July 27, 2003 By LYDIA POLGREEN
CAPE TOWN - When the man from the African National Congress came looking for votes in 1994, Mohammed Khan says he listened carefully.
The man promised jobs, better schools and new houses for the hundreds of thousands of people crammed into the Cape Flats, the sprawling townships built by the apartheid government.
Most important, Mr. Khan recalls, the man said that in the new South Africa, people of mixed race, known here under apartheid as coloreds, would be full and equal citizens. To someone like Mr. Khan, who had lived only as a second-class citizen, derided as the progeny of forbidden racial mixing, uprooted from his neighborhood in Cape Town as a little boy and sent to live in a distant ghetto to make room for white people, it was a powerful message.
"We were all going to be South Africans now, not colored, not black, not white, just South Africans," said Mr. Khan, 43, an unemployed laborer who lives in Netreg, a few miles from Table Mountain. Mr. Khan was convinced; he cast his ballot for Nelson Mandela.
"We were all going to have a better life together," he said.
Nearly 10 years after Mr. Mandela became South Africa's first black president, Mr. Khan still does not have a job. He collects scrap metal on a horse-drawn cart to feed his family. His parents still live next door in a two-room cinder-block house, with 18 other relatives living in shacks in the backyard with the horses and chickens. Worst of all, he feels that people of mixed race are still caught in the middle of South Africa's rainbow.
"In the old system we weren't white enough," Mr. Khan said. "Now we aren't black enough. It is still colored people who are stuck in the middle, and no one cares about us. I am not a racist, and I fought in the struggle against apartheid. But we have to admit that under white rule, we had a better life - less crime, more welfare, better schools and doctors."
People of mixed race are not the only ones disappointed; people in all racial groups have felt the shocks and pangs of South Africa's slow and painful progress from authoritarian, racist rule to multicultural democracy. Unemployment, crime and the scourge of AIDS afflict all South Africans to varying degrees.
But among the mixed-race residents of the Cape Flats, where poverty and unemployment help push young men into violent street gangs, and where life seems to have gotten harder since apartheid's end, many people say they feel there is no place for them in the new South Africa.
"Black people have jobs because of affirmative action," Mr. Khan said. "White people had everything anyway. But we lost the little bit that we had. It isn't fair."
In a country whose history is usually simplified into a struggle between a white minority and a black majority, the four million people known as coloreds are often little more than a footnote. They are descendants of European colonists, Malay and Indonesian slaves, and Khoi and San bushmen and other African tribes, proof that the races have mingled on the tip of Africa for more than 300 years.
Yet people of mixed race have always been central to the nation's history, and today they form an important and hotly contested voting bloc, especially for the largely white opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, which seeks their support as a bulwark against the powerful African National Congress.
During apartheid, people of mixed race were granted a slightly higher status than blacks: they had marginally better schools and housing, and did not have to carry passes to enter white areas, as black people did. Here in the Western Cape, mixed-race people could get skilled blue-collar jobs that paid better than the menial ones open to black people. They were uprooted from their homes and banished from white areas, but were not sent to distant homelands, like the so-called bantustans created for black people under apartheid. Most people of mixed race spoke Afrikaans, which linked them culturally to the ruling elite.
But that thread of privilege came at a price. The Population Registration Act, which codified racial categories under apartheid, put nonwhites in a crude hierarchy, using a variety of humiliating methods to determine race. Perhaps the most absurd was the pencil test, in which a white bureaucrat would put a pencil into the hair of a person whose racial origin was uncertain. If the pencil fell out, the person was white. If it stayed put, the person was colored.
These indignities created a deep antipathy to apartheid; indeed, the mixed-race community of the Western Cape was central to a powerful and important anti-apartheid movement, the United Democratic Front.
But the apartheid government also went to great lengths to patronize and demoralize people of mixed race, building a system of dependence through social welfare and sowing fear and contempt of black people. This effort was effective and lasting: in South Africa's first nonracial elections, the largely colored Western Cape went to the National Party, the architects of apartheid.
In the dream of a nonracial South Africa, mixed-race people were to become simply South Africans, no longer burdened with the inhuman probing of their identity. But their status today illustrates just how difficult the task of creating a nonracial identity has been.
"We all thought that after 1994, the whole notion of colored would just disappear," said Trevor Oosterwyk, a political writer and historian who grew up in the Cape Flats and was active in the anti-apartheid struggle. "But it did not disappear; if anything it reasserted itself in the form of colored nationalism. And now colored people are struggling to figure out precisely where they fit in."
Of course, there are people of mixed race who have fit into the new South Africa just fine. They hold high positions in government and business, and new educational and career opportunities are helping many break into the middle class.
"I don't have any sense of dislocation racially in South Africa," said Jimi Matthews, who at 50 holds one of the nation's most prestigious jobs in journalism, director of television news at the South African Broadcasting Corporation. He was once classified as colored but like many intellectuals of his generation, he rejected that identity when he discovered the black consciousness movement as a young man in the 1970's. "The kind of country we aspire to politically and that we theorized about in the struggle seems to be very possible."
But Robert Mattes, a professor of political science at the University of Cape Town who led a survey published last year on political attitudes, said that of all racial groups, colored people were the most pessimistic about the country's future as a peaceful and prosperous multiracial nation.
In some ways, people of mixed race had the most to lose with the end of apartheid. The white ruling elite kept its wealth even as it relinquished political control. Mixed-race people, never allowed the tools to accumulate wealth, had lived in part on government patronage that now must be spread among 44 million people.
These tensions are not limited to the Western Cape, where most of the mixed-race population lives. Last month the premier of Gauteng Province, which includes Johannesburg, went to a mixed-race township called Eldorado Park. There he heard from residents angry that several years' worth of arrears in electricity bills had been written off for people in Soweto, a black township, while the people in Eldorado Park, many of them just as poor, still had to pay. They wanted to know whether the government, now run by black people, was practicing reverse racism.
The premier, Mbhazima Shilowa, struggled to explain that Soweto was electrified later than Eldorado Park, by a power company, while Eldorado Park got its electricity from the Johannesburg City Council. It was not racism but the legacy of apartheid and the relative privilege of mixed-race people under that system that explained the difference, he said.
The government's aggressive affirmative action program, which gives preference to blacks in hiring, is another sore point. Mixed-race people contend that they cannot get jobs because the jobs all go to blacks.
Even though millions of black people continue to live in desperate poverty, many mixed-race people believe that blacks now live the kind of wealthy, comfortable lives that whites led when they controlled the country, said Graeme Simpson, director of the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, which studies racial attitudes.
Just a few doors down from Mr. Khan's house, a community organizer and A.N.C. member, Elizabeth Tully, said she, too, was disappointed that her neighborhood had seen little change since apartheid ended. But she said people of mixed race must not allow poverty to blind them to what they have gained.
"We have to be honest," Ms. Tully said. "In many ways life here is no different than it was during apartheid. Maybe we feel betrayed because the government used to take care of us. But those handouts were payments for oppression. They denied us the right to vote. They said we were less than white people.
"Now we have our dignity. Now we have our freedom. The rest will come."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/international/africa/27AFRI.html?ex=1060492805&ei=1&en=059b648908fc0bd0
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