In one sense the white minority of South Africa (roughly 5.5m people out of a total population of 40m) is only now getting used to being a minority. It is not just that until the last few years it had the political, economic and military power that normally only majorities have but, at a certain level, it actually felt it was, if not exactly a majority, at least somehow more authentically South African than black or brown South Africans could ever be.
Whites (even English-speaking whites) used to say things like: "So-and-so's a real South African-he loves rugby, boerewors and speaking die taal." Even relatively liberal whites sometimes slipped into such patterns. I can remember, in the political science department in which I used to teach in Durban, the departmental secretary, Miss X-a charming, intelligent woman, fiercely opposed to apartheid-typing up the seminar lists of students after universities were desegregated in the 1980s. In the first "open" year, only 2 per cent of the students were African or Indian; in the second year about 6 per cent; but in the third year the number shot up to 28 per cent and the year after to over 50 per cent. The result was that Miss X found herself typing lists which not only included Browns and van der Merwes but Tshabalalas, Poovalinghams and Ntsebezas. After a while a weary sigh escaped Miss X, bent over the keys: "Oh dear, such a lot of foreign names this year!"
But while whites were the only full citizens-making up the army, all the police officer corps, all the leading positions in business and the professions and, of course, the only ones with a full vote-they also knew, at a more fundamental level, not only that they were a numerical minority but that they were, as such, deeply threatened. When President de Klerk crossed the Rubicon in 1990, unbanned the ANC and announced universal suffrage elections, many whites believed that he had all sorts of hidden aces up his sleeve, that he had no real intention of letting "them" take over. This impression was so wide and deep that a friend of mine who is a sophisticated liberal politician was so unsure of whether de Klerk had fully understood that the process he had begun could only end in the transfer of power that he sought out the president and questioned him himself.
The appeal of Eugene Terreblanche's far right Afrikaner resistance movement (AWB) for long rested on his promise that he would prevent "communist revolution," that is, majority rule. The entire basis of Terreblanche's appeal lay in a Canute-like belief that the future could be held at bay. It was widely expected, as the 1994 election drew nearer, that AWB support would rise as the spectre of black rule grew closer. In fact the opposite happened and it shrank into insignificance: as reality dawned, that black rule could not be prevented, the poor whites who made up the bulk of AWB support saw that they would have difficulty enough in the new situation looking after themselves and their families' interests without bothering with the sort of right wing adventurism that Terreblanche stood for.
All this now seems a century ago. The 1994 election not only made anything other than black rule unthinkable but also unleashed a euphoria which has only recently started to fray. The rhetoric of the new South Africa is a home grown version of what C Wright Mills termed "the American celebration," a constant self-confirmatory, self-praising soothing of collective insecurities. What we hear, endlessly, is that South Africans are the "rainbow people of god;" that we are a "miracle nation" which had a "miracle election," although, truth to tell, it was not wholly free or fair; that South Africa is the land of a historic reconciliation, and Nelson Mandela a man who represents the victory of humanity over bitterness. This rhetoric is oppressive, just as the "American celebration" was, suffocating not only dissident voices but a far greater variety of experience than any such celebration can ever allow. In South Africa, this enforced cheerfulness often covers a deep pessimism, indeed a real fear. Many whites are, in their daily lives, scared-scared of violence, of crime, of being squeezed out of jobs by affirmative action and, above all, scared of the sheer brute power of African nationalism. But South Africa is, without much doubt, now the most politically correct country in the world and it is politically incorrect to admit that one is scared. So, many whites are not only scared but are scared to say that they are scared-a truly Orwellian situation.
In one sense such fears seem odd; in every obvious way, things are now better than they have been for a very long time. Not only is apartheid gone but there is an increasingly easy and unbothered mixing of the races; at a purely personal level, in offices, homes and factories, race relations are better here than in the US. The urban guerrilla war is over, all manner of institutions (the police, army, broadcasting, the intelligence services, the civil service, and so on) have been united. Moreover, the ANC has moved through 180 degrees on its economic policy. Seven years ago it saw its objective as building a new East Germany in Africa; but now it has not only not nationalised anything but even talks about possible privatisations. Inflation is down, growth is at over 3 per cent (after years of negative growth) and tourists are flowing in. When you contrast this reality with what even relatively sober white opinion expected a few years ago, there is no doubt that things are a great deal better than most had dared to hope.
Yet skilled whites are still emigrating in considerable numbers (the 1996 figures are 27 per cent up on 1995 thus far) and even many of those who are happy about their decision to stay are passionate in their determination that their children must be equipped to live in other countries. It is, indeed, a clich? of white South African life-it has been most marked among Jews-to find parents anchored here, their children in Britain, Australia or the US, and an immense amount of money and energy put into the endless trips and phone calls necessary to keep some sense of family together. There is no doubting the anguishing price such people are willing to pay-and the bulk of them are non-racist political liberals-to ensure that their children do not have to risk living and working in the new South Africa.
