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'Whites fear exclusion in new S. Africa' by Laurie Goering of the Chicago Tribune (foreign correspondent)
Worried about surging violent crime and the future of his two young daughters, Steve Wimberley six years ago quit his veterinary practice in South Africa, flew to England and soon tracked down a new job in Portsmouth.
"It was a very nice job, in a very nice place," he recalled.
But when he flew home to pack for the move, "I never could settle with it. I was so uneasy. The decision kept me up," he said.
Finally, after a week of sleepless nights, staring out into what he called "the beautiful African night," the fourth-generation South African abandoned his plans to emigrate.
"I decided my heart was here," the 42-year-old recalled. "I've never regretted that decision for a minute."
More than a decade after the end of apartheid, white South Africans still are weighing their future in a society where creating economic clout for the country's long-repressed black majority has become the top national priority.
Under broad affirmative action programs, blacks are favored for the civil service jobs whites used to take for granted. White business people are obliged to hire black subcontractors, train black employees and sell shares of their companies to black co-owners or face losing government contracts.
The country's black leaders are pushing for what a ruling African National Congress briefing paper calls a "critical mass of common culture and cultural practices." Whites who fail to back the ANC's transformation efforts and adapt to the country's changing culture, leaders suggest, may ultimately no longer be considered South Africans.
For South Africa's 4 million whites--many from centuries-old South African families or white communities that fled unwelcoming African countries such as Zimbabwe--the prospect of becoming unwelcome in the last white stronghold in Africa is chilling.
"There can be no more fundamental threat to a community's sense of security than to declare them, even in a roundabout way, unwanted aliens in their own country," Max du Preez, a white columnist for Johannesburg's Star newspaper, wrote recently.
When President Robert Mugabe of neighboring Zimbabwe declares that his nation "is for black people, not white people," and South Africa's leaders fail to rebuke him, "this drives a red-hot poker through the hearts of white South Africans, especially those with no cultural, emotional or family links with any country outside Africa," du Preez said.
Deeply rooted traditions
Africa, at the start of a new century, is struggling to find ways to make itself a success. Its leaders, eager to ease the continent's persistent poverty, promote peace and development and prove that black leaders can solve Africa's problems, are sorting through deeply rooted cultural traditions, colonial-era legacies and the demands of a newly globalized world, searching for African answers to the continent's woes.
Where Africa's dwindling number of whites fits into the continent's future remains in question. For 50 years, the famed Freedom Charter of South Africa's multiracial African National Congress has insisted that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white." Most South Africans, black and white, believe that, and believe that a non-racist, if not exactly non-racial, future is possible.
But some whites are nervous. South African President Thabo Mbeki has been quick to dismiss criticism of his government, particularly by white opposition figures, as racist. His failure to denounce economic misrule and human-rights violations in Zimbabwe, his suggestions that the country's judiciary needs to be less independent and more in tune with the ANC's programs, and his hints that English-speaking white South Africans may not be as genuinely African as their Afrikaner counterparts have all raised fears about the future of whites and non-racial democracy in South Africa.
"It's undermined confidence," said Helen Suzman, a white liberal icon of the anti-apartheid struggle, and now a critic of the ANC government. During more than four decades of apartheid, a steady flow of whites left South Africa "because they didn't like the system," she said. "Now a lot are leaving because they don't like their prospects."
Fifty years after white colonial rule in Africa began to collapse, relatively few whites remain in sub-Saharan Africa. In Kenya, a former white stronghold, Europeans, Asians and Arabs combined now make up less than 1 percent of the population. Zimbabwe has lost nearly three-quarters of a million whites in recent years; today just 35,000 remain.
In places such as Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Zambia, whites are so few that census takers no longer bother counting them as a separate racial category. In total, sub-Saharan Africa has less than 5 million whites, out of a total population of more than 600 million people.
Many whites have left as colonial-era jobs and privileges disappeared. Some have fled wars, crime, declining living standards or collapsing economies. Others have become political targets, particularly in places such as Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe.
In South Africa, at least a quarter-million whites have emigrated since the end of apartheid a decade ago. But the country remains home to 80 percent of the continent's white community, and after a decade of relative peace and prosperity, most of those who remain say they hope they are here to stay.
Unlike whites in much of the rest of Africa, most have nowhere else to go. In particular, the country's millions of Afrikaners--descendants of primarily Dutch and French immigrants who began arriving 400 years ago--speak a language used nowhere else in the world and have no family ties anywhere else.
While some English-speaking whites--like Wimberley, who almost emigrated--have the right to British or other passports through ancestral ties, "there's no other place for us," says Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, an Afrikaner political analyst. "I wouldn't know where to start looking."
Because of their long history in the country, whites in South Africa--unlike in most African countries--rarely are seen as outsiders. The ruling ANC was formed nearly a century ago as a multiracial organization, and whites numbered among the country's most prominent anti-apartheid fighters.
