South African Whites Say Deck Is Stacked Against Them

When the Greater Cape Town morgue started looking for a new superintendent in 2000, police Capt. Ricardo Schouten was convinced he would get the job. A medically trained cop skilled in autopsies, he had already been the acting superintendent for three years.

Furthermore, his experience and police service grade placed him first on a list of potential candidates, the local police union confirmed.

But Schouten, who is white, was passed over. The position was awarded to a less qualified candidate of mixed race, union bosses acknowledged.

Schouten felt betrayed.

“There was not even a call to say, ‘Thanks for the past three years,’ ” said Schouten, who believes he was denied the promotion on racial grounds.

When the government labor court referred him first to the national arbitration commission, Schouten decided to drop the case. He was subsequently assigned to investigate illegal pornography outlets and secondhand shops.

As South Africa grapples to redress the legacy of inequality and prejudice against the country’s black majority, many South Africans feel that they are being unfairly penalized.

The affirmative action policies, they charge, have resulted in reverse discrimination against the country’s white and other nonblack minorities.

“What has happened here is that an image has been created of a new power system,” said Lawrence Schlemmer, the Cape Town-based vice president of the South African Institute of Race Relations. “The image is that in all spheres there is a greater tendency to provide greater opportunity to the formerly disadvantaged, so that the minority is now at a disadvantage.”

Critics also argue that affirmative action policies are causing increased racial tension that threatens to derail any progress made toward racial harmony in the eight years since apartheid was demolished.

“The emphasis is by far no longer on reconciliation. The central concept is now transformation,” said Koos Malan, an executive member of the Group of 63, a movement of Afrikaner intellectuals. Afrikaners, descendants of 17th century Dutch settlers to southern Africa, represent one of the country’s minority groups. The then-ruling Afrikaner National Party instituted apartheid in 1948.

But government officials defend the transformation as being key to South Africa’s development as a democracy, and they praise legislation that has been introduced to level the racial playing field and counter discrimination in all areas of society.

Under the former system of apartheid, blacks, who make up 77% of the country’s population of 43 million, were relegated to menial and labor-intensive jobs, subjected to legalized racial oppression and denied citizenship. Indians and so-called “coloreds,” or people of mixed race, were placed on a higher rung than blacks but were still considered inferior to whites, who make up about 10.5% of the population.

Today, the Employment Equity Act of 1998 seeks to achieve racial equity in the workplace by demanding that all employers with 50 or more workers undertake measures to promote equal opportunity for people from previously disadvantaged communities.

Although there is no officially required quota for such staff, the legislation endorses preferential treatment and numerical goals to ensure equitable representation.

Frans Moatshe, director of employment equity at the Labor Department, said government inspectors regularly drop by companies unannounced to monitor whether they are abiding by affirmative action rules.

The traditionally white-dominated fields of banking, mining and insurance were prime targets of the government inspectors, Moatshe said.

Companies failing to comply with employment equity guidelines after two written warnings face court action and a possible fine of between $50,000 and $90,000, Moatshe said, adding that there is, in general, a high level of compliance, partly enforced by the threat of penalties.

“If you don’t comply, the possibility of contracting state services or contracts is low,” Moatshe said.

A recently revised Mineral and Petroleum Development Bill will make black economic empowerment a compulsory requirement when granting mining and prospecting permits to private companies.

“Corporations in this country had an opportunity to institute affirmative action the right way, and it is fair to say they failed dismally,” Danisa Baloyi, executive director of the National Black Business Caucus, recently told the Sowetan newspaper. “Now they must be made to change.”

Detractors, however, charge that black empowerment policies have been a useful tool for the ruling elite to appoint unskilled and inexperienced government cronies in the public and private sector, which they argue could have dire consequences for the economy.

“There is a feeling, certainly among minorities, that standards have dropped,” said Schlemmer, the race relations analyst. “It’s not only [in terms of] qualifications. It’s also experience. A large number of new decision-makers in the public sector have no experience whatsoever, and they are young.”