So if things are so good, how come things are so bad? While President Mandela has successfully created an atmosphere of reconciliation and even (assisted by a series of national sporting triumphs) a modicum of national unity, he has not generated a feeling of confidence in the future. There is instead a feeling of phoney war, the sense that while things are going not too badly now, a number of processes are at work which are bound to lead to disaster.
The first of these processes is affirmative action. The new government is, in many ways, na?ve and incompetent. Having, for example, promised to build 1m cheap houses in its first five years, the government has actually slowed down the rate of house-building going on under de Klerk (54,000 in his last year) to 34,000 in the past two years. Many other ministries are missing their targets by wide margins and the government's overall Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) is in a shambles of over-promise and under-delivery. Yet the one target the government is meeting is that for affirmative action appointments as large numbers of the under-trained and under-educated new elite swarm aboard the gravy train while older, better educated whites descend from it. This process convinces whites that the doors of employment will be shut to their children simply on racial grounds and it also more or less guarantees a steep decline in the already unimpressive efficiency of government and the public enterprises. As yet the state sector still has the forward momentum of the proverbial supertanker but the general assumption is that down in the engine room things will begin to seize up. To some extent this pessimism has roots in a deep and general white misgiving about African competence, but it is also more solidly rooted in the poor educational level even of the black elite-the most dangerous and enduring inheritance of apartheid. Certainly, those institutions which have been under black administration longest-the HBUs (historically black universities)-are synonyms for low standards, demoralised faculties and endless student protest. Whites look at institutions such as the HBUs, take note that the older, once all-white universities are under pressure to transform themselves on the HBU model, and start planning to send their children abroad.
What is happening with doctors provides a parable. The country's oldest and most prestigious medical school is at the University of Cape Town but admission standards there have been so strongly affected by affirmative action criteria that white males, who would normally have made up perhaps 75 per cent of the entry on merit, would now be lucky to secure 25 per cent of the places. In the interests of equity and a proposed national health service the government is holding down doctors' pay, cutting the number of teaching hospitals and has banned certain expensive operations-for example, in the whole of the Johannesburg-Pretoria region, the country's economic powerhouse, public hospitals are forbidden to carry out heart transplants. In the country which performed the world's first heart transplants and has a long tradition of medical excellence, these changes have created demoralisation and the emigration of at least half of each graduating year of doctors. The government rages against this behaviour, talks about making it compulsory for doctors to work in deprived rural areas for several years, and is now importing 2,000 doctors from Cuba. It is quite normal to hear senior doctors predicting the wholesale collapse of medical education and state hospitals over the next few years. Not least of the pressures generating an emigratory push for many doctors is the knowledge that the chances of their children getting into medical school are now uncomfortably slight.
The lower standards of education inflicted on blacks by Verwoerd's Bantu education system mean that as educational institutions are fully integrated so the rearguard battle waged by whites to preserve standards is generally interpreted as a white racist attempt to maintain the exclusion of blacks or at least their consignment to lower grades, despite the workings of what is known here as "affirmative marking." This has produced strong counter-pressures of "pass one, pass all" and lower standards which horrify whites. It is not the only thing to horrify them. They also point anxiously at the country's senior university, Witwatersrand, where a black deputy vice-chancellor, Professor Willie Makgoba, who claims that maths was invented in Nigeria and that there is a worldwide plot to undermine African culture, has been accused of falsifying his curriculum vitae. Others point to the black principal of the oldest African university, Fort Hare, recently caught out in an act of flagrant plagiarism.
The differing educational backgrounds of blacks and whites and the enormous black sensitivity that what whites mean by "lower standards" is "the congenital inferiority of blacks," often creates quite impossible work situations. One liberal woman friend of mine works in a research division where she is the only white. Recently her division was given a project with an urgent deadline. As time slipped by it became clear that no one was doing any work on the project and that all attempts to bring up the subject saw it brushed aside on the general principle of ma?ana (this being an African as well as a Latin American tradition). My friend, knowing she was fundamentally better educated and equipped than her colleagues, began quietly taking the files home in the evening and when, on deadline day, the panic over the project's non-completion began, she was able to announce that the division's reputation was intact: she had completed the project the night before. Her black colleagues furiously denounced her for having made them feel bad about themselves and inferior and, indeed, for being a racist white who had clearly assumed in advance that her black colleagues were hopeless. They have angrily ordained that she is to be sent to Coventry for her racist white arrogance. She is still working in this silent, unhappy atmosphere although she tells me that there are signs of the boycott cracking and that she expects to be talking to at least most of her colleagues again soon. One could argue this case both ways but the important point is simply that it is impossible to imagine the majority of whites putting up with such situations for long: either they will flee into more private sectors of the economy where such conditions are less likely to obtain, or they will leave.