Commitment to a multiracial society also is long-standing and considered a "high moral principle" within the ANC. At the Rivonia trial, where he was sentenced to life in prison in the 1960s, Nelson Mandela insisted he was opposed to white domination and to black domination. Mandela, the former president, said then that he was prepared to die to achieve his cherished ideal "of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunity."
Fears of exclusion
In South Africa, "it's taken for granted that both white and black people live here and always will," said Xolela Mangcu, executive director of the social cohesion and identity unit of the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa. Even after the ugly apartheid years, white fears of being forced out are unfounded, he insisted.
The tougher question is how comfortably whites may continue to fit into a country run by a ruling party bent on uniting all South Africans behind its policies and ensuring that the country's long-disenfranchised black majority gets ahead.
The ANC last month held a national party meeting on what it calls "the national question," or how to unite South Africans behind a common culture.
Leaders of the ANC, which already enjoys the backing of about 70 percent of South Africans, say bringing the rest of the country on board is crucial to achieving party aims and uplifting the country's black majority, still suffering from high poverty and unemployment rates.
"The ANC must intensify the mobilization of the whole of South African society behind a program of fundamental change," Mbeki insisted at the meeting's opening.
Critics, however, warn that the dominant ANC's growing demand for consensus and impatience with dissent could result in those who refuse to sign onto the party's aims being dismissed as less-than-genuine South Africans.
Mbeki has said he believes Afrikaners and black Africans can work together because "they share common African roots and are tied to our country by an emotional bond." That remarkable discovery of common ground with the ethnic group that spawned apartheid comes on the heels of a decision by the New National Party--the modern progeny of the hated apartheid National Party--to disband and fold itself into the ANC.
But while Afrikaners "are embracing the new South Africa and Africanism," according to the ANC, English-speaking whites--including many active in the liberation struggle and now vocal in their criticism of the government--have been increasingly dismissed as racists, and as perhaps less-than-African.
"Mbeki is so delighted to have swallowed up the NNP that he's embraced [Afrikaners] while the people who fought against apartheid are brushed aside with contempt," Suzman said.
What worries many whites is that if the ANC's undisputed power is genuinely threatened, the party could follow Mugabe's lead and blame whites for the country's failures in an effort to divert attention from anti-government discontent.
"We could quickly see the ANC resort to the old African style of eliminating the opposition. I think that's a fairly realistic possibility down the line," Wimberley acknowledged. "I'm pretty optimistic about this country, but you never know. Things could turn at any time."
Most South African political analysts, however, say they believe such a scenario is very unlikely. South Africa, a much larger and more economically powerful nation than Zimbabwe, has a vibrant civil society, a strong independent news media and entrenched governmental institutions that so far serve as an effective check on the ANC administration.
Just as important, "everyone here can see what's happening in Zimbabwe doesn't solve a thing," said van Zyl Slabbert, the Afrikaner political analyst. By attacking whites and other political opponents in an effort to cling to power, an increasingly unpopular Mugabe has instead driven his once-prosperous country to the brink of economic collapse.
New class of blacks
One change seen as encouraging for whites in South Africa is that class is fast catching up with race as the country's major dividing line. Economic affirmative action policies--known as black economic empowerment--have created a new class of wealthy black business magnates, and a growing South African economy has slowly allowed an increasing number blacks to join the middle class.
Congestion on Johannesburg's roads is growing as more black South Africans buy cars. Middle-class blacks are moving into formerly all-white neighborhoods, buying homes with swimming pools, hiring maids and putting their children in private schools, just like their white neighbors.
At the same time, poorly educated whites--once first in line for government jobs under apartheid--are joining the lines of black beggars at traffic lights and moving into black townships such as Soweto, which are more affordable.
Challenge to create jobs
In South Africa, "race is increasingly not the issue," van Zyl Slabbert said. Instead, the challenge is to create enough economic growth and new jobs to lift the country's still struggling majority rather than just a fortunate black minority.
How well South Africa succeeds in that effort will largely determine what the future looks like for white--as well as black--South Africans. If the country's immense poverty and joblessness are left unchecked, whites and their new middle-class black neighbors may move in ever-greater numbers into the posh walled neighborhoods springing up at Johannesburg's fringes, hoping guards and electric wire can keep the desperate poor away.
Failure to improve life for South Africa's impoverished majority could lead to a populist backlash that would reverse the country's commitment to free markets and leave everyone poorer, economists warn. Similarly, affirmative action programs, if kept up too long, could eventually drive whites--and investment--away.
What is likely is that race will be less of an issue for South Africa's children than for its older generations raised under apartheid. Wimberley's daughters study with black and white classmates and have neighbors and friends of various races.
"It will take years for the hang-ups of race to leave this country," Wimberley warned. "But I know my children have far less hang-ups than we ever had. That's a positive."
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