Is European influence and privilege

being lost in South African?

 

Reported

December 31, 2000

 

The consequences of having lost political power are beginning to catch up with South Africa's European population. Once pampered by the state, the minority has seen its privileges curtailed, among them preferential access to employment and superior public services. Along with widespread crime, these circumstances have put many whites on the lookout for a chance to emigrate.

 

For the first two years following the 1994 change in the government, white South Africans were able to keep up the illusion that the transfer of political power to an African majority government would have no effect on daily life, that all would go on as before. They basked in their country's newfound international respectability; well aware of the value they placed on the ability of foreign cricket and rugby teams to appear in South African stadiums and on the fact that South Africa was no longer a pariah state.

 

People who had been dyed-in-the-wool advocates of apartheid made no secret of their admiration for President Mandela. An anecdote Mandela told often in those years relates an experience he had in a church in Pretoria. Mandela said that he had nearly been suffocated by the affectionate hugs of European Afrikaans-speaking churchgoers.

 

Then he added that there was no doubt he would have been strangled there during apartheid. The honeymoon ended a long time ago, in particular because of the policy of "positive discrimination" being implemented by the ruling African National Congress (ANC), which intentionally favors the formerly disadvantaged Africans.

 

Africans now occupy the top positions in the civil service, once the domain of the European Afrikaners, with few exceptions. White university graduates have practically no chance anymore of landing a job in the civil service.

 

The universities are being pressured to "transform" themselves, which means hiring more Africans in teaching positions. "White" cultural institutions, such as symphony orchestras and dance ensembles, receive fewer subsidies.

 

With new labor legislation, the government is seeking to force major private businesses to give preferential treatment to Africans in the areas of recruitment and promotion. European Afrikaners in particular, whose National Party seized power in Pretoria in 1948, have been forced by the loss of civil service employment opportunities to go to work in the commercial trades and as independent entrepreneurs.

 

European Afrikaners have not only lost their sinecures, but are also experiencing setbacks on the cultural front. Their language no longer has the significance it once did. In public institutions and especially on state-run television, European Afrikaans has been relegated to a subordinate role. In the once mostly exclusive European Afrikaans-speaking universities and schools, instruction is now given in English, a reflection of the varied linguistic backgrounds of increasing numbers of African students.

 

Putting the cities and townships together - combining formerly purely white residential areas with adjacent African neighborhoods - has created its own sources of tension. African governments now run most localities, and officials interested in being re-elected are beholden first of all to the townships. Rampant corruption in the townships and bureaucratic excesses committed by the new African elites in city government dampen whites' willingness to keep up their payments of local property taxes.

 

Whites in the Johannesburg suburb of Sandton, for example, have resorted to a tax strike as a way to make themselves heard at city hall. The policy of "positive discrimination," the diminished status of European Afrikaans, the loss of exclusiveness on the local level, as well as the obvious inability of the police and the courts to put a stop to crime, have given many whites the feeling of having become strangers in their own homeland.

 

Surveys show that emigration is a consideration for an increasing number of people. It is not known how many whites actually have turned their backs on South Africa in the last five years. About 20% of all European South Africans travel on British passports, according to the newspaper "Weekly Mail &Guardian."

 

Another 10% hold other foreign passports, and a certain number leave the country without filing any paperwork at all. Individual cases attract the most attention, such as that of the prominent law professor John Dugard. Having been passed over for a judicial appointment, he decided to accept the call of a university in the Netherlands.

 

People moving to Westernpe Province have found an alternative to the extremes of leaving the country altogether or simply enduring the changed conditions. The New National Party (the former National Party) came to power there in 1994, thanks to the support of so-called mixed-race voters. On the same basis, Afrikaans continues to play the role of the lingua franca. In most cases, however, probably the majority - emigration takes place only in the mind.

