Keeble McFarlane

We have heard and read much in the past week or so about the remarkable transformation which has been taking place in South Africa in the past decade. Tuesday was the 10th anniversary of the first real democratic exercise to have taken place in that turbulent country. Nelson Mandela, a moral giant who had given most of his younger life to fighting against hatred, oppression, bigotry and the wide range of evils that human beings can devise to inflict upon their fellow humans, emerged not only as his country's moral leader, but the actual one. How well many of us remember those startling pictures of hundreds of people standing in line for hours on end in order to exercise that most wonderful of all humankind's inventions - the vote! And that process was repeated once again in the past few days, with Mandela's successor, Thabo Mbeki, emerging even more resoundingly as his country's chosen leader.

South Africa is a country suffering from many daunting problems, some of them seeming insurmountable and worthy of despair. Unemployment is still extremely high - in the 40 per cent range. The educational level of the former underclass - mostly black people - while rising, is still below what it should be for a real functioning industrial society. Violence, especially among and between the less-privileged (again mostly black) people, is way too high. And, worst of all, the scourge of HIV and AIDS is affecting one-fifth of the population, a condition which can suck the life out of any society, let alone one with so many other problems.

And yet, what has happened in South Africa since that odious system of racial bigotry, segregation, separation and vitriolic hatred known as apartheid came crashing down is nothing short of miraculous.

In the mid-1960s when I worked at RJR, the word had come into prominence because of the heightened activities of the government of Hendrik Verwoerd (pronounced fair-vort) and his cohorts. At that time the writer, Peter Abrahams, who escaped to Jamaica from South Africa, used to do regular commentaries on RJR. I asked him one day what was the correct way to pronounce the word. "Apart-hate is how you say it, and apart-hate is what it means," was his reply.
Apartheid is not pronounced in the German manner as suggested by its spelling. I remember a Commonwealth conference in Vancouver, Canada, in the 1980s at which President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia spoke about something he called "appa-tite", which led me to think he was talking about his desire for food. At an earlier Commonwealth conference in London, Peter Tosh released his album, Get Up, Stand Up. It contained a song summoning forces to fight "apar-tide", conjuring up pictures of people battling the rising ocean. None of this, of course: they were both actually talking about how to end apartheid, the appalling system of racial hatred in South Africa.

Apartheid is Afrikaans, a language which is, essentially, a dialect of Dutch. It means "apart-ness", and the whole concept and system were concocted by the leaders of the National Party as a means of maintaining the white power structure and control of the country. It operated with the blessing of the Dutch Reformed Church, was the official religion of the original Dutch settlers who had claimed the fertile land at the southern tip of Africa and established themselves as the white African tribe.

In later years, thinking South Africans used to describe the Boers, as the Afrikaners were known, as being of two main sorts. The Afrikaans words used were quite correct and very descriptive: verkrampte and verligte. The former means people who are reactionary or constricted in their outlook. It literally means "narrow, cramped". The verligtes, on the other hand, were, as the word suggests, enlightened folks who saw the unfairness, evil, and overall absurdity of the whole concept.

Not only was apartheid a stupid system, it was enormously wasteful. Think of the whole state bureaucracy set up to ensure that whites were kept separate from blacks, coloureds, Asians and whatnot. The different races were not supposed to fraternise, and certainly things like going to bed together were verboten. This meant not only for sexual purposes, but even something as innocent as children who looked lighter or darker than their siblings from being in the same bed. The whole game was supposed to be "separate but equal", but that was merely a hollow slogan.

The state spent several times the money to educate white children as it did on blacks; work was allocated according to one's racial classification, with, naturally, the demeaning, undesirable and low-paying jobs reserved for the blacks, coloureds, etc, while the whites had the pick of the crop.

Along with this was the oppressive pass system, under which people were given designated areas in which they could live legally, again to the complete disadvantage of the blacks, coloureds and other less-desirable ethnic groups. People were relegated to barren, infertile Bantustans with no economic prospects, which made life a daily hell for millions.

Agitation by the African National Council had become so intense, along with the international opprobrium it generated, that the then president, F W de Klerk, had no choice but to release Mandela and some of his main cohorts from the oppressive conditions at the infamous Robben Island prison.
Several months before that happened, I was having breakfast with a member of South Africa's diplomatic mission in Canada about the prospects for my application for a journalistic visa to visit that country. He said the best he expected from his superiors in Pretoria was a 50-50 chance.
But he remarked at one point that every conscious South
African knew that a black man would one day be president. The only thing in doubt was when.

What is most remarkable of all about the South African experience is the grace with which the ANC government has behaved since its democratic coup d'état. There has been a minimum of gloating, bad blood, hatred or nastiness. The Truth and Reconciliation process, even though criticised by some as too soft on the old Boers, has had an emollient effect which has allowed the country to move forward to tackle the enormous problems it faced, and will continue to face for years to come.

I recently read some comments by young South Africans who had very little or no experience of those awful years, and what they voiced was more impatience than anything else about getting on with life and tackling the problems and opportunities that face them.

What all this demonstrates, above all, is that when you give people hope, and show them a glimpse of the way to tackle the stupendous problems they face, instead of collapsing from the enormity of the task, they bend into it and exert the extra effort that task requires. There's a lesson here for many of us in other places with similar serious problems.

Keeble.mack@sympatico.ca

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