(The first part of this article was published in the Sunday issue of Dawn)

Not long after Mandela came to power it was difficult to find white people who admitted to supporting apartheid as fear gave way to a degree of shame over past wrongs. But it wasn’t long before many white people came to see themselves as victims amid rising crime, in particular the 20,000 murders a year, and then affirmative action laws that reserved 80 per cent of most new jobs for black people and put an end to the virtual guarantee of university places for white students.

The very name of the Transvaal Agricultural Union gives away its take on the new South Africa. The Transvaal ceased to exist as a country after the Boer war and as a province after apartheid but the group representing mostly white farmers clings to the name as a statement. The views of its general manager, Bennie van Zyl, are not representative of most white people but they are sufficiently widespread to give his organisation some political clout. They are also the kind of views that underpin the actions of the Free State university students.

“This government has a clampdown on whites. Because of affirmative action they are chasing away a lot of white people, white people with skills. They go out of the country. They don’t hire the best man for the job. They appoint people who don’t have the capacity. Now everything is so ideologically driven and politically driven, not economically driven. That is one of the big problems with Africa. Look at Zimbabwe. That’s the African reality.”

Mbeki has done little to reassure white people. When he came to power in 1999, South Africa’s president made clear that he saw things differently from Mandela and that race was a yardstick by which almost everything would be judged. “The defining parameter in our continuing struggle for national unity and reconciliation is the question of race,” he says. “For many years to come, we will be able to measure the distance we have travelled towards the accomplishment of these objectives by the degree to which we have succeeded to close the great racial divides that continue to separate our communities.”

Kollapen says that Mbeki’s shift of emphasis, from calming white fears to delivering better living standards and opportunities for black people, was viewed by many white people as a betrayal of Mandela’s promise of reconciliation. “There was quite a distinct response from white people during the Mandela era and at the beginning of the Mbeki era. Some would cynically say that Mandela was the kind of president who made white people feel more secure and comfortable because of his strong focus on reconciliation. A Mbeki presidency was characterised by a strong need to deliver and to transform, which was why we saw programmes that pushed greater equity, and once you started talking greater equity, it meant making inroads into white people’s interests,” he says.It is difficult to say just how many South Africans, white and black, have emigrated because most do not formally declare they are doing so, but there are hundreds of thousands in Britain alone, many of them students or young people on Commonwealth work visas. Recently, however, there has been more talk about leaving among white people who fought for the new South Africa. For some it is simply the fear of crime periodically accentuated by some murder that stands out from the rest. This week, it was the shooting dead of an architect, and the wounding of his wife and 16-year-old son, in their Johannesburg home. Last month, it was the killing of 12-year-old Emily Williams in a robbery.

Others, such as Howard Varney, an anti-apartheid lawyer who was an investigator for Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s truth and reconciliation commission, are increasingly disillusioned with what they see as the undermining of the institutions built up to protect post-apartheid democracy. The ANC is dismantling the elite anti-corruption unit prosecuting Zuma and other prominent party figures for corruption. Mbeki’s attempts to prevent the prosecution of his police chief, Jackie Selebi, for corruption and ties to a leading crime boss has reinforced a perception that the rule of law is hostage to political interests. The ANC leadership also blocked an investigation into graft by political figures in the country’s largest ever weapons deal.

“There’s a feeling of great unease,” says Varney. “Many people who were part and parcel of the liberation struggle feel that what is going on is not what they worked toward. The constitutional principles, the rule of law, seem to be given short shrift depending on political influence. Certainly there’s a sense that if there’s a problem with criminal justice you just change the system. In the Mandela era, these things were sacrosanct and had to be built and respected. In the Mbeki era, there has been a slow undermining of these institutions and the placing of yes men in all key positions.”

So will he leave? “I think so, yeah,” he says. “Whereas Mandela’s approach was one of inclusiveness, that constructive approach has given way to Mbeki’s almost vindictive approach.”

Perhaps it was too much to expect that South Africa would change so fundamentally in a single generation? “I think the idea of the rainbow nation was a wonderful vision,” says Kollapen. “We almost had a collective sense of where we wanted to go to and maybe that was more comforting than trying to find out where we’ve come from. Even today, whenever there’s a debate around race in society, everybody makes the same point: that this goes counter to what we want to achieve. But no one really asks the question: do these things happen in part because we haven’t quite dealt with where we’ve come from?”

Kollapen says that South Africa needs the kind of powerful apology for apartheid that was recently offered by the Australian government to Aborigines in order to get white South Africans to stop looking on themselves as the victims.

Van Zyl says it won’t come from him.

“Racism isn’t necessarily bad. It’s about cultural differences. We should accept each other as we are,” he says. “They say apartheid was so bad but it created communications and infrastructure, railways, roads, the mines. It created jobs. I myself will never apologise for something that created the best opportunities in this country. People take apartheid out of context. It was different groups of people living in their culture, the way they like it.”—Dawn/Guardian News Service

(Concluded)