Inverse apartheid

Apartheid’s time was up; racial policy would never return. The first free election had been held. No police helicopters were hovering in the air above Soweto; no searchlights were playing across houses and streets. We sat on a wall overlooking the street outside Nozipo’s house, talking of what it would be like in the new South Africa when someone raised the question of mixed marriage.
“It’s impossible,” said Lindi, and to my astonishment most people mumbled their approval.
“The neighbourhood would never accept it,” Lindy continued, and I assumed that she meant the white people.

“No, no,” she said, ”The black community, I mean. It would never work. A white marrying into a black family? Never! Think of our customs, our traditions and how we socialise. We have a completely different culture than white people. You cannot alter that, nor can you completely understand it unless you are born into it; it is better that white people marry white people and black people marry black people.”
“Almost everyone agreed with her. I felt slightly dazed. I had known this group for some years. These people had helped me get about in Soweto between the barricades, the massacres, the police armoured cars and battles between Inkatha’s impis from obnoxious hostels and the residents’ self-defence gangs. They had been born in the middle of the revolt against apartheid; they had grown up in it. And here they sat at the moment of victory arguing in the same way as the most single-mindedly conservative Boers.
When I was at home in Sweden on a visit I told some colleagues about this conversation.
“Well, it’s not so strange that they feel like that,” they said. “The way they’ve been treated.”
I often got the same reaction when I explained my indignation about how bizarrely violent the predominantly black crime in South Africa had become.

“Well that’s not so strange? The way they’ve been treated all these years…”
I often fell silent. The kindly understanding frightened me. Should not respect for human rights be universal? Was someone who had once been oppressed clearly and for ever always good? Where did this apologetic attitude lead to in the long run?
In our mental picture racism is always white. The feeling of guilt that the world is so unjust perhaps makes us blinkered.

I lived and travelled for 12 years in a black world in which poverty was deeper, corruption worse and ethnic conflicts and civil wars more frequent than in the rest of the world. But responsibility always seems to lie somewhere else. Colonialism. The slave trade. The Cold War. Apartheid. It will never be possible to explain away the enormous influence they had on Africa. An injury which casts long shadows.

But how long can one go on being understanding about the fact that Africa’s leaders continue to blame their own shortcomings on it? In South Africa white nationalism has been replaced by black. The governing ANC Party’s touchy way of branding critics as racists if they are white, or traitors if they are black, is deeply worrying. At the same time as there is a very tangible and positive change in attitude on the part of both whites and blacks at grass roots level, politicians use racism both as a defence and a weapon. South Africa has a non-racist constitution. But all of the parties agreed at an early stage to introduce affirmative action in order to favour the majority population which hitherto had been discriminated against. Blacks, coloureds and women would be given preference for jobs if they had similar merits to other applicants. A conscious discrimination to put right the injustices of white racism.

A while ago Labour minister Membathisi Mdladlana emphasised in a debate that affirmative action will never be abolished in South Africa. Inverse apartheid will be made permanent. A move that scarcely reduces the brain drain from which the country suffers. Even coloureds and Indians are complaining. They are too white when the state-owned companies are recruiting. In new ANC-run large municipal districts like, for example, Tshwana, which encompasses Pretoria and its suburbs, it is only black entrepreneurs who win contracts in bidding procedures, says the mayor. Race and political contacts are trump cards.

Among the most worrying things is the ANC’s aversion to a free press, and how from the very top people are undermining the black majority’s confidence in the press. President Thabo Mbeki set the tone even 10 years ago when he painted newspaper offices as centres from which attacks were systematically being planned against the new democracy. The board of SABC, state radio and TV, is packed with Mbeki loyalists and its chair has decided to leave the South African National Editors’ Forum because newspapers ”do not show respect for our people”. The purge of impartially critical and socially aware journalists at SABC came just a few years after the first election, when Nelson Mandela’s conciliatory era was beginning to ebb away. Political commissars who had direct contact with the office of the president and Thabo Mbeki’s inner circle were appointed in their place. White liberal journalists who once did battle with apartheid were kicked out first; those who shut their eyes and towed the line then would do so even now.

