The Politics of Apartheid

...As he admits, " Wyndal was not a typical community...

...While a few of the monologues may seem too long, particularly to anyone familiar with South Africa, they are on the whole invaluable for someone just becoming acquainted with this much-caricatured society...

...If adiplomat, you appear grateful when someone visits your embassy, accepts your documentation and listens politely to your point of view...

...Nonetheless, the Afrikaners' sense of destiny is explained, as is thesimple fact that they have no possible home other than South Africa...

...They are not waiting for the directional changes that can result from a national election or the death of a great leader, but the unpredictable, probably traumatic, possibly punitive alterations to their way of life that could occur if the three fourths of the country's populace officially excluded from a similarly privileged existence should come to the fore...

...Crapanzano should do some further research among whitcSouth Africans, this lime aimed at identifying how and with whom we could work to produce more meaningful and rapid changes—and remove some of the dread from waiting...

...Whether Afrikaans- or English-speaking, liberal or conservative, government official or private citizen, you are so accustomed to being treated as a malevolent curiosity that you automatically become defensive among foreigners...

...In many ways the victims as well as the beneficiaries of apartheid, they may seek simultaneously to escape into it and from it...

...It is rural, whereas most whites inhabit cities...

...Sleepy Wyndal, in this instance, is at its least "typical.' The material concerning personal idiosyncrasies and experiences, if again occasionally excessive, also adds to the major achievement of the book: the demolition of many popular stereotypes...

...But most whites, as these pages show, are humane enough to acknowledge that...

...They talk about their political impotence...

...Diplomat or not, you are relieved to get through a social evening emotionally unscathed by the inevitable declamations against apartheid and the exhortations concerning what you have to do about it...

...Vincent Crapanzano has done this in a well researched, thoughtful work that could hardly be more timely or useful...

...Crapanzano sets the stage with an excellent analysis of the central, peculiar dilemma in Wyndal: Its citizens, as his title implies, are constantly (if not always consciously) waiting for something, anything, to happen...

...You are sincerely embarrassed by at least some aspects of your singular system, and know that it must somehow change...

...theEng-lish are often less than honest in being critical while profiting from it...

...Knowing that something is wrong with thepresent, they fear the future...

...Furthermore, the average age of the villagers, who include many retirees, is higher than the national average...

...The system which their ancestors originated—English as well as Afrikaner— has unquestionably wrought much evil...

...Reviewed by Lorna Hahn Director, Association on Third World Affairs Virtually every nation in the world, except for a few other "pariahs," condemns your country and, by implication, you...

...By contrast, English speakers retain thcoption of leaving for Great Britain or, in thecaseof Jews, for Israel...

...blame the government, the Nats [National Party], the Afrikaners...

...Although dominant in the society, the whites do not really dominate it...

...But you desperately wish outsiders would try to understand the special circumstances that produced apartheid, and the excruciating difficulties involved in merely altering, let alone destroying it...

...And the cross section of interviewees is broad enough to make their positions representative of most, if not all, white South African thinking...

...For purposes of understanding "The Whites of South Africa," too much attention is given to the religious ferment in Wyndal and to the growing fascination with charismatics, faith healing, second baptisms, and the like...

...their statements may thus reflect where white South Africans are coming from more than where they are at or might be willing to go...

...The assorted voices suggest as well what many black South Africans have long asserted: The Afrikaners are at least honest in defending apartheid...

...Urban whites trying to cope with the forces of change are more worried about the political activities of church organizations than they are about personal salvation...

...Like the author of Waiting, I was initially surprised to learn that these people could have values and lifestyles very different from mine, yet in most cases be decent human beings even in individual (as distinct from institutional) dealings with blacks...

...I suspect that weariness with tales of Afrikaner heroism is one reason why such younger intellectuals as Breylen Brey-lenbach and Andre Brink have turned so vehemently against their culture...

...I formed the above impressions during many years of dealing with white South Africans both in this country and in theirs...

...People in Wyndal have many contacts with col-oreds, but relatively few with blacks...

...This, however, may be to the good: It is precisely those deeply imbedded attitudes that outsiders concerned with promoting change need to understand...

...They pretend to a liberalism that I, at least, am not always convinced is as strongly held as it appears...

...Crapanzano himself comments: "The English-speaking South Africans...

...Crapanzano explores their unease by giving background information and commentaries on various topics, then letting the people speak for themselves— in a manner reminiscent of South African novelist Andre Brink's A Chain of Voices...

...A New York anthropologist, Crapanzano chose, in 1980 and 1981, to study the 1,500 inhabitants of a gentile village outside Cape Town that he calls" Wyn-dal...

...We meet no civilian or military employees of the government—a major employer of whites, particularly Afrikaners—and no politicians, big businessmen, journalists, or other individuals who are apt to be actively involved in trying to ward off drastic changes, rather than merely awaiting whatever might come...

...Several developments since Crapan-zano's departure—e.g., the affirmation that blacks may be permanent citizens of South Africa, and the scrapping of bans on interracial sex and marriage— have indicated a recognition of past injustices...

...They cast themselves as victims...

...I began to wish that someone would do a serious study of white South Africans and of the perilous uncertainty—no less unique than the circumstances and the system responsible for it—that marks their daily lives...

...They make clear, for example, the depth of the cleavage that remains between Afrikaners and English...

...Abroad its products are boycotted, its performers are banned, its buildings are picketed...

...The wounds of the Boer War still fester, particularly among the older Afrikaners, who incessantly seek comprehension of their suffering at English hands (which led many of them to at first support England's enemy, Nazi Germany) and of their historical ordeal generally...

...South Africa is too often depicted in Manichean black-versus-white terms, with whites painted as a monolithic evil...

...On the other hand, the government has made clear its determination lo control the pace of liberalization...