Whites fear exclusion in new South Africa

Laurie Goering:

More than a decade after the end of apartheid, white South Africans still are weighing their future in a society where creating economic clout for the country's long-repressed black majority has become the top national priority.

Under broad affirmative action programs, blacks are favored for the civil service jobs whites used to take for granted. White business people are obliged to hire black subcontractors, train black employees and sell shares of their companies to black co-owners or face losing government contracts.

The country's black leaders are pushing for what a ruling African National Congress briefing paper calls a "critical mass of common culture and cultural practices." Whites who fail to back the ANC's transformation efforts and adapt to the country's changing culture, leaders suggest, may ultimately no longer be considered South Africans.

For South Africa's 4 million whites--many from centuries-old South African families or white communities that fled unwelcoming African countries such as Zimbabwe--the prospect of becoming unwelcome in the last white stronghold in Africa is chilling.

"There can be no more fundamental threat to a community's sense of security than to declare them, even in a roundabout way, unwanted aliens in their own country," Max du Preez, a white columnist for Johannesburg's Star newspaper, wrote recently.

When President Robert Mugabe of neighboring Zimbabwe declares that his nation "is for black people, not white people," and South Africa's leaders fail to rebuke him, "this drives a red-hot poker through the hearts of white South Africans, especially those with no cultural, emotional or family links with any country outside Africa," du Preez said.

Africa, at the start of a new century, is struggling to find ways to make itself a success. Its leaders, eager to ease the continent's persistent poverty, promote peace and development and prove that black leaders can solve Africa's problems, are sorting through deeply rooted cultural traditions, colonial-era legacies and the demands of a newly globalized world, searching for African answers to the continent's woes.

Where Africa's dwindling number of whites fits into the continent's future remains in question. For 50 years, the famed Freedom Charter of South Africa's multiracial African National Congress has insisted that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white." Most South Africans, black and white, believe that, and believe that a non-racist, if not exactly non-racial, future is possible.

But some whites are nervous. South African President Thabo Mbeki has been quick to dismiss criticism of his government, particularly by white opposition figures, as racist. His failure to denounce economic misrule and human-rights violations in Zimbabwe, his suggestions that the country's judiciary needs to be less independent and more in tune with the ANC's programs, and his hints that English-speaking white South Africans may not be as genuinely African as their Afrikaner counterparts have all raised fears about the future of whites and non-racial democracy in South Africa.

"It's undermined confidence," said Helen Suzman, a white liberal icon of the anti-apartheid struggle, and now a critic of the ANC government. During more than four decades of apartheid, a steady flow of whites left South Africa "because they didn't like the system," she said. "Now a lot are leaving because they don't like their prospects."

Fifty years after white colonial rule in Africa began to collapse, relatively few whites remain in sub-Saharan Africa. In Kenya, a former white stronghold, Europeans, Asians and Arabs combined now make up less than 1 percent of the population. Zimbabwe has lost nearly three-quarters of a million whites in recent years; today just 35,000 remain.

In places such as Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Zambia, whites are so few that census takers no longer bother counting them as a separate racial category. In total, sub-Saharan Africa has less than 5 million whites, out of a total population of more than 600 million people.

Many whites have left as colonial-era jobs and privileges disappeared. Some have fled wars, crime, declining living standards or collapsing economies. Others have become political targets, particularly in places such as Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe.

In South Africa, at least a quarter-million whites have emigrated since the end of apartheid a decade ago. But the country remains home to 80 percent of the continent's white community, and after a decade of relative peace and prosperity, most of those who remain say they hope they are here to stay.

Unlike whites in much of the rest of Africa, most have nowhere else to go. In particular, the country's millions of Afrikaners--descendants of primarily Dutch and French immigrants who began arriving 400 years ago--speak a language used nowhere else in the world and have no family ties anywhere else.

Personally, I think that it would be smart for the whites to emigrate since it is only a matter of time before South Africa degenerates just like the rest of post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa.