Since Apartheid, Suburb’s Results Are Mixed

When apartheid ended a decade ago, this was a tidy, all-white suburb of 20,000 squeezed between the sprawling black township of Soweto and the economic engine of white rule, Johannesburg. But the residents who converged on a local school to vote in elections Wednesday reflected, like so much of South Africa, a nation transformed.

Now a teeming suburb of 50,000, Rosettenville is a racial melange. Thousands have moved here from Soweto and other black and mixed-race townships, often buying homes from departing whites. Joining them have been Nigerians, Zimbabweans and Mozambicans, lured by the post-apartheid detente with the rest of Africa.

The result is an ethnically diverse community that symbolizes the heralded successes -- but also the enormous challenges -- facing this country 10 years after its first free elections. Whites and blacks live side by side here in equal numbers and relative harmony. But crime has escalated, housing prices have sunk, schools are overcrowded, public transportation has become unreliable and joblessness shadows the streets of modest homes.

“We used to have municipal services. The roads got repaired, the police came when you called. You used to see green grass,” said Brian Waterston, one of the whites who has remained. “That’s all gone now.”

A lifelong Rosettenville resident, Waterston has no problem with the fact that blacks have moved into many houses on his block.

“They mind their own business,” and racial diversity is good for the town, he said.

His wife, Priscilla Mare, 44, sells BMWs at a Johannesburg dealership recently bought by four wealthy black investors, beneficiaries of black empowerment initiatives.

“That’s taken a while to get used to,” she admitted. “Getting used to their culture, their ways. But they’re good businessmen and they have a lot of contacts with the government.”

Most of the customers for the cars, some with $100,000 sticker prices, are black businessmen. The credit checks are interesting, she says. “It’s frightening to see how much money these guys make a month. A month!”

But the quality of life for everyone in Rosettenville has fallen precipitously, they say.

Waterston, a 51-year-old insurance broker, said he was forced to invest in iron bars and gates to protect his home after a robbery and carjacking in the driveway last year.

“We actually live more in prisons now than the actual criminals,” he said.

Added his wife: “I have to psych myself up every time I drive back to our house.”

They blame the crime on the influx of immigrants from other African countries as well as the unemployment rate, which the government estimates at about 30% and independent economists put at more than 40%. “People have got to feed their families,” Waterston said. “You’ve got to create jobs for people.”

Although Waterston and Mare cast their votes Wednesday for the Democratic Alliance, the main opposition party, their concern about crime and jobs is shared by supporters of the African National Congress. The ANC, which has ruled the country since South Africa’s black majority won the right to vote in 1994, had campaigned this time on the slogan “A better life for all.” It’s expected to cruise to victory again.

Georgina Mashaba, 31, moved here from a black township near Pretoria two years ago. She works part time as a cashier at a grocery store for $1.50 an hour. It isn’t enough to pay her share of the $220-a-month, one-bedroom home where she lives with a friend and, even though she has a teaching certificate, she’s been unable to find a full-time job as a teacher.

“The ANC hasn’t done everything it promised,” she said. “We need better jobs. But 10 years is not a long time. It’s too early to give up on them.”

Such views are common across South Africa. In an editorial this week, Business Day, an influential voice of the still mostly white business establishment, acknowledged what it called “serious failures” of the government to create jobs and halt corruption. But it praised the ANC’s prudent economic and fiscal policies, which have slashed government debt and sparked steady economic growth.

Some in Rosettenville aren’t so sure about the ANC’s tenure.

“The end of apartheid was a good thing,” said Christopher Letshwit, 32, a service station attendant who moved here from a black township a year ago. “I voted for the ANC, I voted for something good to happen, and now we can do anything whites do, so it’s better. But crime, drugs, it’s all over.”

This time, he cast his vote for a small opposition group, the Independent Democrats.

It was crime that drove Marco and Lilian Gaggia out of this suburb five years ago. Their house was burglarized twice, and prostitutes had begun to appear across from the school.

They returned to vote here, where they’re still registered, but they live in Alberton, a mostly Afrikaner suburb nearby. In Alberton, Marco said, “there’s a lot more respect for law enforcement. You can phone the police and they do arrive.”

Still, they say they’d prefer to live in an integrated area. “A lot of good has been done in South Africa over the last 10 years. A lot of wrongs have been righted,” said Lilian, 31, a medical technician. “There’s a lot of character in this country. And our races and cultures are very much intertwined.”

But the ANC “is too big a party, and it needs someone to put some fire under their butts,” she said. She and her husband cast their ballots for the fringe African Christian Democratic Party.