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Subject: NYTimes.com Article: Decade of Democracy Fills Gaps in South Africa
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 16:30:04 -0400 (EDT)
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Decade of Democracy Fills Gaps in South Africa
April 26, 2004
By MICHAEL WINES
and SHARON LaFRANIERE
SOSHANGUVE, South Africa - Some days are unforgettable, and
so it is that Meisie Ndlovu and John Henshall both recall
what they were doing 10 years ago on April 26, 1994, when
South Africa won its freedom.
Mr. Henshall stood in a broiling sun in his all-white
suburb, part of a two-mile line of voters electing the
first democratic president. Ms. Ndlovu stood in a line in
her all-black town, listening to neighbors exult that
democracy meant free food, forever, for everyone.
Mr. Henshall was skeptical that black rule would be as bad
as some neighbors feared. Ms. Ndlovu was skeptical that it
would be as good as neighbors predicted.
"I didn't believe it," she said, laughing. "I said, `This
government is going to be poor.' I said, `I am not
educated, but I can think.' "
As it turned out, they were both right.
This is a tale
about the Ndlovus, black and striving, and the Henshalls,
white and coping, and what a decade of democracy has
brought them and their country.
The two families are not acquainted. Indeed, they are
separated, like most blacks and whites here, by huge racial
and economic divides.
But if a lesson can be drawn from a decade of multiracial
democracy, a transformation hailed for its almost
miraculous absence of rancor, it is that families like
these are far more alike today than they were before 1994 -
both in aspirations and fears.
For Ms. Ndlovu, a plump, round-faced woman with a quick
laugh, there is no mistaking what 10 years of freedom have
done. Just look at her toolshed.
Set behind her brick home just outside this city of
146,000, the shed is 10 feet by 10 feet, a listing shambles
of rusted corrugated iron and sheet metal, unexceptional
but for this: before it was a toolshed, the Ndlovu family
lived there for five years.
Under apartheid, Ms. Ndlovu was an illiterate black
domestic in a white household. Today she runs her own
construction company, laying asphalt and building fences on
freeway projects. Her three-bedroom home has new
living-room furniture and a carved wood door.
Her old shack sits in the backyard, a dilapidated reminder
of the past. Her 17-year-old daughter calls it "scary." Ms.
Ndlovu refuses to tear it down. "I like that house," she
said. "I suffered in that house."
There is also no mistaking what a decade has brought John
and Liann - Li for short - Henshall. Just look at Kyalami
Estate, the idyllic suburb they and their three children
call home.
Ten miles north of Johannesburg, theirs is an
American-style community, studded with tennis courts,
parks, lakes and community centers, unexceptional but for
this: it is enclosed by a 10-foot brick wall, crowned with
an electric fence.
Five miles west is the Diepsloot squatter camp, 11 years
old and 86,000 impoverished people strong - Ms. Ndlovu's
toolshed, replicated by the thousands. The Henshalls,
whites who prospered in a decade of black rule, feel for
Diepsloot's residents. Not unreasonably, they fear them,
too.
"We believe that if you employ your own police force and
you live behind the right kind of wall, you stand a
chance," said Mr. Henshall, a bluff man with an embracing
manner. "We're happy inside our walls."
Outside the walls, they are wary. Li says, "How good can
life be if you have to live in fear?"
A decade after apartheid, many analysts say South Africa
has stepped back from the racial precipice. The real worry
now, they say, is not the racial gap, but the gap between
the haves, of any color, and the have-nots - what President
Thabo Mbeki calls two economies "without a connecting
staircase."
South Africa's four million plus whites still dominate an
economy serving 45 million citizens. They claim nearly half
of all income. Yet today they are joined by as many as 11
million blacks who are also entrenched in the middle and
upper classes.
More black children are in school; more black adults are
literate; millions more blacks have clean water,
electricity, toilets.
At the same time, a vast black underclass is swelling.
Roughly half of South Africans are either poor or on the
edge of poverty, economists say. Thirty to 40 percent are
jobless. The United Nations says the living standard has
fallen since 1990, mostly because of the devastation of
AIDS.
Crime, among the world's worst, is terrifying for its
strikingly gratuitous violence. Skilled workers are still
leaving, but a much feared exodus of whites never
materialized.
