 40 percent." - (R.W. Johnson, "South Africa's New Problems," in The Wall Street Journal, 19 September 1997, p. A-14).
The question is how long blacks can wait before they start getting their fair share of the economic pie.
They can't eat the vote. They know when they are hungry and why their stomachs are empty. They know when they don't have decent or affordable housing. And they know why.
Statistics of economic growth mean absolutely nothing to them when those figures don't translate into concrete benefits for them in their everyday lives. And nothing is going to change without fundamental change.
But many non-blacks don't want to make sacrifices to help uplift their fellow countrymen, blacks people, who collectively suffer the most - in terms of economic disadvantages - even after the end of apartheid.
Many of them, especially whites, have chosen to leave South Africa instead of staying to help build the country. They should also consider themselves to be very lucky there has been no backlash against them from many blacks in retaliation for the atrocities of apartheid.
Yet, it is also a fact that if blacks come down really hard on whites, they are going to speed up the brain drain they want to avoid in order to keep white professionals whom they need to keep their country going.
There are simply not enough blacks in South Africa who have the necessary skills to run such an industrialised country with a sophisticated economy. They were denied education for too long, and it will be a long time before they catch up with whites, if at all.
And that is the only weapon whites have in their hands pointed at blacks and which they have been dangling over their heads. They can use it as a bargaining tool to extract meaningful concessions from the predominantly black government.
If all skilled whites were to pull out of South Africa today, their departure would have a devastating impact on the country. It would be a catastrophe. The economy, industry, and infrastructure would collapse overnight.
Therefore they have a moral duty to remain in South Africa and help blacks whom they exploited for more than 300 years. But they keep on fleeing mainly because it is unthinkable for many of them to live under a black government. And they started fleeing soon after apartheid ended and have continued to do so through the years. Statistics on white flight even back in the 1990s tell the story:
"It's apparently not enough for the country's 10 million nonblacks to be told that they should feel lucky....They are disenchanted enough that large numbers are emigrating.
The figures are difficult to ascertain: Up to 40 per cent of whites have foreign passports and therefore need not formally emigrate. But the South African press estimates that 50,000 to 80,000 whites have left each year since 1994 - a loss perhaps 5 to 6 per cent of the total white population.
For the moment, the economic effect is somewhat diminished, because many skilled whites and Asians near retirement age are staying on.
But as they leave the labour market, the full effects of the departure of so many of their younger colleagues will be evident. Since almost all the country's professional and managerial skills are concentrated in the white and Asian populations, one can expect a significant 'deskilling' of the economy. Such wholesale emigration was disastrous even in Mozambique and Angola, primarily agricultural economies.
South Africa's first black majority government must set out to make the white and Asian minorities feel more at home. It must ensure that the promise of national reconciliation is kept. And it must seek to reverse the brain drain that threatens the livelihood of all South Africans. That miracle is clearly within reach of this government - if only it would make the effort." - (Ibid).
That miracle is also possible if whites and other non-blacks reciprocate the feelings of the black-majority government whose conciliatory gestures have in many cases been rebuffed by whites.
Blacks have been more forgiving than whites have been repentant, and they have been more patient than whites have been willing to sacrifice in order to close the economic gap between the two races.
It is whites who are making themselves uncomfortable; a point critics of the black-majority government ignore. Just turn the tables and see how they would feel had they been in the black man's position after being brutalised for centuries by their conquerors.
Also blacks can not by themselves keep the reconciliation process on track when the vast majority of whites are determined to derail it by contending that any discussion of the atrocities of apartheid - in a bygone era - is a witch hunt against them.
They should be glad blacks have not tried to do more than that. And there's no guarantee they won't in the future if nothing changes and if the intransigence on the part of whites continues.
And blacks can not reverse the brain drain, as skilled whites continue to flee the country, if their former oppressors insist on maintaining white privilege as the price black people have to pay to keep trained whites in the country. Such confrontational tactics are counter-productive for both sides and will only make race relations worse.
One day, both sides could reach a point where they would be able to say, "We can do without each other," as they bid each other farewell. Pray they don't live to see that day.
And it can be avoided, but only if whites reciprocate the conciliatory gestures of the black-majority government and start making meaningful concessions to blacks in order to build a truly just society free of racial inequalities whites want to perpetuate in order to maintain their privileged position at the expense of their fellow countrymen.
Some of the black groups which have been in the forefront of the liberation struggle to end economic apartheid - which still exists almost as much as it did during the era of legally sanctioned apartheid - are labour unions across the country, especially in the cities. And they have have formidable credentials to carry on the struggle.
It was black workers who were mobilised into a powerful force which brought the apartheid regime down to its knees and forced it to the conference table to start negotiating with its opponents for a transition to majority rule.
It is true that blacks are making inroads into the economy, a bastion of white power for centuries, without which political power is meaningless. But they still have a long way to go. As Mark Gevisser reported from Johannesburg in his article, "Ending Economic Apartheid," in The Nation:
"In South African politics and government, blacks now rule, incontrovertibly.
But despite the fact that blacks are more than 80 percent of South Africa's population, black companies control only 8 percent of the equities on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange - [while] Anglo-American alone controls 24 percent." - (Mark Gevisser, "Ending Economic Apartheid: Is Labor Capitalism Risking the Legacy of South Africa's Liberation Struggle?," in The Nation, New York, 29 September 1997, p. 24).
That was more than 10 years ago. And little has changed.
However, there are blacks who complain that such "economic empowerment" benefits only the black middle class, to the exclusion of the masses who bore the brunt of the liberation struggle. As Sam Shilowa, the secretary-general of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), stated:
"Black people are justified when they say that democracy means more than just the right to vote; that it means economic empowerment. But there are those who believe it means self-enrichment of a few." - (Sam Shilowa, quoted ibid., p. 25. See also "South Africa's Powerful Unions: Labour's Weight," in The Economist, 27 September 1997, pp. 48 - 49).
Still, black trade unions have the financial - and the political - clout which can enable them to exercise some leverage, and in many cases a lot of leverage, in the economic arena.
Collectively, the retirement funds of black workers amount to billions of dollars which the unions partly control.
That is a substantial amount of capital which can be harnessed to enable union members to buy shares in different companies and become active participants in the economy, not only as workers but as part-owners as well. Some can even buy shares directly on their own, or their trade unions can collectively buy substantial shares with their retirement funds on their behalf from which they will get returns.
But that is still not enough to level the playing field in the economic arena. And it is not enough to end racial disparities.
Most blacks - in the general population - will be left out. And labour union members themselves can not expect a significant improvement in their lives simply because they own shares in companies through their membership in trade unions which have invested their retirement funds on their behalf.
Immediate improvement in their economic status will have to come from better jobs and better wages from an economy controlled by whites, the majority of whom are not willing to make major concessions to blacks in those areas.
Yet it is white South Africa, because of the apartheid policies it supported, which is responsible for so much poverty and unemployment afflicting black communities. South Africa is the most industrialised country on the entire continent. Unfortunately, a disproportionately large number of blacks can not find jobs in such an economy because they don't have needed skills and the necessary academic training, thanks to years of inferior education for blacks under apartheid and even before then.
And you can't take short cuts, just hire anybody or lower standards. Doing so will ruin the economy and the country as a whole.
Many blacks can and do provide unskilled labour. It is cheap, and there is plenty of it. But it is not highly productive in such a sophisticated economy. By contrast, skilled labour is scarce and costly.
Therefore it is the responsibility of white South African business owners and companies - all of whom were the biggest beneficiaries during apartheid - to train black workers in order to make them more competitive and more productive. As productivity increases, the economy grows and creates more jobs, and will in the long run help alleviate the problem of extremely high unemployment among blacks.
Also to help ease the economic plight among blacks, all whites need to pay a reparations tax to help black people until they catch up with them. That is not asking too much, considering the fact that for more than 300 years, it is whites who have enjoyed preferential treatment at the expense of blacks, while paying them almost nothing for their labour.
In fact, blacks were enslaved for years. After slavery ended, they continued to work as virtual slaves until the end of apartheid during the early 1990s.
Even after the end of apartheid - no one should expect a miracle overnight but things could move a little faster - the income gap between blacks and whites is astounding. According to The Economist:
"Black incomes are barely a sixth of white ones." - ("South Africa - How Wrong Is It Going?: South Africa's Breezy Post-Apartheid Self-Confidence Has Crumbled," in The Economist, 12 October 1996, p. 23. See also "After Mandela's Gone," ibid., pp. 17 - 18).
That is just one of the remnants of apartheid. And, in the face of white intransigence, it partly explains why there are those who would settle for nothing less than tit-for-tat.
There is yet no groundswell for such feelings among blacks, the primary victims of legally sanctioned racism. But it can not be entirely ruled out in the future, depending on the extent to which whites, however grudgingly, are going to meet justified demands by blacks for meaningful concessions from their former oppressors:
"Not all blacks are as forgiving as Mr. Mandela. Some still seek vengeance for the crimes of apartheid, others merely want to press harder for black advancement.
And no wonder: much power, especially in business, the civil service, the press and the universities, remains in white hands. It needs to spread....Whites should be clear that their privileges can not endure." - (Ibid., pp. 17, and 18).
It is this perpetuation of white privilege by the white oligarchy and bureaucracy in multiracial democratic South Africa which has been the main catalyst for "Africanbond," a phenomenon of racial bonding among South African blacks - especially the elite - although in spirit and intent it is entirely different from the virulently racist Afrikaner Broederbond which was formed to perpetuate white supremacy. As reported from Johannesburg in October 1996, not long after apartheid officially ended, by The Economist:
"It was revealed this month that [some members of the black elite] had got together to hatch an 'Africanbond,' an informal black society that would promote the interests of black brotherhood.
The aim, declared the minutes of a meeting reported in South Africa's Sunday Times, was to combat 'the growing conspiracy against meaningful black participation in extending and leveraging political democracy to facilitate economic and social democracy.'
The guest list reads like a Who's Who of South Africa's top black business people, lawyers and media types.
The idea of an Africanbond sent a frisson through white South Africa. Many seized on the unfortunate choice of name, and its echo of the Afrikaner Broederbond, a secret society that started out as an informal means of promoting Afrikaners in a world dominated by white English-speakers, but ended up as a powerful, manipulative and corrupting network." - ("Bonding of South Africa's Blacks," in The Economist, 18 October 1996, p. 50).
It also ended up being the true embodiment of the soul and spirit of Afrikanerdom and a hotbed of intrigue against blacks.
By glaring contrast, Africanbond is not intended to be a fountainhead of racist ideas or an instrument of racial oppression to be used against whites or other non-blacks; nor is it a team of black ideologues providing an ideological rationale for some future race war against non-blacks as the Afrikaner Broederbond did against blacks during the apartheid era. It is the antithesis of all that:
"There is nothing sinister about the Africanbond, insists Peter Vundla, who runs Herdbuoys, an advertising agency, and who was one of the hosts to the gathering: 'It's just a group of people who have been bonded by our collective African experience.'
The name, he says, was one of several suggested by the group. There are no plans to turn it into a formal organisation, with membership rules, let alone vows and silly handshakes. A nearer parallel would be the Brenthurst group, a loose clan of top white businessmen which from time to time meets members of the government.
Whatever its nature, the Africanbond venture exposes the discontent of the country's black elite. Political liberation has not delivered instant access to other centres of power. Big business, most universities, the best-selling newspapers, remain firmly in white hands....Blacks are frustrated at their relative lack of business and intellectual clout.
A striking example of this was the row last year (1995) when William Makgoba, then deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Witwatersrand, a stronghold of white liberalism, tried to 'Africanise' it....
Some white academics found Mr. Makgoba's tactics more than unpleasant. He was eventually moved to another post.
Blacks were indignant. He was 'the newest victim of the spontaneous white conspiracy against the black intelligentsia,' wroteThami Mazwai, a black writer and Africanbond guest....
Much of the time, black and white muddle along together, by choice or circumstance. But then comes a sharp reminder of how readily South Africans retreat into the racial laager." - (Ibid., pp. 50 - 51).
As they retreat into that sanctuary assuming a defensive posture, they start to hurl charges and counter-charges, recriminations which, in order to be properly understood, must be looked at in the context of apartheid South Africa which inflicted so much damage on its citizenry. The effects of this destruction continue to reverberate and are felt in every nook and corner of the South African society.
After blacks took over, whites right away started complaining about the "inefficiency" of the predominantly black government. Black leaders were not surprised to hear that. And, as one former South African, John Chettle, pointed out:
"[It is true that] there are inevitably parts of the bureaucracy that now work less efficiently than before, although the South African bureaucracy under the previous regime was not famous for its efficiency." - (John Chettle, "After the Miracle: Can South Africa Be A Normal State?," in The National Interest, Washington, D.C., Spring 1997, p. 66).
The apartheid regime was, in fact, inefficient and corrupt. It was also bloated. The only area in which is was highly efficient was in the dispensation of injustice when it functioned as a notoriously repressive apparatus against blacks.
Its inefficiency was compounded by the fact that apartheid South Africa was nothing more than a welfare state for whites at the expense of blacks; nor do whites who complained about bureaucratic inefficiency mention the fact that even with the black-majority government in power, the civil service - hence the bureaucracy - is still mostly white.
They also complained that the rate of crime soared astronomically after the multiracial democratic government of President Mandela came to power. Yet they did not mention the fact that the police force, which should be fighting crime, was still dominated by whites and was highly corrupt.
It was also behind much of the crime going on across the country. As Chettle, who for nearly two decades was director of the South Africa Foundation for North and South America before he became an American citizen, stated in The National Interest:
"The Financial Times of London pointed to crime as the most significant factor inflicting damage on international views of the country. An average of 52 people were murdered each day in South Africa in 1995, proportionately nine times higher than in the United States (according to the South African newspaper, The Citizen, 18 April 1996).
In 1995, according to the corporate-sponsored Project on Crime, Violence and Investment, there were 97,950 car thefts. That is equivalent to nearly 47 percent of total sales in the year.
When one links that to the evidence that police are organising car thefts, that many of the stolen cars are exported, and that 30 percent of all goods landed at Durban's port are disappearing, it suggests very extensive corruption among the police, customs, harbor authority, and other officials." - (Ibid., pp. 66 - 67. See also Tony Leon, "Fumbling the Crime Issue," in the Sunday Times, South Africa, 10 December 1995; The Citizen, Johannesburg, South Africa, 18 April 1996; Edward Osborn: "It's a devilish paradox, but crime is good for the economy; it's sustaining consumer spending," in the Sunday Independent, South Africa, 29 September 1996; The Mail & Guardian, South Africa, 4 October 1996).
Who was behind all that? Black people? Who controlled the police? Who controlled the port in Durban even after the end of apartheid? Blacks?
It was the white-dominated police force which allowed all that to go on - because it was a part of the problem itself, and not a part of the solution - and then blamed the nation's black leaders for the mess, in order to discredit them after they assumed power when apartheid ended.
It wasn't just the police force. Even the customs officials and harbour authorities were mostly white. They were also the ones, in collusion with the white-dominated police force, who were behind the export of stolen cars and the disappearance of large amounts of goods landing at South African ports; not just Durban but also Cape Town, East London, Port Elizabeth and others.
Yet the black-majority government was blamed for all that. What was it supposed to do? Fire all those whites and then incur the wrath of the entire international community for being a black racist government?
Why didn't the white authorities themselves straighten out? They were corrupt. But they didn't want to straighten out and clean up the mess they caused because, besides lining their pockets by allowing rampant corruption to go on, they also had a hidden agenda, but which was not always hidden. And that was to make black leaders look bad and destabilise the black-majority government.
The black-majority government, hence the black community, is also blamed for white flight which is leading to the loss of much-needed professionals practically in all fields except politics. Yet, besides the refusal by many whites to live under black rule, much of that flight is not due to affirmative action policies opening up opportunities for blacks - although that also is a factor - but mainly due to the spiraling rate of crime the white-dominated police force allowed to spin out of control soon after the end of apartheid; again, as part of a hidden agenda - on behalf of the white community angry at the end of white minority rule - to ruin the country, and then blame blacks for it once everything deteriorates due to the loss of trained professionals most of whom are white.
There already about 500 major crime syndicates operating in South Africa with international ties round the globe, using the country, among several other criminal operations, as a transit point for drugs from Asia and Latin America going to Europe, North America and other parts of the world. These syndicates are not controlled by black people in South Africa.
They have strong ties to the South African business community, which is overwhelmingly white; to the banks laundering money for them, which are also controlled by whites; and to the police and customs officials who are also mostly white.
No small-time operator is going to export stolen cars or steal tons of goods landing at Durban and other South African ports:
"This is not the work merely of young, nervous, trigger-happy gunmen who confront the motorist. It may be the most serious remnant of the moral corruption of apartheid and, if it is not defeated soon, the consequences could be profound.
It contributes to what one political scientist called 'the negative halo effect.' It strengthens the notion that South Africa is fast becoming just another lawless (black-ruled) African state. It fosters the impression of government incompetence (by blacks).
