Understanding the Riots Part 4 : Seeing Ourselves : JOHANNESBURG : ‘Sort out your own racial problems.’

Only a few hours after the Los Angeles jury returned its verdicts against four white police officers accused of beating a black man, a white judge in South Africa was sentencing a white policeman to death for murdering 11 blacks.

It would have been easy to jump to the conclusion that South Africa was making rapid progress toward racial equality while one of its loudest critics, the United States, was taking a leap backward.

Said the Citizen newspaper, a pro-government daily and no friend of the black liberation struggle in South Africa:

“The United States, that paragon of virtue, that font of democracy, did not have the social and economic advancement policies that would give blacks their rightful place in the sun.

“Our advice to the United States is: Sort out your own racial problems. As L.A. has shown, you are not a great example to us.”

But most black South Africans found no cause to delight in America’s violent racial upheaval, scenes of which occupied the front pages here for days. They have long admired the United States as a country where racial equality and freedom are entrenched in law, and where black men and women have become respected mayors, governors, legislators and judges.

And they were deeply troubled by the events in Los Angeles.

Blacks here know that South Africa, despite President Frederik W. de Klerk’s recent reforms, is hardly an example of racial equality.

They were reminded of that shortly before the white South African police officer was sentenced to death, when the government freed a black policeman who had served just 9 months of a 27-year sentence for murder in a reign of terror aimed at black opponents of the government.

The government blithely blamed an administrative error for the early release of the policeman, who had been described as a “beast” by the judge in his trial. The officer, the government said, wasn’t supposed to be released for another 3 months.

Some worried that racial harmony may be unattainable under a capitalist, U.S.-style democracy, the basic constitutional model favored by the white government in Pretoria.

And Ameen Akhalwaya, a columnist in the liberal Weekly Mail newspaper, was baffled that blacks in Los Angeles could “feel trapped in a city headed by an African-American mayor.”

Akhalwaya concluded: “If the pace of minority advancement hasn’t curbed disenchantment in a country whose Constitution and Bill of Rights have evolved over 200 years, then we in South Africa face a truly awesome challenge. We can’t take comfort from the American experience, but we can learn from it.”