In Zimbabwe, too, it was those whites who were positive towards change who were first attacked when the chaos called land reform broke out. A lawless condition which was fermented by a deeply cynical president Robert Mugabe, who was prepared to do anything to retain power.

The remarkable thing even here was that so many people in the Western world initially showed understanding for what was happening, excusing the raw cynicism and seeing it as justifiable. David Stevens was the first white farmer to be killed. Just a couple of days before I had visited his occupied farm, talked to him and his Swedish wife Maria, listened to the crackling walkie-talkie on which terrified neighbours were talking about how they and their children were being threatened and how government-backed agitators were inflaming the mob whilst the police rapidly withdrew. Ethnic cleansing had begun.

There were of course racists and roughnecks among Zimbabwe’s roughly 4,000 white farmers. But there were also many people, like David Stevens, who had been encouraged to buy land and become farmers when racist Rhodesia became the new Zimbabwe. For years Robert Mugabe had consciously avoided the attempts of those countries giving him aid to bring about planned land reform. When his economic policy began to fail, he let loose lawlessness. Whites who had been born in the country would no longer obviously be Zimbabweans. Soon an independent judicial system was destroyed just like private enterprise. Zimbabwe’s commercial farms had made the country into one of Africa’s few granaries. The white farmers were put to flight, their farms given to party bosses and army men or divided up into plots too small to feed a family. Today 4 Zimbabweans out of 5 are unemployed, 80% live below the poverty line, and the galloping inflation has topped 8,000% per annum.

The opposition is persecuted and assaulted. Several million Zimbabweans have fled to South Africa. But Robert Mugabe still, after 27 years in power, lays the blame on the whites and colonialism.
In August this year the heads of government of southern Africa met for an SADC (Southern African Development Community) conference in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. Robert Mugabe was welcomed as a hero with enthusiastic cheering by the other leaders and their delegations. When the same leaders speak to the western world and at aid conferences, they praise democratic values and human rights. Once they are home again, they pat the dictator on the back and talk about their common African values. Some of these are actually incredibly prejudiced and racist.

Namibia’s former president Sam Nujoma claims, just like Robert Mugabe, that homosexuality is un-African. It is in their eyes a depraved sexual deviation which the whites brought with them. Sam Nujoma has on several occasions encouraged Namibia’s police to arrest and deport all homosexuals, because they are unnatural. The “Africanism” the leaders in southern Africa are therefore referring to is sometimes painfully prejudiced.
A month ago South Africa became world champions at rugby. A huge event in Great Britain, southern Europe and in the southern hemisphere. But scarcely something that has been observed by many people in Sweden, as it is a minority sport here.

For this reason neither were there many people in Sweden who realised what it meant when South Africa for the first time became world champions. It was 1995 and up until then the Springboks, as the South African national team is called, had been one of the world’s most hated national teams. The black population always used to support their opponents. With a Rugby World Cup played at home, this all changed; the blacks began to call the team Amabokoboko. When Nelson Mandela went down on to the pitch dressed in a Springbok shirt to celebrate with the players after the final victory, the whole South African population got the greatest kick ever out of a renewed feeling of nationhood. Economic boycotts had, of course, been noticeable, but nothing had wounded the South African soul as much as isolation from all of world sport. The World Cup victory in 1995 was one of the most important events in creating solidarity in the rainbow nation.

The world championship title in 2007 was also very pleasing, of course. But it was overshadowed by the stern announcement from the sports minister that in future the national rugby team had to mirror the nation’s demographic profile. In other words at least 80% of the players will have to be black. Whites and coloureds will only provide a few players. Affirmative action again. Or an angular bureaucratic decree.
The black population identify themselves to the greatest extent with football. I have never seen children in Soweto or the other townships playing rugby on the street. It is football, football and more football. Do they really feel racially offended because the natural rugby team is not ethnically correct?