SOUTH AFRICA: FORGING A NATION : SOUTH AFRICA: A TALE OF SIX FAMILIES : CHAPTER THREE / The White Retreat

Gen. Constand Viljoen, chief of the South African Defense Forces in the early 1980s and revered as “the soldier’s general” for his presence in the hottest front lines, watched the growing political struggle with increasing disquietude.

“We warned the government, we warned the politicians, that they had to come to a political accommodation,” Viljoen recalled, his pale blue eyes hardening as he recalled the civilian “vacillation.”

“We in the military and security forces could contain the unrest, we could continue detaining people, we could continue shooting people, we could prevent the government’s violent overthrow,” he said, but then added: “I had studied revolutionary wars very closely, and I was convinced, and told the government so in 1980, that a military solution was not possible. We could buy time, we could create security conditions, but that is all we could do.”

Under Viljoen and Defense Minister Magnus Malan, however, the security forces grew into what South Africans came to call a “securocracy”--the National Security Management System that paralleled, increasingly directed or even supplanted the government at all levels with the aim of matching oppression with measures that would “win the hearts and minds” of blacks.

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With this strategy more than the brute force of earlier years, the regime checked the campaign to make the country ungovernable and then turn those areas into “liberated zones,” as envisioned by some ANC strategists.

Said Viljoen: “Never was there a possibility, let alone a danger, that the government would be overthrown.”

But with equal candor Viljoen acknowledged that the white authorities failed to roll back the resistance “to point zero,” as they had virtually done in the 1950s and 1960s, or to win legitimacy for an alternative system of their own.

“At least five times, we military people called the politicians together and told them that the solution lay not with us, but in a settlement that accommodated the aspirations, the political aspirations above everything else, of all the people of South Africa,” Viljoen said.

“Some would squirm in their chairs because they didn’t like what we were telling them; others would nod their heads, but do nothing . . . apartheid was dead, and we said, so be it . . . the struggle now was for the future of the country, and whether we would have freedom or communism.”

As Constand Viljoen retired to his farm in eastern Transvaal, his twin brother, Braam, a theologian in the Dutch Reformed Church, joined liberal Afrikaners seeking reconciliation with South Africa’s black majority and starting negotiations with the ANC on the country’s future.

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A 1987 meeting between Afrikaner intellectuals, including Braam Viljoen and ANC leaders in Dakar, Senegal, helped lay the basis for the unbanning of the organization, the release of its imprisoned leaders and ultimately, the new political system.

“When Nelson Mandela was released in February, 1990, I thought, ‘Good, this is what we have been telling the government to do for 20 years,’ ” Constand Viljoen recalled. “We watched the negotiations between the ANC and the government. We did not see a win for the ANC as a loss for us; we thought it would be a win-win situation.

“But it all fell apart. The government lost the initiative, and it could not manage the changes it had set in motion. The South African Communist Party virtually took over the negotiations. The National Party collapsed into a pitiful, spineless heap. The ANC began to ram socialism down our throats.”

Viljoen, a soldier, a farmer and now a politician, advocates a volkstaat --a homeland within South Africa for those Afrikaners wishing to preserve their way of life and culture in tight-knit communities.

“We want strong home rule under a central government to protect us from communism,” Viljoen said.

“This is not a question of race or of superiority; it stems from the principle of self-determination. We want to preserve our heritage, to enjoy the benefits of a free economy and, above all, to remain a Christian people.”

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Dawn comes to Louis Botha’s farm not with the sharp crack of an electric switch but with a gentle roll, the soft, misty light suffusing the fields and the woods, turning dark shadows back into cattle and seeping through the windows of the house.

“It’s a magic time,” Botha said. “Even when there is a very heavy day ahead, this is a moment to enjoy, just to look around, to be happy to be alive and free and to thank God for what he has given us.”

With his brother, Coen, Botha farms 667 acres at Sterkfontein, near the town of Amsterdam in eastern Transvaal, but it is a farm that does not, and probably cannot, pay its own way.

The soil is thin and rocky, the acreage less than half what the Bothas need for economic viability; modern equipment costs more than the crops will earn at the market, and interest rates are so high that a bank loan is the first step to foreclosure.

“We are sentimental farmers,” Louis Botha said as he surveyed a patch of sloping ground on which he wants to raise more spinach, beet root and other vegetables. “Economically, you have to ask how this makes sense. Yet, it is something I really want to do.”

Sentiment drew the Botha brothers, both raised in the town of Bethal, where their father sold fertilizer and agricultural chemicals, back to the farm where their mother, Kotie, now 56, was born.

“There is something about the Afrikaner that makes him want to be close to the land,” Louis Botha, 32, said as he drove home from his “city job” as an industrial relations manager at a chip board factory 20 miles away in Piet Retief. “The Afrikaner feels a strong attachment to the soil. If there is no place for me here, there is no place for me anywhere. None of my neighbors makes a living farming, but none wants to leave.”

Sentiment of quite a different type, however, keeps the Bothas farming.

“The main thing is that if we stop farming, we would have to let our black farmhands go,” Louis Botha said, “and that would be unfair, wrong, something I just could not live with. When a man comes and works with you for five or six years, you can’t just tell them to bugger off, not in these days. Where will he find a job? How would his family live?”

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Speaking the fluent Zulu he learned as a boy and that he has developed with further study, Botha greets his foreman, Daniel Nzimande, 55, at 7 a.m. with clear affection and respect.