It may be the biggest single reason for the exodus - still not statistically significant, but potentially so - of young professionals whose are not easily replaceable.
It is not surprising, then, to find these factors - crime and consequent emigration - cited by Anton Rupert, chairman of the worldwide Rembrandt Group, as the greatest threats facing the country." - (J. Chettle, ibid., p. 67; Sunday Independent, 29 September 1996).
Like the slow pace of change in bridging the economic gap between blacks and whites which may radicalise a significant number of blacks, especially among the masses on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, and turn them against whites because of the latter's refusal to make meaningful concessions to the black majority for the sake of racial equality; white flight may also increasingly turn blacks against whites if the economy continues to deteriorate due to loss of skilled manpower as white professionals continue to emigrate in increasing numbers, in search of better life elsewhere, especially in predominantly white countries.
And in both cases, the fault rests squarely on the shoulders of white South Africans: in the former, because of their intransigence - insisting on maintaining white privilege; and in the latter, because of the unwillingness by the white-dominated police and security forces to combat crime which - more than anything else including affirmative action for blacks - is forcing tens of thousands of whites to flee South Africa every year and settle in other countries, especially in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. According to The Economist:
"The emigration of skilled South Africans is hobbling the economy. A way to staunch the outflow would be to tackle the crime that drives whites out....
The falling rand and job-preferment for blacks are said to be minor annoyances compared with crime. A recent survey by FSA/Contact, a market-research group, revealed that 96 per cent of South African emigrants cited fear of criminal violence as a reason for packing their bags. They are fleeing, they say, because they want to live somewhere where speeding through red lights at night is not safer than stopping....
This is thought to be the main reason why every middle-class South African has friends who have left....
According to the Central Statistical Service (CSS) in Pretoria, nearly 39,000 South Africans emigrated between 1994 and 1997. The true total is certainly higher....
Since most emigrants are white, some less thoughtful South Africans bid them good riddance, imagining that every departing Caucasian leaves a vacancy for a formerly oppressed black.
But the government sees the haemorrhage of talent as hurting the economy....Almost all emigrants are managers, technicians or professionals and their families....
According to FSA/Contact, 11 per cent of the top managers and 6 per cent of the middle managers who resigned last year (in 1997) did so in order to emigrate." - ("White Flight from South Africa: White South Africa on the Wing - The Emigration of Skilled South Africans is Hobbling the Economy," in The Economist, 6 June 1998, p. 43).
And the trend has continued through the years, unabated.
The problem of white flight also has multiplier effect, compounding the negative perception of South Africa, and the negative impact of the brain drain on the black population, especially for those in the cities who depend on jobs provided by whites.
The economy suffers, of course, from the impact of white flight. But in addition to that, several jobs are also lost when just one professional emigrates - with devastating impact on black families who depend on him for a living:
"Since South African bosses tend to be responsible for large numbers of staff - even electricians have assistants to pass them their screwdrivers and maids to iron their socks - each lost brain swells the unemployment rate, already a teriffying 30 per cent or so....
Mr. Mandela's regular pleas for whites to remain, and coercive policies, such as a proposal by the health minister, Dr. Nkosazana Zuma (one of the few women in the cabinet), that doctors should have to repay the government for their medical training if they refuse to work in South Africa, may stem the tide a little. A more permanent solution would be to cut violent crime. That will not be easy.
Alongside Brazil, South Africa has the world's widest gap between rich and poor, meaning that there is a lot of stuff to steal and a lot of people for whom stealing is the most lucrative career option....
Few criminals are caught or convicted, and few potential gangsters are deterred.
Mark Shaw of the Institute for Security Studies in Johannesburg argues that it will be years before crime begins to decline." - (Ibid., pp. 43 - 44).
All that helps to serve racist purposes: the higher the crime rate, and the longer it takes to stem the tide, the better for the exponents of white supremacy.
Whites may have failed to maintain apartheid even after putting up stiff resistance against their opponents, but many of them seem to be equally determined to undermine the predominantly black government in retaliation.
One way of doing that is by letting crime get out of control, as the white-dominated police and security forces look the other way while they participate in criminal activities themselves, thus perpetuating the vicious cycle of violence.
It is a sophisticated destabilisation campaign by racists, blaming the wave of crime on blacks, which is intended not only to undermine the black-majority government but also to exonerate whites of any responsibility should South Africa degenerate into chaos, or if its economy fails to create enough jobs - especially for blacks - due to lack of foreign investments scared away by the spiraling rate of crime and white flight.
But in spite of white flight, South Africa continues - and probably will continue - to attract large numbers of foreign investors because of its relatively strong economy (the most developed and the strongest in Africa), trained work force, and free-market policies even the formerly socialist-oriented African National Congress (ANC) embraced when it came to power in 1994.
It was a radical change, for, this is the same party whose main leaders had been spouting socialist rhetoric through the years during the struggle against apartheid and promised to implement socialist policies once in power; only to be sobered by harsh economic realities when they went into office, especially after the collapse of communism following the disintegration of the Soviet Union and some of her satellites in the early 1990s.
And after the collapse of communism, any rationale for socialism the African National Congress used, could not be sustained in the face of such catastrophic failure; even in Africa itself, socialism had proved to be a tragic failure in all the countries where it had been instituted, including my home country, Tanzania.
The end of communism did, of course, also deprive the National Party - which introduced apartheid - of its "unassailable" logic in defence of its hegemonic rule over South Africa, contending that it was a bulwark against communist onslaught into Africa and a protector of sea lanes round the tip of southern Africa which were vital to the survival of the West, with ships carrying oil and other vital supplies to Western Europe and North America.
So, the struggle between the supporters of the National Party, hence white-minority rule, and of the African National Congress could not be internationalised anymore in the new world order, and became localised after the latter became the legitimate government of South Africa. And it continues today as some whites try to sabotage the multiracial democratic government, although after more than ten years since the end of apartheid, some of the opponents of racial equality and black-majority rule have given up and virtually conceded defeat.
The economic arena is now the biggest theatre of combat between the two contending forces and will continue to be one probably for many years to come until whites sacrifice their privileged position for the sake of racial equality and national unity, and until blacks get their share of the economic pie. Statistics of the plight of the black masses are disturbing. They include figures compiled by the World Bank:
"The real long-term threat to South African economic policy (and race relations) arises more from certain structural problems in the economy....They center on poverty, productivity, and education. The worst problem is poverty.
Among comparable middle-income developing countries, South Africa has one of the worst records in terms of health, education, safe water, fertility, and income inequality.
According to the World Bank, unemployment rates stand at 50 per cent among the poor. The lowest 40 per cent of households (almost all black), equivalent to 53 per cent of the population, account for less than 10 per cent of total consumption." - (J. Chettle, "After the Miracle: Can South Africa Be a Normal State?," op. cit., p. 69. See also The Citizen, Johannesburg, 18 September 1996; Business Day, Johannesburg, 17 September 1996).
South Africa's future stability will very much depend on how successful the predominantly black government is in solving problems of unemployment and in reducing poverty among blacks who constitute the vast majority of the population. But neither of these can be solved without cooperation from whites who control the economy.
Therefore, however realistic and sound economic policies formulated by the government may be, they can not be successfully implemented unless whites make substantial sacrifices and give up the privileges they continue to enjoy at the expense of their fellow countrymen, and also at the expense of domestic tranquility.
The privileged position of whites, thanks to centuries of exploitation of the black masses, is clearly demonstrated by appalling statistics. As Antoinette Handley, director of studies at the South African Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg, and Jeffrey Herbst, an associate professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University in the United States, stated in their article, "South Africa: The Perils of Normalcy," in Current History: A Journal of Contemporary World Affairs:
"The new government inherited an extraordinary set of economic problems in 1994. Fifty-three percent of Africans live below the poverty line, compared to 2 per cent of all whites....
Especially in urban areas, poor black populations, often without adequate food, water, and shelter, coexist with a white society whose lifestyle is modeled on Europe and the United States." - (Antoinette Handley and Jeffrey Herbst, "South Africa: The Perils of Normalcy," in Current History: A Journal of Contemporary World Affairs, May 1997, pp. 224, and 226).
Those problems can not be solved overnight. But speed is critical. The pace of change will also be partly determined by the commitment of the black leaders themselves, combined with sacrifices made by - and concessions extracted from - whites.
This unconscionable economic gap not only exacerbates racial tensions but also fuels crime. As Nelson Mandela stated shortly before the transition from white minority rule to the new dispensation:
"The youths in the (black) townships have had over the decades a visible enemy, the (white) government. Now that the enemy is no longer visible, because of the transformation that is taking place.
Their enemy now is you and me, people who drive a car and have a house. It's order, anything that relates to order, and it is a very grave situation. "- (Nelson Mandela, quoted ibid., p. 226).
The problem can be solved only through expanded economic opportunities, especially in the private sector, in order to not only fight unemployment but also raise living standards of black people who constitute a disproportionately high percentage of the poor and the unemployed in South Africa.
The question is how. As R. Stephen Brent, an officer in the US Agency for International Development (USAID) mission in Pretoria, South Africa, stated in Foreign Affairs:
"To make real progress in raising black living standards, South Africa needs higher growth, at least five percent a year, and it must be more employment-intensive.
To achieve this the new government will have to address South Africa's structural weaknesses and expand foreign investment and trade....
It wants to spend more on black social needs, but taxes and government spending are already high. It wants to create jobs for black South Africans, but it cannot hire more civil servants (the civil service is still dominated by whites) or force the private sector to make labor-intensive investments". - (R. Stephen Brent, "South Africa: Tough Road to Prosperity," in Foreign Affairs, March/April 1996, p. 116).
And it can not concentrate exclusively on promoting economic growth and expanding the private sector at the expense of social services. Otherwise the government is going to alienate its supporters and help erode its political base anchored in the black constituency.
To maintain its legitimacy, it must provide more social services for blacks - health care, education, housing, clean water, electricity, transport; pursue affirmative action policies; and introduce changes in the economy in order to create more employment opportunities and increase black ownership.
All those goals must be pursued at the same time, and must also, of necessity, entail elimination of white privilege. But such erosion of white privilege, especially if it is done precipitately, will only lead to increased white flight, hence rapid deterioration of the economy.
Therefore black demands for social equity, which are legitimate demands, must be tempered with realism in a world in which harsh economic realities rarely conform to people's aspirations.
Blacks shouldn't expect miracles overnight - and they don't. And whites shouldn't insist on maintaining their privileged position they acquired at the expense of blacks. They should also remember that their country needs them as much as it needs blacks. And the government can not remove all whites from their jobs just to replace them with blacks. As Public Services Minister Zola Skweyiya bluntly stated:
"I had to tell them, 'We need your skills.'
In deciding who goes and who remains, the interests of the state must prevail....
Whites have got skills, and we need those skills to run South Africa." - Zola Skweyiya, quoted by Lynne Duke, "Affirmative Action, South African Style: With Skilled White Workers Still in Demand, the Black Majority Government Moves Carefully," in The Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, 22 July 1996, p. 18).
That is just one of the legacies of apartheid.
Although apartheid has ended as a legal monstrosity, its dead policies continue to haunt and have a devastating impact on the living by keeping whites on top for many years to come, with dire consequences of a backlash from some blacks. And it is impossible to undo the damage that has been inflicted on blacks for centuries by an oppressive white minority. As Lynne Duke, reporting from Pretoria, South Africa, stated in The Washington Post:
"Apartheid's legacy is devastating: Adult blacks today have had half the educational years of whites; their salaries are barely a third of whites' salaries; and their unemployment rate is eight times higher.
Although blacks run the nation's government, white still run the economy; whites are 13 percent of the population, but own 90 percent of the nation's wealth, according to government statistics." - (Lynne Duke, "Affirmative Action, South African Style," ibid. See also "South Africa's Wealth Gap: Even Less Equal in South Africa," in The Economist, 25 October 1997, p. 46).
And because whites still control most of the jobs in both the private and public sectors, racial discrimination against blacks remains a major problem, in spite of the fact that blacks control the government , as exemplified by this case:
"Khosi Jiyane, 27, a black woman with a master's degree in business from one of South Africa's premier universities, was told by her bosses at an insurance firm that her ambition and assertiveness made her a threat to her white co-workers.
Now a human resources consultant with a black-advancement firm called Bridging the Gap, Jiyane resigned from the insurance firm earlier this year (in 1996) after she was denied several promotions and her job as a junior personnel officer turned out to be unchallenging. 'What I ended up doing was some secretarial job, taking minutes,' Jiyane said bitterly." - (Khosi Jiyane, cited by Lynne Duke, ibid).
Many qualified blacks have encountered open hostility and resentment from their white employers and co-workers, now that the end of apartheid has opened up opportunities for them in areas they would not even have dared to enter during the era of white-minority rule.
The demand for qualified blacks is great, nonetheless, but even more so for highly qualified black executives and managers. However, there has been little progress in the corporate area. Blacks hold only about 10 per cent of the management positions in the private sector. And that is considered to be an improvement.
Many blacks say the government should set numerical goals to promote black advancement in the private sector and other areas. As Hazel Ralefeta, managing director of the Black Management Forum, an advancement advocacy group, stated:
"We believe the government should have come out much clearer with targets. If you do not set targets, how do you measure?" - (Hazel Ralefeta, ibid).
And in spite of the need to retain skilled whites in their positions, it is simply a matter of time before blacks become the dominant group in the educated labour force, including management. As cabinet member Zola Skweyiya put it, considering the nation's demographics, whites will be ultimately swamped:
"You can not run away from that." - (Zola Skweyiya, ibid).
And as Thabo Mbeki, who was then deputy president under Nelson Mandela, also stated:
"If, in time, the majority of the black population sees that no change has occurred, one must expect that people will rebel." - (Thabo Mbeki, quoted in "South Africa: The End of a Miracle?," in The Economist, 13 December 1997, p. 18).
But there is also the danger that the advancement of the black elite, especially their rapid accumulation of wealth, will alienate the black masses from them, the very same people who are supposed to end white bureaucratic control and domination of the economy and help open up more opportunities for blacks in general.
Yet at the same time, the logic behind such progress for the black elite has universal appeal even among the deprived black masses because it is a continuation of the black liberation struggle blacks of all classes supported. As Nthato Motlana, Nelson Mandela's former family doctor, bitterly remarked:
"They say it's good for a white man to be rich, but it's not good for a black man. If you're black and you succeed, there's something wrong." - (Nthato Motlana, quoted in "South Africa: Black Can Be Rich: Black Capitalists in South Africa," in The Economist, 15 March 1997, p. 44).
In addition to being the product of apartheid which favoured whites, the wealth accumulated by whites is further augmented by additional income from criminal syndicates all of which are controlled and dominated by whites.
Mbeki explicitly stated that this criminal enterprise is part of a well-orchestrated attempt to undermine the black-majority government. According to The Economist:
"The police last year (in 1996) knew of 481 criminal syndicates involved in smuggling drugs, guns, diamonds, rhino horn or luxury cars....
Worse still, some of these criminals work with ex-members (and current members) of South Africa's security forces, whose connections can still secure false papers and get police dockets destroyed.
Mr. Mbeki believes that some of them may even have a political motive: 'I wouldn't rule out a more orchestrated attempt to undermine the government by organised crime,' he says." - ("South Africa: The End of a Miracle?," op. cit., p. 18).
Some people, probably a significant number of whites, may interpret that as an overreaction or may be even as an attack on whites. Yet there is reason for such concern as expressed by Mbeki; for, there are still whites who would like to see the government fail and they will do anything they can to undermine it. Far from being anti-white, Mbeki is guided not only by pragmatic instincts, but by a genuine desire for racial equality.
But he also knows that it is impossible to achieve that goal by maintaining the status quo and without eliminating white privilege. And that explains why he was viewed with apprehension, and trepidation, by some whites when he was vice president and when he became president:
"Mbeki is content. Whites wonder....Unlike Mr. Mandela, he is less occupied with racial reconciliation than with racial transformation of South Africa's still-white institutions....White South Africans have some reason to fear that the world will not be quite so comfortable or familiar to them when Nelson Mandela is gone....A recent poll showed that only 6 per cent of whites wanted Mr. Mbeki to succeed him." - ("Who Would Run South Africa?: Health of the Nation," in The Economist 9 March 1996, p. 41; "Mandela and Mbeki: South Africa - The Old Chief and the New One," in The Economist, 5 April 1997, p. 43.
So it was with apprehension that many white South Africans entered a new era under Mbeki's residency. Yet little changed in terms of their privileged status contrasted with the predicament of the black masses who had suffered so much under apartheid when whites enjoyed a high standard of living, one of the highest in the world, as they still do today.
And it is clear that much as people may talk about racial reconciliation in the context of South Africa, they must also come to grips with some harsh realities about the racial disparities which make such reconciliation virtually impossible. It is impossible to have racial reconciliation without racial and institutional transformation to rebuild a new society from the ashes of apartheid.
