Whites in the New South Africa

...In the South African case this enforced sense of cheerfulness often covers a deep pessimism, indeed often a real fear...

...Whites note that the older, once all-white universities are under pressure to transform themselves on the HBU model, and start planning to send their children to be educated abroad...

...The new government is, in many obvious ways, naive and incompetent...

...As time slipped by it became clear that no one was doing any work on the project and that her attempts to bring up the subject were brushed aside on the general principle of manatia...

...The rhetoric of the new South Africa is a homegrown version of what C. Wright Mills termed "the American celebration," an endless self-confirmatory, self-praising soothing of collective insecurities...

...Inevitably, this process has strong demographic implications, with whites becoming a steadily more elderly group—in sharper and sharper contrast to blacks, half of whom are under twenty...

...After a while a weary sigh escaped Miss X, bent over the keys: "Oh dear, such a lot of foreign names this year...

...There is no doubting the anguished price such folk are willing to pay—and the bulk of them are nonracist political liberals—to ensure that their children do not have to risk living and working in the new South Africa...

...But the ironic result of these pressures is that, for all the nationalist rhetoric about "building a new nation," many whites (together with a fair smattering of Indians and blacks) are moving back toward a more colonial frame of mind, devoting enormous care to building prudential relationships with the metropole-building up an illegal nest egg in a hard currency foreign bank account, acquiring a foreign passport, placing a child in education abroad, acquiring internationally valid qualifications, or just taking out time to travel overseas to build a contact network there...

...In one sense such fears seem odd, for in every obvious way things are now better in South Africa than they have been for a long time...

...Inflation is down, growth is at over 3 percent (after years of negative growth), and tourists are flowing in...

...To such worries many whites would add others...

...q SUMMER • 1996 • 137 138 • DISSENT...

...The lower standards of education inflicted on blacks by Verwoerd's Bantu Education System mean that as educational institutions are fully integrated the rearguard battle waged by white teachers and parents to preserve standards is generally interpreted as a white racist attempt to maintain the exclusion of blacks or at least their consignment to lower grades, despite the workings of what is known here as "affirmative marking...

...This has produced strong counterpressures of "pass one, pass all" and a frank pressure to lower standards that horrifies whites...

...Even relatively liberal whites sometimes slipped into such thought patterns...

...Already 12 percent of the adult population is HIV-positive and the figure is advancing rapidly toward the one-third level, which seems to be where the disease has plateaued in East Africa...

...It is politically incorrect to draw attention to the fact that the Ministers of Defense, the Police, Transport and probably several others are members of the Communist party and that the party wholly controls the intelligence services, the trade unions, and many of the parliamentary committees...

...In the interests of equity and a proposed national health service the government is holding down doctors' pay, cutting the number of teaching hospitals, and has banned certain expensive operations—thus, for example, in the whole of the Johannesburg-Pretoria region, the country's economic powerhouse, the government hospitals are forbidden to carry out heart transplants...

...Either they will flee into more private sectors of the economy where such conditions are less likely to obtain or they will leave...

...Yet the one target the government is certainly meeting is that for affirmative action appointments, as large numbers of gravely under-trained and under-educated blacks swarm aboard the gravy train while older, better educated and more experienced whites descend from it...

...It was widely expected, as the 1994 election drew nearer, that AWB support would rise as the specter of black rule grew closer and more threatening...

...At present this seems unlikely, though recent polls show growing white support for a separate white volkstaat...

...The urban guerrilla war is over, all manner of institutions and revolutionary counter-institutions (the police, army, the diplomatic corps, and so on) have been united...

...This is a pattern we have seen elsewhere in settler Africa, with the white population gradually reduced to short-stay consultants, a few hardy farmers, and international aid workers...

...Certainly, those institutions that have been under black administration longest— the HBUs (Historically Black Universities)— are synonyms for low standards, demoralized faculties, and endless student protest...

...The appeal of Eugene Terreblanche's far rightAWB (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) for long rested on his promise that he would prevent "Communist revolution" (that is, majority rule...

...It is, indeed, a cliché of white South African life—it has been most marked among the Jewish community for over a decade now—to find parents anchored here, their children in Britain, Australia, or the United States, and an immense expense and effort put into the endless trips and phone calls necessary to keep some sense of family together...

...Moreover, the ANC has moved through 180 degrees on its economic policy...

...There is also the longer term fear that although Mandela may have the approval of all races, he will have to go by 1999, if not before, and that his likely successor, Thabo Mbeki, may not be able to hold together this deeply divided country...

