Mandela’s vision doubted in S. Africa
As racism lingers, blacks question reconciliation
JOHANNESBURG — Early one weekend morning, just after the nightclubs had closed, three young white men ambled into the harsh fluorescent light of a South African takeout food franchise. They whistled at the staffers, all of them black, tugged their clothing and pulled their caps askew.
When customers Sikhulekile Duma and two fellow black students told them to stop, they said people who didn’t speak Afrikaans didn’t belong there.
“They were whistling at them like they were whistling (at) dogs. They even jumped over the counter, and they were patting them like they were dogs. Yourself, you feel disrespected. You know this is racial, this disrespect,” Duma said.
After leaving the restaurant in Stellenbosch, near Cape Town, Duma and his friends were confronted by seven young white men, including the three who had humiliated the staff.
“These guys were really big. I got hit from behind, and I fell on the ground. My glasses broke,” Duma recalled in an interview about the February incident.
Racist incidents such as this, Duma says, remain commonplace in South Africa more than two decades after Nelson Mandela, the nation’s first black president, took office.
At Stellenbosch University, Duma is a member of an activist group seeking to make the overwhelmingly white governing council more representative, to demand that it offer all classes in English and to reform the “passively hostile culture of white Afrikanerdom.”
After organizing a protest in April at the inauguration of the university’s new rector, who is white, Duma received a text message:
— “You black bastard from a white farmer.”
A white academic at the university has been suspended, pending an investigation, on suspicion of sending the message.
Reports of racism have increased at universities, schools, parking lots, restaurants and office blocks, and on Facebook and Twitter, according to the South African Human Rights Commission. Some black South Africans, frustrated by overt racism, question Mandela’s soft vision of reconciliation.
Tumi Mpofu and her family say they were denied a reservation at an upscale Cape Town restaurant, the 12 Apostles, last year after her father provided their surname. When Tumi Mpofu then asked a white friend to phone for a table of the same size a few minutes later, the request was granted. When the Mpofu family arrived, they were told there was no table. Again Tumi Mpofu phoned her white friend, who intervened, and the Mpofus were seated. Restaurant management acknowledged making a mistake but denied racism.
“Our words just seemed to fly right past them,” Tumi Mpofu said. “There were six adults. It had to take a white person who was not even in the same room for them to take us seriously. This incident was just so upsetting for me and obviously hurtful.”
Once seated, “it took us forever to get someone to come to us. On top of everything that happened, they came and told us to keep it down,” she said in an interview. “My dad was absolutely livid.”
Political power might have changed hands 21 years ago, but much of South Africa’s economic power remains in the hands of whites. White per capita income in 2008 was about $ 9,400, compared with $1,220 for blacks, according to the South African Institute of Race Relations.
Now that the first black president has passed away, many young black South Africans reject what some call “Mandela’s bubble” and believe that whites should give up their economic advantages to atone for the past. Many whites, comfortable and privileged, don’t see the need for a new debate on race.
To them, it’s time for blacks to stop referring to the nation’s ugly apartheid past.
“It’s like an abuser telling the abused to ‘get over it,’ ” Tumi Mpofu said.
“Many whites in South Africa are generally unwilling to engage in the topic of racism, most crying out that we ‘must move beyond race’ and that they ‘do not see color,’ ” South African filmmaker and writer Gillian Schutte, who is white, wrote in a column in the Mail & Guardian.
“This is the new phenomenon of ‘colorblind racism’ that denies and ignores the fact that for people of color/ black people, race still matters because they still experience it.”
Frans Cronje, chief executive of the South African Institute of Race Relations, said many South Africans assumed that more than two decades after Mandela was elected, racial tension would have subsided. Instead, the nation has become more divided, he said, as the economy has failed to deliver the jobs required to bring greater financial equality.
“In a society that becomes increasingly polarized, you can expect more of these things coming to the fore,” he said, referring to the racist incidents. With South Africa’s growth predicted to be 2 percent this year and the unemployment rate stubbornly high, the rand has declined, pessimism has set in, and Cronje expects “racial relations will be increasingly fraught and increasingly difficult.”
“We are starting to make peace with the fact that the inequalities we inherited from the apartheid era are going to be with us for very much longer than we imagined,” Cronje said.
Duma, the Stellenbosch student, said the effect of apartheid remains ever present. “The fault lines have always been there and they have been deep and we have been quiet about it, and now we are getting to the point that it’s beginning to expose itself. What we are seeing is it’s not working. I think it’s to do with what a lot of white people have, in terms of white privilege,” he said.
Like Duma, Tumi Mpofu believes Mandela’s reconciliation was too soft on whites.
“It’s all about accommodating white people and making them feel like they’re part of the new democratic South Africa, at the expense of black people. Awhole lot of people are still holding on to this Rainbow Nation thing, because it benefits them, because it’s working for them,” she said. “But it’s not working for black people.
“I don’t think our government has even begun to deal with racism issues. People are starting to wake up and say, ‘We’ve been deluding ourselves.’ The more racist incidents that happen, the more people are waking up.”
“Jou swart moer van die wit boer”