Pride, Despair Mix in S. Africa

Albert Gamakulu has moved up in the world. Since his uncle, Nelson Mandela, was elected this country’s first black president five years ago, Gamakulu and his family have taken up residence in a one-room house with windows of flattened cardboard boxes and torn flour sacks.

Going to the toilet still means a trip through the cornfield to his parents’ outhouse. Running water is the tip-of-the-bucket variety collected from a roadside tap. Nonetheless, Gamakulu’s last home--a drafty metal shack--has finally reverted to its intended use as a gardening shed.

“I want to paint the house peach with black trim,” Gamakulu told a visitor to the mud-and-concrete saltbox house. “And I want this to become a big house for my children and the grand ones.”

Gamakulu is a slender, loquacious man who wears a knit cap as protection against the Eastern Cape’s inhospitable sun. His uncle Nelson’s retirement home, he said with only the slightest pretension, is just down the road, less than eight utility poles away. It is thanks to Mandela and the ruling African National Congress, or ANC, he said, that villagers can now reckon distances in utility poles.

South Africans return to voting booths June 2 for their second national elections as a democracy of multiple races, and Mandela intends to retire afterward. In places such as Qunu, where Mandela spent his early childhood, there is pride and gratitude for black majority rule, something few believed possible after nearly 350 years of white dominance capped by half a century of forced racial separation.

But as Gamakulu and others here are somewhat ashamed to acknowledge, especially to an outsider, there is also a deep sense of frustration and despair with what is commonly known as South Africa’s “new dispensation.”

Call it impatience, ingratitude or even impertinence, but this isn’t what many South Africans had in mind when they flocked to the polls in April 1994 to rid the continent of its last, notorious white minority regime.

The South Africa that Mandela will find back home is not unlike the South Africa of countless villages, townships and informal settlements where the majority of the country’s 35 million blacks and people of mixed race live. Simply put, people say, life is better in some real--and intangible--ways since Qunu’s favorite son pulled off one of the century’s greatest political turnarounds, from prisoner to president. But it is not nearly good enough.

“I am trying to be a man myself and not always look to my mother and father for help,” said Gamakulu, who at 47 depends not only on his parents’ pit toilet but also their generosity with other necessities as well. “The ANC has brought water into the village. But I have no money to connect the pipe to my house. Yes, this place is beautiful, but what is it without money?”

Across South Africa, there are new houses, power lines, water taps and telephones. Due to its presidential connections, Qunu is even getting a $200,000 tunnel under the main highway so that villagers--and their cattle--can safely cross to Mandela’s house and its rolling, velvety green pastures. There remains unbending popular allegiance to the ANC--so much so that some political pundits figure the onetime underground movement will poll even better than in 1994, when it garnered nearly 63% of the vote nationwide.

Almost everyone agrees that the ANC-led government has made substantial strides in improving the lot of poor blacks, who were systematically deprived of basic necessities afforded to whites under the apartheid system of racial separation. The ANC-dominated Parliament has passed one of the world’s most progressive constitutions and enacted more than 500 pieces of legislation reversing, at least on paper, sins of the past.

Maids and gardeners can now demand regular work hours; displaced ethnic groups can make claims to lost ancestral lands; blacks can attend previously whites-only schools; and companies can be forced to give preference to black job applicants. Meanwhile, the controversial Truth and Reconciliation Commission has exposed countless hushed-up human rights abuses of the apartheid era.

“In brief, we have laid the foundation for a better life,” Mandela said in his farewell speech to Parliament in March. “Things that were unimaginable a few years ago have become everyday reality.”

Nonetheless, South Africans of all races say they are restless and apprehensive. Jobs are scarce, crime is unbearable, schools are overcrowded, and new services are patchy. Many new utilities have to be provided free of charge because people cannot afford the few dollars a month in delivery fees.

A survey conducted in December by the Pretoria-based Human Sciences Research Council revealed that just one in three South Africans is satisfied with how the country is being governed. Some attribute the national funk to the inevitable hangover from the euphoria of 1994; others worry that the angst runs deeper, that it may take generations before a country with such a troubled past can clearly focus on the present.

Those with an appreciation for the bottom line say nothing will change so long as the economy is in recession and 40 million people compete for fewer jobs and scarce public resources. Poverty is so endemic that the telephone company lost more than $7.5 million last year to thieves running off with its newly installed copper cables.

“The next government is going to have to be about results, not about ‘let’s forgive each other,’ ” said Jabulani Mtsweni, an unemployed ANC activist. “The only way people are going to forgive the past is if their lives start getting better.”

In Mtentu Gardens, the next big village down the two-lane highway from Qunu, residents still live without electricity, water taps and telephones. The journey to fetch drinking water from a nearby river requires 90 minutes of backbreaking work.

Women worry about rape and AIDS and hungry children. Men drink themselves to sleep, their singular preparation for the next day without purpose.

“All I eat is mealie meal,” said Ntuba Khululwa, 20, referring to the South African version of hominy grits. “There is nothing else. There is no milk for the children. We were promised jobs and houses, and we got nothing.”

In some hushed fireside chats, as grandmother tends the kettle and mother grinds the corn, there is even nostalgia for the unfathomable: The “good old days” when blacks were forced to live in homelands but jobs seemed more plentiful and criminals less menacing.