Whites were worried about Mbeki's presidency, not because he was going to punish them for the sins of apartheid; they were worried because they did not want to make sacrifices to bring about fundamental change in the country, a change that would entail structural transformation of a structurally flawed society.
Therefore apprehension about the future for whites under his presidency was clearly evident. And it was an assessment that came from more than one source. According to a report from Johannesburg in The Washington Post:
"The notion of a Mbeki presidency is disquieting for some.
Despite a bold and poetic speech he delivered in May (1996) in which he welcomed whites as Africans along with blacks, the white-run media and other observers view him as less committed to racial reconciliation than Mandela.
Tom Lodge a political scientist at Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand, notes that Mbeki does not have any close white advisers. Rucky Naidoo (an Indian and), a Mbeki spokesman, counters that Mbeki has frequent contact with white businessmen here and abroad.
There also is concern over Mbeki's push to transform the white-dominated business and media sectors.
His special adviser, the Reverend Frank Chikane, says Mbeki really is 'an analytic and strategic thinker' and that his long-term strategy for transforming the country will naturally step on the toes of those not yet accustomed to black-majority rule." - ("South Africa Prepares for Life After the Messiah: Nelson Mandela's Designated Successor is Already Getting Ready for the Transition," in The Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, 28 October 1996, p. 18).
Mbeki had on more than one occasion been asked whether or not he was satisfied with the pace of change in post-apartheid South Africa. His response was that transformation was going to take time, and it must be done. In one of his most definitive responses, he told The Economist:
"The reality is that the legacy of apartheid still defines present-day South Africa....The white population I don't think has quite understood the importance of this challenge....
If you were speaking of national reconciliation based on the maintenance of the status quo, because you did not want to move at a pace that frightens the whites, it means you wouldn't carry out the task of transformation.
You would not produce reconciliation on that basis.
It might look so to the people who benefited from apartheid - everybody's forgiven us, nobody's after nationalising our swimming pools. It isn't, because you have the anger that would be boiling among the black people. So, you've got to transform the society." - (Thabo Mbeki, quoted in "White South Africa Awaits Mbeki: Who is Thabo Mbeki?," in The Economist, 1 November 1997, p. 45).
In short, Mbeki was seen as a nemesis for whites, a leader who was going to give them a harder time than they have had, if at all, since the end of legal apartheid.
It's not that he was going to nationalise their property or the country's large assets such as land and mines and industry, or raise taxes; he was going to use the government, and its power, to open up opportunities for blacks across the spectrum including the upper echelons of society. As he explained his policy of affirmative action:
"Affirmative action isn't a philosophy, it's not an end in itself. It's an instrument to get a more equal society, broadly representative of South African demography. "- (Ibid).
His message was simple and direct, even if it scared whites. But he was just as firm in pursuing privatisation and other free-market policies to promote economic growth in which whites were expected to play a critical role since they controlled the economy. And he became business-friendly during his tenure as president to a degree many people did not expect.
In fact, many people in the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and elsewhere said, besides being somewhat aloof and lacking the common touch Mandela and other leaders including Jacob Zuma had, he was too business-friendly and they wanted the government to do more for the poor. Yet he was also determined to bring about fundamental change:
"He insists that whatever the pressure to go soft on economic management, some aspects, such as the pledge to cut the budget deficit, are 'set in stone.'
No less firm is his message to South Africa's whites, who still hold most of the country's economic power: if they do not change things voluntarily, he will not hesitate to force them to do so." - ("White South Africa Awaits Mbeki," ibid).
And most of them don't want to change voluntarily. They insist on maintaining white privilege, although they obtained those benefits with the help of a regime which brutalised and exploited blacks.
They would not have been able to acquire those benefits had it not been for the racist policies they themselves supported by deliberately keeping in power racist leaders whom they continued to support, and vote for, election after election.
In fact, many whites, if not most including the country's leading businessmen, contend that they never benefited from apartheid. Whom it benefit, instead? Its victims? According to The Wall Street Journal in its report from Johannesburg:
"During the years of apartheid, many companies grew rich and powerful. But rather than beg for forgiveness or apologize for any wrongdoings, most South African businessmen argued that the economic abuses of South Africa's past weren't their fault....
(In) three days of hearings before the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission,...former bankers, heads of mining groups and an ex-chairman of the South African Chamber of Commerce all denied that business supported or benefited from the system of racial segregation and white minority rule known as apartheid." - (Robert Block, "South Africa's Corporate Elite Says It Didn't Prop Up Apartheid," in The Wall Street Journal, 12 November 1997, p. A-18).
It is such denial and racist attitudes which make racial reconciliation very difficult to achieve, convincing many blacks that whites in South Africa - with the exception of a few - are not sorry for what they did to them during all those years of white-minority rule.
The result is racial polarisation, at best, paving the way for a populist rebellion and may be even a radical black government in the future which will end white privilege in one swoop even if it means scaring the majority of the whites out of the country.
A number of black leaders in South Africa, and many ordinary black citizens, have looked across the border and have seen what President Robert Mugabe has done to end white privilege in Zimbabwe - through his fast-track land reform programme - and feel that is the right way to go, whatever the cost.
During their testimony before the Truth Commission, only Eskom, the state-owned electric company, apologised unconditionally to black South Africans for "entertaining and perpetuating apartheid." Eskom executive Willem Koch told the Commission on 11 November 1997 that his company did not conduct itself as a good corporate citizen and did little, if anything, to alleviate the plight of black people.
He was quoted by The Wall Street Journal in a report just cited above. And as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairman of the Truth Commission, said about the 55 submissions from companies and business groups which remained adamant in their refusal to apologise and in their position on apartheid:
"No one today admits supporting apartheid."
He was also quoted in the same report by The Wall Street Journal when the hearings were going on before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in November 1997.
In its testimony, the Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the biggest and most powerful labour organisation in the country, said business couldn't be trusted to fully disclose its role in suppressing black labour unions, in paying black workers starvation wages, in employing child labour on white farms, and in making use of prison labour on public works and white-owned businesses and farms.
However, during the same hearings, there was another voice of reason from the white side besides the apologetic testimony by Eskom executive Willem Koch. It came from an economics professor at the leading Afrikaner institution of higher learning, Stellenbosch University, who proposed paying some form of reparations to blacks:
"Sampie Terreblanche, an economist at Stellenbosch University, proposed a restitution tax imposed on wealth accumulated under apartheid.
Everyone with net assets of more than two million rand - $414,200 - could be taxed an additional 0.5 percentage point annually over 10 or 20 years, he told the hearing, to achieve what Dr. Terreblanche termed 'systemic justice and social stability' for the majority of South Africans.
Businessmen rejected the tax proposal." - (Sampie Terreblanche, cited by Robert Block in The Wall Street Journal, ibid).
By rejecting the tax proposal for reparations, South Africa's corporate elite were emphatically stating that they did nothing wrong to blacks during apartheid.
Some did not even believe that apartheid was wrong, a sentiment forcefully articulated in public by the hawkish and finger-wagging former president and one of the last two leaders of the apartheid regime, P.W. Botha, who bluntly stated: "We did nothing wrong." Therefore there was nothing to apologise for. And as Philip Krawitz, the former chairman of the South African Chamber of Business, told the Truth Commission:
"I believe it is not factually correct to assign guilt on a collective basis to business in South Africa.
Indeed, there were individual businesses who did prosper under apartheid, who did exploit the system, who were cozy with the government. But we who were in the South African Chamber of Business and its forerunners....we stood resolutely against apartheid for many decades." - (Philip Krawitz, quoted ibid).
If the members of the South African Chamber of Business "stood resolutely against apartheid for many decades," as Philip Krawitz contended, why did they continue to pay their black employees starvation wages? Why didn't they do something to help improve living conditions of their black employees and other blacks mired in poverty in the townships?
Why didn't they work with the South African Council of Churches and other groups opposed to apartheid to fight against racial injustice?
They never did any of that.
How is it that, at least some of them, never implemented the Sullivan principles to desegregate their businesses? Only some foreign companies doing business in South Africa did that; South African businesses didn't, they remained segregated and underpaid their black workers.
Why didn't they help to internationalise the struggle against the diabolical regime by working with anti-apartheid groups in other countries and by making financial contributions towards relief funds for apartheid victims?
They did nothing of the sort.
Why didn't they, as the linchpin of the South African economy, bring pressure to bear upon the white-minority regime to abandon its racist policies?
They never did.
Krawitz simply did not tell the truth.
His argument contradicts what some South African business tycoons conceded, although they denied propping up apartheid.
Mining executives admitted that exploiting racial and tribal divisions helped cut labour costs. Afrikaner executives admitted that the Afrikaner-dominated apartheid regime helped them get contracts - in what amounted to an act of ethnic solidarity.
They were all solidly behind the white racist government even until the late 1980s when the edifice of apartheid began to crack under mounting international pressure from economic sanctions. As Donald G. McNeil stated in a report from Johannesburg in The New York Times:
"Many companies helped the government evade trade sanctions, thwart the oil embargo and the United Nations arms embargo so effectively that the country built a powerful arms industry and even nuclear weapons." - (Donald G. McNeal, Jr., "Tycoons Voice Their Remorse for Profiting from Apartheid," in The New York Times, 14 November 1997, p. A-10).
One of the most blatant denials came from Armscor, the government-owned armaments industry.
Although it supplied weapons to the police and the army, it still maintained that it never committed human rights violations and never even imagined that the weapons it made would be used against fellow South Africans.
What is even harder to imagine is where the South African police in particular could have used the weapons besides South Africa itself.
And to say that the South African police, using weapons supplied by Armscor, did not commit human rights violations is to stretch the imagination. The claim lacks credibility and stretches credulity.
They did it on regular basis, especially against blacks, and Armscor executives knew that. Yet, they kept on arming the nation's racist and repressive security forces. Even South African solders, armed by Armscor, attacked black townships within South Africa in addition to launching raids into neighbouring countries to kill anti-apartheid opponents directly on orders from President P.W. Botha himself, the Great Crocodile.
Armscor executives were aware of all that and other human rights violations by the apartheid regime despite their professions to the contrary.
As white businesses - the biggest beneficiaries of South Africa's racist policies - continue to deny their role in propping up apartheid; and as the vast majority of whites, at least in the context of white electoral politics during the era of white minority rule, also continue to deny having played the most critical role in legitimising this abominable institution by electing racist leaders who openly enunciated and defended racist policies; the reaction from the other side, especially from blacks, is one of anger and disbelief, frustration and despair, at the refusal by whites to tell the truth about the atrocities perpetrated by one of the most racist and most oppressive regimes in modern times.
But the more whites continue to deny all that and try to undermine the black-majority government, the more militant blacks become.
Even segments of the moderate wing of the African National Congress (ANC) may become increasingly radicalised, although not quite like the populist Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC).
But there is, nonetheless, a discernable trend in that direction even if it's for purposes of forestalling a populist rebellion by adopting measures strong enough to placate feelings among blacks who are becoming increasingly impatient at the slow pace of change, especially in the economic arena where they still have been locked out because of the intransigence of the white minority who still control the economy.
And that was clearly the sentiment at the conference of the African National Congress at Polokwane when Jacob Zuma was overwhelmingly elected as the leader of the ruling party on 18th December 2007. It was the party's 60th congress.
His supporters never doubted that he had the popular touch, contrasted with President Thabo Mbeki who was seen as rather aloof. According to a report by BBC Africa, “Zuma: South Africa's Comeback Kid”:
“'He is a man who listens; he doesn't take the approach of an intellectual king,' said one unnamed supporter, in an apparent swipe at Mr Mbeki....
Throughout his political career, Mr Zuma has championed the rights of ordinary people.
His supporters believe the man they call JZ will redistribute South Africa's wealth in favour of the poor.
They say Mr Mbeki has been too business-friendly and presided over 'jobless growth.'"
The ruling African National Congress (ANC) does not want to be left behind by its own supporters who may become increasingly radical in their quest for fundamental structural changes in society in order to achieve economic equality.
That was clearly the position of the ANC even back in the 1990s at its 50th caucus held in the small town of Mafikeng near the border with Botswana in December 1997. As Kurt Shillinger reported from South Africa in The Boston Globe:
"After more than three years of rhetoric about reconciliation, black leaders voice increasing intolerance toward begrudged whites, who in turn feel increasingly alienated under majority rule.
The working class, mired in static living conditions, feels forsaken." - (Kurt Shillinger, “ANC Convenes 50th Caucus, Readying Torch to be Passed: Mandela Takes Party to Point of a New Era,” in The Boston Globe, December 16, 1997, p. A-12).
Critics said the ANC was more concerned about fiscal health than housing the poor and providing them with other services such as clean water, medical care, and electricity. And that was a very strong message the leadership could not ignore if the ANC was to stay in power well into the 21st century.
And it is the same message today. As Steven Friedman, director of the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg, stated:
"There is a sense among the grassroots that the government is not being responsible or accountable. That alienation is based on legitimate expectations of how government is supposed to work." - Steven Friedman, quoted, ibid).
The constant theme trumpeted by the militant wing of the ANC which may radicalise the ruling party is not only that the government is not fulfilling its promises to address the needs of the impoverished majority, but also that it is too lenient towards whites who are just as equally determined not to give up their privileges or share control of the economy with blacks.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, former wife of Nelson Mandela and a stubborn populist, was the most forceful exponent of this collective sentiment of the downtrodden masses and remained one through the years. As Sipho Maseko, a black political scientist at the University of the Western Cape, stated:
"A majority need someone like Winnie Mandela to articulate their complaints." - (Sipho Maseko, ibid.).
In fact, that is what President Mandela himself did in his farewell speech as leader of the African National Congress at the ANC's 50th caucus in Mafikeng on 16th December 1997.
His speech will be remembered for its strident tone as much as for its potent message and was undoubtedly one of the most militant he had ever given since he came out of prison and assumed stewardship of the nation.
He accused apartheid-era leaders of waging a clandestine campaign to destabilise South Africa's multiracial government. “The leopard has not changed its spots,” Mandela said of the National Party, which instituted apartheid and still represented the Afrikaner minority of Dutch-French-German-descended white settlers and other whites as well as Coloureds and Indians. He went on to say:
"These elements find it difficult to redefine their role in the setting of nonracial democracy. They continue to be imprisoned by notions of white supremacy. - (Nelson Mandela, quoted in "'A Militant Mandela Leaves ANC: While Remaining President, He Relinquishes Party Role,'" in the International Herald Tribune, December 17, 1997, p. 6).
Mandela warned the African National Congress that some whites wanted to maintain vestiges of apartheid to protect their privileges of the past.
He went on to say that those “who have not accepted the reality of majority rule” were helping to instigate South Africa's widespread crime, sabotaging the economy and using the mass media to spread anti-ANC propaganda. The goal, Mandela said, was to make the country ungovernable, subvert the economy and erode confidence in the ANC's ability to govern.
He also accused the mass media and some aid and development groups of working against his government. In the three-and-a-half years the ANC had been in power, “the matter has become perfectly clear that the bulk of the mass media in our country has set itself up as a force opposed to the ANC,” Mandela said.
He went on to say some aid groups were in fact acting as the political ears and mouthpieces for local and foreign interests acting against his government. He quoted, in particular, a United States Aid for International Development (USAID) document which he said stated its goals as challenging his government on important issues, “in some respects making President Mandela's task more difficult.”
President Mandela also listed the ANC government's achievements, including a new constitution, a stable government and programmes to provide electric power, running water and housing for millions of poor blacks ignored under apartheid.
“Who in this country could do better than the ANC?,” he asked at one point in a booming voice, departing from his prepared text.
It was a bitter speech in which he lashed out at South Africa's whites, saying they expected continued economic advantages in exchange for relinquishing political power to blacks.
Resting several times and frequently drinking water in the stifling hot auditorium during his four-hour address, Mandela said whites had begun to define “national reconciliation” as a guarantee that “their privileged positions in the socio-economic sphere” remain untouched.
He was quoted by Suzanne Daley in her report from South Africa, “Mandela Speech Attacks White Economic Elite,” published in the December 17, 1997 edition of The New York Times.
In his last major speech as president of the ruling African National Congress, Mandela went on to say that transformation from apartheid to racial equality was far from complete. Yet when any meaningful changes were attempted, such as the use of affirmative action to end racial inequalities, whites “consistently demonstrated” their determination to maintain the status quo, he said. He further stated:
"The spokespersons of the advantaged have not hesitated to cry foul, citing all manner of evil, such as racism, violation of the Constitution, nepotism, dictatorship, inducing a brain drain and frightening the foreign investor." - (Mandela, quoted by Suzanne Daley, “Mandela Speech Attacks White Economic Elite,” in The New York Times, December 17, 1997, p. A-1. See also “South Africa's New Leaders,” in The Economist, 20 December 1997, pp. 55 – 56).
Although Mandela had always saved his fiercest oratory for ANC gatherings, the tone of his farewell address was surprising to many people in its harshness, especially to whites.
