Pessimism Hides S. Africa’s Gains

It was the morose party conversations at white South African dinner tables that caused author Steuart Pennington to tackle the nation’s pessimism head on.

Pennington said he got so tired of doomsayers bouncing the party talk from one dire topic to the next that he and Brett Bowes invented a quiz with 15 questions on crime, housing, education, health and other topics.

Of 11,000 white South African respondents, mainly executives and senior managers, only eight managed to get more than 10 of the questions right -- and two of them were expatriates working in South Africa. The average number of correct answers was three.

“South Africans almost get a sort of pleasure in being able to talk the country down. In virtually every social situation when you are in the company of white people over 45, you’ll find that sort of discussion,” Pennington said.

Pennington peppers his conversation with statistics, such as the 8 million people who have received housing with electricity and water since 1994. Tax revenues have risen from $100 billion to $280 billion in the same period, and more than 60% of South Africans live in middle-class conditions today, compared with 46% in 1994.

As South Africa approaches its 10th anniversary of free elections and the end of white minority rule, it is a time for reviewing successes and disappointments. Economic stability has been paid for by the patience of the black population. They have won political freedom, but most blacks are still waiting for the economic advantages that whites enjoy.

Yet whites who hold the best jobs and housing are the most pessimistic about the country’s future, Pennington argues. In this climate of self-examination, Pennington and Bowes, a pair of management consultants and authors of two positive books about South Africa’s transition since the end of apartheid in 1994, see an opportunity to boost national pride.

Pennington said South Africa’s media help inculcate negative images of the country. “They’re obsessed with bad news and almost reluctantly communicate the good news. That’s what people are getting angry about,” he said, noting that many media organizations are run by white people over the age of 45.

The second book, “South Africa: More Good News,” was the focus of a promotional campaign, sponsored by a local bank, during the Christmas season. More than a million pamphlets summarizing its contents were to go out to South Africans.

Anyone attending the recent Reconciliation Day celebrations in Pretoria was bound to run into the phenomenon Pennington talks about. The official proceedings, loud and hearty, with musicians, speeches, and a free lunch for thousands, were attended largely by black South Africans.

Willem Kleynhans, 82, a retired professor of politics at the University of South Africa, skipped the lunch. After South African President Thabo Mbeki spoke, the professor exploded angrily from the VIP tent, complaining that only a few whites had attended.

“Whites don’t want to come, so we’re not making much progress in nation building. They don’t want to be part of the new nation,” he said, though it was not clear whether that or some other factor was behind the low attendance.

Kleynhans, an Afrikaner, said he had warned fellow Afrikaners against introducing apartheid in 1948 and was branded “an enemy of the Volk.” But now he feels that the country’s history is being rewritten, with whites as villains and blacks as the only heroes.

“We are heading for confrontation,” he said.

Another invitee in the VIP tent, Khala Mthimunye, 34, an official in the Department of Arts and Culture, was also critical of the low turnout by whites.

“We are trying to forget the past and move on. But most of the white people are complaining,” he said. “The only thing we want is truth and forgiveness.”

While the official Reconciliation Day ceremony was taking place, a very different event was unfolding a short distance away, on Pretoria’s outskirts.

At the Afrikaners’ most revered site, the Voortrekkers Monument, several thousand gathered to commemorate the Battle of Blood River in 1838, when a force of 464 Afrikaner pioneers, the Voortrekkers, slaughtered 3,000 Zulus without the loss of a single man. Since then, Afrikaners have honored a vow to treat the day as the Sabbath.

As a single beam of sunlight passed through a hole in the monument’s dome and fell upon an inscription carved in stone, the crowd burst into the old pre-democracy national anthem, holding aloft the flags of the former Afrikaner provinces.

Many people at the monument resented that their most sacred holiday had been taken over and renamed Reconciliation Day in the name of national unity. They felt anything but unified.

“Lots of people I know feel that it’s our day and people took it away from us,” said Don Pretorius, 27, a computer programmer from Johannesburg, who kept referring darkly to “they” -- the majority, who support the country’s current direction. Asked about South Africa’s future, he said: “It’s actually very unsure for us here. We don’t know if the same thing will happen here as happened in Zimbabwe,” he said, referring to the seizure of white-owned farmland in that neighboring country.

When the “Good News” promotional campaign was announced recently at a news conference in Johannesburg, some wondered whether it would boost the reelection campaign next year of the ruling African National Congress party.

Pennington said he and his co-author were independent, noting that criticisms of some ANC policies in the first book had ruffled government feathers. He said his main concern was to transform the national psyche.

The world -- and many South Africans -- expected mayhem and killings when the apartheid era ended and majority rule replaced it, Pennington said.

When such predictions were not fulfilled, many predicted economic chaos, hyperinflation and a rapid slide in the value of the rand, to as low as 30 to the dollar. The currency is now about six to the dollar and inflation is declining.

“People scurried off overseas and got their money out by hook or by crook,” Pennington said. “But eight years later, those predictions have been proven wrong. I think a lot of white people can’t swallow it.”

Pennington said he knows many people who regret leaving South Africa.

People at South African dinner parties might complain about their homeland, but many of their compatriots were languishing in far-off places where the grass had turned out to be no greener.

“There are awful stories of South Africans who yearn to come back but can’t afford to,” Pennington said.