If only the adults would behave like the children

South Africa was once the apple of every gushing liberal’s eye. Now it seems, even the great moralisers in “the Economist” have begun to take note of the facts on the ground.

Apr 21st 2005 | CAPE TOWN AND JOHANNESBURG
From The Economist print edition

South Africa has made admirable strides since apartheid was abolished 11 years ago. But the political scene is once again taking on a nastier racial tinge

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IT FEELS light years away from the era of apartheid, when the bizarre, brutal apparatus—of race classification, separation and enforcement—would stun the visitor on arrival in South Africa, as though he had landed on a strange planet. This correspondent last saw South Africa two decades ago, when the ruling Afrikaners (those of mainly Dutch descent who had conquered the land and its people three centuries ago, wresting power at the polls in 1948 from the whites who spoke English) had begun to agonise over whether to surrender power or to fight on from within their besieged laager. Yet they were still emphatically, deadeningly, in charge. Whites ran everything worth running.

Now, after the miracle of the harmonious handover in 1994, the change in mood remains palpable and still, for the most part, inspiring. The visitor arrives in a country which looks, on the face of things, to be normal in a humdrum multi-racial manner. The bullying and cringeing in public places is mercifully over.

These days in Melville, once a dowdy and largely Afrikaner suburb of Johannesburg but now a fashionably cosmopolitan village of bars, bookshops and internet cafés, young blacks and whites laugh and josh together on Friday nights—more noticeably than in most American cities. In the shopping malls of the posher suburbs farther north, suave young blacks, perhaps children of some of the 25,000-odd dollar millionaires said to have been created since 1994, buy trendy clothes from solicitous white shop assistants. In the nearby playgrounds of the better state schools, black children play happily with white ones. In the evenings, whites and blacks both chuckle at the strange multi-racial goings-on in “Isidingo”, a television soap saga, one of several set in the social mix of the new South Africa.

For blacks, who make up 79% of the total populace of some 47m, a new sense of freedom still prevails: opinion polls show that they overwhelmingly believe their country is heading the right way and that their lives are getting, or will get, better. The vote for the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has risen steadily in three general elections (1994, 1999 and 2004) from 62% to nearly 70%. For many of the 4.4m whites, comprising under 10% of South Africans, their sense of loss—of power, privilege and to some extent purse—is matched by a more agreeable feeling that they are no longer an oppressive minority to be vilified by the world and hated by many of their compatriots. For the 4.1m coloureds, as mixed-race South Africans still call themselves, and the 1.1m Indians, 9% and 2% of the population respectively, the new order is generally more pleasant, if not entirely so.

The ANC, under President Thabo Mbeki, remains officially wedded to its long-vaunted charter of racial equality. The make-up of his government reflects the rainbow ideal. Six of the 28-strong cabinet are non-black (including three whites), along with ten out of 21 deputy-ministers (of whom six are white). Mr Mbeki seems particularly keen to reach out to embrace Afrikaners, once the blacks’ chief oppressors, and bring them into his broad-church ANC. “He [Mbeki] sees Afrikaners as genuinely African people,” says the last white president, F.W. de Klerk, “the English not so much.”

It looks nice but…
Moreover, despite switching huge dollops of cash from the budget to improve poor black people’s housing, their supply of electricity and water, and education at the lower end of the scale, the prudent handling of the macroeconomy under the watchful eyes of Trevor Manuel, the finance minister, and Tito Mboweni, the central bank’s boss, has been praised even by the wariest of white sceptics. Few whites think they are being squeezed by the taxman until the pips squeak. For most of them, with even middle managers enjoying servants and a swimming pool, South Africa is still extraordinarily cushy.

Yet behind this superficial picture of integration and progress, real as much of it is, all is not rosy. White emigration figures are hard to pin down, because most of those departing do not say that they are going for good. It is likely, however, that 250,000-plus have left since 1994, many of them young and talented. An increasing number of whites, especially those with children, are edgier about pledging themselves to the country’s long-term future.

There are three main reasons for this. The first is a growing feeling, sharpened by loudly vaunted schemes that amount to positive discrimination in favour of blacks, that they will not, in the long run, have equal career prospects with their black compatriots, now that the legislative boot is on the other foot.

The second is a growing suspicion that the ANC is not truly committed to a pluralistic, liberal democracy. It increasingly gives the impression that opposition is tantamount to undermining the government’s efforts to build a just society—and that people who do not accommodate themselves to the reality of ANC power should somehow be penalised.

The third reason, consequently, is the growing sense of racial polarisation in politics that now threatens to seep into other walks of life. In contrast to his predecessor, Nelson Mandela, who softened the hearts of the harshest Afrikaner racist with his magnanimity and humility, Mr Mbeki has shaken the confidence of many whites with his bitter, racially loaded attacks on those he deems to be critical of him or his government. In particular, his attacks on the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA)—now backed by some three-quarters of South Africa’s whites and maybe half of its coloureds—and on its white leader, Tony Leon, have been virulent. In the minds of many whites, this virulence departs from the norms of civility in a liberal democracy.