However, the blistering attack on their intransigence and manipulative tactics by many of them to sabotage the reconciliation process and undermine the government was well-deserved.
And President Mandela clearly intended his message to get out to the world, since more than 350 news agencies covered the event; a fact he was not oblivious of.
Some political experts said Mandela's speech also probably reflected the views of the man succeeding him, Thabo Mbeki, and was an attempt by Mandela to throw his weight behind Mbeki. As Allister Sparks, author of several books on South African politics, stated:
"It was a watershed speech in many ways. I think what you saw is Mr. Mandela legitimising a tougher line for Mbeki." - (Allister Sparks, quoted by Suzanne Daley, “Mandela Speech Attacks White Economic Elite,” op.cit.).
Others said the speech was also an attempt to focus on the general elections of 1999. By repeatedly characterising the struggle to transform South Africa as being far from complete, Mandela once again defined the African National Congress as a liberation movement which must stick together and mobilise forces in the on-going struggle against the vestiges of apartheid.
But there were those who said the speech was, in fact, prepared by Mbeki and his team. As Michael Bratton, professor of political science and African studies at Michigan State University in the United States, who once was a visiting Fulbright scholar at the University of Natal and at the University of Durban in South Africa, stated:
"When 3,000 ANC delegates gathered in Mafikeng for the party's 50th congress in December 1997, Mandela gave a vituperative valedictory speech.
Before cataloguing the ANC's achievements, he lashed out at 'a counterrevolutionary network [of those] who have not accepted the reality of majority rule.'
Accused of subverting the government's program were apartheid holdovers in the bureaucracy, the main white opposition parties, foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and 'the bulk of the mass media.'
Although the text of the speech was reportedly prepared by Mbeki's office and is thought to reflect his views, it was presented by Mandela, perhaps because his vast [moral] authority made a strident message more palatable, and because a reversal of roles enabled Mbeki, whose supremacy is still being established, to rise above the fray." - (Michael Bratton, “After Mandela's Miracle in South Africa,” in Current History: A Journal of Contemporary World Affairs, May 1998, p. 216).
The reaction from white South Africans was swift and strong, although muted in some quarters. But international press coverage was also negative.
Many people, used to Mandela's conciliatory attitude towards whites, expected to hear the same kind of message in his farewell address as the leader of the ruling party, although he was to remain president of South Africa until his term expired in April 1999, after which he said he would not seek re-election for a second term.
Yet, such magnanimity on the part of blacks without reciprocity from whites would only embolden whites to become even more defiant against the black-majority government and its agenda for restructuring the society to achieve racial equality.
That is one of the most important things Mandela's critics, including much of the international press, ignored in their assessment of his valedictory speech which was nonetheless well-received among blacks who remain magnanimous towards whites and even elected a majority of non-blacks to the highest posts in the ruling African National Congress:
"International press coverage of the speech was adverse...[But] black domestic audiences reacted more favorably to a public rebuke of those white South Africans who insist on the preservation of what are widely perceived as ill-gotten gains.
Indeed, Mandela probably enhanced his status with core constituents who felt that he had gone too far to accommodate white interests....
[But also] to their credit, the 3,000 ANC delegates gathered in Mafikeng – who were overwhelmingly African – helped the ANC reaffirm its well-established nonracial credentials by electing seven non-Africans to the party's ten top executive positions." - (Ibid).
In his withering attack on whites still sympathetic to the old apartheid regime and who are also opposed to black-majority rule, President Mandela went on to say that an underground network of “the former ruling group” was poised “to launch or intensify a campaign of destabilization” that would include subverting the economy and using crime to “render the country ungovernable.”
He also attacked the media for “exploiting the dominant position it achieved as a result of the apartheid system, to campaign against both real change and the real agent of change, as represented by our movement.”
And he mentioned both the largely white liberal Democratic Party, and the National Party which instituted apartheid, as parties “engaged in a desperate struggle” to convince white voters that they are the most “reliable and best defenders of white privilege.”
Some of Mandela's most vitriolic statements were directed against the newly formed United Democratic Movement which was attempting to establish itself as a multiracial party and present itself as a credible alternative to the virtually unassailable multiracial African National Congress.
But the new party discredited itself right from the beginning with its dubious multiracial agenda and notorious leadership. As Mandela pointed out, the United Democratic Movement had drawn “into its ranks some of the most backward and corrupt elements in our society, which have no interest whatsoever in promoting the interests of the people. Thus the presence of leaders of criminal gangs at its founding conference was no accident.”
Mandela was quoted by Suzanne Daley, a reporter of The Washington Post, in her report from South Africa cited earlier.
Many delegates praised Mandela's speech, saying it addressed issues most South Africans – that is, the vast majority of blacks – really cared about; particularly the intransigence and lack of effort on the part of whites to reach across the great racial divide and help end racial inequalities. As Vusi Chinga, a 25 year-old black delegate from Klerksdorp, bluntly stated:
"That is the reality of the situation. We expected a lot of changes in South Africa, but it seems like change is only expected from us. We are really the only ones reconciling. They just want to see an African fail." - (Quoted, ibid).
And there is a lot of truth to that statement. The more blacks try to reach across the great racial divide, the further most whites pull back or look the other way; and the more blacks try to heal the wounds of the past through constructive dialogue and forgiveness, the more whites accuse them of conducting a witch hunt, instead of thanking them for being so forgiving.
They have made a big joke out of the whole reconciliation process by the Truth Commission to try and bring the races together in a spirit of brotherhood. As Professor Michael Bratton stated:
"The most ambitious goal of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, targeted through extensive radio and television coverage of its public hearings, is to change how white South Africans think. In this it has so far failed. Few whites are willing to admit complicity in apartheid." - (Michael Bratton, “After Mandela's Miracle in South Africa,” op.cit., p. 217).
Yet these are the very same people who deliberately kept the apartheid regime in power, as they consistently voted for racist leaders, election after election, year after year, decade after decade. They knew exactly what they were doing, whom they were voting for, and why: to keep blacks at the bottom - more than anybody else.
Without white voters, apartheid would have died a long time ago – and would not, in fact, even have had the chance to establish itself, except in the minds of those who conceived it. It would have been still-born. Even the architects of this diabolical institution knew that.
So, as whites continue to insulate themselves from the truth, race relations continue to be polarised, a feeling eloquently expressed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in December 1997:
"Tutu summed up the mood of the country by saying in late December last year that whites begrudge being asked to carry a burden of guilt and blacks resent the failure of whites to acknowledge how lucky they are."- (Desmond Tutu, cited ibid).
Given what human nature is, they should indeed consider themselves very lucky, especially in a country where they are vastly outnumbered by the people they oppressed for centuries and who continue to be their victims in many ways.
But there is a limit to human patience. Even saints run out of it. That is simply human.
Even people who have endured suffering without bitterness for years can not be expected to endure it forever. That partly explains why Mandela gave such a vituperative speech in which he strongly condemned and accused the white opposition and the white media of trying to thwart reforms in order to preserve and perpetuate white privilege at the expense of blacks.
He also warned that security networks established in the era of white-minority rule were never dismantled and still posed a threat to stability and democracy. He did not directly warn of an impending or a possible racial conflict but seemed to suggest such a possibility when he said that his three-year-and-a-half government's efforts to transform society still were new:
"[They have] not yet impacted seriously on the apartheid paradigm which affects all aspects of our lives. This process has not yet tested the strength of the counteroffensive which would seek to maintain the privileges of the white minority." - (Nelson Mandela, quoted in “Mandela Lambastes White Opposition in ANC Farewell,” in The Boston Globe, December 17, 1997, p. A-1; and in The Washington Post, December 17, 1997).
He went on to say that his efforts at reconciliation had been spurned by white political leaders. Specifically, he said the National Party's withdrawal in 1996 from a government of national unity showed that the party viewed the ANC with “implacable enmity.” South Africa's white parties had “decided against the pursuit of a national agenda” and had chosen instead to propagate “a reactionary, dangerous and opportunistic” position against the ruling African National Congress.
He also accused whites of invoking racist symbolism to gain political mileage from the nation's high crime rate and to suggest that a black government is doomed to fail. In addition, Mandela said, “the bulk of the mass media in our country has set itself up as a force of opposition to the ANC.”
That was one of the forces – racist white opposition – his successor Thabo Mbeki had to contend with after he assumed the presidency of the African National Congress at the party's 50th caucus in Mafikeng in December 1997, and of the country in June 1999.
Upon taking control of the ANC, Mbeki pledged to eradicate the stubborn remains of apartheid and bring economic liberation to the impoverished black masses:
"We must pursue the objectives of high and sustained economic growth and development to achieve a visible improvement in the standard of living of our people, with special emphasis on the poor." - (Thabo Mbeki, quoted in “Mandela Passes ANC Torch: Successor Aims for Development,” in The Boston Globe, December 21, 1997, p. A-2).
But Mbeki's leadership also posed a dilemma. As Kurt Shillinger reported from South Africa in The Boston Globe:
"An advocate of swifter social transformation, Mbeki has in recent months (in 1997) led some whites to fear that he wants to push them farther to the sidelines.
Trade unionists, meanwhile, worry that he is too conservative, focused more on economic growth than jobs for the masses." - (Ibid).
The trade unionists and their supporters had a point. During a period of 18 months before the 50th ANC party conference in Mafikeng in December 1997, the government's economic policies had cost the economy more jobs, through belt-tightening, than it had created. Labour Minister Toto Mboweni acknowledged this failure and the need for a careful balance between economic growth and job creation:
"Despite significant improvements in the rate of growth of the economy, there has been no visible improvement on the jobs numbers, and therefore we need to more vigorously proceed and implement some of the programs of economic transformation and development." - (Tito Mboweni, quoted ibid).
Mandela's speech signalled a possible shift to more emphasis on addressing the needs of the black masses than had been the case before among the ANC leaders whose focus on macroeconomic policy and fiscal austerity had often clashed with the need to tackle daily problems faced by millions of poverty-stricken blacks; a dichotomy acknowledged by Deputy President Mbeki and Labour Minister Mboweni as well as others in the ANC leadership.
Since he became president of South Africa in 1994, Mandela had pursued racial reconciliation diligently and was even able to establish good relations with a right-wing racist general who launched a rebellion before the 1994 election in a desperate attempt to reassert white supremacy.
He also held regular meetings on economic policy with the white corporate elite. He did all this to reassure whites that South Africa was their country too; and also to keep their economic and military power from being used against the new fragile multiracial government.
And he did that for good reason. Whites still dominated the armed forces and the entire security apparatus as well as the economy without which the government is nothing.
But in his farewell speech as leader of the ruling African National Congress, he stunned whites when he told them in no uncertain terms that they had not done enough in return:
"[He also] accused whites of treating reconciliation cavalierly and protecting their socioeconomic privilege by resisting efforts to uplift the nation's black majority. He singled out white opposition parties and the white media for opposing reforms, suggesting that their reluctance to buy into a 'new patriotism' being pushed by the ANC was tantamount to being an enemy of the state." - (“Mandela's Message: White Privilege Must Give Way,” in the International Herald Tribune, December 22, 1997, p. 1).
His speech clearly showed that South Africa was entering a new phase in which reconciliation would not necessarily be a top priority – unless whites reciprocate after deliberately choosing to remain aloof from the healing process in spite of all the efforts by the ruling African National Congress to try and reach out to them. As Lynne Duke reported from South Africa in the International Herald Tribune:
"Thabo Mbeki, Mandela's successor as ANC leader, has touched on these themes many times before, causing suspicion among whites that he would take a harder line toward them than Mr. Mandela did." - (Ibid.).
It was a perception shared by other analysts, since transformation of post-apartheid South Africa is usually seen as the antithesis of reconciliation because it entails elimination of white privilege whites are determined to maintain indefinitely, if not forever is possible. As Robert Schrirer, a political scientist at the University of Cape Town, put it:
"To some extent, the popular perception was of Nelson Mandela as the reconciler and Thabo Mbeki the transformer. I think that one should really view the speech as the opening shot of the Thabo presidency." - (Robert Shrirer, quoted , ibid).
On reaching out to whites, Mbeki said he would hold personal meetings with whites, in a spirit of constructive engagement, to allay their fears and at the same time let them know that it was imperative for all South Africans to face harsh realities if the country was going to achieve genuine racial reconciliation and justice and equality for all its citizens.
But some people feared that the Mandela-Mbeki team invoked racial group interests to an extent that is out of step with the new multiracial government's espoused goal of a non-racial society. As Themba Sono, the black president of the South Africa Institute of Race Relations, said about Mandela's speech:
"He was clearing the decks for Thabo Mbeki to come and focus no longer on reconciliation but on the primacy of the interests of the black majority.
Does this comport with our constitutional prescriptions?" - (Themba Sono, quoted ibid.).
It does, of course, because the new South African constitution allows the government to correct past racial injustices such as those inflicted on blacks by apartheid; a point that, for some inexplicable reason, Sono did not seem to grasp.
But the constitution also allows for the protection of minority rights. Accommodating the interests of both is one of the main challenges the African National Congress is going to face for many years to come if it remains, as it probably will, secured anchored in power.
The ANC continues to see itself as a black liberation movement with a mission to not simply lead the country but also improve the living conditions of the vast majority of blacks who were denied opportunities during the apartheid era. Therefore it is obvious that the interests of the two racial groups are going to clash.
But that is primarily because whites, who are the richest people in South Africa, don't want to make any economic sacrifices to help uplift blacks who are collectively the poorest racial group in the country.
It is a zero-sum game in which one group's gains are seen as another group's loss.
And the economic gap between blacks and whites will continue to exist and strain race relations unless whites, because of their disproportionately high incomes, are taxed higher than they are being taxed now, and also pay a reparations tax for decades in order to help improve the condition of the black masses.
Although Mandela's speech was not well-received in the white community, and probably frightened the majority of them, one could still hear the voice of reason coming from a few whites; in fact very few.
In the media, Patrick Bulger, political editor of the Johannesburg Star newspaper, broke ranks with his colleagues – most of whom, because of their hostility, only vindicated Mandela's position when he said in his speech that they were working to undermine his government – when he wrote a scathing analysis of the white perception of the new dispensation, saying:
"[The common but unspoken white view is] that blacks somehow should be satisfied with less, that this is somehow in the natural God-given order of things.
The ANC, the conventional white wisdom would go, is welcome to bring about a better life for all South Africans, but not at the cost of white privilege. "- (Patrick Bulger, in an editorial in the Johannesburg Star, December 1997; also quoted by Lynne Duke, “Mandela: Putting Whites on Notice,” International Herald Tribune, ibid., p. 9).
Without sacrificing their privileged position, there can be no better life for all South Africans. And what whites have always feared will become a self-fulling prophecy because of their intransigence.
Yet, that is exactly what the African National Congress has been trying to avoid but, unfortunately, without getting a positive response from most whites who would rather risk an all-out confrontation with blacks than give up their privileges they unjustly acquired during the apartheid era at the expense of blacks.
But, in spite of their defiance, the transformation will go on, nonetheless, in order to correct past racial injustices – they themselves were responsible for – and build a stable multiracial society. As The Economist reported after the 50th ANC party conference – which takes place every three years – in December 1997:
"There is mounting pressure for what South Africans call 'transformation.' This means the shifting of power – whether in business, the media, universities or the use of municipal resources – from white to black.
The two groups see this matter differently: whites seem to think they have done enough and it is time to get back to business as usual; blacks believe that genuine change has barely begun." - (“South Africa's New leaders,” in The Economist, 20 December 1997, p. 55).
It was in this context that Mandela lashed out at white intransigence in his militant speech which clearly showed that the struggle continues.
But probably more than anybody else, it was Winnie Madikizela-Mandela who embodied the anger and frustration of the most downtrodden black masses; a sentiment she had been able to articulate forcefully from a populist platform for years, sending a powerful message to whites that they may not even have a place under the African sun – because of their own undoing – if they didn't come to terms with the new realities of a free multiracial South Africa that was nonetheless predominantly black African.
She made it clear that white control was over. In a rare public address in February 1998, the former wife of Nelson Mandela told white business leaders at a conference in Johannesburg that newly democratic South Africa faces a second revolution to break the white stranglehold on the economy. She went on to bluntly state:
"The truth and reality is that South Africa today and into the future is no longer European or white, but African and, more often, black." - (Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, “Madikizela-Mandela Speaks Out: Says Whites' Control of Economy is Over in South Africa, in The Boston Globe, February 13, 1998, p. A-23).
A leader of international stature in her own right with formidable populist credentials, the former Mrs. Mandela -whose ties to Mandela and continued use of her former spousal name also invests her with an aura of moral authority - told an almost white audience of businessmen and businesswomen that white dominance in the country's boardrooms was over, and also that following the victory of the African National Congress in the country's first all-race elections in 1994, South Africa faced “a second revolution that is focused on Africanism, African humanism, a clearer African identity. The second revolution will lead among other things to the demise of Eurocentric liberalism; the disappearance of the white man as we have known him and her in Africa; and the renaissance of African ubuntu.”
