by Alec Russell
The bond's information officer, Cobus Rossouw, was clearly delighted with his radical new responsibilities. 'Quite a few guys are itchy about the publicity,' he joked. 'It's not long ago that we checked for helicopters flying overhead and photographers in hot-air balloons.' It could have been the annual general meeting of a London club, an analogy which the new chairman, Tom de Beer, was keen to promote. 'I joined when I was a student,' he reminisced. 'I found members from different churches, different groups. I enjoyed the divergent views.' That was a whopper of an obfuscation even for a country that prided itself on ambiguous language- ‘Ministry of Plural Affairs’ was the old South African department that was responsible for Africans. But I let it pass because I was more interested in the present than the past. I was looking for signs of change, for an indication that the former Afrikaner powerbrokers might be willing to provide leadership for the confused and bewildered bulk of Afrikanerdom.
In the Eighties the bond was an important player in secret
talks between the ANC and the Afrikaner establishment. Long before the government could openly consider forging links with their enemies, the broeders were sending out feelers to the ANC. But by the mid-Nineties they appeared to have retreated back into their shell: the laager mentality prevailed; the old victim mentality of the apartheid era was intact; far from looking out, they seemed more insular than ever. Their reluctance to face up to the past was frustrating but inevitable, but their inability to face up to the future was more damaging if the Afrikaner was to take his place in the new South Africa.
De Klerk was not at Bloemfontein. In the old days all cabinet members were in the bond, but post-1994 it would have been political suicide for a Nationalist MP to attend a meeting. However, many of F.W.'s friends and soul mates were present. These were not horny-handed farmers from the platteland. These were the lawyers, the judges, the academics, and the thinkers who had provided the moral and intellectual platform for white rule. If they were finding it difficult to adjust to the new order, it seemed hardly surprising that De Klerk, too, was struggling.
There is an old Afrikaans expression 'die boer is soos nkakiebos' (the Boer is like the kakie weed, a particularly dogged plant which is deemed almost impossible to kill off). Under South Africa's new multi-racial democracy De Klerk proved remarkably obdurate. His catchphrases were 'politics is not for sissies' and 'cowboys don't cry'. Month after month he slugged it out with critics from the right and the left. But in typical Afrikaner fashion it was an attack from within the ranks that proved the most wounding.
Since the first ox-wagons headed off into the interior the Afrikaners have proved past-masters at fissiparous politics. In Afrikaans the phenomenon is called broedertwis - brother fighting brother. After the 1994 election it threatened to tear the National Party apart between reformist and reactionary wings. Caught in the middle, De Klerk was criticized from both sides. Conservatives accused him of having flunked the pre-election negotiations with the ANC and of having betrayed the Afrikaner. While recognizing that his telegenic style made him easily the party's best vote-winner, reformists argued his past was a brake on their attempts to attract new supporters. Following the retirement of R.F. 'Pik' Botha, his veteran foreign minister, he was the last of the old guard. As a scandal loomed over his private life, he belatedly decided to step down.
On the day he announced his resignation from politics the South African Broadcasting Corporation led its nightly television news with a report on the collapse of a scaffolding in Johannesburg's northern suburbs. Three people were killed and fifteen injured in the accident, hardly an explosive story in a country where some 30,000 people were murdered each year, and yet it eclipsed the political obituary of the world's best known Boer. The editorial decision said something about the politically correct priorities of the 'new' SABC. It also high lighted how De Klerk had shrunk in the public eye.
He left whites struggling to see if they could adjust to the changes with any more success.
There is no shortage of depressing case studies of Afrikaners who have failed to make the grade in the 'new' South Africa. The tale of Benjamin de Kok is a classic case. For over a decade he ran a successful plumbing business until shortly after the April 1994 election when his bakkie was stolen with all his tools. With his experience he was swiftly taken on as a plumber's mate, but the job did not last because his face or rather skin did not fit. Four years after the 'rainbow revolution' he was to be found each night outside a cafe just round the corner from my Johannesburg home, parking cars for a few pounds a day as part of a thriving new security co-operative for the unemployed.
'As soon as the darkies took power I knew things would change. But I didn't know how quick it would be. My boss needed more black faces to win the right contracts. He could also pay them less. What chance did I have?'
De Kok's story had resonance across white South Africa as Mandela's government started to try to redress the divided past. Day in day out his gaunt unshaven face hovered in the shadows. A few months before I met him his wife had been made redundant after twenty-five years as a bank clerk. He said he could not afford a night off if they were to pay their rent. His humiliation was absolute.
'And it is so embarrassing. I see on the street people I went to school with, with nice houses and cars. And here I am walking the streets. I hide my head and hope they don't see me.'
There have always been poor whites in South Africa. One of the misconceptions about Afrikanerdom was that all whites became rich under apartheid and joined the middle class. Many blacks freely admit how shocked they were to see poor whites, until they reminded themselves that they had been brainwashed by the 'system' to assume whites were rich and blacks poor. But under apartheid if you had a white skin it was hard not to thrive. For many there was a job for life. The National Party implemented the ultimate 'affirmative action' scheme for Afrikaners. The deal was simple. You voted 'Nat' and you joined the club. If there was no room in the civil service or the post office you could try the railway. If you tired of the army there was always room in the police. Horrified as they would have been by the parallel, the Afrikaners were merely behaving like other dominant elites in the rest of Africa. But post-1994 the boot was on the other foot as the ANC introduced its own far reaching programme to uplift its own supporters.