...Many whites are, in their daily lives, deeply scared—scared of violence, of crime, of being squeezed out of jobs by affirmative action and, above all, scared of the sheer brute power of African nationalism...

...As long as the economy continues to grow healthily, such trends will remain within bounds, but a downturn in the business cycle would see white disaffection grow...

...But while whites were the only full citizens— making up the army, all the police officer corps, all the leading positions in the business and the professions and, of course, the only ones with a full vote—they also knew, at a more fundamental level, not only that they were a numerical minority but that they were, as such, deeply threatened, that it all could not last...

...That, in a sense, is what the change has been all about...

...There could well be increased white support for potential separatist movements in the Western Cape or in KwaZuluNatal, but even this would depend on alliances with the Cape Coloured or Buthelezi's Zulus, neither of which is unproblematic...

...This feeling was perceptible in many different ways...

...Once President F.W...

...The result was that Miss X found herself typing lists that included not only Johnsons, Browns, and Van der Merwes but Tshabalalas, Poovalinghams, and Ntsebezas...

...Many other ministries are missing their targets by wide margins, and the government's overall Reconstruction and SUMMER • 1996 • 135 South Africa Development Plan (RDP) is in a shambles of over-promise and under-delivery...

...The county's oldest and most prestigious medical school is at the University of Cape Town, but admission standards there have been so strongly affected by affirmative action criteria that white males, who would normally have made up perhaps 75 percent of the entry on merit, would now be lucky to secure 25 percent of the places...

...This impression was so wide and deep that a friend of mine who is a sophisticated liberal politician was so unsure of whether de Klerk had fully understood that the process he had begun could only end in the transfer of power that he was not satisfied until he had sought out de Klerk and questioned him himself...

...Whites (even English-speaking whites) used to say things like "So-and-so's a real South African—he loves rugby, boerewors, and speaking die taal," a turn of phrase that made it clear that being a real South African involved conformity to a white Afrikaner stereotype...

...but in the third year blacks really cottoned on that things had changed and the number shot up to 28 percent and the year after to over 50 percent...

...President Mandela's invitation to Muammar alQaddafi and Fidel Castro to visit South Africa has perturbed others, as did his willingness to meet Louis Farrakhan and his announced willingness to meet with representatives of Hamasthis in the week following Hamas atrocities in Israel...

...The key distinction to make is that although Nelson Mandela has successfully created an atmosphere of reconciliation and even (greatly assisted by a series of national sporting triumphs) a modicum of national unity, he has not generated a feeling of confidence in the future...

...One liberal friend of mine works in a research division where she is the only white...

...Having, for example, promised to build one million cheap houses in its first five years for the vast number of homeless or shack-dwelling Africans, the government has actually slowed down the rate of house-building (54,000 in de Klerk's last year, to 20,000 in the past two years...

...Her colleagues furiously denounced her for having made them feel bad about themselves and inferior and indeed, for being a racist white who had clearly assumed in advance that her black colleagues were hopeless...

...I can remember, in the political science department I used to teach in Durban, the departmental secretary, Miss X—a charming, intelligent woman, fiercely opposed to apartheid—having to type up the seminar lists of students after universities were desegregated in the 1980s...

...The entire basis of Terreblanche's appeal lay in a Canute-like belief that the future could be held at bay...

...The first of these processes is affirmative action...

...This is quite a list, but South African whites are often a hardy lot, used to living with the impossible— with a murder rate ten times that of the United States, with border wars, an extreme climate, and so on...

...This was both inevitable and unthinkable...

...She is still working in this silent, unhappy atmosphere though she tells me that there are signs of the boycott cracking and that she expects to be talking to at least most of her colleagues again soon...

...The differing educational backgrounds of blacks and whites and the enormous black sensitivity that what whites mean by "lower standards" is "the congenital inferiority of blacks," often creates impossible work situations...

...It is quite normal to find senior doctors predicting the wholesale collapse of medical education and state hospitals over the next few years...

...In the first "open" year, only 2 percent of the students were African or Indian...

...This is the group that could provide the muscle of a militant white reaction, but whether or not this occurs depends on whether a better equipped white group emerges to give social leadership to such a reaction...

...One could doubtless argue this case both ways, but the important point is simply that it is impossible to imagine the majority of whites putting up with such situations for long...

...The era when whites will take decisive political action on their own is over...