The white spectrum
Still, South Africa’s whites are not—and never were—homogeneous in their racial and political attitudes. A third of them, mostly Afrikaners, voted against Mr de Klerk’s referendum in 1992 when he, in effect, proposed handing over power to the black majority. Most of these, especially working-class whites, poorer farmers and low-level public servants, including the thousands of policemen and other agents of repression who lost their jobs, may still like to turn the clock back. But they know they can’t; they have no power at all, and generally keep quiet.

Many English-speaking whites who seemed content with apartheid at the time (you rarely meet a white person who openly says he or she supported it) have gone into a sort of “internal migration”, closing their eyes to the new reality, living behind their high-security walls, paying, if they can afford it, for private security, private medicine, private education and houses in areas where blacks still rarely take up residence. They feel that a simple bargain was struck, and should be kept: the blacks won political power, letting the whites continue to do business as usual.

Then come the more adaptable and go-ahead Afrikaners. Pragmatic, tough and deeply rooted in the country, many have come to terms with the new rulers faster than their English counterparts. Young Afrikaner media and mobile-phone magnates such as Koos Bekker, the driving spirit behind the revamped, once slavishly pro-apartheid Nasionale Pers, which owned many of the most influential newspapers in the apartheid era, now get along with the ANC—and Mr Mbeki—just fine.

Big business has also long since made its peace with the ANC. Indeed, it is deeply grateful that Mr Mbeki, and before him Mr Mandela, persuaded the party faithful to ditch their long-held belief in nationalisation and to accept a market economy. Firms such as Anglo American, the mining and manufacturing conglomerate, have happily been co-opted. Many businessmen see the empowerment charters, which, with variations by industry, propose “voluntary” incremental increases in the proportion of blacks in management and—most controversially—in the amount of black-held equity, as a price worth paying, provided the old corporate regime ticks over more or less as before.

The typical transfer of shares—and the issuing of new ones—means that blacks are expected to end up owning at least a quarter of the company by, say, 2010. It’s like paying a tariff for a long-term licence, explains the scion of an old mining house. “The cost to the shareholders is usually 2-3%...at the end of the day it’s a pretty bloody cheap price to keep up our first-world structure.”

At the far-left end of the white spectrum, only a handful of whites—perhaps as low as 2% —actually support the ANC at the polls. Some have bailed out, thanks to what they see as Mr Mbeki’s wrong-headed views on Zimbabwe and/or how to tackle AIDS. But most of them have remained loyal (their more cynical fellow whites tend to dub them “ANC groupies”), turning a blind eye to Mr Mbeki’s peculiarities, in order to display solidarity with the hallowed cause of “transformation”.

The most unhappy whites, in politics, are undoubtedly the liberals, including Mr Leon and his party’s indomitable 87-year-old icon, Helen Suzman, who for many years was a lone voice of dissent in the apartheid-era parliament but who now roundly criticises the ANC from a liberal standpoint. Such people, and most of the DA’s leading lights, consistently fought against apartheid in the hope of replacing it with a non-racial, tolerant, pluralistic but individualistic society. It is the bitter polarisation between white liberals and the ANC that is making race relations look ugly again, especially since the ANC’s strong Africanist element sees the country as essentially one run by blacks, with whites, if they wish to join in, adapting to African cultural and political traditions.

Still a liberation movement
In key respects, the two groups stand for quite distinct values. For sure, the ANC is a big tent. “We are very mixed,” says Sue van der Merwe, a deputy foreign minister who has worked closely with Mr Mbeki. “We have neo-liberals and Marxists but mainly we’re social democrats.” But the party’s deepest instincts still derive from its many years as a liberation movement in exile. “Unity is all,” says a former activist. The ANC’s party discipline is still often ferociously enforced, as it was during those long years of conspiratorial politics, when Leninist centralism prevailed and the Soviet Union was the movement’s chief ally.

With its recent strong popular endorsement at the polls, the ANC, which looks set to hold power for the foreseeable future, is gradually conflating, in its collective mind, the interests of party and state. As elsewhere in Africa in the past, there is little concept of a loyal opposition. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said, “a culture of sycophancy” has grown up around the president, who scolded the prelate in vitriolic terms for his temerity in speaking out.

Among thoughtful members of the ANC, there is a sort of struggle between head and heart. In their heads, they accept a separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary and the media, the importance of a freestanding civil society, and the rights of the parliamentary opposition to oppose. The party has not sought to tamper with the highly liberal post-apartheid constitution. “It defines an arms-length relationship between the institutions and the executive,” says Joel Netshitenzhe, a close aide to Mr Mbeki, approvingly.