No one suggests turning back the clock, but for the desperate--mostly women burdened with the task of feeding, clothing and schooling a family--the trade-off seems less clear-cut than before.

“People were so excited in the last election, but no one talks excited about voting this time,” said Zoleka Jafta, principal at Qunu’s newly renovated Milton Mbekela Secondary School. “I don’t know what happened, but everything has changed.”

For Nolungile Timakhwe, a Mtentu Gardens grandmother whose monthly pension of $80 supports an extended family of five, there is no mystery. After scolding her granddaughter for sloshing water from a wobbly bucket perched on her head, she fixed a stern gaze on her questioner.

“It was bad before, but it is even worse now,” said Timakhwe, 76. “The truth is, I was happier with the old government.”

Here in the place most commonly associated with Mandela, no one shares such views, at least not openly. With its presidential connection and largess, Qunu is regarded as a jewel of the former Transkei homeland; in every direction on the surrounding horizon, outsiders speak enviously of the village’s privilege.

Yet even in Qunu, proud relatives of the president turn to begging from visitors.

Gamakulu, who serves on the village governing council, hasn’t been able to find work since last year, when he quit a job pumping gas after he was robbed at gunpoint. He was too frightened to return. In the meantime, his wife and two children have moved in with relatives in Umtata, a big town nearby, where she has found work in a shop.

“All I ask for is 12 rands [about $2] so that I can pay for my ANC membership card,” Gamakulu appealed to his journalist visitor.

Two of his cousins are less circumspect.

“How about some money?” asked one of them, Cynthia Mandela, husking corn for a feast honoring the president and his new wife during one of the first couple’s weekend forays from Johannesburg.

“Look at me,” she continued, as she and a sister-in-law, Patricia Mandela, slipped off their shoes to expose swollen ankles and feet. “I am suffering.”

Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, in line to succeed Mandela in June, acknowledges that the government has fallen short of expectations, particularly in rural provinces such as this one. But Mbeki reminds voters that five years is not long enough to undo centuries of racist history.

“Our central challenge for the next five years is to use the experience we have gained, the policies we have put in place and the institutions of democracy we have created, to bring about even greater change,” Mbeki said in launching the ANC’s campaign manifesto.

Every day since the 1994 elections, the government reported earlier this year, 1,300 homes had received electricity, 1,700 people had gained access to clean water and 750 telephones had been installed. The ANC has not met its campaign pledge of building 1 million houses in five years, but an estimated 3 million families have been provided shelter with government assistance.

In big cities, moreover, a small but conspicuous class of affluent blacks has emerged, sipping cappuccino in Cape Town restaurants and enjoying live jazz at trendy nightclubs in Johannesburg.

The queues of BMWs and Mercedeses at shopping malls in Sandton, Johannesburg’s previously whites-only suburb and the richest swath of earth in Africa, are speckled with faces of color--and they are no longer necessarily hired help. Blacks now make up about half the country’s civil servants, turning places such as Pretoria into empowerment zones.

Even in small communities, black successes can be found. In Mandela Village in the former KwaNdebele homeland, Lazarus Madiseng has turned a backyard chicken coop into a thriving poultry business that, along with a garden, keeps his family and four others in comfortable financial shape.

His wife, Jane, sells cold drinks and fresh achar, a spicy relish made from green mangoes, from a shack that doubles as her kitchen. In his spare time, Lazarus Madiseng toils on the family’s unfinished three-bedroom dream house.

“You can tell everyone that we are living just like the umlungu,” said Jane Madiseng, using a common term for whites. “We have electricity and water. I am only short a telephone. And I want one. I want to be able to lie in bed and talk to my friends. That would be heaven.”

In Mandela’s hometown, few people would claim to be living like the umlungu, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t holding hopes. The president has seen to it that several relatives are getting new houses.

For the hill behind the village, plans are in the works for a presidential museum, maybe even a hotel or conference center. But villagers worry that, when the time comes, Mandela’s Mozambican wife, Graca Machel, may find Qunu too sleepy--and the Mandela magic may move elsewhere.

Those in South Africa eager to believe in a brighter future, however, can find comfort in a Xhosa fable. Mandela has related the story, as told to him by his mother, of an old woman with cataracts who asks a traveler for help. The man, disgusted by her looks, turns away. But when the old woman approaches a second traveler, he obliges and cleans her eyes.

The cataracts are miraculously cured, and the woman suddenly becomes young and beautiful. The two marry and live a prosperous life. “It is a simple tale,” Mandela writes in his autobiography, “but its message is an enduring one: Virtue and generosity will be rewarded in ways that one cannot know.”

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About This Series

In this three-part series, The Times examines a changed South Africa as it prepares for its second free, multiracial elections.

* Today: Life is better since Nelson Mandela came to power five years ago, people say. But it is not nearly good enough.

* Thursday: The historic black-white schism endures as one of the country’s most sensitive and intractable problems.

* Friday: A tale of two cities: one a “town of hate,” the other a place where blacks and whites are working hand in hand.

The series is available on the Web at https://www.latimes.com/safrica.

*

The complete series, “Unfinished Revolution: South Africa After Apartheid,” will be available on The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/safrica.