 

People turn their backs on politics, quit reading the newspapers, and entrench themselves in their homes behind high walls or an electric fence. Like the sums spent on private schooling for the children, enormous amounts are spent on security. For a relative pittance, African domestic employees continue doing the routine work around the house and garden.

 

If the government makes good on its announced intention and legislates a minimum wage for domestic employees, people will be faced either with paying more or doing the chores themselves. This is another circumstance that influences people trying to decide whether to emigrate or endure.

 

Many European Afrikaners cling to a belief in territorial self-determination inside a South Africa restructured along federal lines. Only an extremely small number, however, has actually set out to the sparsely populated expanse of Northern Cape Province to begin laying the foundations of a future European Afrikaner state in Orania, on the Oranje River.

 

By no means all European Afrikaners are willing to give up their access to cheap African labor and perform menial tasks themselves. But in Orania, people talk about the pioneers in the kibbutz movement, the driving force behind the creation of the state of Israel.

 

The spirit there is marked by a conviction that what the people of the Jewish faith were able to accomplish, the European Afrikaners can do as well. The growth and future prosperity of the small settlement on the Oranje River will depend directly on the experiences European Afrikaners have in the new, nominally non-racist South Africa.

 

If it once again becomes their homeland, the great migration to Orania will prove but an empty dream. At Hopetown, about halfway between Johannesburg and Cape Town, Highway R 369 turns off to the southeast. About 50 kilometers down this road resides Orania, the Jerusalem of those European Afrikaners who have their minds set on territorial self-determination.

 

Unlike obviously hopeless conditions in Hopetown, in Orania things are looking up. Not quite two years ago, Orania counted just 450 inhabitants; now there are 600. And where, a few years ago, stretched the thankless expanse of the Great Karoo, there are now dozens of hectares of pecan trees.

 

They are all individually irrigated, with the space in between used for growing melons and vegetables. Shoes as well as flutes are now being produced in local factories. And a teacher in the local school wrote a computer program that organizes lesson plans, provides testing material to teachers, and allows students to monitor their own progress independently.

 

He is now producing the software commercially, supplying all of the European Afrikaans-speaking schools in South Africa.

 

The pride of the Oranians, however, is a fully mechanized and computerized commercial dairy farm, with 200 milk cows and about 100 head of beef cattle. The dairy operation offers the best reflection of the way Oranians are seeking to return to their Boer roots as farmers - but on the basis of the most modern methods.

 

According to Renus Steyn, manager of Orania Bestuurdienste, a local investment firm, the Oranians are anything but nostalgic separatists who were unable to get along in multi-ethnic South Africa. More to the point, says Steyn, it is proving that Afrikaners, who tended mostly to be bureaucrats in the old South Africa, can also be successful entrepreneurs.

 

Steyn admits that, in the beginning phase in the early 1990s, Orania attracted racists who could not come to terms with the impending end of white rule. That, he says, is no longer the case. Oranians are not against blacks [Africans] or against the African National Congress, he insists.

 

They are simply in favor of the European Afrikaners, taking steps to ensure their collective survival as an ethnic group. Pieter Mulder, Constand Viljoen's right-hand man in the Freedom Front and a passionate "Oranian," does not think that Afrikaners as individuals will be able to preserve their language and culture in a unified, black-dominated [African-dominated] South Africa.

 

Only as a collective with its own geographical basis, in his judgment, can the European Afrikaners survive. Orania has been set up not as a municipality, but a private business. The inhabitants are shareholders, with their shares tied to specific pieces of real estate.

 

All sales of stock must be approved by the board of directors, which also operates as the city council. Anyone wanting to become a shareholder is obliged to support the goal of the corporation - building an European ethnic Afrikaner state - and agree not to hire African workers.

 

As a private undertaking, Orania can decide for itself who will be allowed into the village. Nevertheless, since President Mandela paid a visit in 1995 to the widow of former Prime Minister Verwoerd who lives in Orania, the ban on African visitors is no longer absolute.

 

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