South African Whites Protest Racism, But Not In Unity Mandela Is Accused Of Belittling The Afrikaans Language

They gathered 2,000 strong at an open-air meeting Saturday, once-privileged whites now complaining of racial discrimination in a black-led South Africa.

But the sight of organizers of the right-wing rally hoisting the country’s new flag in a gesture of national reconciliation broke their unity.

“Take down that kaffir flag!” shouted a knot of extremists, using a derogatory Afrikaans word for blacks. “If you raise that flag here today, blood will be spilled!”

To a few cheers, one man ripped the flag off a tree while another held a cigarette lighter to it. An organizer wrested the flag back, walked to the podium and delivered a speech as the protesters stormed off.

Sticking to his prepared text, he didn’t miss a beat.

“It’s nice we could get together here today to look each other in the eye,” Theo de Jager told the crowd in the shady grove in Pretoria, an Afrikaner stronghold.

The flag was folded and put away. But not the divide among Afrikaners, descendants of 17th-century Dutch settlers and the ruling class under apartheid, in their reactions to their loss of power since Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first black president nearly two years ago.

The vast majority of the 3 million Afrikaners accept Mandela’s gestures of reconciliation and are making the best of the new system.

Mandela has also skillfully seduced conservatives like de Jager away from extremism, increasingly isolating neo-Nazi elements and making a race war highly unlikely.

But speakers at the rally accused Mandela of belittling the Afrikaans language by reducing its use on television and in schools, discriminating against Afrikaners in employment, and unfairly prosecuting police and soldiers who enforced white-minority rule. They threatened court challenges and strikes, but not violence.

De Jager said he supported the new system but was “sick of everything going wrong in the country being blamed on apartheid.”

On Saturday, Mandela told members of an Afrikaner youth group that he would never degrade their language or culture. He urged them not “to fall into the trap of seeing people as belonging to different groups. We must look at the needs of South Africa as a whole.”

Extremist Afrikaners want out of South Africa completely and threaten war if they don’t get their own state. They can’t agree on the borders, but share the belief that South Africa comprises different tribally based peoples unable to live together.

Such ideas underpinned apartheid rule. It became clear Saturday how far they have fallen.