Also known for her fiery rhetoric, Madikizela-Mandela was viewed with apprehension by most whites because of her immense popularity among the masses – at the grassroots level – especially in the townships, a hotbed of radical activism, and had the potential to greatly influence the course of events in South Africa from behind the scenes even if she did not win any public office in the future as a national leader.
At the December 1997 ANC conference in Mafikeng, the 63-year-old former first lady shelved a bid for election as deputy president of the African National Congress – which would have virtually assured her the vice-presidency of the country after the 1999 general election – when she failed to win enough support from the convention delegates who had been manipulated by the party leadership to block her from winning because of her tarnished record in the final years of apartheid.
She was alleged to have masterminded a violent campaign against her opponents in the black township of Soweto during that period, but denied all the charges levelled against her.
Political analysts linked her to the radical left wing of the ANC which shifted from socialism to more moderate positions after the party was unbanned in 1990 by the last apartheid rulers to prepare for a transition to black majority rule. She was also linked to a faction within the African National Congress, which was virtually assured of a second victory in the 1999 general election, that sought to limit the role of whites, Indians and Coloureds, and promote the influence of blacks.
Using the ANC's euphemism for the issue of race balances in government and business, the former Mrs. Mandela told the white businessmen and women: “This second revolution will address the national question in a program that is both systemic and prioritized.”
Speaking directly to business for the first time, Madikizela-Mandela said blacks would not tolerate cosmetic changes in corporations:
"Business, like all institutions of our society, should be Africanized during the transformation process. In short, transform the corporate culture.
Unless the African is placed at the center of transformation and the national agenda, our country will not be stable, productive, and competitive." - (Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, quoted in The Boston Globe, ibid).
On the same day his former wife addressed white businessmen and women in Johannesburg, President Mandela appealed for unity to rebuild the country, returning to his more familiar theme of reconciliation after a hard-hitting speech at the 50th ANC party conference in Mafikeng in December 1997. He stated on 12 February 1998:
"What we need, as we approach the fifth year of freedom, is to become a nation rich in the diversity of its culture and opinions, but united in its resolve to relieve the poverty that still blights the lives of the majority."- (Nelson Mandela, quoted, ibid).
In spite of President Mandela's noble sentiment of multi-racialism, an equally noble sentiment of black nationalism is on the rise. And there is nothing wrong with black nationalism in a predominantly black nation provided the rights of minority groups are equally protected by the majority.
That is the ideological position articulated by Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, although the message may be misconstrued – or even deliberately distorted – by others to mean: exclude or shut out all whites and other non-blacks; which would be a contradiction of her position on what she calls “African ubuntu.”
True ubuntu is colour-blind; it can't be but that as a philosophy predicated on the equality and brotherhood of men. And African ubuntu has proved to be exactly that as the history of the white man in Africa clearly shows. He has been embraced and treated with compassion in spite of all the pain and suffering he has inflicted on Africans since he conquered and took over the continent as if it belonged to nobody.
The position Madikizela-Mandela articulates on what she calls “Africanism,...[and] a clearer African identity” is also the same position articulated by the late Steve Biko, founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, who was murdered by the apartheid regime in September 1977 at the age of 30.
Even President Mandela conceded the primacy of this position, articulated by his former wife and by Steve Biko, as he clearly demonstrated in his militant speech at the 50th ANC party conference in Mafikeng in December 1997.
Therefore, although Biko is dead, his legacy lives on and will continue to inspire and shape the future of the African National Congress – as will, undoubtedly, the militant wing of the party whose most forceful and most articulate spokesperson was Winine Madikizela-Mandela. As Peter Beinart stated in a dispatch from Johannesburg in The New Republic:
"In the past several months, the ANC has begun an ideological transformation toward Biko-style black nationalism, a turn signaled most dramatically by Nelson Mandela's fiery, anti-white speech in December (1997) at the ANC conference in Mafikeng.
This shift is already prompting howls of fear and disapproval from white liberals in South Africa and the West.
But the fear is misplaced. The ANC's growing Africanism is the flip side of its remarkable embrace of the free market.
It is best understood not as a move to the left, but to the right – part of a broader turn toward market authoritarianism in black politics that is visible in phenomena as seemingly unrelated as the rise of IMF-approved autocrats like Uganda's Yoweri Museveni and in Louis Farrakhan's support of black entrepreneurship." - (Peter Beinart, “Black Markets: Why Capitalism is Trumping Multiracialism in South African Politics,” in The New Republic, Washington, D.C., February 16, 1998, p. 11).
And affirmative-action policies pursued by President Mandela's government and by others after him are a key component of this increasing emphasis on Africanism, although they don't go far enough, at least according to the view of the charismatic populist icon Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the radical faction of the ruling African National Congress of which she was an integral part. But it is a move in the right direction, nonetheless.
In a media campaign launched in February 1998, coincidentally or not, the same month in which the former Mrs. Mandela also gave her strongly pro-African speech, President Mandela's government announced a spate of affirmative-action policies in jobs and other areas including sports, land, mineral, and water resources. As Mandela himself said during the opening of parliament in the same month:
"Affirmative action is a corrective action. We shall not be discouraged by the sirens of self-interest that are being sounded in defense of privilege, and the insults that equate women, Africans,...Coloureds, and the disabled with a lowering of standards." - (Nelson Mandela, quoted by Kate Dunn in “Mandela Hits White Wealth: South Africa Turns to Affirmative Action,” in The Christian Science Monitor, February 26, 1998, pp. 1, and 7).
The imperative need for such corrective measures should be viewed in the context of the huge disparities which still exist today and threaten to put blacks and whites on a collision course with dire consequences for the country even without the possibility of a low-intensity race war.
The disparities are frightening. And they are being perpetuated by whites who control the economy. That should be enough to jolt the conscience of white South Africans and make them give up some of their privileges, as a start, before it's too late and they end up with nothing. As Kate Dunn reported from Cape Town in a despatch to The Christian Science Monitor:
"So far, the end of apartheid has yielded little change in South Africa.
The richest 20 percent of the population, mostly white, earn 65 percent of all income, while the poorest 20 percent, mostly black, earn only 3 percent."- Kate Dunn, ibid., p. 7).
Khehla Shubane, a black political analyst at the Centre for Political Studies in Johannesburg, said the ANC's affirmative-action policy was partly inspired by a need to “reassure blacks after three years of reassuring whites,” quoted by one of South Africa's major business publications, Business Day, in February 1998.
No one would, of course, expect major changes in the economic arena after only three years or so since the African National Congress came to power in May 1994 after the general elections in April that year. But even more important, besides such reassurance to blacks, Shubane said, was the need to use affirmative action to create a black middle class to replace whites who were slowly leaving the country after the end of white minority rule.
There was, however, fierce opposition to this policy. And that is still the case today.
The South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), a libertarian think tank funded partly by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) – one of the foreign agencies President Mandela accused of trying to undermine his government – was a persistent and vociferous critic of the ANC's affirmative-action initiatives and has remained one through the years. It contends that such a policy would legalise reverse discrimination and spawn lawsuits by non-blacks against businesses enforcing it.
It also points out that affirmative action requires the categorisation of employers and employees on the basis of race, not very much different from what was done under apartheid.
Many critics of the government's policy argue that apartheid itself started as a form of affirmative action through which jobs and educational opportunities were reserved for poor whites, mostly Afrikaners.
Therefore post-apartheid South Africa should have a system of meritocracy under which people are judged purely on the basis of merit, they contend.
In response to all that, President Mandela accused the Institute of Race relations and the predominantly white opposition Democratic Party of “scaremongering” and defending white privilege.
Even Business Day, the voice of the white business elite, took Mandela's side, stating in February 1998 that the proposed affirmative-action legislation was “an unobtrusive bill to address historical inequities and contemporary political pressure which, if not remedied, could lead to economic instability.”
Response to affirmative action in mining policy was more subdued, even though it involved the most powerful white interests in South Africa.
Mines Minister Panuell Maduna proposed that, over time, mineral rights now held by individuals and corporations should revert to the state. The government would then issue licences for their exploitation, preferably by blacks. Unexploited licences would be revoked and reissued.
Maduna, a black himself, did not give any details about his proposals to empower small-scale black mining concerns.
Similarly, Water Minister Kader Asmal, a South African of Indian descent, proposed abolition of rights through which landowners own water on their property. He wanted to free up water resources to be used by blacks, many of whom can't get water.
Interestingly enough, frustrated white entrepreneurs applauded the water and mines initiatives because they would break the stranglehold “old money” had on those resources, especially in the hands of monopolistic interests.
But even those white entrepreneurs who were now seeking to end this monopoly had access to capital and other economic opportunities blacks did not have under apartheid.
Fundamental changes were also underway in the agricultural sector. Agriculture Minister Derek Hanekom, a white, said his ministry would continue its policy of negotiating, at market price, land purchase from whites as restitution for blacks who lost property under apartheid. He also added that the intransigence on the part of some white farmers may lead him to start expropriating land.
But a white backlash is to be expected in the form of economic sabotage and abuse of black workers because of such expropriation and what most whites consider to be an invasion of their domain: the economy over which they have a stranglehold and which they could send flying into a tailspin at will if they chose to do so.
One of the reasons they may not do so is that they are going to suffer as well, unless they leave South Africa. In addition to their almost exclusive monopoly of the economy and other levers of power, for example in education and national security, they are also determined to maintain exclusive control in certain areas of sports:
"South Africa may have a tough time tackling affirmative action in the sports arena, especially rugby. Whites consider rugby a last bastion of dominance. Every white boy plays it at school, and it is linked to Afrikaners' sense of never-say-die toughness.
President Mandela tried to use the sport as an element of national reconciliation by attending the 1995 World Cup won by a South African squad with only one black player. He did so on the promise that officials would encourage racial integration, but they have not done so." - (K. Dunn, “Tackling Rugby's White-Only Image,” in The Christian Science Monitor, ibid., p. 7).
It is such intransigence, and raw-naked racism, which justifies strong measures such as legally sanctioned affirmative action to end racial inequalities across the spectrum.
If the rugby team is a national team, as its white officials claim it is, representing the entire South Africa and not just white South Africa, then there is no reason why blacks – who constitute almost 80 per cent of the country's total population – should not be included in it, and in significant numbers, and not just as a token. As Sports Minister Steve Tshwete stated:
"Perhaps it's time we should insist on a quota system." - (quoted ibid.).
Even after the end of apartheid as a legal institution, not only do whites continue to flex muscles; there are many who brutalise blacks without any fear of retribution even under the law. That is because they still dominate the police and the courts. They also have financial clout. Money talks.
Perhaps nowhere is such abuse greater than in the area of tenant farming where blacks are at the mercy of white farmers many of whom brutalise them at will.
The law says it is illegal to kick tenant farmers off the land. But such evictions are still common. The law also says farm owners have no right to beat up their employees. But they do it all the time.
White landowners simply ignore the law, knowing that the people who are supposed to enforce it are on their side. Most of them are white just like they are.
There have been numerous cases of brutality against black farm workers through the years. And they continue to suffer even today.
One example of such brutality and callousness involved the landless Phiri family in the winelands of the Cape Province not long after apartheid ended and was probably intended to show that nothing has changed:
"The only sign of the 'new' South Africa in their lives is the calendar on their cardboard wall advertising the post-apartheid Constitution and Bill of Rights, neither of which has helped them in heir plight." - (“South Africa's Landless Still Get the Boot,” in The Christian Science Monitor, March 26, 1998, p. 6).
In July 1997, Listen Phiri and his wife, Dinah, were evicted from the farm of P.J. Benade, where they had worked for 18 years. Yet the post-apartheid era law against such evictions guarantees 6 million tenant workers the right to housing on the farms they have worked on for 10 years or more. Most of the tenant workers, including the Phiri family, are black.
On 4 July 1997, the local sheriff arrived at the Phiri's home and carted out all the family's belongings in spite of the fact that it was raining outside.
The goods were loaded in two trucks and dumped outside the farm gate “which was behind us. We just stood there in the rain, crying. We had nowhere to go,” Mr. Phiri explained, quoted by The Christian Science Monitor, in March 1998.
Adding insult to injury, the farm owner, P. J. Benade, billed them the equivalent of $400 - US dollars - for the cost of their eviction, an astronomical amount for people of such low income, on top of everything that had been done to them.
The new post-apartheid law also gives elderly and disabled tenant farmers the right to live in their farmhouses until they die. But even they are not safe from eviction and abuse by the white farm owners.
Fortunately for the Phiri family, they were able to move into a single-room cement brick house built with a $3,000-government-housing subsidy, but almost a year after they were kicked off the land.
But they were grateful, nonetheless, for the housing they got from the new democratic government of South Africa, something which would have never been done for a black family during apartheid. As Dina Phiri said: “I'm just happy that President Mandela has given us a place here where the white man can not tell us anything anymore.”
It is this kind of treatment, or mistreatment, which fuels resentment among many blacks against whites who continue to treat them as subhuman beings in their native land.
And it could even lead to a populist uprising in which whites will be the biggest losers. But it would be a rebellion whites themselves started because of their continued mistreatment of blacks even after the end of apartheid.
White farmers have vehemently attacked the new land-reform laws protecting black tenant farmers in spite of the fact that they lose nothing when blacks are protected by the new legislation from arbitrary evictions. And not all evictions are reported. As Denzel van Zyl, an advocate with Lawyers for Human Rights, stated:
"We hear about 8 to 10 evictions per month in the winelands region alone, and that's only the cases we hear about. I'm sure there are many more."- (Quoted in “South Africa's Landless Still Get the Boot,” in The Christian Science Monitor, ibid).
The plight of Albertina Zulu is another such case. A former tenant farmer, Mrs. Zulu was evicted in 1995 after her husband died.
Under the new law passed after the end of apartheid, no eviction can be carried out without a court order. But that has not discouraged or stopped white landowners from evicting black tenant workers. And the reason is simple. Like most landowners, most magistrates are “white, middle-class, conservative males. Social [and racial] links...render it unthinkable that a magistrate would act against his [white] friends on behalf of [black] farm workers,” said Denzel van Zyl.
It is racism, pure and simple.
An even more explosive issue, besides eviction, in the area of land policy is that of restitution for land seized from blacks during the apartheid era and the period of British colonial government.
An estimated 7 million blacks were swindled out of their land by whites between 1913 and 1989. And the new multiracial government says the land must be returned to its rightful owners on “willing buyer, willing seller” agreement” basis.
The government is supposed to partially fund the repurchase of stolen land, or similar land, if the owner is unwilling to sell it.
But it has not mobilised enough funds to do so, since appropriations for the land acquisition and purchase programmes are hampered or even entirely blocked by a number of obstacles including constitutional strictures. As opposition member of parliament Patricia de Lille of the militant Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) stated:
"The government needs more constitutional leeway to expropriate."- (Patricia de Lille, quoted, ibid.).
One of the most tragic cases which demonstrated the powerlessness of black farm workers and the depraved nature of the apartheid mentality involved the murder of a black infant by a white farmer.
His black workers said he had a habit of shooting into the air in bursts of belligerence and were afraid of him.
On 11 April 1998, this farmer, Nicholas Steyn, shouted angrily at a 9-year-old black girl, Francina Dlamini, from the gate of his rural homestead in Zesfontein, an obscure locale 25 miles east of Johannesburg. The girl did not stop:
"[She was carrying] her 6-month-old cousin Angelina in a traditional blanket pouch on her back, and was nearing the three-room hut where she lived with 10 relatives, who represented two generations of rural workers for the Steyn family. She was almost home." (Lynne Duke, “Infant's Murder Shakes South Africans,” in the International Herald Tribune, April 22, 1998, p. 6).
That was when tragedy struck.
Steyn fired his handgun – just one of several weapons he had in his gun collection – and hit Angelina in the head. The bullet smashed through the infant's skull and also hit Francina in the back. The infant died.
It was brutal white power at its worst, showing that apartheid may be legally dead but it is very much alive in many areas of life and in the minds of most whites as has been clearly demonstrated by their stiff resistance to change under the new multiracial government.
Under white-minority rule, brutality against blacks was common. Many were savagely beaten and even murdered by whites at will. Those killed were buried in unmarked graves or simply disposed of. Unfortunately, for many blacks, today is still yesterday.
The brutal murder of a 6-month-old black baby by a white farmer made headlines, such as “Infant Murder Shakes South Africans,” in the International Herald Tribune; and “April 11 Killing of A Black Infant by a White Farmer Points to Still-Simmering Racial Strife,” in The Christian Science Monitor in its edition of 22 April 1998. And there was an uproar in South Africa itself:
"The killing of Angelina and the critical wounding of Francina have dominated headlines and radio talk shows across a shocked nation.
That such an incident could happen after four years of democracy and a sustained attempt by the new government to foster racial tolerance and reconciliation 'has struck a chord because it appears stereotypical of the most brutal pre-1994 racism,' the newspaper Business Day declared in an editorial last week." - (“Killing: South Africa Shaken by a Reminder of the Apartheid Era,” in the International Herald Tribune, April 22, 1998, p. 7; Business Day, Johannesburg, April 1998. See also The New York Times and The Washington Post, April 22, 1998).
