by Robert Guest
Ken Saro-Wiwa, a leader of the Ogoni tribe who was hanged by the old military government in 1995, once warned that “you must not think that there is this thing called Nigeria and it’s untouchable, no matter what happens. The Soviet Union was set up about the same time [as] Nigeria. It’s gone. Yugoslavia is gone. Therefore, you have to be very careful.”18
But most Nigerians trust that the country will somehow muddle through. A story I chanced upon in Kaduna augurs well. In the early 1990s, two religious terrorists, Muhammad Ashafa and James Wuye, tried to have each other killed. It was during a burst of religious rioting for which Ashafa blamed the Christian paramilitary group led by Wuye, and Wuye blamed Ashafa’s Muslim youth organization. Christian assassins knocked on Ashafa’s door and killed the man who answered it. Their victim, as it happened, was Muhammed Ashafa’s uncle. But they did not realize this. Meanwhile, Muslim assassins attacked James Wuye, hacked his arm off, and left him for dead.
Both men believed they had killed the other. When they later discovered that they had not, they took it as a sign from God that they should make peace. So they set up a joint charity to promote dialogue between Muslims and Christians. Ashafa told me this story over hot tea in his small but elegantly carpeted flat. A tall and slightly overbearing man, he greeted me with a big hug and a long sermon on the need for people of faith to live in harmony. Wuye and he are now, he said, the best of friends.19
From apartheid to affirmative action
Under apartheid, there was only one black employee at the Koeberg nuclear power station. It was one of South Africa’s most secret sites, and since any black South African was considered a security risk, the management strained to avoid hiring any. But there was one job that could not be done by a white. Koeberg’s lone black worker was paid to run away from the guard dogs, to train them to bite blacks.20
For centuries, white settlers in South Africa burned black people’s houses and stole their land. From 1948 until 1994, the country was ruled by the National Party, an organization that sought to advance only the interests of South Africa’s “European” tribe. White “superiority” was codified in law. At the height of apartheid, blacks were not allowed to vote, hold desirable jobs, or own land in “white areas” (about 87 percent of the country). When an area inhabited by blacks was designated white, the inhabitants were sometimes forced onto trucks at gunpoint, driven away as bulldozers crushed their homes, and dumped on distant patches of waste land.
With such a history, no one would have been surprised if South Africa had disintegrated into civil war. In the 1980s, when black protesters were daily showered with tear gas and sometimes shot dead by white policemen, a bloodbath seemed inevitable. Several thousand people were killed, but South Africa somehow held back from the precipice.
There were several reasons for this. The collapse of the Soviet Union forced the leaders of the African National Congress to reconsider their socialist beliefs. This reassured whites, who were nervous that if they surrendered power, their country would become another Marxist basket case. The ANC, meanwhile, realized that it was never going to win power by force. After years of “armed struggle,” it had won no battles. But in the propaganda war, it had triumphed. The world ostracized the apartheid regime. Sanctions gnawed at South African business. South African sports teams were barred from international contests. White South Africans traveling abroad were met with hostility, and British satirists composed a catchy song with the refrain “I’ve never met a nice South African.” With the world spitting on their shadows, white South Africans, even leaders of the National Party, began to lose the courage of their apartheid convictions.
Both sides were drawn to talk to each other. After the first secret, tentative contacts in the mid-1980s, serious negotiations began in 1990. Slowly and fitfully, a political settlement was thrashed out that more or less satisfied both sides.21 Black-on-black political violence grew worse in the run-up to the first all-race election in 1994, as the two main parties, the ANC and the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party, fought for local dominance. But the election itself passed relatively smoothly. The ANC won easily, with almost two-thirds of the vote. The National Party accepted defeat. A rumored armed revolt by white hardliners never materialized, and black-on-black political killings dropped dramatically.
In 1996, South Africa adopted a new constitution, one of the world’s most liberal. Besides guaranteeing all sorts of freedoms, it forbids discrimination on the grounds of “race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.”
The surprisingly peaceful transition was the work of many South Africans, but one stands out. Having acquired titanic moral stature after twenty-seven years in jail, Nelson Mandela, the ANC leader, was able both to soothe white fears and to curb the violent inclinations of some of his followers. As the country’s first black president, he preached reconciliation. He spoke of a “rainbow nation” in which people of all colors might live together in harmony. By including the Inkatha leader, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, in his cabinet, he helped bring peace to the province of KwaZulu-Natal, where the ANC and Inkatha had been fighting each other most fiercely with the tacit encouragement of the apartheid security forces.
In his gestures, Mandela showed generosity of spirit. He addressed Afrikaner audiences in Afrikaans. He took tea with Betsie Verwoerd, the frail widow of the architect of apartheid. He even donned the colors of the traditionally white national rugby team, the Springboks, during the world cup in 1995. When South Africa won the tournament, blacks and whites celebrated together. That day, the nation probably felt more united than ever before or since.
