South Africa School an Emotional Battleground

Magiliweni Alson Matukane suddenly twisted around in the passenger seat and pointed out the car’s rear window.

“Did you see the car following us?” the 43-year-old black engineer asked nervously. The vehicle, if it really was chasing him, turned at the corner and Matukane added softly: “It’s always scary. You never know. We still have the old South Africa here.”

His fear is real. Last month, angry white Afrikaners shouted racial taunts and insults at Matukane and his three boys--Nhlanhla, 8, Jabu, 12, and Yvonne, 13--when he went to enroll them at the town’s whites-only primary school.

“They closed the gate in front of us,” he recalled. “My young one, even now, has nightmares.”

Matukane wasn’t alone. Militant whites tried to bar the town’s newly elected black mayor, Boysea Thole, from the school Monday.

“They said I didn’t have any right to be there,” Thole said. When he finally got in, “The principal said he didn’t have time to talk to me.”

A bitter battle for desegregation in this bastion of right-wing whites has provided an ugly reminder of how little has changed for many South Africans, black and white, nearly two years after democracy replaced the segregation and brutality of apartheid.

But a showdown--and perhaps conflict--may come today. Unless a new legal wrangle emerges, provincial officials plan to deploy armed riot police to escort Matukane’s three children and 18 other black students into the whites-only Potgietersrus Primary School in defiance of white parents.

“If any of the parents tries anything outside the law, they will be arrested,” said Jack Mokobi, spokesman for the province. “We cannot allow apartheid in the schools to continue.”

After a brief hearing Wednesday, a Supreme Court judge dismissed an urgent appeal by the white parents to delay integration of the state-supported school.

Later, after classes had ended for the day, the first 16 black children were registered without incident, Mokobi said.

The case is already a landmark. As in the U.S. civil rights struggle, South Africa’s schools have become an emotional battleground in the post-apartheid period, as newly empowered black officials try to overturn generations of ingrained racial prejudice and raw discrimination.

Many white schools, especially in rural towns, remain segregated or have accepted only a handful of blacks.

Education officials warn that it may take five years or more just to combine the 14 separate and unequal school bureaucracies created under apartheid for different races and black “homelands.”

And tensions are growing. In Trompsburg, a white-run town 300 miles southwest of Johannesburg, hundreds of black parents marched Wednesday to demand that their children be allowed to attend the white-dominated high school. The peaceful protest followed rioting the day before.

The Potgietersrus case is also critical for right-wing whites. For them, the fight to prevent 21 black pupils from joining 764 whites is a key test of their claims that Afrikaner culture and language can only be preserved if they are allowed what they call “self-determination” in schools and other institutions.

“It’s not racism,” insisted Koos Nil, head of the school’s governing body of white parents. “It’s Afrikaner culture that is at stake.”

Schools are not the only issue. Many of the country’s 3.5 million Afrikaners also see their traditions threatened by affirmative action, the downgrading of Afrikaans-language broadcasting in state-run media and the prosecution of former leaders for apartheid-era crimes.

In many ways, this prosperous farming town 155 miles northeast of Johannesburg embodies Afrikaner culture and the legacy of apartheid.

Founded in 1852 and named for Andries H. Potgieter, a leader of the mid-19th century “Great Trek” of Afrikaners into the country’s interior, Potgietersrus is filled with stone monuments and plaques commemorating white settlers.

The local museum displays hundreds of exhibits about whites but not one artifact of black culture. And while the town’s 10,000 or so white residents enjoy swimming pools, verdant parks and a large library, most of the estimated 100,000 blacks live miles away in Mahwelereng, a dusty township filled with axle-breaking potholes and heart-breaking poverty.

Unlike the well-equipped white school, Mahwelereng’s all-black Kgati-Ya-Moshate High School has no computers, sports fields, laboratory or library. Indeed, it has no electricity and only a single tap outside for water.

“Whites think we just want our children to sit next to whites,” said teacher Thibang Ledwaba, who has sought to enroll his 8-year-old daughter in the white school. “It’s not true. We just want the same resources for our children.”

The white parents insist that their school, which has about 30 pupils per class, is too full to admit blacks.

The black high school, however, crams more than 100 students into each of its five small classrooms. Another 140 are somehow jammed in a sweltering tent erected outside for the overflow. None had desks.

Apartheid also survives in student textbooks until a new curriculum is prepared. The school still uses history books published in 1987 that lionize the architects of apartheid and portray blacks as savages.

Matukane, father of the three boys, does not see the current case as a victory, however. The son of an itinerant farm worker was one of only five blacks at an otherwise white university, then earned a master’s degree in engineering in 1991 at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., before returning to South Africa in 1994.

Matukane said he has received more than 100 phone calls in recent weeks, mostly from whites and all offering support. But he fears that real reconciliation, at least in towns like this, remains a distant dream.

“What we’re doing as South Africans is trying to forget,” he said. “But there’s no way. There’s no way.”