South Africa’s hard-line racists hope to capitalize on such resentments in their uphill battle against the dismantling of apartheid. “We are not part of this ’new South Africa’,” one militant Afrikaner told a reporter at the funeral last week of one of three right-wingers killed while trying to disrupt a speech by President F. W. de Klerk in the right-wing stronghold of Ventersdorp. But the run-in proved that the largely Afrikaner security services will not necessarily break ranks when confronted by angry Afrikaner demonstrators. Whites are apparently going to have to learn to live with de Klerk’s plan for pulling the country out of an 18-month-old recession. He hopes to break the country’s economic isolation by acceding to the world’s demands that blacks be treated fairly and given a role in government. In doing so, the South African president is striking a pragmatic economic blow at long-protected members of his own white constituency. The National Party has done a great deal for its volk, but now the weakest will have to be cut adrift.
The pages of local newspapers are peppered with profiles of people like the unemployed railway messenger from Port Elizabeth who is reduced to washing down black-owned minibuses at $4 per vehicle. Other whites take temporary jobs as strikebreakers–only to be thrown out of work when the dispute is settled. In the mines, reform has made it possible for thousands of blacks to earn a bigger paycheck but has forced unskilled whites to accept menial jobs, sometimes under black bosses. Outside the middle-class Cape Town suburb of Milnerton, five Afrikaner families have even erected crude shacks in a black squatter camp.
It’s an inescapable historical fact that if it hadn’t been for apartheid, South Africa would contain far more poor Afrikaners. The turn-of-the-century Boer War devastated an entire class of Afrikaans-speaking farmers, forcing thousands off the land and into the cities. The National Party’s founders were voted into power in 1948 in part on a promise to “uplift” downtrodden Afrikaners, and the ruling party fulfilled that pledge by enacting racist laws that turned state-owned companies like the railways into employment havens for underqualified whites. State-funded universities for Afrikaners helped build a new business and professional class. But the crudest method of giving whites a leg up was abandoned in 1988 with the repeal of “job reservation”-the practice of keeping blacks out of skilled jobs. And today those who have not availed themselves of what were essentially affirmative-action programs for Afrikaners face stiff competition from blacks for entry-level positions.
The number of jobless whites who are registered with the nation’s manpower department has more than doubled in the last year, to nearly 50,000. Destitution is also spreading: the director of a Pretoria charity called Werk en Oorleef (Work and Survive) says her organization provides food, clothing and other aid to 5,000 white families, up from 3,000 a year ago. Says Wouter Hoffman of the pro-apartheid Conservative Party: “We have a lot of calls and letters from [whites] who are in dire straits.”
Such politicians apply a traditional double standard. They complain about unemployment of only 3 percent among the country’s 2 million “economically active” whites but say little about black unemployment, estimated at more than 35 percent. Still, theirs is an angry constituency, a white underclass that includes the high-school dropout, the laid-off blue-collar worker and the divorced housewife.
In their bid to turn back the clock, right-wingers are telling poor whites that nobody else cares. In July the Conservative Party founded Helpmekaar (Help Each Other), a private agency that coordinates welfare efforts aimed specifically at down-and-out whites. Though the CP’s original base was among middle-class farmers, it is gaining support in urban neighborhoods like Jan Hofmeyr, an enclave of white poverty just three miles from the skyscrapers of Johannesburg’s downtown. “De Klerk listens too much to the [blacks],” fumes unemployed meat plant supervisor Francois Viviers, who apparently has not grasped what most of those in the office towers have come to accept: if South Africa does not accommodate its black majority, it may never again attract the foreign capital it desperately needs for everyone, black and white.