There is a reassuring precedent for the Afrikaners. In the aftermath of the Boer War they looked doomed to a shadowy life as inferior citizens under British rule. They had lost the war. More than 20,000 women and children had died in British concentration camps. Their farms had been razed to the ground. Even their culture and language were under threat from English. The tale of Afrikaner boys standing in corners derided as dunces because they could not speak English resounds through the collective Afrikaner memory.
And yet the spirit of the kakiebos won the day; the Afrikaners learned to adapt and then counter-attack. The British aided the recovery by opting for magnanimity rather than triumphalism. In the post-war settlement that led to the Act of Union of 1910 the Afrikaners were accorded the same citizen rights as the smaller group of English-speaking whites. But the main factor in the Afrikaners' fight back was the perseverance of their leaders, a burning community spirit and a determination never again to be humbled.
Once in power in 1948, the Nationalists took pride in bringing hundreds of thousands of their people into the cities, where they were educated and rescued from the poverty and discrimination their forefathers had faced. This was in tune with the communitarian spirit of the continent. Just as the voortrek kers had circled the wagons until trouble passed, so black township residents rallied together to. survive the worst of apartheid. Many Afrikaner civil servants still beat their breasts about being the first generation away from the breadline. 'Pik' Botha, who was the world's longest-serving foreign minister, told me that winning a place in the foreign service as a young man was one of the proudest moments in his long career.
During the years of apartheid's cosseting, however, the Afrikan
ers' sense of community seems to have waned. On the outskirts of Johannesburg's city centre lies the domain of the white-collar poor. Shabby bungalows jostle dingy apartment blocks. It is here that you can find Florida Park caravan site. In the heyday of white rule it was a stop-off for Afrikaners on their way from the veld to the coast. Post-1994 it became a permanent home for poor whites. Amber van Wyk took up residence there when she finally gave up the battle to pay the £200 a month rent for her flat. For twenty years she had worked as a supermarket supervisor. She resigned when her husband retired to live off his pension, but he died a few months later and she could not find work. She smiled when asked why her two sons, a security guard and a mechanic, did not help. 'They are too busy with their own families and you know what daughters-in law are like ...'
Everyone knows everyone in Johannesburg's teeming black townships, but in Florida Lake shame and suspicion hold sway.
'I don't know my neighbours,' added Mrs van Wyk. 'We tend to keep ourselves to ourselves.' Sheltering behind a rickety caravan I came across Sara, who was unwilling to give her surname, sunning herself on a white plastic chair outside her new home. 'I am always here,' she chuckled. 'It's nice, don't you think?' Her Jimmy had been made redundant four years earlier after more than thirty years on the railways. 'He was such a hard worker. He never took off one day. He's just fifty one and he may never get another job. It's been a terrible shock.' She broke off to call him to put his own case. There was a pause followed by a mumbled reply. 'If you don't mind, he'd rather not see you,' she explained. 'He seldom goes outside. He's so ashamed.'
It is easy enough to paint a fairly bleak picture of life for whites in the future. The suburban nightmare of maids and gardeners walking through the front door and demanding the keys to the car soon faded as blacks proved, as they had always insisted, that they were not seeking revenge but merely wanted a fair chance. As the months have passed, however, so inevitably the old white certainties have crumbled amid a dawning realization that a revolution has taken place.
A far-reaching programme of reverse discrimination threatens the job prospects of future white generations. The spread of South Africa's appalling levels of criminal violence from the black townships into formerly white areas has led to a siege mentality in suburbia. White farmers were among the worst hit:
400 were murdered in the four years after De Klerk handed over power. Official statistics indicated the national rate of murder dropped slightly after the end of white rule, but that was no consolation for those living in terror of every knock at the door. The rule of law does not run far in much of the continent; Africa at the end of the twentieth century is as prone to eruptions of unrest and war as it ever was. The violence that blights South African society has rekindled the old white fears that black equals barbaric and bad. According to official statistics about 10,000 whites a year, mainly professionals, emigrated during Mandela's presidency, but many more are thought to have left unannounced. The inevitable temptation among the vast body of whites, and not just those who voted for apartheid, is to wallow in defeatism and blame the ANC.
Wilhelm Verwoerd, the grandson of the architect of apartheid, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, is profoundly depressed about the Afrikaner mindset. He is a philosophy lecturer at Stellenbosch University, which was once the intellectual home of Afrikaner dom. He is married to an ANC MP and is not on speaking terms with most of his family but still has close contact with the traditional wing of the volk. We met during the honeymoon period of the first two years when many whites were still congratulating themselves on having avoided the abyss. But Verwoerd was already convinced that many Afrikaner Nationalists were willing the new South Africa to fail so their doom and gloom prophecies could be proven right.