To make matters worse:
"There are whites who have told reporters that Mr. Steyn, as a farmer in fear of being victimised by rural workers, was justified in what he did." - (Ibid).
One wonders what kind of outlaws a 6-month-old baby and a 9-year-old girl – both in clear view of the white farmer who shot them – would be.
Adding insult to injury, Angelina's mother was not even told which hospital her baby had been taken to. When the children were rushed off in an ambulance, “that was the last time I saw them,” said the mother, 29-year-old Violet Dlamini, a poor domestic servant, quoted in the International Herald Tribune, April 22, 1998.
And the 42-year-old Steyn was not even arrested until the day after the shooting and his house was not searched until days after that.
Many blacks, infuriated, by the murder and having suffered so much racial injustice themselves, wanted to avenge the murder.
Their anger was fuelled even further when they heard that there were whites who told reporters that Steyn was justified in shooting the two black children even though they were not, and could not have been, a threat to him or his family.
Hundreds of black demonstrators converged in the court during his bail hearing. When he saw all that, he decided to stay in jail where he felt he would be safer. Even his parents who lived on the farm with him moved away for their own safety.
As the victims' family members described the scene when they rushed to the children after they heard the screams of 11-year-old Vusi, Angelina's brother who had been walking with Francina, blood was everywhere. And as Ed O'Loughlin reported from South Africa in The Christian Science Monitor:
"Angelina Zwane was born more than three years after South Africa's apartheid system was formally brought to an end. Yet many South Africans believe it was apartheid that killed her....
Her nine-year-old cousin, Francina Dlamini, who was carrying her on her back, was seriously wounded by the same bullet.
The farmer, Nicholas Steyn, claimed the shooting was justified because the children were trespassing on his land.
The killing has shocked the world, and left many South Africans wondering how much has really changed from the old days of white privilege.
Together with a number of other incidents, it has also led to worries of rising ethnic tensions in a country where race is still the greatest single issue in political, social, and economic life." - (Ed O'Loughlin, “Old Issues of Black and White Stir Up the New South Africa: April 11 Killing of a Black Infant by a White Farmer Points to Still Simmering Racial Strife,” in The Christian Science Monitor, April 22, 1998, p. 6).
The shooting of the two black children was horrific enough. And what intensified public outrage was the way the police handled the matter.
They not only refused to arrest the shooter, Steyn, after the shooting; they manhandled the 9-year-old victim, Francina, in spite of the fact that she was seriously injured, in bad condition, and in the hospital:
"The police's initial failure to take Mr. Steyn into custody because he was 'cooperative' and had a fixed address reminded many angry blacks of times not long ago when white farmers were able to assault and even kill blacks with near impunity.
The police have also been accused of gross insensitivity after reporters said they witnessed two detectives – one black, one white – manhandling and aggressively interrogating Francina as she lay recuperating from her gunshot wound in the hospital." - (Ibid).
And the mistreatment of Angelina's mother herself after the shooting, and the abject poverty in which she lived and worked as a farm hand for slave wages, further inflamed passions especially among blacks against whites many of whom continue to abuse and even brutalise them after the end of apartheid.
Steyn emerged as a powerful symbol of white supremacy, an embodiment of a system which refuses to die.
The case also highlighted the great racial divide and the predicament – virtual slavery – in which millions of blacks are still trapped and left at the mercy of cruel white masters mainly because whites still control the economy and the police as well as the judicial system:
"The revelation that Angelina's mother was working seven days a week for Steyn's family in return for a mud hut and $40 a month has highlighted the fact that many poor blacks still work as near-slave laborers for their employers.
According to Mrs. Dlamini, Steyn's first action after shooting her daughter was to fire Dlamini and order her off his property.
Even more troubling was the reaction of other white farmers living near the Steyns. The Saturday Star newspaper in Johannesburg reported that several of them felt Steyn – who often mounted lone vigilante patrols at night – must have had good reason to shoot the children." - (Ibid).
The murder of 6-month-old Angelina and the shooting of her 9-year-old cousin came at a time when racial violence was taking place in other parts of the country, including an attack by white parents and white policemen on black children at a high school which continued to practise racial segregation after apartheid was outlawed by the new multiracial government.
The school was closed for more than three weeks in March and April 1998 following violent racial clashes in which black students and black policemen who tried to protect them were overwhelmed by whites:
"The killing comes fresh on the heels of recent racial clashes at a high school in Vryburg, northwest of Johannesburg.
Last month (March 1998), white parents and policemen attacked black pupils who were demonstrating against continuing racial segregation in what, until four years ago, was a whites-only school.
Journalists witnessed white adults assaulting black boys and girls with sjamboks (heavy leather whips). Black policemen were forced to defend the pupils." - (Ibid).
Desegregation and affirmative action are some of the major policy initiatives the first multiracial democratic government under President Nelson Mandela launched to end racial injustices. As Joel Netshitenzhe, Mandela's spokesman, stated:
"Racist paradigms often underlie criticism of government policy." - (cited, ibid).
And in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, the South African Institute of Race Relations blames blacks more than it does whites for the deterioration of race relations, contending that black-on-white racism in national life is on the rise. This is the same institute Mandela blamed for attempting to thwart government efforts towards racial integration.
Therefore, while it is true that fundamental changes have taken place in South Africa especially in the political arena since the end of apartheid, it is equally true that the country still has a long way to go and has not changed in many fundamental respects.
Many whites still don't respect blacks. And many of them don't believe that black people have any rights any white person – in his or her right mind – is bound to respect.
It makes no difference to them that a person of high moral stature like Mandela became president of South Africa, or that black majority rule is now a fact of life. Push them too far, they will cripple the economy, and the infrastructure, which depend so much on white professionals who constitute the critical mass of the country's manpower. They are the backbone of the infrastructure, the most developed on the entire African continent.
That is the veiled threat many of them use to keep blacks in check.
And in areas where they have allowed blacks to enter in the economic arena, they have made sure whites are still firmly in control. They manipulate the levers of power, enabling them to manipulate blacks at will. And they can even starve some blacks, if they want to, because they are ones who feed them by providing them with jobs.
That is what led the International Herald Tribune to ask this question: “Is 'Black Empowerment' Working in South Africa?: Critics Say Too Few Are Reaching the Top.” It was the headline of a report, in that news paper, by Donald G. McNeil sent from Johannesburg:
"When does a 'black empowerment deal' truly empower blacks? And when is it just another example of what Jimmy Manye calls 'the Irish coffee problem' – blacks on the bottom, whites on top, with a sprinkling of black faces like cinnamon on the foam to lend credibility? These are some of the hardest questions in South African business today." - (Donald G. McNeil, “Is 'Black Empowerment' Working in South Africa?: Critics Say Too Few Are Reaching the Top,” in the International Herald Tribune, April 18, 1998, p. 1; The New York Times, April 16, 1998).
In reality, whatever major business deals are made between black businessmen and white businessmen, enabling black investors to “buy” some white companies, they enrich only a few blacks. And in most cases, black “owners” are no more than fronts for white owners, executives, bankers and other business tycoons.
The situation is not very much different from what goes on in the United States where black “contractors” front for white owners to get business contracts from the federal government under the affirmative-action programme. As Jimmy Manye, head of the Black Management Forum in South Africa, bitterly remarked:
"We're sick and tired of the companies who do what they want and call it empowerment. We're going to make it our business to investigate these deals." - (Quoted, ibid).
And as Phinda Madi, author of a book, Black Empowerment in the New South Africa, published in 1997, put it, some companies think that having a minority black stake and “a well-known black personality with (liberation) credentials (as chairman will) serve as protection against the transformation barbarians at the gate.”
It is an open secret, he said, that “some organizations with dreadful industrial-relations track records get into empowerment deals as a labor-relations shield. The new chairman becomes the fire-eater, the magician to calm the marauding masses on the shop floor.”
He was quoted by Donald G. McNeil in the April 18, 1998 edition of the International Herald Tribune. And he articulated a collective sentiment shared by many blacks across the nation.
Even some whites don't question its rationale. As Jenny Cargill, director of Business Map, a consulting firm in Johannesburg that tracks business trends, stated:
"One can't belittle black ownership – it's important. But it's usually been achieved with very high debt levels. All the dividends go back to the (white) institutions that backed the deal.
Now the companies need to get scrutinised more on their internal policies – management training, affirmative action. There are these enormous glass ceilings over black staff." - (Jenny Cargill, quoted in “Is 'Black Empowerment' Working in South Africa?,” ibid).
These enormous glass ceilings over blacks are installed to block them from advancing farther into what most whites consider to be their domain, the economy – around which everything else revolves – now that blacks dominate the political field but where power is meaningless without economic clout.
But such intransigence by whites is not only retarding black economic progress; it is pushing the country to the precipice:
"A rural high school erupts in racial clashes. Dozens (of blacks) die in detention or at the hands of the (white-controlled) police each month....
South Africa, after its peaceful transition to majority rule, suddenly seems to be sliding back into the racism and intolerance of its apartheid past.
A series of incidents has shaken the confidence of the hopeful and confirmed the worst fears of the skeptical....
More than isolated events, analysts said, the confrontations of the past several weeks reflect that the country is passing into a more openly contentious stage of transformation that will test whether it can build an equitable multiracial society....
Many whites have ignored or resisted change from the outset, while most blacks say it has come too slowly." - (Kurt Shillinger, reporting from South Africa, in his report, “South Africa's Growing Pains: Racial Clashes, Police Violence Are Blows to Confidence,” in The Boston Globe, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, May 24, 1998, p. A-11).
Besides the shooting of two black children by a white farmer, the attack on black pupils by white parents at a former all-white school, the death of many blacks at the hands of the white-dominated police every month, and the brutal treatment of black workers on white farms and in other places where they are employed by whites, many other incidents have highlighted the racial tensions which exist and continue to rise in the country.
They include efforts by the white establishment to destabilise the government, and pit blacks against fellow blacks within the government itself as the Afrikaner head of the army attempted to do when he presented President Nelson Mandela with a report claiming that top black soldiers and some of the country's leading black politicians – including his former wife Winnine Madikizela-Mandela – were plotting to overthrow him.
The report turned out to be a total fabrication by the old guard from the apartheid era trying to sow seeds of confusion and discord among blacks and discredit the black-majority government with the intention of bringing it down.
Whites are also angry at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for exposing the atrocities committed against blacks and others under apartheid. And every racial incident has cumulative effect:
"Two areas in particular have underscored the fragility of South Africa's transition to democracy. One is the conservative rural outposts where racism remains the most stubborn.
In March (1998), the dusty cattle town of Vryburg erupted when white parents attacked black students and forced the local high school to shut its doors temporarily.
A few weeks later (in April), a white farmer shot at black children crossing his land outside this town, killing a baby. Police did not immediately arrest the man, outraging blacks.
Such violence may be symptomatic of anger over the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which in the past two years has probed human rights violations of the apartheid era. 'It is a circus,' said a white woman in Sam Horne's sewing shop (in Vryburg)." - (Ibid).
Even more disturbing is the fact that this kind of hostility towards blacks is being manifested by the nation's security forces almost in the same manner it was during apartheid.
Many whites, who still control the security apparatus and defence forces, are openly defiant and hostile towards blacks and continue to subject them to humiliation and brutal treatment the same way they did before the end of white-minority rule:
"The police, the military, and national intelligence units are also under scrutiny.
A report issued last week (May 1998) found that roughly 60 people (almost all black) die each month in police custody or as a result of police actions.
The government, meanwhile, was rattled in March when the outgoing chief of the military, an Afrikaner, delivered a report directly to Mandela warning that prominent black soldiers and politicians were plotting a coup.
The paper was quickly discredited.
Both reports, however, served as reminder that the old apartheid guard and old practices remain entrenched in the police and armed forces." - (Ibid).
Also firmly entrenched in the minds of millions of whites is the racist mentality which leads them to denounce the Truth Commission for exposing the diabolical iniquities they perpetrated against blacks under apartheid and even before the architects of this abominable institution came to power.
They may not want to hear the truth about what they did. And they can ignore all the warnings from blacks and others about the danger of such intransigence. But they should seriously think about what alternative might have been and what could even happen in the future if they still believe that blacks have no rights any white person is bound to respect.
And many blacks still wonder whether justice has really been served through reconciliation without retribution.
Crime Without Punishment: Justice Denied?
State terrorism against blacks during the apartheid era continues to divide South Africa today along racial lines in this post-traumatic period of reconciliation without retribution. And it probably will continue to play the same divisive role a generation hence, as long as whites refuse to repent and atone for their sins against their victims. It is also a subject that will continue to be discussed by many black South Africans and others for many years to come, and may be even for generations.
Black South African writer Mark Mathabane, author of Kaffir Boy and Love in Black and White, raised some very important issues concerning the pardons granted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to the enforcers of apartheid who tortured, maimed, mutilated and killed blacks and other apartheid opponents at will, but mostly blacks many of whom were not even political activists.
The victims included black women and children who were not only innocent but were not even remotely involved in campaigns against the white-minority regime. As Mathabane stated in his article, “South Africa: Reconciliation Yes, but Justice as Well,” in The New York Times:
"Is it possible to forgive someone who attaches a power generator to the chained hands and feet of other human beings, calmly turns on the switch and then watches them writhe and foam blood at the mouth and ears as bursts of electricity fry every part of their bodies?....
After listening to accounts of such atrocities, I found myself asking: What about the victims? What about the mothers who have lost their sons and daughters and husbands? What about the orphaned children I recently saw wandering in my hometown, Alexandria, dressed in rags, sleeping in shacks without heat, scavenging for food in garbage heaps?....
What about the youths scarred for life by torture? How can they be expected to accept that torturers and murderers are being set free, and that many sometimes return to their old jobs as policemen and receive pensions for 'honorable service to the country'?....
Many of these survivors and families feel that justice has not been served....Someone must be held responsible for these crimes....
Reconciliation is possible, provided the families of the victims do not believe that in pursuit of truth, they are being denied justice." - (Mark Mathabane, “South Africa: Reconciliation Yes, but Justice as Well,” in The New York Times; and in the International Herald Tribune, December 15, 1997, p. 8. See also, Mark Mathabane, Kaffir Boy, an autobiographical work on growing up and living under apartheid. It is also a searing indictment against that oppressive system).
We might as well add an equally important question: Will white South Africans ever be grateful for being forgiven for all the pain and suffering they inflicted on the during apartheid, and even before then?
The list of atrocities perpetrated against blacks is endless. It is a litany of unspeakable horror and crimes against humanity enough to sear the conscience of even some of the most hardened souls.
That is how through, and virulent, the system of apartheid was in its oppression of black people and other non-whites, but especially blacks, the most maligned and despised people in South Africa.
And reliving those memories through reconciliation is as painful as it is cathartic.
But even the cathartic effect of this reconciliation process is overwhelmed by the sheer brutality of those atrocities, especially when most whites have rebuffed the conciliatory gestures from blacks who, as the victims, have every reason to demand punishment for those who brutalised, dehumanised, and killed them.
In fact, this systematic oppression went on up to the very end of apartheid – with official sanction – when blacks were about to assume power, as the tragic case of Albert Nkuna clearly shows. And there were countless others. As Don L. Boroughs wrote from South Africa in the U.S. & World Report:
"'When I regained consciousness, I felt that my private parts were dead,' (Albert Nkuna testified before the Truth Commission, as he broke down, crying).
Free elections were only months away in 1994 when police searching for guns arrived at Albert Nkuna's shack in Katlehong township to interrogate – and torture – him." (Don L. Boroughs, “Will the Truth Set Them Free? Confronting Their Terrible Past, South Africans Seek Reconciliation,” in U.S. News & World Report, April 28, 1997, p. 42).
The question is why those who tortured and castrated him should not be punished; and why others like them should be pardoned when their only reason for seeking amnesty is to avoid punishment, and not because they are sorry for what they did.
Who seriously believes they are sorry now? Why would they, all of a sudden, be sorry now – when they are seeking amnesty – and not before when they were busy torturing, maiming and killing blacks?
If they were sorry before, for doing all that, and didn't like what they were doing, why did they continue doing it? And if they said they did so because they didn't want to lose their jobs and had to take care of their families first, or just themselves if they were single, they would still have to answer this question: Were those the only jobs – torturing and killing black people – that were available to them? Couldn't have they found other jobs like millions of their fellow countrymen did?
How do those who are no longer on the police force explain the fact that they were not unemployed and were able to get jobs after the end of apartheid if there weren't any jobs available for them, besides police work, under white-minority rule? Of all times! It was a golden era for all whites, the best of times.
Did employment opportunities for them improve when blacks came to power, thus giving them a wider selection of jobs which might explain why these former police officers did not end up unemployed after the end of apartheid?
