Mandela’s Campaign Faces Uphill Battle in Cape Area

Black, yellow and green balloons filled the crisp blue sky. Uncaged pigeons took flight over a sea of waving flags and fists. About 20,000 people cheered and chanted in wild adulation, surging forward with such force that three people were trampled to death and 21 were injured.

Other than the gruesome deaths at the soccer stadium rally here, Nelson Mandela’s final campaign visit Sunday to the scenic Cape Town region, home of South Africa’ first white settlement and last white Parliament, was typical of an astonishing race in which his victory as the first black president was assured from the start.

Typical except for one other thing. Mandela is likely to lose the Western Cape, the only province where his African National Congress has actually engaged in a brutal, bare-knuckles political battle with its opponents in President Frederik W. de Klerk’s ruling National Party.

But the cause of the ANC’s uphill fight here holds a warning for what the future may hold. That’s because the nation’s first all-race elections next week appear to be breaking on distinctly racial lines, the result of decades of deliberate racial polarization and ethnic enmity under apartheid.

Despite both parties’ pleas for racial reconciliation, polls show that the ANC is expected to win nearly all the black votes and little else. And while the once-whites-only National Party will come in second, it is likely to win most of the white, Indian and mixed-race, or so-called Colored, votes in a broad anti-ANC coalition. Together they form a quarter of the population.

But the Western Cape, the triangular southern tip of the country that ends at the rocky Cape of Good Hope, is the only province where blacks are actually a minority. Slightly more than half the estimated 2.3 million voters here are Colored, with blacks and whites splitting most of the rest. And Mandela’s messianic appeal elsewhere counts for little among Colored voters.

“He’s a jailbird,” snapped Nayuma Cloete, 31, a mixed-race woman who gathered with her children and neighbors to jeer passing ANC supporters near the stadium where the world’s most famous former political prisoner had just held his rally. “And he will make us suffer. Whites gave us food, houses and education for our children. The blacks will give us nothing.”

“The blacks will take revenge,” worried Junaid Julius, 22, who held a poster of De Klerk. “One of these people told my wife, ‘You’re going to be my wife when this is finished.’ She’s afraid.”

History here explains a lot. The Coloreds, the apartheid-era term for the cocoa-skinned, mixed-race offspring of European settlers, African natives and Asian immigrants, were given preference for jobs and housing over blacks in the Cape under the rigid segregationist rules of white supremacy.

Coloreds were also mistreated, of course. Many were evicted at gunpoint from their land and their homes, brutally bulldozed out of white communities and trucked to crowded townships. The indignities of racial tyranny included having bureaucrats run pencils through their hair to see if lighter-skinned Coloreds could qualify for jobs reserved for whites.

But most Coloreds adopted the Dutch Reformed Church that is favored by the ruling white minority and spoke the same Afrikaans language as whites. Most had access to better schools and jobs than blacks. And unlike blacks, Coloreds and Indians were given the vote for separate chambers of Parliament in 1983 in a National Party attempt to split opposition to apartheid.

The result was the emergence of a prosperous Colored middle class that is now terrified of losing the relative status and privileges it enjoys. Many Coloreds openly fear and distrust blacks, who fought pitched battles against the white authorities and spread terror in many townships.

“We Coloreds are more racist than the whites,” said Trevor Jones, 32, a printer’s assistant who waved an ANC flag at the Mandela rally. “My friends say the ANC is bad. They say the blacks are dangerous. And they hate Mandela.”

Those fears have been exploited by the National Party with the crudest--or perhaps shrewdest--negative advertising and campaign tactics anywhere in the country.

The party, for example, recently distributed 80,000 copies in the Cape of an Afrikaans-language comic book called “Winds of Change.” It shows a Colored family being driven from its home by a 14-year-old black youth with an AK-47 assault rifle. “You were our useful idiots,” the boy says, while his dog adds, “Kill the Colored, kill the farmer.”

After the ANC bitterly complained, the Independent Electoral Commission, the neutral group overseeing the April 26-28 elections, banned the comic as flagrantly racist and inflammatory.

Mandela angrily denounced the comic during his televised debate Thursday with De Klerk. And at his rally here, he complained: “At a time when the ANC is trying to be all-inclusive, the National Party issued the most vicious racist propaganda in order to turn one set of people against another.”

But the National Party also ran an advertisement in local papers that had echoes of the Willie Horton commercials used by the Republicans against Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988. Focusing on the ANC’s call to give the vote to all prisoners, the ad shows a ghoulish, dark-skinned police composite picture of a since-captured serial killer suspect and asks: “Can you imagine the Cape Strangler having the vote?”

And should anyone doubt where the National Party stands, their candidate for provincial premier is Hernus Kriel. Known as “Mr. Tough,” he is the government’s minister for law and order and oversees an infamously ruthless police force that has long been used to suppress blacks.

Melt Hamman, a member of Parliament who is the National Party’s election strategist for the Cape, said voters have legitimate fears of ANC-inspired violence and intimidation. He says the ANC’s complaints against the comic are “racist,” designed to “exploit black-white confrontations” to mobilize black support.

ANC leaders admit that the National Party tactics have worked. Recent internal tracking polls show the ANC with about 30% to the National Party’s 38%, with most other voters either undecided or unwilling to discuss their choice.

“This is the only region we think we could lose,” said Sue de Villiers, the ANC spokeswoman in Cape Town.

“There’s still a sense that the ANC is an African organization and there isn’t a place for Coloreds in the ANC,” she said. “People are very frightened. They’re being told they’re going to lose their homes and their jobs.”

Willie Hofmeyr, one of the ANC’s chief election strategists, agreed that the ANC is on the defensive in Colored areas. “People don’t like the National Party, but they’d rather have the devil they know than the devil they don’t.”

Anglican Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, warned in a recent news conference in Cape Town that the divisive appeals to racism may create “a potentially explosive situation” after the elections.

“If people go into the new South Africa with deep resentments, it is going to undermine the possibility of a tremendous future,” he said.