But in their hearts, the desire for the kind of one-party state—in spirit if not in constitutional writ—that virtually all their fellow-liberation counterparts achieved elsewhere in Africa remains strong. The same Mr Netshitenzhe, writing in an ANC journal during the party’s first term in office, declared that “the transformation of the state entails, first and foremost, extending the power of the National Liberation Movement over all the levers of power: the army, the police, the bureaucracy, intelligence structures, the judiciary, parastatals, and agencies such as regulatory bodies, the public broadcaster, the central bank, and so on.” He may have changed his mind. Many of his colleagues have not.

Given the size of the ANC’s majority in parliament, it is perhaps not surprising that the government appears to put such little stock in debates in the chamber. The party-list system (opposed by the liberals) means that ANC dissenters tend to get quickly pushed out. Private members’ bills are very rare. Mr Leon’s party, though the second largest, has only 50 out of 400 seats to the ANC’s 285.

Mr Mbeki reserves his most biting contempt for Mr Leon and his social and economic liberals. The ANC, says Mr Leon, has referred to him repeatedly as a racist, a neo-Nazi, a Zionist, a crook and, in Mr Mbeki’s dismissive words, “that white man who chooses to practice his craft in South Africa.” The most depressing phenomenon, in the DA’s view, is that, again and again, any criticism of ANC policies is met with accusations of racism.

Thabo and Tony: no love lost

The DA’s criticism of the ANC’s policy of black empowerment and its drive towards “representivity” across the board (the aim that the racial composition of every outfit, whether a school or a business or a national sports team, should eventually be in proportion to the country’s overall racial profile) is poisoning the atmosphere. The DA thinks that job allocations should not be classified by race. It fears that economic empowerment has meant white tycoons handing over slabs of equity to a handful of black tycoons without benefiting the masses of poverty-stricken blacks, more than 40% of whom are jobless (against 8% of whites), and more than 50% of whom live in poverty.

Instead, the emphasis, according to the DA, should be on growth, education, deregulation and a freer labour market. “Race entitlement is being legitimised again,” sighs Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, who led the liberal forerunner of the DA in the 1980s. “Unfortunately race is again being built into a whole range of activities.”

The liberals tend to decry the willingness of big business to co-operate with the ANC. “Anglo licks the ANC’s boots,” says Mrs Suzman, referring to the country’s premier company. The big corporations are “so scared of government, they just crawl under the table,” says Mr Leon. Black editors as well as white ones are vilified if they dissent, often with the charge that they are defending white privilege.

Cool it, Tony, you’re embarrassing us
The more pragmatic whites, who think it wiser to go with the flow, think Mr Leon, a brave, clever and ebullient lawyer who would revel in the hurly-burly of parliamentary debate in a western democracy, far too adversarial. True, he heads the opposition. But his attitude goes against the idea that “we’re all in this new project together”, as a wary white editor puts it. They think he is unduly derisive of the government. Though in an ideal world it would be nice if qualified and talented blacks gradually worked their way up through the ranks of whatever profession they are in, it would be politically ludicrous, say the pragmatists, for Mr Mbeki not to be taking drastic and immediate steps to ensure that they are better represented, especially at the top. Moreover, bluntly speaking, the DA would be more credible if it were led by a black man.

Apart from black empowerment, two other policies of Mr Mbeki have further fanned the flames of racial animosity: Zimbabwe and AIDS. On both scores, the liberals put the blame largely on the president. Various explanations for his refusal to censure Robert Mugabe have been floated, but racial solidarity—shared, in any case, by most other leaders in southern Africa—is one of the most plausible.

A curious way to define a plague
On AIDS, Mr Mbeki’s attitude seems even more puzzling—and has sharpened racial animosity still more. Though his government is belatedly implementing a plan to dish out anti-retroviral drugs, it still woefully lacks a sense of urgency. Meanwhile, 1.5m South Africans have probably died of the scourge, and at least 5m are thought to be infected with HIV, one of the highest rates in the world.

What is plain, in any event, is that Mr Mbeki sees attacks on his attitude (for refusing, at least initially, to accept a causal link between HIV and AIDS) as racially driven and implying—among other things—a contempt for black men. In an outburst in parliament, he accused “certain people” (meaning anti-rape campaigners and the DA) of propagating stereotypes of black men as “rampant sexual beasts, unable to control our urges, unable to keep our legs crossed, unable to keep it in our pants”.

Such “racial prickliness” (to use the archbishop’s words) does little for race relations. Arguably, Mr Mbeki may feel he has to echo the widely shared sentiments of his black compatriots, their sense of anger and frustration that so many of them are still living in dire poverty as they were under apartheid, while the white minority still has it so good.

For, despite the impressive strides towards integration at the top of the pile (however skewed, in liberal eyes, that process, has been), South Africa is still two countries: a first-world one of comfort and plenty, and a far bigger third-world one of poverty and disease.

Both white liberals and ANC Africanists agree that the two must meet and, one day, merge in prosperity. The booming black middle class provides a useful bridge. But disagreement over the methods of achieving a better life for the poor are sharp. The shame is that these disagreements are being increasingly drawn in terms of racial antagonism.

Posted by Phil Peterson on Sunday, April 24, 2005 at 02:15 PM in Race realism
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