There were plenty of jobs for whites then, during apartheid, as there are now, after the end of apartheid. And whites still enjoy privileges, black people don't, because they are members of a race, the white race, which consolidated its position in the economic arena and in other areas when its people, white people, were in power for more than three centuries since the founding of South Africa as a nation.
Saying that white police officers during apartheid needed their jobs is equivalent to saying that they had to continue torturing and killing blacks, willingly, in order to take care of their families and themselves. It is also equivalent to saying there was nothing wrong with what they were doing.
They could have left and found other jobs besides torturing, maiming and killing black people and other opponents of apartheid to feed their families just as they found other jobs when they left the police force after the end of white-minority rule.
There is one very simple explanation why they continued to do what they did when the country was under the apartheid regime. Dirk Coetzee, commander of a ruthless hit squad notorious for killing blacks during the era of white-minority rule, put it succinctly:
"In those days, a black man's life meant absolutely nothing." - (Quoted, ibid).
And that's no reason for seeking pardon – or granting one. It is a compelling argument for punishment, severe punishment, without mitigating factors or extenuating circumstances.
In its report from South Africa, the U.S. News & World Report had more spine-chilling stories to tell, besides Nkuna's, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu's reactions. As Tutu himself put it after hearing for months and months harrowing testimony given by former security policemen and their victims:
"We even heard people say that after killing some people, they burned their bodies and kept turning them over on the fire, while at the same time they were partying, drinking beer, and having a barbecue.
It really takes away your breath that people could be so callous and so inhumane." - (Desomond Tutu, quoted, ibid.).
What is so remarkable, and even incomprehensible to outsiders, is that there has not been widespread demand among blacks for vengeance.
But there are those who are vindictive, and they may be biding their time.
Apartheid inflicted so much damage that it will take a nation of saints to let bygones be bygones in a spirit of forgiveness. It may not be the right attitude, but it is easy to understand why:
"At the heart of South Africa's darkness lay a security apparatus run by men who saw their black victims as something other than human.
What else could explain the agony of Maurice Nchabeleng who, as a schoolboy, was taken to the room where his activist father had just been tortured and killed? There, Nchabeleng told the Truth Commission, policemen ordered him to wash his hands in his father's blood.
How else could soldiers have gathered around the bed of Kate Serekolo to laugh as she gave birth in detention?
What other force could have so dulled the consciences of security police that they were able to shoot a shopkeeper's two sleeping children just because their father operated an African National Congress safe house?
More astounding than any of these revelations, however, is the fact that the suffering they recall has not stirred up widespread demands for vengeance." - (Don L. Boroughs, ibid).
Another unanswered question is how child victims of apartheid such as Maurice Nchabeleng who was ordered to wash his hands in his father's blood and many others are going to react to all this when they grow up, especially when they see that whites are not only unrepentant but insist on maintaining their privileged position.
These are children who have been scarred for life, emotionally and physically. These are also children who sacrificed their lives upon the altar of freedom. They include children such as Mxolisi Goboza, random target of security forces gone berserk at the sight of a black skin:
"'I didn't run away. They shot me and I fell....The doctor said there is nothing that he can do because the pellets are right in my intestines.'
Mxolisi Goboza, the youngest person to testify before the Truth Commission, was just 11 years old in 1993 when he saw armored police vehicles heading his way in a township near Venterstad.
A municipal van had been burned in a student protest, and witnesses say that police responded the next day by randomly shooting young people in the streets of the township." - (Mxolisi Goboza, cited ibid).
The testimony by some of the apartheid enforcers was just as revolting, down to the scatological.
Many of them gave only the barest essentials, obviously unrepentant, although they were testifying before the Truth Commission to seek amnesty; while the testimony of others was backed up by their victims, giving it even more credibility.
Yet others had to be prodded, and pressed repeatedly, to bring out the truth, a lot of times to no avail.
Those who “succumbed” to pressure did so only to avoid prosecution, and left the hearings with no more concern – let alone respect – for blacks than they did when they first went in.
Most of the testimony was blood-curdling, nonetheless, as shown by one of those harrowing accounts in The New York Times:
"Jeffrey Benzien was one of the many minor but effective functionaries who made apartheid work for South Africa's white government....
[He] was particularly adept at the use of the 'wet bag,' in which a cloth placed over victims' heads brought them to the terrifying brink of asphyxiation, over and over again. Few withstood more than half an hour....
'If I say to Mr. Jacobs I put the electrodes on his nose I may be wrong,' he testified (before the Truth Commission). 'If I say I attached them to his genitals, I may be wrong. If I say I put a probe in his rectum, I may be wrong. I could have used any of those methods'....
One victim said Mr. Benzien had shoved a broomstick up his rectum. There were beatings, too, and some people were hung for hours by handcuffs attached to the window bars in their cells....
Mr. Benzien remains in the police force....
Mr. Benzien says he was an enthusiastic supporter of the National Party, which ran the government....
His commanding officer also testified, acknowledging that he had known about Mr. Benzien's torture sessions and had once helped pin a prisoner down....
In describing his work, Mr. Benzien seemed at times to take pride in his accomplishments. 'I believe that due to my expeditious and unorthodox conduct,' he said at one point, 'we made a big difference in combating terror'....
One victim asked, 'do you remember saying that you are going to break my nose and then putting both your thumbs into my nostrils and pulling it until the blood came out of my nose?'
'I know you had a nose bleed. I thought it was the result of a smack I gave you.'" - (“Apartheid Torturer Testifies, as Evil Shows Its Banal Face: Torturer's Testimony Gives South Africa a New Lesson in the Banality of Evil,” in The New York Times, November 9, 1997, pp. 1, and 8).
These are the kind of people who applied for and were granted amnesty.
And many of them, including Benzien himself, remained on the police force after the end of apartheid in spite of what they did to their victims.
All that was done for the sake of reconciliation, what Truth Commission chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu described as “restorative justice” as opposed to “retributive justice.”
But where is justice for the victims?
Why is reconciliation not reciprocal if whites are truly sorry for what they did, persecuting blacks?
How can there be national healing when there is such a deep racial divide which is being deliberately perpetuated by the refusal of most whites not only to acknowledge the wrongs they did but to make up for all those injustices?
Even President Mandela, Africa's elder statesman, was ignored by whites despite his pleas for reconciliation. They wanted him to do what they thought was best for them, just forget the past, but not what is best for the country, which is to remember the past so that you don't repeat it.
This is the kind of contempt similar to what the United States said about Mandela's two visits to Libya in 1997, a country that was blacklisted by the American government. He defended those trips and lashed out at whites who criticised his foreign policy just because he is a black leader. Responding to criticism by the United States, he snapped:
"I am master of my own fate." - (quoted in “For Mandela, A Balancing Act: Defying West, he Plays to Constituents at Home,” in The Boston Globe, November 6, 1997, p. 1).
And he again bluntly stated on CNN (Cable News Network) on 11 November 1997 from Johannesburg:
"This contempt for black leaders is something I resent from the bottom of my heart....
Why should anybody question my relationship with Colonel Khadafy?
He is our friend because he helped us when many people – who are now trying to lecture to us not to go there – were helping the apartheid government of this country." - (Nelson Mandela, quoted in “Mandela Sees Racism in Foes of [South Africa's] Foreign Policy,” in The Boston Globe, November 12, 1997, p. A-2).
And as The Christian Science Monitor also reported from Johannesburg:
"Mandela has angrily suggested that President Clinton's criticism of his plans to visit Libya was racist.
That tone continued when South African Ambassador to the UN, Khiphusizi Jele, urged the General Assembly to condemn the Helms-Burton Act (passed by the US Congress), which seeks to punish foreign companies that do business with Cuba....
(And) on September 13 (1997), President Mandela met (in South Africa) with President Hashemi Rafsanjani of Iran, which the US calls a pariah state....
The West may regard Libya and Iran as sponsors of terrorism, but to South Africa, they are friends from the struggle against apartheid." - (“Friends of Mandela Aren't U.S. Friends,” in The Christian Science Monitor, November 21, 1997, p. 5).
The parallels are almost exact.
While black-led post-apartheid South Africa has been criticised abroad by the United States and other Western countries for refusing to take their side against “rogue” states like Libya and Iran, and also for what they see as “ineptitude” and an “amateurish” conduct of foreign policy, the Truth Commission led by the black Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu has equally been condemned and dismissed by whites at home in condescending terms as no more than “a circus,” despite its efforts to reach out to whites in a spirit of reconciliation and grant pardons to those who perpetrated some of the heinous crimes known to man in order to perpetuate white-minority rule and persecute blacks and other non-whites, but especially blacks.
Former President P.W. Botha, a hardliner also known as “the Great Crocodile” and “Piet the Gun” during his iron-fisted rule, was the very embodiment of such white defiance. His persistent refusal to apologise for the atrocities of apartheid made him a hero to millions of South African whites and was seen as a symbol of white resistance to what was perceived to be a black invasion of the bastions of white privilege:
"The former president has said repeatedly that he has nothing to explain or apologize for." - (P.W. Botha, cited in “Ex-South African President Is Ordered to Court,” in The Boston Globe, January 8, 1998, p. A-7).
And as he defiantly stated:
"I am not going to the Truth Commission. I am not going to repent. I am not going to ask for favors.
What I did, I did for my country, for my God, for my people, and for all the people of South Africa." - (P.W. Botha, quoted, ibid).
Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, former opposition member of parliament during Botha's leadership, saw a familiar quality in Botha's stance:
He likes to say he has many faults but being wrong isn't one of them. He's an obstinant (sic), self-congratulating character." - (Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, ibid).
During a brief court appearance on 23 January 1998 to answer contempt charges stemming from his failure in December 1997 to heed a subpoena requiring him to testify before the Truth Commission, Botha, an Afrikaner, defended apartheid as a benign policy for separate racial development.
He addressed the media in the court room and used the preliminary session as an occasion to exploit the public spotlight for the first time since he left office in 1989. Wagging his finger, he told reporters – and the rest of the world – first in Afrikaans, then in English:
"We will not stand our language (Afrikaans) being trampled upon and we will not stand our cultural values to be trampled upon.
The tiger...is going to fight back. We are busy organizing." - (P.W. Botha, quoted in “Botha, In Court, Offers No Apologies for Apartheid,” in The Boston Globe, January 24, 1998, p. 2).
He was obviously talking about efforts by whites to undermine President Mandela's multiracial government by various means including white-dominated police and security forces who continued to encourage and participate in crime. Botha called the press conference after the court proceedings and went on to say:
"I am not prepared to apologise for lawful actions of my government in its struggle to curb the violent onslaught against our country. I also do not apologise for my views on peaceful coexistence of all the people of our country." - (Botha, ibid).
His startling candour, and defiance, not only endeared him to millions of whites who longed for “the good old days” - many still do so even today; it earned him a place in the pantheon of white leaders who once ruled the entire continent with imperial arrogance in defence of white supremacy.
During the same meeting with the press in the court room, Botha went so far as to call for the resignation of President Nelson Mandela whom he described as incompetent:
"He said he has told President Nelson Mandela to step down since the ANC-led government could not deliver services efficiently and had done nothing to stem violent crime." - (Botha, cited in “Botha, In Court, Offers No Apologies for Apartheid,” ibid).
And from the other side, Archbishop Tutu appealed to South African whites to embrace the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as their last chance of healing divisions caused by apartheid.
He said the commission, set up in 1995 to investigate human rights abuses during white-minority rule, had reached out to whites. But it had been ignored by most of them. He told journalists in Cape Town:
"They are being given the only opportunity they are ever going to get of coming to terms with the awful things that they did to my people.
This comes from my heart. I am praying that one day you white people will understand....
I have nearly been vilified in the black community because I have sought to reach out to you white people." - (Desmond Tutu, quoted by Paul Harris, “Tutu Asks Whites to Support Work of His Reconciliation Panel,” in The Boston Globe, February 19, 1998, p. A-8).
But in spite of such magnanimity, the symbol of white resistance to black people's quest for equality, P.W. Botha, remained defiant.
He had his worst nightmare on 14 April 1998 when he appeared before a black judge – of all people – on charges of refusing to cooperate with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
He sat impassively as prosecutors presented a barrage of evidence that the State Security Council he created and headed may have authorised the killing of anti-apartheid activists. But during a break in the proceedings, he spoke defiantly to reporters:
"Even if they destroy me, they cannot destroy my soul and my convictions." - (P.W. Botha, quoted in “Botha Shows Defiance at His Trial,” in The Boston Globe, April 16, 1998, p. A-2).
The case before the black magistrate, Victor Lugaju, highlighted racial divisions in South Africa after the end of apartheid. As Paul Harris, of The Boston Globe, reported from the small town of George in the Eastern Cape Province where the trial was held:
"Botha has called the Truth Commission a circus and has vowed he would never testify before it in person.
His intransigence has made him a rallying point for right-wingers who consider the commission biased against whites." - (Paul Harris, ibid).
It did, in fact, help to turn him into an iconic figure of Afrikaner nationalism, and a rallying point for most whites who bitterly resent the end of white-minority rule. As Archbishop Tutu said about the defiant Botha:
"In his view we have done nothing but humiliate his people. I don't think anything we try to say or do would move him from that position." - (Tutu, quoted , ibid).
Botha's intransigence also became a crucial test for the Truth Commission's credibility with many blacks who still believe that apartheid leaders and members of the police and security forces who routinely tortured and killed blacks got off easy during their testimonies before the commission; while black leaders such as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela had lengthy public hearings during which they were subjected to gruelling questioning to extract confessions of the crimes they allegedly committed against their enemies in the black townships during the struggle to end white-minority rule.
There was overwhelming evidence linking Botha to the murder of black activists during his rule.
Although the former president was in court for ignoring a summons to appear before the Truth Commission, his trial, the first ever for a former South African head of state, focused on his role as chairman of the State Security Council which coordinated a security crackdown on black liberation groups.
The commission's executive secretary, Paul van Zyl, said on 11 June 1998 that minutes from State Security Council meetings contained words like “eliminate” and “neutralise” when referring to opponents of white-minority rule:
"It is quite clear from these documents, as we interpret it, the word 'eliminate' means 'kill.'" - (Paul van Zyl, quoted in “Botha Linked at Trial to Killing of Activists,” in the International Herald Tribune, June 3, 1996, p. 6).
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission – also known as the TRC – presented the court with dozens of documents implicating Botha in atrocities perpetrated by his regime against blacks and other anti-apartheid opponents.
Van Zyl said the State Security Council, composed of members of the cabinet and military and security officials, had been briefed in 1979 about plans to begin overseas operations against members of the African National Congress (ANC), including sending them mail bombs. One of those bombs killed anti-apartheid activist Ruth First, wife of ANC leader Joe Slovo, in Maputo, Mozambique in 1982.
Other ANC activists were eliminated in similar fashion in neighbouring countries.
The assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986 was also the work of the South African intelligence service, the Bureau of State Security, also known by its acronym, BOSS.
Olof Palme was a strong supporter of the African National Congress and his country, under his leadership, poured $400 million – in nonmilitary assistance – into the liberation struggle in South Africa through the years, thus incurring the wrath of the apartheid regime.
He was gunned down by a lone gunman in Stockholm, the Swedish capital, as he was walking with his wife and son back home from a movie theatre.
None of the assassinations carried out by the South African security forces would have been done without the knowledge and approval of President Botha.
Eugene de Kock, a former police colonel who headed a group of apartheid-era assassins, also testified against Botha during the trial.
Sentenced to life in prison for apartheid-era crimes, one of the few apartheid operatives to be convicted in a criminal court, de Kock carried out the bombing of the anti-apartheid South African Council of Churches building in Johannesburg in 1988. And a former national police chief, Johan van der Merwe, told the Truth Commission that Botha authorised the attack.
The former president pleaded not guilty to ignoring the summons to appear before the commission and insisted that the panel wanted to humiliate him by forcing him to appear in person.
But what the commission wanted from him was the truth about his role in the violence and other abuses perpetrated against the opponents of white-minority rule:
"Former President P.W. Botha not only knew about, but ordered, the bombing in 1988 of the South African Council of Churches headquarters that injured 23 people, a senior police commander testified....
In Pretoria, former police commissioner Johan van der Merwe told the commission's amnesty committee that Botha had personally ordered the destruction of Khotso House, the Johannesburg office building of the Council of Churches....
'We had information that Khotso House was being used by the underground movements,' van der Merwe testified. 'We received the order from Botha, and arranged for members of Vlakpaas – a special unit of the Security Branch police – to blow it up.'
Botha has denied consistently he knew about the incident....
And in Port Elizabeth, a former senior state official named Jaap van Jaarveld told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Botha's inner security circle had advance knowledge of – and probably approved – the killing of four black activists in 1985." - (“Botha Linked to Church Office Bombing: Ex-Police Aide Says He Ordered Attack; Hearing Focuses on Abuses and Attacks,” in The Boston Globe, June 3, 1998, p. A-5).
