Two Towns, Two Tests of Freedom

This dusty ranching town looks and feels a lot like Texas. The biggest happening within miles is the weekly cattle auction. The landscape is flat, dry savannah. Late last century, the town served as the capital of a maverick white republic whose flag featured a single star.

But when William Langeveldt moved back home to Vryburg a few years ago after living in the United States, he was reminded of an American town during the civil rights struggle.

“Vryburg is the Birmingham, Ala., of South Africa,” said Langeveldt, a former town clerk whose ancestors were the indigenous Khoi-San, or Bushmen. “It is a typical South African town, except that things exploded quicker here.”

What makes Vryburg’s plight typical, Langeveldt and others say, is that five years of multiracial democracy have done little to address one of its oldest problems: Blacks and whites don’t know how to get along. In some cases, they are not interested in trying. And the entire town of 38,000 is suffering as a consequence, with both economic and social development at a virtual standstill.

“We are living from hand to mouth right now,” said Mayor Hoffman Galeng, a former anti-apartheid activist.

Unlike Birmingham in the 1960s, blacks here have not been killed in racist bombings or blocked from entering public schools. But the town’s formerly whites-only high school has become a violent battleground for English-speaking blacks and Afrikaans-speaking whites uneasy with changing racial and linguistic roles.

Student Conflict at Vryburg High School

People of all races say they sometimes worry about their safety because of tension at the 110-year-old school, which was required to accept black students after the country’s multiracial elections in 1994.

“The conflict around Vryburg High School over the past years cannot be seen in separation from the wider processes of transition and change in the country as a whole,” a report commissioned by provincial education authorities concluded last year. “From the different sides, the school has taken on symbolic dimensions.”

Last year, scores of black students were beaten with leather horsewhips in their classrooms by a gang of angry white parents and new graduates who said they were fed up with “undisciplined blacks” disrupting the school. The whips, known as sjamboks, were the kind used by police during the apartheid era to break up black crowds.

Among the complaints were allegations by white girls that black students were groping them in the hallways. According to one education official, some white parents were so incensed that they came with firearms.

At the beginning of this school year, a 19-year-old black student, Andrew Babeile, stabbed a white student in the neck with a pair of scissors after a shoving match. Babeile, who has repeated the same grade four times, has been identified by whites as a ringleader of blacks more interested in troublemaking than learning.

“We must transform our country. We must change the past picture,” said Frik de Bruin, deputy chairman of the all-white school board, which has two nonvoting black observers. “But unfortunately, the majority of blacks are now taking revenge--doing to others what had been done to them.”

Babeile, whose dream is to play basketball, says he is continually provoked by white classmates. With no black administrators and only a handful of black teachers, he says, black students have nowhere to turn.

“It isn’t everyone, but there is a group of whites who are influencing the others,” said Babeile, who has returned to school while the stabbing incident is being investigated. “They just don’t want us in their school because we are black.”

Vryburg’s racial difficulties have centered on the high school, but residents say the problems are not limited to the institution. As in many towns across South Africa, the new black majority town council has managed to improve basic services to neglected black neighborhoods. There are new street lights, sewer lines, a swimming pool and a new library in the outlying black township of Huhudi.

With many blacks and whites still at loggerheads, however, there has been little progress in what everyone describes as the town’s most urgent needs: jobs and investment.

“If the whites would change and think of us as people, it would get a lot better,” said Huhudi resident Lilly Meyer, who lost her job of 30 years when a local clothing factory went out of business in 1996. “They closed the factory when we all joined a union. The whites don’t like us to live better.”

Blacks complain about other forms of bigotry, such as double standards for blacks and whites seeking bank loans, white police commanders who show little interest in crime in black neighborhoods and even inattentive service at white-run restaurants.

Downtown Vryburg eating establishments no longer turn away blacks at the door, said the Rev. Julius Pudule of the United Congregational Church. But some proprietors make the dining experience so unpleasant that their message is clear: We don’t want you back.

“You can be sitting there for 30 minutes and not be served while the white people around you are eating their meals,” Pudule said.

Whites, who account for 18% of the local population, have their gripes as well. The Vryburg Ratepayers Assn., a group of about 400 homeowners and merchants, withheld local taxes for nearly a year. They had hoped to pressure Galeng, the town’s black mayor, to tone down what they perceived as inflammatory rhetoric against whites.

Galeng, whose house was set on fire during the 1980s for his anti-apartheid activities, refused to give ground, saying he calls things as he sees them. After a lengthy court battle, the white residents gave up.

“When [then-South African President] F.W. de Klerk unbanned all of those black parties, he made one big mistake by capitulating to have the first elections in 1994,” said Abel Bester, a Vryburg lawyer who heads the taxpayers group. “Those people never had the right to vote or participate in government and needed to be taught first.”

The vocabulary of race relations in Vryburg is dominated by “we and they” and “us and them,” even among well-intentioned residents who insist that problems aren’t as bad as some make them out to be.

Marijke van Eeden, the high school’s student leader, says she and others are working to bring students of all races together. A few racists on each side are responsible for the problems, she says.

“They don’t bother us, and we don’t bother them,” Van Eeden, 18, said of whites and blacks at the school. “They have their teachers, and we have our teachers. We come together in the hallways and the playground.”

The racial friction in Vryburg is only one indication of a society struggling with a torrent of change. The white-black divide here is mirrored by an Afrikaans-English linguistic divide, in which many whites fear integration will destroy Afrikaner culture.

Linguistic Separation Reinforces Differences

Unlike dual-language schools elsewhere in the country--where classes are integrated and each teacher gives instruction in both English and Afrikaans--Vryburg High School is essentially two schools in one. Most of the 100 black students attend classes in English, while all 550 whites are taught in Afrikaans, the language of the descendants of the original Dutch and French settlers.

The separation has not only reinforced racial differences, but it has also become a rallying point for embattled Afrikaners, who ruled the country under apartheid but who now feel like outcasts.

“We have only one Afrikaans medium high school, and come hell or high water, [the blacks] want to take over the school because they say it is the last white institution,” de Bruin, the school board official, said. “That is not true. It is open to all colors, but under one condition: Children must be there to learn and not be destructive or play politics.”

Politics are an obstacle all around Vryburg, with outside analysts blaming many of the town’s problems on the inability of people to look beyond what politically divides them. Langeveldt, the former town clerk, lost his job last year in a political tussle with the town council that was unrelated to race, but he has decided to stick it out.

Langeveldt says he believes that the Vryburg-Birmingham comparison extends beyond racial intolerance. In the U.S. civil rights struggle, Birmingham eventually became an example of wrongs turned right; Langeveldt holds out hope that Vryburg may become the same.

As a start, a small multiracial group of educators and nonprofit organizations recently established the Bophirma Development Initiative. Their first project, a community college that emphasizes entrepreneurial skills, opened in March with 40 students and six teachers.

“Vryburg is described as a town of hate, but it is not the entire town,” Langeveldt said. “There are people who really want to change things.”