South Africa has undergone profound transformation

BRITS, South Africa – Visitors to the tranquil offices of the Brits Town Council a decade ago were greeted by a friendly white receptionist. Upstairs, white secretaries catered to a white mayor and his white staff. Blacks served tea.

Today, the receptionist and secretaries are still white. But most of the bosses, including the mayor and the city manager, are black. And, in the entryway the other day, a white maintenance man was washing the windows.

“As a black person, you wouldn’t go near these offices a decade ago,” Kenneth Ngubegusha said.

Back then, Ngubegusha was a student fighting to end apartheid and saw whites as the enemy. Now he is communications officer for the council in this prosperous community on acacia-covered hills near Pretoria. And he believes it is no longer “a matter of black versus white in South Africa today.”

As a correspondent in South Africa from 1986 to 1993, I watched the dying breaths of apartheid: The failed attempt to force blacks into autonomous “homelands.” The dismantling of laws imposing racial separation. The week in 1990 that the African National Congress was unbanned and its leader, Nelson Mandela, freed. And I returned in 1994 when the black four-fifths of South Africa’s 45 million people got their first chance to cast a free vote.

When I returned again recently, I found a country that, at first, felt and looked familiar. The haze of coal smoke and mining dust still carpeted the mile-high metropolis of Johannesburg. The combis, vans packed with black commuters, still speeded to and from the sprawling township of Soweto. Thickets of squatter shacks still pressed against the road from Cape Town’s airport to Table Mountain. And the singular beauty of this land, from its shimmering veld to its pristine beaches, was undiminished.

But, on closer inspection, it was clear that 10 years of black majority rule had brought profound change. An aggressive affirmative action program had lifted blacks into private industry and swelled the black middle class. All-white schools had become predominantly black schools. All-white suburbs were deeply integrated.

What was equally remarkable, though, was what the black majority had not done. It had not used its new upper hand to crush the white minority. It had not taken property from whites or jailed leaders of the former regime. It had not erased the achievements of white rulers from its history books. In fact, the victors had displayed a confidence and magnanimity rarely seen in post-revolutionary societies.

Race once dominated conversations here. But no longer. Today, South Africans complain most frequently about crime, and they’ve built higher security walls and hired more private guards. They criticize the government’s mishandling of the AIDS epidemic that now claims 600 lives a day. They lament the persistent poverty, fed by an unemployment rate of more than 20 percent – twice that by some estimates.

And, when asked, they look back in surprise that their country has undergone a peaceful transition from black oppression to multiracial democracy.

Back in 1994, Frederik W. de Klerk was a white president negotiating himself out of power. Today, at 68, he runs a foundation that offers help to foreign countries trying to manage racial diversity. And he’s bullish on his own country.

“South Africa has been quite successful in the first phase, the political transformation,” de Klerk said, speaking in his hilltop Cape Town office, with postcard views of Robben Island, where his National Party predecessors held Mandela for many years. “We’ve laid a good foundation for the second phase – socioeconomic transformation.”

These days, de Klerk is frequently stopped by blacks and whites who want to shake his hand. “I’m at times embarrassed by the affection I’ve experienced,” he said.

When I first met Zwelakhe Sisulu, a black newspaper editor, in the late 1980s, he had just emerged from jail where he’d been sent for criticizing the white government. After the 1994 elections, the government appointed him head of the South African Broadcasting Corp., the onetime mouthpiece of apartheid.

Now Sisulu is a businessman. He’s moved out of Soweto and has homes in a wealthy Johannesburg suburb and the tony waterfront in Cape Town. His new struggle is to create a private media company with operations across Africa.

“Black people have made serious inroads and are serious players in business today,” he said. And the ruling ANC’s political machinery “is oiled by the new business class. A political leadership, but also a business leadership, is important in a young democracy.”

Not all ANC activists found a home in politics or business. When I met Leslee Durr in 1989, the rebel daughter of an Afrikaner farmer had just been arrested and expelled for leading an anti-apartheid protest at the University of Stellenbosch, the bastion of Afrikaner higher education. She expected to devote her life to the cause.