Critics also insist that compulsory black empowerment has resulted in a brain drain, because white men in particular are leaving companies--often for opportunities overseas--when they realize that they stand little, or no, chance of promotion. Billy Daniels, regional secretary for the South African Police Union in Western Cape, said the practice of excluding whites from promotions could harm working relations within the police service, and that trying to exclusively promote nonwhite officers fosters a false sense of entitlement.

“[The police management] has never bothered to allay white fears,” Daniels said. “And they’ve never said to the black employee that we can’t all become commissioner. A lot of black officers out there have the attitude that I ‘must’ be the next commissioner.”

In reality, nonwhites still trail behind whites in the police service hierarchy, as in other fields.

The Labor Department reported last fall that in more than 8,000 workplaces across all sectors of the economy, blacks held 27.3% of the jobs at all levels of management and professional employment.

Although many view the figures as a significant step forward, government statistics also showed that representation of blacks at the top management level was 85% lower than black representation in “unskilled and defined decision-making” positions.

Controversy over equal racial representation has touched most areas of South African life.

The debate exploded in the sporting arena earlier this year when the president of the country’s cricket board ordered selectors of the national cricket team, which was scheduled to tour Australia, to replace a white player with one of mixed race.

The move got the full backing of Sports Minister Ngconde Balfour, who argued that the pace of ensuring equal racial representation in sports had to be speeded up.

“In the so-called ‘excellence versus transformation’ debate, those advocating ‘merit selection’ argue that patience and caution must be exercised in bringing black sports people through into provincial and national teams,” Balfour told reporters at a February briefing in Cape Town. “Young sports people are fast losing patience with such arguments.”

The issue sparked a raging debate among South Africans across the racial divide, with many blacks insisting that they were as good, if not better, at cricket than whites, and whites arguing that the longtime exclusion of nonwhites from professional cricket meant they couldn’t possibly be up to scratch yet.

“Whites have been playing cricket in this country for 100 years,” wrote Chris Oelschig, who identified himself as a white accountant in a letter to the national Star newspaper. “What is the point of putting players in the team to play against the best in the world when they are nowhere near ready?”

Another reader, M. Petersen, argued in a letter to the daily Citizen that the government’s sports policy underscored the general “anti-white” stance of South African President Thabo Mbeki.

“He is bent on having only blacks in every conceivable key position in South African society,” said Petersen, who refused to give a first name. “Deep down in his heart, he resents whites and will do all in his power to make whites feel ill at ease in the land of their birth or adoption.”

Schlemmer said the frustration expressed by the country’s minority groups is no surprise.

“There is a feeling that in all spheres, they are battling against odds,” Schlemmer said. “They are not actually suffering, but they are having to make additional effort.”

Malan, the Group of 63 member, said an increasing feeling of isolation had led thousands of Afrikaners to emigrate since 1994 and caused others to insulate themselves within society.

Last year, a survey conducted by Schlemmer found that Afrikaners were more likely than any other group to identify race discrimination, and specifically affirmative action policies, as the key issue holding them back in life.

“The problem is, the pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other,” Malan said. “And that is why you find increasing alienation among Afrikaners these days.”

For the beneficiaries of the country’s equity policies, however, the policy has largely been rewarding, and many employers say it has transformed the South African workplace for the better.

“You get a group of people working together from various backgrounds, so you get to know their culture, and it is very enriching,” said Hymie Swanepoel, a partner at the Cape Town-based accounting firm of Moores Rowland, which pursues an aggressive policy of affirmative action. As of the end of April, 80 of 181 staff members were people of color.

Armed only with a high school diploma, Marco Abrahams joined Moores Rowland as a filing clerk in 1999.

He has since been promoted to the position of a tax administrator, thanks to the firm’s equity policy, which boasts a training program for formerly underprivileged groups.

“I think it’s something very special that previously disadvantaged people can actually get a chance to succeed,” said Abrahams, 26, who is of mixed race. “I actually had a lucky break.”