'It's foolish, misguided and offensive but understandable because if the new order works then their vision is finally undermined. Afrikaner culture is more fluid than the right wingers like to make out. If people can move out of their skins, experiment, take risks, then there is hope. But just as trekking is a prominent part of the Afrikaner myth, so is the laager. If you can't trek, you huddle behind the wagons, and that is what they are doing.'
For many whites the solution is clear: it is back to the days of the bitter almond hedge. With its temperate, very 'un African' climate and its European feel, Cape Town is increasingly being seen by whites as a last bastion. Throughout the Nineties there was a steady stream of whites moving south from Johannesburg back to the very city whence many of their ancestors had first trekked.
The geographical symbolism was stark: Cape Town clings on to the toe of the continent just as the end of white rule left whites feeling they were scrambling to maintain a foothold in Africa. When the city was making an abortive bid for the 2004 Olympics, a powerful anti-lobby warned of the dangers of blacks heading south from all over the continent looking for jobs.
'The Cape is to South Africa what Belgium was to the Belgian Congo,' one senior Nationalist MP confided. It was an analogy that he would not have dared to make before the April 1994 election.
The post-colonial history of Africa does not make positive reading for South Africa's white tribes, at least not for those who want to play an active part in political life. If South Africa is to develop the robust democracy the ANC says it wants, then it has to be prepared to let white politicians and critics have their say. But with memories of apartheid's injustices so recent and racial inequities so starkly apparent, the race card will for the forseeable future play well with voters. The road may even lead to Zimbabwe or Kenya, where, as Richard Leakey knows all too well, whites are expected to stay out of politics unless they are prepared to take a 'constructive' line. Three years after he founded the opposition party, Safina, he returned to his old job as director of Kenya's Wildlife Service, and then accepted the post as head of the civil service in a tacit acknowledgement that opposition politics was a waste of time.
Ian Smith, who led white Rhodesia into its unilateral declaration of independence, readily concedes that his old enemy, President Robert Mugabe, has to be congratulated for swallowing his resentment at the dour old white reactionary whose intransigence prolonged the civil war at a cost of thousands of lives. He resides in a nondescript bungalow with the front door always on the latch, alongside - of all ironies - the Cuban Embassy. But whenever there is a political or economic crisis,
'Smithie' and other whites are the first to face Mr. Mugabe's spleen. It was seen as no coincidence that Smith's farm was one of those earmarked for confiscation in the first draft of a controversial land reform scheme to transfer property to landless blacks.
The ANC attests the liberal sprinkling of whites in its National Executive, the party's inner circle, as a riposte to critics who claim that the days of white politics are over. Three of the most important ministers in Mandela's government were white ANC members. But it is hard to see a white holding one of the top government posts in the first few decades of the twenty-first century. There is a defensive current in the party that fears that appointing a white to a key ministry would be an admission of defeat. Moreover, the real test of the ANC's commitment to non-racial politics will come in its attitude to white opponents.
As the euphoria of liberation faded and the problems inevitably mounted for the ANC, some of them followed the hoary old tack of other newly independent African states and started to brand white criticism as racist, reactionary and ergo irrelevant. Outside the Western Cape, where it controlled the provincial government, the National Party required little kicking as its plodding style, born of years in government, was easily brushed aside. Under De Klerk's successor, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, a colourless party hack, the National Party plummeted from 20 per cent of the vote in 1994 to 6.9 per cent in 1999. The handful of MPs from the Democratic Party, the Nationalists' old liberal rival from the days of white-only politics, assumed their old role and became the ANC's most trenchant critics. The DP was repeatedly repudiated as elitist and white, in a sign that its attacks had hit home. Tony Leon, its p
ugnacious leader, relished the cut and thrust, and, at the expense of the Nationalists, increased the DP's share of the vote from l.7 per cent in 1994 to almost 10 per cent in 1999. But with its white 'European' image the DP may never be able to break out of the suburbs and win enough non-white votes to become a genuinely national party.
And yet the gloomy and paranoid views to be heard from both Afrikaners and English-speakers do not always reflect the reality. The white man in Africa may be destined for an apolitical role, but that does not mean he is doomed. For most whites, life five years into the 'new' South Africa was little changed. As De Klerk said in his autobiography: 'The golf courses [in Pretoria] remained busy with peak activity on Wednesday afternoons and over the weekends. In the country club lounges the ladies continued to play bridge and sip tea and sometimes gin and tonic.'4 Beyond the paranoid dinner table talk in white households, there are tentative signs of a metamorphosis unfolding as many whites are slowly adapting. It is, in the words of a prominent Afrikaner academic, or at least can be, 'surrender without defeat'. (5)
Tim du Plessis, editor of the conservative Citizen newspaper, is wryly confident the Afrikaner will not only cope but may even prosper. He believes there is a spirit of subservience that runs through the Afrikaner psyche that may help them to adapt more easily than white English-speakers, many of whom hoped to go on living to the same rules as their relatives and friends did in Western Europe - a perfectly justifiable but wholly unrealistic expectation.
'Once we Afrikaners can overcome racism and bigotry we will slip easily into the African way of thinking,' he told me.