Mandela’s message was one of forgiveness but not of forgetting. Under his presidency, a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” recorded testimony from some 21,000 victims of apartheid-era crimes. The commission was criticized both for being too soft on the perpetrators – who were offered amnesty in return for confessions – and for an alleged pro-ANC bias. But whatever its faults it gave thousands of unhappy people their only chance of a day in court and made it impossible for white South Africans to pretend that apartheid was anything but vile.
Walk through a South African city today, and you still do not see anything like as many mixed-race couples as you would in, say, London. But you do see a few. Given that romance across the color line was recently illegal, this is encouraging. Ugly incidents of racial violence are reported in South African newspapers with depressing frequency, but these headlines tell of exceptions, not the norm. For the most part, South Africans of all races tolerate each other. No one now finds it odd that black pupils study alongside whites at formerly whites-only schools or that white waiters grovel to black diners at restaurants that until recently excluded them.
Few black South Africans now cite racism as the greatest problem facing the country; unemployment, crime, housing, and water supplies worry them far more.22 But President Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, thinks they are wrong. In speech after wordy speech, he insists that South Africa is “a country of two nations,”23 that “wealth, income, opportunity, and skills continue to be distributed according to racial patterns,” and that there can be no rest until the ruling party has achieved the “fundamental transformation of our society.”24 President Mbeki has increasingly sought to divert attention from his government’s shortcomings by blaming whites for blocking this “transformation.” The ANC remains a multiracial party, but the trend is nonetheless worrying.
Before the mid-1970s, blacks, no matter how enterprising or intelligent, were barred from the best jobs. Whites, no matter how lazy or stupid, were all but guaranteed an adequate wage working on the railroads or at some other state-owned firm. The most offensive apartheid rules were gradually dismantled in the 1980s and early 1990s, but it was not until 1994 that white legal privileges were wholly abolished. Apartheid was not, however, replaced by a simple ban on racial discrimination. Inst
ead, the ANC passed laws mandating preferential treatment for members of “previously disadvantaged” groups, in hiring, promotion, university admissions, and the award of government contracts. These preferences apply not only to blacks but also to women and the disabled. The system is inspired by America’s “affirmative action” programs, but there is a difference. Whereas in America the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action are a minority, in South Africa they are 95 percent of the population.
On the face of it, the case for corrective laws to make up for the injustices of the past is unanswerable. Because black education was neglected under apartheid, many blacks feel they cannot compete in the job market. Under the old regime, spending per white pupil was roughly seven times as much as was spent on blacks. Hendrik Verwoerd, prime minister from 1958 until his assassination in 1966, argued that there was no point in educating blacks well, for this might create “people trained for professions not open to them.”25
ANC leaders believe, like the late Lyndon Johnson, American president in the 1960s, that you do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race, and then say “You are free to compete with all the others.” Emotionally, this is persuasive. But the important question about corrective discrimination is not “Is it justified?” but “Does it work?”
A boost for the black middle class
For black professionals, the answer may be yes. Partly because the old anti-black laws were abolished, and partly because of the new pro-black laws, the black middle class expanded swiftly in the 1990s. Progress has been fastest in the civil service, where the proportion of managerial jobs filled by blacks has soared. In 1994, more than 95 percent of public-service managers were white; now more than 60 percent are black.26 Whites are rarely sacked. But when they retire or resign because their chances of promotion are slim, they are usually replaced by blacks.
In private business, figures are harder to come by, but the proportion of managers who are black appears to have risen rapidly from hardly any in 1994 to about half in 2003. The reason the transformation has not been faster, according to businessmen, is that the supply of appropriately skilled blacks has run dry. This is mainly the legacy of the apartheid government’s deliberate neglect of black education. In 2001, of the 884,000 South Africans of working age who had university degrees, 55 percent were white and only 31 percent were black.27 This imbalance is being reduced, but not in the most commercially useful disciplines. Although whites are only a tenth of the population, three times more whites than blacks gained degrees or diplomas in computer science in 1998. In engineering and business studies, the ratio was two to one. White high-school pupils were fifty times more likely to pass higher-grade science and math than black pupils.28
The education budget is quite generous, and some state schools achieve excellent results. But many are no better than they were under apartheid: awash with guns and drugs, lacking textbooks and discipline, and with teachers who show up to work drunk or not at all.
In 1999, I visited the Morris Isaacson high school, best known as the starting point of the Soweto uprising of 1976, when students protesting against apartheid education were cut down by the police. In those days, the school was a hotbed not only of radicalism but also of academic excellence. The headmaster, Elias Mashile, told me that its former pupils included many doctors and South Africa’s only black nuclear physicist. The pupils I saw, however, did not seem single-mindedly studious. Many were wandering aimlessly around the courtyard, when they should have been in class. Mashile admitted that three-quarters of his students failed to graduate and that only one in fifty made it to university.
The school was not short of money: the buildings were sturdy and comfortable, and there were enough teachers. The problem was unruliness. Students in their twenties who had repeatedly failed their exams mixed with teenagers, sometimes impregnating them. School equipment was often stolen. The previous month an entire school in Port Elizabeth had been pinched, its prefabricated walls used to make houses in nearby squatter camps. During the struggle against apartheid, schoolchildren used to chant “Liberation before education.” Despite liberation, the rowdiness persists. “We are trying to revive the culture of learning,” said Mashile, “but it takes time.”