...Yet skilled whites are still emigrating in considerable numbers and even many of those who are happy about their decision to stay are not just emphatic but downright passionate in their determination that their children must be equipped to seek their living in other countries...

...Many point at the country's senior university, Wits, where a black deputy vice chancellor, Professor Willie Makgoba, who claims that math was invented in Nigeria and that there is a worldwide plot to undermine African culture, was caught falsifying his resume...

...The government rages against this behavior, talks about making it compulsory for doctors to work in deprived rural areas for several years, and is now importing two thousand doctors from Cuba...

...The explanation of such bizarre behavior as rooted in sheer naiveté is not entirely reassuring...

...What we hear, endlessly, is that South Africans are the "rainbow people of god," that we are a "miracle nation," which had a "miracle election" (although, truth to tell, it was not wholly free or fair), that SouthAfrica is the land of historic reconciliation, an example to the whole world, a South Africa symbolized by Nelson Mandela, a man who represents the victory of humanity over bitterness...

...All this now seems a century ago...

...My friend, knowing she was fundamentally better educated and equipped than her colleagues, began quietly taking files home in the evening and when, on deadline day, the panic 136 • DISSENT South Africa over the project's noncompletion began, she was able to announce that the division's reputation was intact: she had completed the project the night before...

...If things are so good, how come things are so bad...

...They have angrily ordained that she is to be sent to Coventry (that is, not spoken to) for her racist white arrogance...

...In the country that carried out the world's first heart transplants and has a long tradition of medical excellence, these changes have created demoralization and the emigration of at least half of each graduating class of doctors every year...

...Recently her division was given a major project with an urgent deadline...

...Others point at the black principal of the oldest African university, Fort Hare, recently caught in an act of fragrant plagiarism, but by this stage of the argument those disputants who have college-age children are often shepherding their dependents toward the airport departure lounge...

...It is not just that until the last few years they had the political, economic, and military power that normally only majorities have but they actually felt that they were, if not exactly a majority, at least somehow more authentically South African than black or brown people could ever be...

...As yet, the state sector still has the forward momentum of the proverbial supertanker, but the general assumption is that down in the engine room things will progressively seize up...

...Seven years ago it saw its objective as building a new East Germany in Africa...

...This rhetoric is oppressive, just as the "American celebration" was, suffocating not only dissident voices but a far greater variety of experience and consciousness than any such "celebration" can ever allow...

...When one contrasts this reality with what even relatively sober white opinion expected a few years ago, there is no doubt that things are a great deal better than most had dared to hope...

...However, not only has it not nationalized anything, but it now even mutters about possible privatizations...

...Not only is apartheid gone, but there is an increasingly easy and unbothered mixing of the races...

...This process convinces whites that the doors of employment will be shut to their children simply on racial grounds and it also more or less guarantees a steep decline in the (already unimpressive) efficiency of government and the parastatal sector...

...But this cannot happen in South Africa: the white population is simply too big, too much of it is too rooted to move, and, above all, most of the "colonial" strategies adumbrated above are simply not available to poorer whites, among whom there is growing unemployment and social distress...

...de Klerk unbanned the African National Congress (ANC) in 1990 and announced free, universal suffrage elections, many whites believed for the next several years that he was so immensely cunning that he had all sorts of hidden aces up his sleeve, that he had no real intention of letting "them" take over...

...at a purely personal level, in offices, homes, and factories, race relations are better and more relaxed here than in the United States...

...in the second year about 6 percent...

...But South Africa is, without much doubt, now the most politically correct country in the world and it is highly politically incorrect, amid this atmosphere of officially endorsed euphoria, to admit that one is scared...

...What is happening with doctors provides a sort of parable...

...In fact the opposite happened, and the AWB shrank into insignificance: as the reality dawned that black rule could not be prevented, the poor whites who made up the bulk of AWB support realized that they would have difficulty enough in the new situation looking after themselves and their families' interests 134 • DISSENT South Africa without bothering with the sort of right-wing adventurism that Terreblanche stood for...

...The 1994 election not only made anything other than black rule unthinkable but also unleashed a euphoria that, superficially at least, continues...

...It would be truer to say that he has created a feeling of phony war, the sense that while things are not going too badly now, at a deeper level a number of processes are at work that are bound to end in tears...

...To some extent this pessimism has roots in a deep and general white misgiving about African competence, but it is also more solidly rooted in the poor educational level of even the black elite, perhaps the most dangerous and enduring inheritance of apartheid...

...nonetheless, many do notice it...