Under Botha, who ruled from 1978 to 1989, the apartheid regime launched a vicious campaign of terror against the opponents of white-minority rule.
The government's response reached unprecedented levels of repression and involved the entire security apparatus including the use of the South African Defence Forces for internal neutralisation of opponents, in addition to launching strikes against neighbouring countries which supported the African National Congress.
The ANC itself had intensified its campaign to render the country ungovernable in the face of brutal repression by the white-minority regime.
Botha responded viciously by cracking down on opponents at home, and by orchestrating a brutal war of destabilisation against neighbouring countries which included the bombing of Harare and Lusaka, the capitals of Zimbabwe and Zambia, respectively, in 1986 by the South African Air Force, as well as attacks on Mazambique's capital, Maputo, also during the 1980s.
The apartheid regime also declared a state of emergency in 1986, giving police sweeping powers to neutralise opponents of the government. More than 30,000 blacks were locked up without charge during that period. All that was approved by President Botha.
In addition to van der Merwe, former Law and Order Minister Adriaan Vlok and convicted killer Eugene de Kock implicated Botha in the Khotso House bombing and other atrocities.
Vlok presented his most damaging testimony before the Truth Commission in July 1998. He told the commission on July 21st that Botha instructed him in June 1998 to render “unusable” the Johannesburg offices of the South African Council of Churches which the government claimed was harbouring anti-apartheid insurgents. Vlok also said the president had targeted other areas as well in the same city:
"Mr. Botha gave the instruction. I had no doubt that irregular action had to be taken if I was to comply with this order." - (Adriaan Vlok, quoted in “Ex-Police Minister Implicates Botha in Bombings,” in The Boston Globe, July 22, 1998, p. A-2).
Adriaan Vlok applied for amnesty for his role in the bombing of the church headquarters and other targets and was the only member of Botha's government to seek the pardon.
His testimony marked the first time in the course of the commission's hearings that a Cabinet-level official had established a direct link between the security forces who committed apartheid-era atrocities and political leaders who authorised the vicious campaign.
Another building bombed was the downtown Johannesburg headquarters of the trade union movement COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions).
Vlok changed his earlier stand to save his skin.
In a radio interview in 1995, he derisively dismissed the work of the Truth Commission as “repulsive.”
He applied for amnesty just two months after an immediate subordinate, former police commssioner Johan van der Merwe, implicated him in the Khotso House bombing during hearings before the Truth Commission in October 1996.
In his testimony on 21 July 1998, Vlok went on to say:
"We agreed there were no legal manners in which the activities inside Khotso House could be stopped. Mr. Botha then said I must make the building unusable." - (Adriaan Vlok, ibid).
He said he passed the order on to van der Merwe, then chief of the Security Branch Police.
The building was bombed on 31 August 1998. No-one was killed, but 23 people were injured in adjacent buildings.
Former South African Council of Churches leader Peter Storey, a Methodist bishop, said the Khotso House was never used for insurgency operations. After the building was destroyed, Vlok said President Botha congratulated him for a job well done.
He also sought amnesty for his role in the bombings of the trade union headquarters in May 1988 and cinemas that were showing the film, “Cry Freedom,” based on the life and death – in police custody – of a prominent anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko. The government said the movie was a threat to national security.
Van der Merwe, testifying in his amnesty hearings for the 1988 death-in-detention of activist Stanza Bopape who was tortured to death by the police, said the following in implicating Botha in the apartheid-era atrocities:
"During the state of emergency, it was impossible to operate within the regulations.
Botha said he was not prepared to apologize for the struggle against the forces trying to usurp the government.
It was an undeclared war, and the Security Branch Police were expected to stop the onslaught at any price – even if it meant using illegitimate methods." - (Johan van der Merwe, quoted in “Botha Linked to Church Office Building,” in The Boston Globe, op.cit., p. A-5).
In his autobiography published in 1988, de Kock, one of the apartheid state's most feared assassins whose ruthlessness earned him the nickname Prime Evil, called himself a “sacrificial lamb” for the apartheid regime's human rights abuses and complained that “the guiltest of all – the generals and politicians – have got off scot-free,” as quoted by The Boston Globe during the hearings before the Truth Commission.
The former death-squad boss was given two life sentences plus 212 years on six charges of murder and 83 other convictions.
But in spite of all the accusations levelled against him by his former subordinates, Botha remained defiant and adamant in his position:
"Mr. Botha has insisted that he has nothing to apologize for and has described the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's work as a witch hunt against whites." - (“Convicted Killer Expected to Testify Against Botha,” in the International Herald Tribune, June 3, 1996, p. 6).
However, de Kock testified in court against former President Botha and accused him of ordering terrorist attacks not only within South Africa but in foreign countries as well. As a former police commander of the notorious secret police force known as Vlakpaas, he knew what he was talking about.
He said his unit had acted on orders from the president when it carried out attacks against anti-apartheid targets including the bombings of two office buildings in South Africa and one in London during the 1980s:
"Covert activity is illegal by nature. [But] the government of the day encouraged it." - (Eugene de Kock, in “Apartheid Figure Ties Ex-Leader Botha to Attacks,” in The Boston Globe, June 4, 1998, p. A-2).
Botha not only refused to admit that; even pleas from President Mandela and Archbishop Tutu urging him to cooperate with the Truth Commission fell on deaf ears:
"Despite repeated efforts by Tutu, President Nelson Mandela and others to gain his cooperation, the former president adamantly refused to take part in a process he regards with contempt." - (Botha, cited ibid).
However, evidence against him and other cabinet members as well as other subordinates including security forces was overwhelming. According to The Economist:
"Only in the past month (July 1998), as the commission was about to complete its business, has the first apartheid-era cabinet minister admitted to authorising terrorist acts.
Adriaan Vlok, a former law-and-order minister, confessed to ordering the bombings of two buildings where ANC agents were thought to meet, and of cinemas that were showing 'Cry Freedom,' an anti-apartheid movie....
Other cabinet ministers knew that the police were behind the blasts...and congratulated him.
Mr. Vlok's testimony hints at what most South Africans believe to be the truth: that Mr. Botha and his ministers knew and approved of their subordinate's crimes." - (“South Africa's Hurtful Truth,” in The Economist, 1 August 1998, pp. 37 – 38).
In spite of his open contempt for the Truth Commission, the former president could not cover up the atrocities for which he was responsible when he led the apartheid government; nor was the debate over the language used by the State Security Council mere semantic quibbling, a point clarified by de Kock during his testimony in court against Botha when he said “neutralise means to kill.”
And he went on to implicate Botha in three separate bombings.
In 1981, de Kock blew up the London offices of the African National Congress (ANC), for which he received the Star of Excellence, an award that only the president could confer; indisputable evidence that Botha knew and approved of the bombing.
Six years later in 1987, de Kock was called in by his superiors and told to bomb the Johannesburg headquarters of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).
And in 1988, he blew up the building which housed the South African Council of Churches. As he bitterly remarked in court in George where Botha was ordered to appear:
"I feel that myself and others in the security forces have been sold out by the politicians in the National Party. They are cowards.
As a lowly colonel, I will take the full responsibility for the actions of all police members whose actions occurred within the framework of the incitement and goading of the politicians for faith and fatherland." - (Eugene de Kock, quoted in “Apartheid Ties Ex-Leader Botha to Attacks,” op. cit., p. A-2).
He also angrily accused Botha and his government of callously abandoning the men who carried out his brutal policies of terrorism against the anti-apartheid opponents within South Africa and against neighbouring countries:
"There was deliberate distancing between the politicians and the operatives, so that if men on the ground went down, the politicians were in the clear (he said, casting a quick glance at Botha). My operatives sit in jails. He does not." - (Eugene de Kock, quoted in “Ex-Assassin Rebukes Ex-South African Leader,” in The Boston Globe, June 5, 1998, p. A-2).
Although the former president hardly stirred throughout the court proceedings, de Kock pinned direct responsibility on him for specific bombings inside and outside South Africa.
At simultaneous hearings before the Truth Commission in other parts of the country, Botha's former commissioner of police, Johan van der Merwe, made corroborative accusations. As Archbishop Tutu said in a hallway interview in the court in the small town of George where Botha's trial was held, after de Kock's devastating testimony against the former president:
"In a wonderful way, we have had our hearing. We have heard his own people here and in Pretoria. We could not have planned it this way." - (Tutu, ibid).
Tutu had good reason to feel that way, since Botha refused to talk about the violence and murders he sanctioned when he was president of apartheid South Africa.
The testimony of his subordinates against him was damning evidence and left him no room to manoeuvre. All he could do was long for “the good old days.”
But even an exhaustive enquiry by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into the past could not have revealed the full extent of what the apartheid regime did, and to which it was prepared to go, to maintain white supremacy at all costs.
In response to mounting pressure from independent African countries to try and force it to end its racist policies, the white-minority government of South Africa invested heavily in a massive military buildup. Included in its arsenal were nuclear weapons, later abandoned by the democratically elected multiracial government of President Mandela.
And to neutralise opposition at home as well as eliminate anti-apartheid activists outside the country, the government did a lot more than what was acknowledged or reported. For example, the massacre of at least 600 teenage black students in the Soweto uprising of June 1976 was bad enough, causing an international uproar. But the end of apartheid itself has shed more light on an even much darker side of that diabolical regime. It included plots to make blacks infertile and destroy Mandela's brain when he was still in prison:
"The panel investigating South Africa's human rights abuses during apartheid is revealing a twisted world of science gone mad.
In the first hearings on the apartheid-era biological and chemical weapons program, scientists told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about concocting poisoned chocolates, plotting to induce brain damage in Nelson Mandela, and trying to find germ-warfare agents and anti-fertility drugs that would target blacks....
They testified that they were willing to do anything to defend white power.
'That was the psychosis that prevailed,' Daan Goosen, who led the converted biological research laboratory, recalled yesterday (June 11, 1998)....
Retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu said this week's testimony was the most shocking he has heard as chairman of the commission....
'Here are people of high intelligence, coldly and clinically in white laboratory coats, working on things meant to be instruments of destroying people,' Tutu said.
The overriding question for the Truth Commission is: Did white leaders of the apartheid governments sanction the killing of blacks?....
The reports were shocking.
One witness testified that a shirt infused with poison – one of the tools developed by the scientists – was given to a black activist, who then loaned it to a friend. The friend wore the shirt, and died." - (“South African Rights Panel Hears of Deadly Science Plots,” in The Boston Globe, June 12, 1998, p. A-8).
One of the intended targets of this kind of chemical warfare was Reverend Frank Chikane, a prominent anti-apartheid activist, who narrowly escaped death and later became head of the office of the presidency under President Thabo Mbeki.
Just as the new government of South Africa under President Mandela renounced nuclear weapons, it also abandoned the apartheid-era chemical and biological weapons programme which targeted blacks within and outside the country.
A statement issued on 15 June 1998 by a senior government spokesman, Joel Netshitenzhe, said the programme had been terminated. He also said:
"The material for offensive purposes in government storage has been destroyed." - (Quoted in “South Africa Asserts Apartheid-Era Chemical Weapons Are History,” in The Boston Globe, June 16, 1998, p. A-29).
Netshitenzhe said the statement was issued in response to media enquiries about the apartheid government's chemical and biological programme after a week of hearings at the Truth Commission.
Over a week of hearings in Cape Town, the Truth Commission heard how scientists worked on bacteria to make blacks infertile and produced an array of tailor-made poisons.
The programme was code-named Project Coast. It was officially, though secretly, instituted in 1983 on the orders of the defence minister. Dr. Niel Knobel, surgeon-general from 1988 to 1997, was technically responsible for the weapons programme, but day-to-day management was left to Dr. Wouter Basson.
Among the wide range of offensive devices were cigarettes laced with anthrax; chocolates and drinks containing toxins including botulism and salmonella; and untraceable poisons that could be applied to clothing and absorbed through the skin.
Project Coast also produced secret weapons such as screwdrivers armed with hypodermic syringes to deliver poisons, and vast quantities of the drugs Mandrax and Ecstasy.
And they were all targeted against blacks. The report is corroborated by other sources. According to The Economist:
"In defence of the apartheid state, white scientists sought to create bacteria that would kill only blacks.
Laboratory assistants masturbated baboons, to use their sperm for experiments to find a vaccine to make black women sterile.
Government researchers produced a tonne of Ecstasy, hoping to dope enraged demonstrators into feeling happy with their disfranchised lot.
If nothing else, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has made it impossible for white South Africans to pretend that the old regime was anything but vile.
By offering amnesty to the perpetrators of politically motivated crimes in return for full confessions, the commission has tempted hordes of brutes to come clean, and added a stack of gory pages to the history books."- (“South Africa's Hurtful Truth,” in The Economist, op. cit., p. 37).
Yet all these revelations – from torture and murder to poisons developed to destroy only blacks, and much more – have been derisively dismissed by whites as a witch hunt against them. And enquiries by the Truth Commission into these abuses and diabolical machinations were equally dismissed as no more than a circus.
These are some of the very same people who sincerely believe that there was nothing wrong with apartheid. Therefore there is no need for them to apologise.
That is what reconciliation without retribution has done to the victims of apartheid.
And it is this lack of contrition on the part of whites which inflames passions among millions of blacks across South Africa, prompting Archbishop Tutu to urge whites to atone for their sins committed during the era of apartheid, victimising blacks and other non-whites, but especially blacks.
He asked them to do so for their own sake, and for the well-being of all South Africans and future generations. As he stated in a commentary published on 4 August 1998 in South African newspapers after the Truth and Reconciliaton Commission finished hearing testimony from witnesses, whites should apologise and take full responsibility for their actions during apartheid. It was a plea as much as it was a warning:
"My dear white compatriots, it is a wake-up call to you.
Do you want us to degenerate into a Bosnia, a Rwanda, a Northern Ireland? Or do you want to contribute to reconciliation by doing something about transformation?
Is there no leader of some stature and some integrity in the white community...who will say quite simply, 'We had a bad policy that had evil consequences. We are sorry. Please forgive us'?....
They [the leaders of the National Party] have lied as a matter of course."- (Tutu, quoted in “Tutu Urges to Atone for Apartheid,” in The Boston Globe, August 7, 1998, p. A-5).
It is clear that although apartheid has legally ended, a deep racial chasm still exists.
That is mainly because of the unrepentant attitude of most whites and the economic inequalities which continue to exist and exacerbate racial tensions.
Not only do such inequalities impede progress for the vast majority of blacks who are trapped in poverty while whites, relatively speaking, live in magnificent splendour; they are potential for catastrophe.
The solution to the problem lies in the willingness of whites to confront their ugly past and abandon their notions of racial supremacy and the belief that they are entitled to privileges – other people are not entitled to – simply because of what they are.
The solution also lies in expanded opportunities for all racial groups and individuals through economic growth which is now being held hostage by white power determined to thwart black progress.
But progress is impossible without stability. And stability is impossible without racial equality.
Whites are on top, and they will remain on top for many years to come; while blacks, who both numerically and proportionally constitute the heap at the bottom, are mired in poverty and will remain in this condition unless fundamental changes are made requiring structural reforms across the spectrum to rebuild South Africa whose priorities as a society were distorted under apartheid and even before then under other white-minority governments for more than three centuries.
And it is highly probable that blacks will remain at the bottom for a very long time. The situation is analogous to what Dr. Walter Rodney described – regarding the relationship between blacks and whites in the international context – in his book The Groundings with My Brothers:
"Conscious blacks can not possibly fail to realise that in our own homelands we have no power, abroad we are discriminated against, and everywhere the black masses suffer from poverty.
You can put together in your own mind a picture of the whole world, with the white imperialist beast crouched over miserable blacks.
And don't forget to label us poor. There is nothing with which poverty coincides so absolutely as with the colour black – small or large population, hot or cold climates, rich or poor in natural resources – poverty cuts across all these factors in order to find black people.
That association of wealth with whites and poverty with blacks is not accidental. It is the nature of the imperialist relationship that enriches the metropolis at the expense of the colony, i.e. it makes the whites richer and the blacks poorer." - (Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, London, The Bogle-L-Ouverture Publications, 1969, p. 19).
Therefore much of what happens in post-apartheid South Africa depends on whether or not whites are willing to give up the privileges they acquired at the expense of blacks under a brutal racist regime, and which they will continue to enjoy indefinitely unless something is done to end this injustice.
So far, the majority of whites are not willing to make the sacrifice. But blacks are not going to wait forever. And the two conflicting interests can not be reconciled without compromising both.
Therefore one has to go in order to be replaced by the paramount interest of racial equality and justice if all the racial groups are going to live together in harmony under the new dispensation. As Dr. Martin Luther King said, “We must learn to live together as brothers [and sisters] or perish together as fools.”
That is one of the challenges that lies ahead for multiracial democratic South Africa in the 21st century.
South Africa in Contemporary Times
Author: Godfrey Mwakikagile
Paperback: 260 pages
Publisher: New Africa Press (8 February 2008)
ISBN-10: 0980258731
ISBN 9780980258738