Today, she helps run her father’s farm and devotes much of her time to helping the mixed-race women who work there. “This is a white South African farm with a history,” Durr told me recently as she smoked a cigarette in her farm home. “This is not a politically neutral business.”

Durr, now 37, has made it her mission to teach her farmworkers how to protect their rights. She has invited ANC leaders to address the farmworkers at election time and counseled them on the particulars of the Fair Employment Act. “My father freaks out when I do that,” she said, smiling. “Any worker agitation is seen as an immense disloyalty to the farm.”

Back in the 1980s, sanctions isolated South Africa. Its rugby, cricket and soccer teams were international pariahs. The American fast-food restaurants that dotted the planet had skipped the tip of Africa. Direct flights to the rest of Africa were rare.

Coming back after a decade away, it’s startling to see how a rush of investment has remade the scene. McDonald’s restaurants are as ubiquitous as jacaranda trees. Sports reporters breathlessly handicap the next international test match. And in the Johannesburg suburb of Sandton, once the enclave of well-heeled whites, there’s now a consulate for Nigeria, which for decades considered itself at war with South Africa.

Back when apartheid was beginning to crumble, whites, and some blacks too, were nervous about the African National Congress. The liberation movement was led by rock-throwers inside the country and an exiled elite, many of whose members were schooled in Communist Russia. What, whites wondered, would the ANC do?

Now they have their answer. Johann Kriegler, a white civil rights lawyer and retired judge, explains it this way: “They took a ragtag group of wild-eyed revolutionaries and bush fighters and persuaded them to accept an open, free-market system that has managed to maintain 22 quarters of economic growth. That’s one hell of an achievement.”

Under apartheid, culture was the one area where blacks had made some inroads. Still, many anti-apartheid cultural icons were white.

Today, an African renaissance has begun to sweep the country. “We’re all developing a pride in our African identity,” said Thami Mazwai, a onetime anti-apartheid activist who now runs a magazine publishing company. “There’s a feeling, an undercurrent, like Paris during the Renaissance.”

The nation’s heritage, once defined solely by the fortitude of its white Afrikaner settlers, now includes homage to the long struggle of its black majority. A new Apartheid Museum near the township of Soweto showcases the battle against white oppression and celebrates the sacrifice of blacks. A downtown Johannesburg prison where ANC leaders were held is being renovated as a museum. And the prison on Robben Island is now a museum, too.

A giant statue of Mandela went up a few weeks ago on a plaza at Sandton City, a shopping mall north of Johannesburg where I remember guards checking handbags for ANC bombs. Now tourists pose there for photographs. Streets that once carried the names of apartheid heroes have been renamed to honor anti-apartheid leaders. In Johannesburg, a new Nelson Mandela Bridge has gone up next to Queen Elizabeth Bridge.

But in preserving the past, the government has not felt the need to rewrite it. In Cape Town, the statue of Louis Botha, turn-of-the-century Afrikaner “statesman,” still stands guard outside the official residence of the state president.

The Voortrekker Monument near Pretoria still commemorates the Afrikaners’ Great Trek into South Africa’s interior and their victory, with what they believed was divine intervention, over their Zulu enemies. The monument once symbolized Afrikaners’ belief that God wanted them to rule South Africa. But today it is a museum of Afrikaner culture and history (and still subsidized by the government). Black guides now give tours in African languages, and jazz concerts have replaced religious services.

But it is in places such as Brits where both the stark and subtle signs of a racial evolution are most apparent.

When I first visited Brits, the conservative whites were trying to drive blacks out of Oukassie, a squatter camp on the edge of the city. Today, the black city fathers have put up a soccer field, tennis courts, library and community center in Oukassie, which has swelled to 18,000 residents.

“This government doesn’t just say, ‘Sorry, bye-bye,’ to Oukassie,” said Ngubegusha, the city official. “We have built 550 new homes for the poorest. People must have a roof over their heads and bread on their tables. We are saying, ‘If you move here, you are a member of our community.’ “

I asked Ngubegusha why the new Town Council didn’t clean house and replace the white secretaries, most of whom once worked for apartheid officials. He seemed surprised by the question.

“You can’t despise a person who is a professional,” he said. “These women are professionals. And a professional is a professional.”