Racial Divide Survives Apartheid’s Demise

When you visit the new deputy presiding judge at the High Court here, a white attendant directs you to a parking space. A white official greets you at the entrance. A white guard checks your bags. A white escort accompanies you to the chambers, where a white secretary seats you.

The regal-looking man in the red robe and pressed ruffles is the judge. He is one of the few blacks in the building.

“Speaking generally, the perception here locally is that, historically, white people look down on black people--it is a fact whether you like it or not,” said Judge Vuka Tshabalala. “Racist or not, they don’t think a black man is capable of anything.”

Tshabalala has been on the job just a few months, the first black to serve as the KwaZulu-Natal provincial court’s second-in-command. The walls of his colonial-era chambers are still decorated with the bare nails from his predecessor’s packed-up pictures.

Like many rising black stars in the new South Africa, Tshabalala arrived here in spite of his white colleagues. More than three-quarters of the provincial High Court judges are white, and all but a handful of them publicly opposed his appointment.

Five years ago, South Africans of all races voted in the country’s first democratic elections, giving the nation a black majority government for the first time since European settlers arrived at the Cape of Good Hope 3 1/2 centuries ago. As South Africans prepare to return to the polls next Wednesday for a second national vote, the historic black-white schism endures as one of the country’s most sensitive and intractable problems.

Although a majority of whites endorsed the negotiated transition to black rule, large numbers have come kicking and screaming into the new South Africa, a place that they say is much worse than they had envisaged. In an independent survey in December, only 6% of white respondents indicated that they were satisfied with the way the country was being run.

Many whites have compensated by clinging to rich and powerful institutions not directly subject to the ballot box, including big business, banking, academia, the news media and even some slow-to-transform government institutions such as the judiciary and police.

Divisions Hinder Reconciliation Efforts

Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, who is poised to succeed President Nelson Mandela next month, has complained bitterly about the divisions between white and black that he says have blocked efforts at national reconciliation.

“We therefore make bold to say that South Africa is a country of two nations,” he told Parliament last year.

The racial tension exists in part because South Africa’s cautious transition has, by design, placed great value on both continuity and change. The strategy has burdened leaders with the task of transforming a fundamentally racist society without turning it inside out. That has left many blacks feeling cheated and many whites with an unrealistic sense of entitlement.

Not only are black judges a minority--only 34 of the 183 High Court judges nationwide are black or of mixed race--but just 5.5% of market capitalization on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange is under black control despite stepped-up government intervention on behalf of previously disadvantaged investors.

Black faces in brokerage houses are virtually nonexistent, as are black managers in big banks. In keeping with the flight of white commerce from newly black downtown Johannesburg, the stock exchange will move next year from Diagonal Street--the Wall Street of South Africa--to suburban Sandton, the metropolitan area’s new white central business district.

There have been numerous high-profile black empowerment deals in business, but financial analysts say there is little evidence that they benefit the broader population. A 1998 survey by Cape Town-based think tank Breakwater Monitor of 430 businesses found that blacks hold just one in 15 senior management positions and one in nine junior management jobs. Tshabalala’s mostly white courthouse is testimony to the same issue.

In their effort to stop Tshabalala’s appointment, white judges declared in a letter to judicial authorities that he would “not be able to command the respect of other judges” because there were better-qualified candidates--all of whom were white. Their recommendation: an erstwhile member of the Afrikaner Broederbond, an organization dedicated to the separation of races under apartheid.

“It is a general attitude: If you are black you have got to prove yourself to be acceptable. It is only after you have been performing that they say after all, ‘This man is good,’ ” Tshabalala said. “One of [the white judges] was actually so forthright as to say to me, ‘I want to tell you straight that I didn’t want you. . . . But now that you are here, there is nothing that I can do. I am working with you because I have to.’ ”

Black Judge Takes It All in Stride

There was a long moment of silence followed by a hearty, rolling chuckle, the kind you would expect from a jolly Kris Kringle, not a judge butting heads with centuries of white prejudice. At 62, Tshabalala says, he takes it all in stride. He is happy to pour his own tea and did so for his visitors as well (brown sugar only, he advised; the white variety can be bad for you). When he lost his way in the century-old courthouse, he laughed at himself.

“I don’t know this place,” he said. “We never used to come here.”

Now the highest-ranking black jurist in South Africa’s most populous province, he says he is willing to give his white critics the benefit of the doubt. They have never actually mentioned race in opposing him, he emphasizes, referring instead to the long tradition of naming top judges on the basis of seniority. But in a country where blacks were barred from the bench until five years ago, the distinction is a debatable one. The country’s constitution mandates affirmative action appointments in the judiciary, regardless of length of tenure.

“If one had to be appointed on the basis of seniority, no blacks would be in this position for the next 20 years--and probably by then I would be dead,” Tshabalala said. “Naturally, before the change in government I would never have dreamed of being a judge; I never even aspired to be one. But now these things are possible.”

Many other blacks are less understanding.