The discussion is about the weather, the condition of the fields, a sick ox, grazing their 100 head of cattle, ploughing more land for the new vegetable patch, completing the haymaking, a fence that needs fixing and other tasks for the day.

“Daniel worked for my father, Chris, years and years ago, and when he heard that my father was going to come back to farming he quit his job and came to us at half the salary, which was all we could afford to pay,” Louis Botha said. “To my mind, this farm is his as much as ours, and as long as Daniel is with us he will have a home for his family and food to eat. . . .

“The truth of it is, we grow these vegetables in order to pay the salaries each month, and we are desperate to increase our crop area so we can increase their pay.”

For Louis Botha, there has always been an interdependence between whites and blacks in South Africa.

In rural areas, the links were clear and direct, he said, for the farmer needed skilled black workers, and their families lived on his land from generation to generation. In the cities, however, the influx of workers from the countryside and their confinement in outlying townships turned them into low-cost, easily replaced labor, and the relationship became exploitive.

“I don’t want to romanticize things, but the relationship between the Afrikaner and the African is far more complex than it seems,” he continued. “In our acceptance of them as people, as human beings, we gain their acceptance of us as people who also have a place here.”

Neither Louis nor Coen Botha, a high school science and mathematics teacher in Piet Retief, would describe himself as a liberal. To the contrary, they see themselves as politically conservative and dedicated to traditional Afrikaner values.

“I used to be very far to the right, and I did not want to see any political changes--unless they were back to the way things were,” Louis Botha said. “Today, I have to say that (President) F.W. de Klerk was right. When he freed Nelson Mandela in 1990 and made that speech (on ending apartheid), I thought he was as wrong as he could be, that he was putting the survival of the Afrikaner at great risk and that he was opening the doors to communism and chaos. I hated his ‘New South Africa’ campaign at the outset.

“But I changed my mind--not overnight, but as I watched and reassessed things. Although my family doesn’t like to hear me say it, I think De Klerk did what needed to be done. He clearly changed the course of history for our country. We are in for a couple of rough years, and we whites will end up with a standard of living lower than what we have. Still, this is right.”

In a quick measure of how his views have changed, Louis Botha recalled: “Three years ago, I would have fought to the last drop of blood for our flag and anthem. They always meant a lot to me. Just seeing that orange, blue and white flag flying in the breeze puffed up my chest, and the anthem made the hairs stand on the back of my neck.

“Today, peace is more important than a flag, and I can always sing ‘Die Stem’ in the shower if I want.”

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Around the Botha living room, there was an uncomfortable shifting at such forthright declarations, and as others spoke in the impromptu family debate, deep fears emerged.

Mercia Botha, Louis’ wife, is worried about how she will manage when her class of second-graders at an all-white government school in Amsterdam is integrated as more black families move into the little town.

“I can’t speak English that well, and the (black) parents will want their children to be taught in English,” she said. “And how will I cope with those children whose level is so low? And if I can’t cope, how will I keep my job? I really don’t know what I’ll do.”

Elize Botha, a sister, who develops programs on family planning, health care and environmental issues for black schools, is worried about affirmative action.

“This is a government job, and they could give it to a Zulu tomorrow,” she said. “My knowledge, my experience and my commitment won’t even be looked at. So, welcome to the new South Africa! None of us knows what lies ahead.”

And Coen Botha is worried by the spate of black attacks on white farmers, particularly elderly couples, a number of whom have been killed in recent robberies.

“ ‘Kill a Boer, kill a farmer,’ ” he said, quoting anti-white slogans of the radical Pan Africanist Congress of Azania. “ ‘One bullet, one settler.’ A community that can’t protect its elders is weak--that’s the way they see us. This has to worry us all.”

Louis Botha, in fact, sleeps with a pistol close at hand, and a tall gun-safe stands in the corner of his bedroom, packed with weapons and ammunition.

“Some people here believe the only way is war, that we Afrikaners have to shoot it out with the blacks--that’s crazy,” he said. “We have to be realistic, we have to remain calm, we cannot undo these changes, like them or not. . . .

“But if someone comes and threatens my family or tries to burn me out of my home, I will fight. They should know that the Afrikaner defends what is his.”

But all the Bothas regard the white-homeland volkstaat movement among some Afrikaners--Louis Botha put the proportion at 20%--as wrongheaded, and they see the abandonment of apartheid as overdue.

“When we became aware of what apartheid really was and what the government was doing, it was a shock,” Elize Botha said. “We never knew, for example, about the removal of black families (from areas set aside for whites) and how their homes were bulldozed. We never realized how apartheid kept black families separated, the man in the city and the families in the homelands. . . .

“Much of what was done in our name was so terribly wrong, dreadfully sinful, and we, particularly the Afrikaner people, will bear that responsibility for a very long time.”

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Louis Botha agreed. “One of the worst things of apartheid is that it kept black and white apart on a daily basis. We never got to know one another, and that’s why there is so much fear among whites now. At the factory, working closely with blacks every day, I have come to see they are just as human as we are . . . and I am ashamed of myself that this came as a revelation.”

As much as the Bothas love life on their farm, it has become more of a drain on their four salaries--Coen’s wife also teaches--than an asset. A prolonged drought hurt all South African farmers badly. And future government policies on agriculture are uncertain.

“I built this house myself--and lived with Mercia in the garage for 10 months while I did it,” Louis Botha said. “Imagine asking your fiancee to come live with you in a garage on a run-down farm! But we did it. Now, we have to ask ourselves each day whether to continue. How much are these wonderful dawns, beautiful sunsets and tranquil nights worth?”