To such worries many whites would add others. Already 12 per cent of the adult population is HIV positive and the figure is advancing rapidly towards the one-third level which seems to be where the disease has plateaued in east Africa. It is regarded as unhelpful to draw attention to the fact that the ministers for defence, the police, transport, justice, trade and probably several others are members of the Communist party and that the party wholly controls the intelligence services, the trade unions and many of the parliamentary committees; none the less, many do notice it. President Mandela's invitation to Gaddafi and Castro to visit South Africa has perturbed some, as did his willingness to meet Farrakhan and representatives of Hamas. The explanation that such bizarre behaviour is sheer na?vet? is not reassuring. There is also the longer term fear that while Mandela may have the approval of all races, he will have to go by 1999, if not before, and that his likely successor, Thabo Mbeki, may not be able to hold together this deeply divided country.
More recently, the eruption of a corruption scandal in which General Bantu Holomisa, a sacked minister, made grave allegations of financial impropriety against Steve Tshwete, the minister for sport, Thabo Mbeki and the ANC in general, has had a major impact on both black and white, particularly since President Mandela himself had to admit that the most substantial allegation-involving a large donation to ANC funds handed directly to him-was indeed true. Many blacks have been shocked that the ANC had such intimate financial dealings with Sol Kerzner, the casino magnate, for long one of the chief financial supports of the apartheid "homeland" system. But whites care less about that than the fact that each time a corruption scandal has erupted involving the ANC, its first reaction invariably has been to denounce the allegations as untrue and to protect the guilty parties in the name of party loyalty. Thus far, at least, the ANC-led government is less corrupt than its Nationalist predecessor but to whites who are hypersensitive to what corruption has done to countries to the north, these cover-ups seem far more ominous than is warranted by the simple facts of each case. They trigger the fear that "we're sliding towards being a giant Zambia."
So, whites worry about crime, falling standards of health and education, Aids, affirmative action, and the possibility of their advanced industrial society foundering in a morass of government incompetence and corruption. This is quite a list but South African whites are a hardy lot, used to living with a murder rate seven times that of the US, with border wars, an extreme climate and so on. But the result of these pressures is that, for all the nationalist rhetoric about "building the new nation," many whites, together with a fair smattering of Indians and blacks, are moving back towards a more colonial frame of mind, devoting enormous care to building prudential relationships with the metropole-building up an (illegal) nest-egg in a hard currency foreign bank account, acquiring a foreign passport, placing a child in education abroad or just taking out time to travel overseas to build a contact network there. Inevitably, this process has strong demographic implications with the whites becoming a steadily more elderly group-in sharp contrast to blacks, half of whom are under 20.
If I say this sort of thing to visiting friends they invariably ask why on earth I gave up a secure job as an Oxford don (which I did last year) to move back to live here? I can give various answers-that I came of age as an anti-apartheid activist here and that there is something immensely satisfying about seeing a job completed, that it is actually quite fun living in the wild west, that the country is, as always, supremely interesting, and that the climate is marvellous. All true, but the emotional truth is also that for many whites of my generation this is and always will be the beloved country, the place which in its crazy, violent and hilarious way, formed you, gave you your chance. You feel that this is your place, that you just want to see what happens, and that you want to be able to pay something back. It can be a real thrill to feel that you can make a difference, to be able to hand on skills or expertise, or just use things you learnt elsewhere to give a different twist to debates out here.
It is not easy for me to admit it, but in the end this boils down to being part of the great missionary tradition-but without illusions: I have more than one friend who began in east Africa, sided with the anti-colonial struggle and then moved south to avoid the ghastliness of the corruption and authoritarianism that followed. Gradually they trickled southwards, repeating the experience in Rhodesia before arriving here, where they once again sided against white privilege, although utterly without illusions about what was likely to follow its overthrow. Such people live in a complicated and tolerant moral universe, doing good when they find a way and getting their laughs where they can. Not a few whites here feel many of these things and to me they are the salt of the earth: I like being among them.
But my particular generation of "missionaries" could be the last: we are not bringing up our children to succeed us in that role. One senses the shrinkage, it is part of the drama. This is a pattern we have seen elsewhere in settler Africa, with the white population gradually reduced to short-stay consultants, a few hardy farmers and international aid workers. But this cannot happen altogether in South Africa: the white population is too big, too much of it is too rooted to move and, above all, most of the "colonial" strategies adumbrated above are not available to poorer whites among whom there is growing unemployment and social distress. This is the group which could provide the muscle of a militant white reaction but whether or not this occurs depends crucially on whether a better educated white group emerges to give leadership to such a reaction. At present this seems unlikely but recent polls show growing white support for a separate white volkstaat. While the economy continues to expand healthily such trends will remain within bounds but a downturn in the business cycle would see white disaffection grow. This could well mean increased white support for potential separatist movements in the Western Cape or in KwaZulu/Natal but even this would depend on alliances with Cape coloureds or Buthelezi's Zulus, neither of which are unproblematic. The era when whites could take decisive political action on their own is over. That, in a sense, is what the change has been all about.