Nationwide, the number of students with good enough grades to qualify for university entrance actually fell after liberation, from 88,000 (18 percent of the total) in 1994 to 68,000 (15 percent) in 2001. Kader Asmal, an able ex-academic who was appointed education minister in 1999, has promised to sort out the mess. His efforts are starting to bear fruit, but the results will not be felt in the labor market for several years.
In the meantime, since blacks with commercially useful skills are scarce, they command high salaries. For instance, in 1999, Barloworld, a large industrial conglomerate, offered newly qualified black accountants about 20 percent more than their white colleagues plus an “entry-level BMW,” pension, health benefits, in-house training, and excellent prospects for promotion. Despite this, Tony Phillips, Barloworld’s chief executive, sighed to me: “After a few months, they are mercilessly head-hunted.”
More laws, more justice?
If firms are paying a premium for black skills, this suggests that the supply of these skills is not matching demand. In other words, firms are searching hard for black talent but not finding enough to reach their racial targets. But the South African government believes that black advancement is being blocked by racist white bosses. Its response has been to pass ever-tougher new racial laws.
The Employment Equity Act, which came into force in 1999, obliges firms above a certain size to submit annual reports on their efforts to make their workforces “demographically representative” from the factory floor to the boardroom. That is, roughly 75 percent black, 52 percent female, 5 percent disabled, and so on. Some allowance is made for the size of the pool of “suitably qualified” individuals. But employers must not refuse to hire a black applicant simply because she lacks the necessary qualifications. Rather, they must show that she could not have acquired the relevant skills in a reasonable time. If someone alleges racism, it is up to the employer to prove his innocence. The normal burden of proof, in other words, has been reversed, and employers face fat fines if found guilty.
In 2000, the government passed an even broader law. The Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act affects all firms, no matter how small, as well as individuals, private clubs, professional bodies, and so on. It forbids discrimination on grounds of race, sex, pregnancy, age, disability, belief, culture, or language. Discrimination is only allowed if it is intended to uplift the previously disadvantaged. That is, you can discriminate in favor of blacks and women but not in favor of white men.
A case from 1997 gives some idea how hard it is to be racially correct. Sarita van Coller, a white woman, applied for a job at Eskom, the state-owned electricity provider. She scored top marks on an aptitude test, but the job was given to a “colored” (the South African term for mixed-race) applicant. She protested to a labor arbitrator and won. The arbitrator ruled that there was nothing wrong with giving preference to blacks or coloreds but that the firm should not discriminate unfairly against whites. It is, of course, impossible to do both.
Mampuru Maseke, a black employee at the same firm, has observed that affirmative action makes white engineers reluctant to pass their skills on to inexperienced black colleagues, because a well-taught black colleague will soon be promoted over their heads. He goes on: “When an affirmative action appointee does not perform well, Eskom usually hires the white former incumbent of that post to act as a consultant to help the appointee. He has generally retired with a nice package and when recalled as a consultant – now earning an extra salary on top – has no incentive to help the black appointee become fully competent, for then his role will end.”29
White bosses are reluctant to complain about the new racial laws because of the utter certainty
that they will be branded racist. On the record, they tend to sound like Chris Thompson, the head of Gold Fields, a big mining firm, who growled tersely to me that “it [affirmative action] is good for the country” and credited the government with showing a “spirit of pragmatism.” Other bosses, talking on condition that their names should never appear in print, have told me that the laws are a burden, and would be a crushing one if they were vigorously enforced, but that they hope they will not be.
Perhaps they are right. The ANC does not want to strangle business: it just wants private firms to do some of its social engineering for it. But government inspectors are not the only ones who may enforce affirmative action, nor are disgruntled present, former, and would-be employees the only ones who can sue for racial discrimination. Any party acting “in the public interest” can initiate an action against an allegedly discriminatory employer, and lawyers can accept cases on a no-win, no-fee basis.
The assumption behind all these laws is that white employers will never treat blacks fairly uncoerced. This is questionable. Doubtless, many white bosses are bigots. But discrimination has costs. A rational employer hires staff on merit: he employs those who will do the best job for the best price. An employer who discriminates on the basis of an unproductive quality such as skin color will be at a disadvantage relative to competitors who hire on merit.
How many businessmen care more about race than they do about money? In 2001, the Sunday Times, a South African newspaper, sent a team of twenty reporters to forty-eight restaurants to find out how racist they were. Black journalists and white journalists entered each restaurant separately and waited for staff to treat them differently. To their editors’ surprise, black reporters reported that they were treated well almost everywhere. The only ugly incident was when a black waiter told a black reporter that he probably wouldn’t be able to afford the wines on the wine list. Instead of a hard-hitting exposé of discrimination, the paper had to make do with publishing a collection of ordinary restaurant reviews.30