[afro-nets] Apartheid is dead....Long Live Apartheid...?

[Sanjoy Kumar Nayak <sanjoy_k_nayak@yahoo.co.uk>]

Apartheid is dead....Long Live Apartheid...?
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The elusive rainbow
Change is glacial in post-apartheid South Africa: power and
wealth are still in the grip of the white minority

By Jonathan Freedland
mailto:freedland@guardian.co.uk

Guardian

Wednesday February 23, 2005


Take the following as a health warning. I've spent the last
month in South Africa, but I was not reporting from there. I was
in the country on a writing break, with my ears and eyes open,
but without ever using my notebook in anger. What I picked up
were impressions, rather than a firm, detailed analysis. I know,
as the nerds like to say, that the plural of anecdote is not
data - and what I have very much falls into the former category.
That's the disclaimer. Here's the unscientific conclusion: I was
disappointed. I fall into the generation for whom apartheid was
the dominant international cause of our youth. If baby-boomers
were galvanised by Vietnam, then those who came of age in the
1980s were inspired by the campaign to transform South Africa.
Even if we were not manning the 24-hour picket at Trafalgar
Square, apartheid formed a kind of backdrop to the times. Cry
Freedom was on at the movies, Free Nelson Mandela was the anthem
at every college disco. What Thatcherism was at home, apartheid
was abroad: the issue of the age.

That was nearly two decades ago. I assumed that a trip in the
winter of 2005 would be to a wholly different country, with
apartheid and all its works a bad, fading memory. That's where I
was wrong.

Of course, and as everyone knows, the formal structures of that
dreaded system have long gone. The country is ruled by its sec-
ond black president; "Whites Only" signs are to be found behind
glass in a museum and nowhere else.

And yet, the rainbow nation, the "new South Africa" so con-
stantly invoked and effectively publicised, proved elusive. What
I found, during what one scholar calls the "banal encounters" of
day-to-day life, was a set-up remarkably like the one I had
imagined back when I was a student shaking a bucket for the
anti-apartheid movement.

If you saw a smart car, its driver was white. If you saw a smart
house, its owner was white. Its cleaner and gardener were black.
This was not "many" or "most". This was all. After a while, I
made a little wager with myself. Would I see, at any point in
nearly four weeks in the country, a white person serving a black
person? I looked hard - at restaurants, at petrol stations, in
bars, in shops, in banks. I never saw it. Not once. I looked at
magazine covers and window-displays in clothing stores. White,
white, white. Occasionally, there would be a token black face,
usually very light-skinned.

I would ask white South Africans I met about this. Sometimes
they would be defensive, insisting that Britain or America were
not much better. It's true: photo displays at Gap or Marks &
Spencer might also have just one or two black faces. The differ-
ence is, Britain has a non-white population that accounts for no
more than 7% of the whole. In the US, African-Americans make up
about 13% of the population. Yet three in four South Africans
are black. Looking around, you'd have thought the reverse was
true: that this was a white country, with a small, tolerated
black minority.

Others would tell me that I needed to get out more and they were
surely right. I did not travel much beyond Cape Town and I am
ready to believe that other cities - with Johannesburg the chief
example - are advancing much more rapidly. Nevertheless, it was
striking to see how often, outside the realms of formal poli-
tics, power and privilege remained in white hands.

Cape Town itself was a shock. It is stunningly beautiful, a city
framed by mountains, two oceans and big, blue skies. All around
were people having relaxed, unending fun. It was not just the
tourists: local people, too, seemed to treat the city as a play-
ground. When they weren't surfing or hang-gliding, they were
sunbathing or heading off for a round of golf. During the day-
time, the cafes would be full, made noisy with local accents:
people with time on their hands and money in their pockets.
White people to be precise - their tables cleaned, their cars
watched, their shirts ironed, their coffee brewed by black peo-
ple, most of them paid a pittance.

Ah, but this is not apartheid, I would be told. It is an eco-
nomic, rather than a racial divide - the same gap between rich
and poor one might find in any country. Is California so differ-
ent, where affluent whites are pampered by Hispanic maids, jani-
tors and valet parkers? Is Britain so much better?

Well, yes. Because while economic and racial dividing lines of-
ten map on to each other elsewhere in the world, in South Africa
they seemed all but identical, entrenched by a long political
history that makes movement across the divide punishingly diffi-
cult. I know there is a white working class in the country and
that, conversely, a few black entrepreneurs are now emerging.
But the overwhelming picture is of a society where the goodies
are still hoarded by one group - and withheld from everyone
else.

The government is doing its best, with a Black Economic Empower-
ment programme designed to spread the spoils more fairly. That
has run into trouble though, with accusations that the chief
beneficiaries have tended to be friends of the ruling elite,
shutting out the majority of black South Africans. (On this
point, one of the loudest critics has been the president's own
brother, Moeletsi Mbeki.)

Nor is it encouraging that the African National Congress seems
to have developed a thin skin when it comes to criticism. While
I was there, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was locked in a very public
row with the ruling party. He accused the president of surround-
ing himself with yes-men, rewarding only sycophancy and punish-
ing dissent. Mbeki shot back, questioning Tutu's respect for the
truth and his right to speak about internal ANC matters when he
is not a member. Later, the party branded Tutu an "icon" of
whites, as if he were no longer an authentic black leader. It
does not amount to a full case of Mugabe syndrome, far from it.
But these are uncomfortable warning signs.

Of course, any fair account has to recognise, as a just-
published state of the nation survey does, that South Africa has
made enormous strides in the 11 years since apartheid. The coun-
try did not descend into civil war, and it is more peaceful and
more prosperous than the sceptics ever predicted.

Nevertheless, my experience has forced me to think again about
the pace of political change. While I was in South Africa, Nel-
son Mandela marked the 15th anniversary of his release from
jail. I remember watching that moment on television along with
the rest of the world. I thought then that the end of apartheid
would bring an end to the crude inequality that made blacks the
servants of whites. A decade and a half later and it has not.
Change, I realise, is glacially slow. As Paul Foot wrote in his
last book, revolutions do not take hours or weeks but many years
- and sometimes even longer.

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