S. Africans Driven Apart by Apartheid Forge New Bonds

The white folks in this 114-year-old conservative community, a speck on South Africa’s vast plains, fought back mightily when President Frederik W. de Klerk began to dismantle apartheid a few years ago.

The city fathers closed the swimming pool rather than honor De Klerk’s demand that it be opened to people from Mzinoni, the impoverished black township next door. They imposed a $200 annual fee on Mzinoni residents at the local library, dues that whites did not pay. And they refused to remove the signs marking separate black and white entrances around town.

But now, with the entire country on the verge of a radical change in the racial balance of power, the hard-line whites in this tiny town about 100 miles east of Johannesburg are beginning to come around, and blacks are showing a new willingness to forgive.

“We are Conservative Party members, but that doesn’t make any difference,” said Johannes Fourie, a white lawyer and town councilman. “We are neighbors with the people of Mzinoni.”

In the township, Pat Sibande, a black 36-year-old organizer for the African National Congress, stood among the shacks of the 60,000 residents and gazed at the edge of Bethal, where 11,000 whites live in tidy middle-class comfort half a mile away.

“We don’t want to drive whites away,” Sibande said. “We can’t wipe whites out, because how can we live without them? All we want is equal rights. And we don’t want any more of this nonsense from the past.”

The remarkable story of this nation’s transition from white minority rule to, simply, majority rule is told in places like Bethal and Mzinoni, where ordinary people driven apart by apartheid are now beginning to find each other.

A few weeks ago, the Bethal town council--whose members all belong to a right-wing party that has vowed to boycott the elections--began meeting with blacks and ethnic Indians from the race-based townships nearby to draft plans to administer the area together after the nation’s first all-race elections this week.

Now Fourie, who says he hasn’t even decided whether to vote, and Mandla Khayiyana, a 26-year-old ANC leader who spent most of his life in exile with his mother, are co-chairmen of a new local forum, facing each other across the long oak conference table at Bethal’s City Hall.

“We are not used to one another yet,” Khayiyana said. “But I think they know there’s no alternative.”

Fourie admits that the town council was forced to sit down with black and Indian neighbors because of a law passed in January that ordered the formation of joint councils. But he says he’s willing to abide by the law.

“If the ANC is the government, it will be the government,” Fourie said. “And in Bethal, we will comply with the laws of the country. I can’t say whether I like it or not. But we will comply.”

Mandla Khayiyana’s mother, Meisie, 43, who is also on the negotiating forum, said: “It won’t be easy for them to give up their power. And we can see some whites are still not happy about coming together with blacks.”

Meisie Khayiyana fled South Africa two decades ago with her son Mandla and her husband, an ANC guerrilla, who later died in battle. Returning two years ago, she was reunited with her two youngest children, and she now lives in a shack without electricity or water. Yet she sees heartening signs of change here.

“As we shop in town, these people (whites) are not like before,” she said. “We greet each other now. They are not chasing us out of the stores as they were before.”

That change of heart in Bethal has been a long time coming.

“They were completely against any negotiations with the township,” recalled Gert Gouws, 47, a candidate for De Klerk’s National Party and director of services for the region that includes Bethal. “They had resisted everything, and I think they were feeling that they could resist to the end.”

The turning point may have been what occurred in the nominally independent black homeland of Bophuthatswana last month when armed white right-wingers arrived to help prop up the homeland leader, an opponent of South Africa’s elections. The rightists were driven from the town by army troops, who killed three of the khaki-clad invaders.

“That was the end of the right-wing dream,” Gouws said. “I think reality struck them, and they started to think about what was possible.”

Even in Mzinoni, which has long been an ANC stronghold, the new atmosphere of tolerance is evident these days. The National Party has an office there, and four party workers, two of them black, were installing party posters written in Zulu at the township entrance the other day.

The posters and even the office would probably have been burned just a few weeks ago. But now there appears to be a genuine commitment to democracy in Mzinoni. It’s a good thing too. Although the ANC is expected to win the elections, the National Party will probably garner enough votes to make De Klerk a deputy president and his party a powerful force.

“We don’t have a problem with the presence of the Nationalists here,” said Sibande, the ANC representative.

The National Party office, a three-room house converted for the campaign, welcomes a daily stream of interested Mzinoni residents, about 5,000 of whom have taken out membership in the party best known for creating the system of apartheid.

“Black people were scared to admit they supported the National Party in the past,” said Michael Masangu, the party’s representative in the township. “But we’re working together with whites now.” The National Party’s list of candidates in the region includes whites, blacks, Indians and mixed-race Coloreds.

“We think of ourselves as human beings,” Masangu said. “Being black or white doesn’t count a lot.”

In Mzinoni, expectations of the new government are high, maybe too high. At least half the residents live in tin shacks without water or electricity, and few of the roads are paved--a stark contrast to nearby Bethal.

Mabel Sihlali, 43, who shares a three-room shack with her husband and three children, is counting on the ANC’s promise of affordable housing. She doesn’t want to live in Bethal, where she fears that right-wingers might attack her.

“But I’d like to have a big house, like other people,” she said.

The ANC will need time, perhaps years, to begin addressing the needs of Mzinoni and the hundreds of townships like it across the country. And some worry that blacks will feel betrayed by political leaders who have made grand promises that they cannot keep.

“People must realize that after the election it won’t be heaven on earth,” a white Bethal councilman said. “The only way they can improve their life is through hard work.”

Sibande said blacks “will have to give the new government a chance. Maybe, with the help of other people, we can deliver the goods.”

In Bethal, many whites fear for themselves and their property. Although Nelson Mandela and other black leaders have tried to assure whites that their future will be secure in the new South Africa, whites here need only drive to the edge of town to see the wide gap between their prosperity and the poverty in Mzinoni.

“No one knows what to expect, what is waiting for us after next week,” said Johan Swart, a 40-year-old father of two who runs the Bethal city department that controls traffic, fire and medical emergency services.

And he is thinking about next year, when new municipal elections will be held and blacks will begin playing a permanent role in hiring and firing city employees such as Swart.

“We just have to accept that the person who rules the country makes the law. And we are a law-abiding society,” he said.

If the National Party fails to win enough seats in the province next week, Gert Gouws knows that he’ll be looking for a new job. But he figures it is worth the risk.

“It will not be the end of the world the day after the election,” said Gouws, a father of three. “We will finally have a government that has legitimacy. That was the thing hurting us all the time.”

And, he added, “even if the ANC wins, I’m confident they have a lot of leaders of a very high caliber.”