Even Mandela, who has earned an international reputation as the dean of racial harmony, has grown impatient with white resistance, at one point angrily declaring “good riddance” to the tens of thousands of whites who have emigrated since his ruling African National Congress came to power.

The anger, however, runs equally deep the other way.

Many whites say they are devastated by what they perceive as the country’s rapid plunge into mediocrity, criminality and chaos. Whites still control the economy and many other big institutions, they argue, largely because there are too few qualified blacks to take top jobs, an unfortunate but real legacy of apartheid’s racist education policies.

Many blacks who do receive important posts, some whites complain, are incompetent or only interested in personal gain. High-profile cases of corruption in both government and business are cited as evidence.

‘Africanization’ of Country Is Criticized

Few whites now admit to having supported apartheid, but they talk disparagingly of the “Africanization” of South Africa, a reference to falling standards in everything from health care to education to in-flight service on the state-owned airlines.

“It is wrong that we are breaking down the whole country to the level the blacks were, instead of bringing them up to ours,” said Frik de Bruin, a white businessman in Vryburg, a farming community in the North West province. “We are changing back to the Third World what has been built into the First World.”

Even liberal whites have found some of the country’s changes difficult to stomach. Helen Suzman, for years the only member of Parliament who actively opposed apartheid, recently quit her post on the country’s Human Rights Commission, a body set up by the ANC-led government. As a white, she says, she felt marginalized.

Suzman says there is growing suspicion among blacks toward white supporters of the anti-apartheid struggle, who are perceived as trying to steal credit for the achievement.

“I can’t claim to be part of the Umkhonto we Sizwe,” Suzman said, referring to the ANC’s former armed wing. “But they can’t find a damned apartheid law I didn’t oppose. And they keep trying.”

Anne Paton, whose late husband, Alan Paton, 50 years ago wrote South Africa’s most famous chronicle of black suffering in “Cry, the Beloved Country,” has decided to return to her native England. In a newspaper column explaining her decision to emigrate after 35 years, she wrote that she has never known greater racial friction in South Africa. She said she was thankful that her husband, who died in 1988, did not live to endure it.

“I was so sorry he did not witness the euphoria and love at the time of the election in 1994,” she wrote in November. “But I am glad he is not alive now. He would have been so distressed to see what has happened to his beloved country.”

At the core of the uneasy coexistence between black and white, somewhat ironically, is the country’s relatively peaceful, orderly transition.

Unlike other colonial implosions across Africa, there were no frantic escapes from South Africa after the 1994 elections. The white head of the military remained in place until last year. A white police chief is still in charge, as is the white head of the national reserve bank. Pictures of Mandela’s white predecessors adorn the walls of the presidential offices in Pretoria, and streets in Johannesburg and elsewhere still bear the names of white heroes.

The National Party, architects of apartheid, participated in a government of national unity for two years after losing the 1994 vote; even today, the formerly whites-only party remains in power in the Western Cape province.

“Underlying our political transition was a consensus that could be taken as the founding pact of the new nation we are building,” Mandela told foreign journalists last year. “It included the recognition that we are one nation with one destiny and that the differences amongst us, political or otherwise, are transcended by the need to survive and prosper together. There was no other choice.”

The strategy has assured South Africa unprecedented stability during a period of momentous change, which has required not only the mixing of previously segregated races but also the merging of an economically developed population with a developing one.

Although tens of thousands of disaffected whites have packed up and moved overseas since 1994, more than 4.4 million remain, making up 11% of the population. Political violence, mostly among blacks in KwaZulu-Natal, has dropped off significantly. The economy is in doldrums, but wary foreign investors blame crime, inflexible labor unions and international factors, not an uncertain political climate.

Yet as much as Mandela is admired for his gestures of reconciliation, some black South Africans feel that he has given unrepentant whites a free ride.

Some Afrikaners, descendants of the original Dutch and French settlers, are still pushing for self-determination, which could include semiautonomous white cantons. Whites who can afford it have led a wholesale abandonment of public schools since they were opened to all races.

And in some rural areas, blacks still complain about apartheid-style discrimination, such as being blocked from entering white churches or being refused service at white-owned restaurants.

Tshabalala, the Durban judge, says institutional racism persists too, though it is usually more difficult to pinpoint. Stacked on his desk were files from a lower court for review. Among them were two cases that he couldn’t get off his mind.

Both were convictions for drunken driving, one of a white man and one of a black man. The drivers had otherwise clean records, and the circumstances of their offenses were nearly identical except that the white person had a higher blood-alcohol count.

A white judge sentenced the white driver to pay $500 or serve 150 days in jail; another white judge ordered the black driver to pay $1,000 or serve 365 days. The white driver paid the fine and went home; the black driver didn’t have enough money and was locked up.

Both sentences were within the law, Tshabalala says. He knows. He has checked his leather-bound volume more than once.

“This isn’t something that suits me,” Tshabalala said, pushing the two files aside. “But there is nothing I can do.”

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South Africa: One County, Two Nations.

The 1996 census, the first comprehensive survey of all South Africans, quantifies wide racial disparities that have confronted the black majority government.

About This Series

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

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

* Today: 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.