Even Kyalami Estate, where the Henshalls live, is itself
one-third black - reflecting tumbling economic barriers and
blacks' equal fear of crime. But the races seldom mingle,
the family said.
For all its peaceful changes, this is not a land of
lion-and-lamb peace. "Weary tolerance is one way to
describe it," says Tom Lodge, an analyst at University of
the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Some whites feel the
sting of lost power; many blacks resent whites' continued
privilege. But majority rule has proved a balm, he said,
fostering "a sense among ordinary black people that things
will change."
Ms. Ndlovu suspects that whites, a tenth of the population,
still wait for black solidarity to dissolve. "I don't think
a person can just change," she said. "They want to get
back. They still want to run the country."
John Henshall says blacks' anger has subsided since the
powder-keg era of apartheid's demise. His wife, Li,
disagrees. "They still feel that," she replied. "Blacks
don't like whites. They will never forgive Afrikaners,
never."
Still, a force stronger than their mistrust binds Ms.
Ndlovu, who rose in 10 years to the head of the little
Meithlo Construction Company, and the Henshalls, who run a
bustling forklift business out of their $225,000 home.
Unlike the have-nots, both of them have a stake in making
this miracle work.
Or, as Mr. Henshall wryly puts it, "Everyone has something
to lose."
Rebuilding a Life
Few in Soshanguve could have said that when Meisie
(pronounced mee-see) Ndlovu arrived.
It was 1989, the year before Nelson Mandela was freed from
prison. Soshanguve, created 15 years before to house
Pretoria's black workers out of whites' sight, was an
endless expanse of shanties on rolling scrubland 20 miles
from the capital.
Ms. Ndlovu's sheet-metal shack was the first on her
nameless dirt street in Block M. Five Ndlovus, plus two
children from her brother Thomas's broken marriage, shared
a dirt floor and an iron roof.
For them, this was a step up in the world.
Ms. Ndlovu
grew up on a white-owned farm, helping her father and
great-aunt mop floors, collect firewood and haul water for
the owners. Thomas attended school at age 13; she had no
such luck.
They treated her kindly. But later, other white employers
"didn't treat us like people," she said. "You can't drink
from their glasses. You can't sit in the chair where the
white lady had been sitting. You can't go to their toilet."
On a trip, her employers stayed in hotels; she slept in the
car.
Ms. Ndlovu left at age 20, married a driver and bore two
boys and a girl. They spent 12 years in a shack at his
mother's squatter camp near Pretoria. Daytimes, she hiked a
half-mile to a creek for water, digging wells in the mud
when it ran dry. Nights, she attended school over her
husband's protests.
In 1989, the couple scraped together $2,000 for a hillside
plot in Soshanguve. South Africa was in the throes of
revolution, but Ms. Ndlovu was not in its ranks.
"I am not in politics," she said. "I am just Meisie."
Instead, she fought for her family. She opened a hair salon
in a black Pretoria storefront in 1991, training stylists
for $25 apiece - women like her, desperate to feed their
children. Her husband left her for a girlfriend.
As she cast her first ballot in 1994, neighbors predicted
nirvana. "Someone said, `After we vote, we are not going to
buy food anymore! We are going to get it free!' " she said.
"And we won't have to work!"
Ms. Ndlovu knew better. But that year, a three-bedroom
brick home with a concrete floor was rising beside her
shack, with Ms. Ndlovu laying brick and hanging gutters;
laborers pouring cement; a 10-year, $14,000 symbol of her
rising fortunes.
Meanwhile, the new government began addressing Soshanguve's
needs.
Anticrime floodlights sprouted in back alleys. Workers laid
lines for water and power; paved roads; built a stadium, a
cricket grounds, a shopping mall. The black technical
college merged with a white Pretoria university. Government
workers built 5,000 one-room homes.
Yet Soshanguve's squatter camps, visible from Ms. Ndlovu's
back steps, also mushroomed. Free to travel for the first
time, uneducated blacks headed for cities like Pretoria in
an often futile search for jobs.
Ms. Ndlovu's brother, Thomas Mangwane, found that freedom
or not, a seventh-grade education limited him. His efforts
to start a tavern, a store and a window-framing business
all failed. Now he drives a cab. "If you don't have an
education, no one takes you seriously," he said.
Ms. Ndlovu agreed. She spent $2,000 to send her eldest son,
Johnathan, to law school, then $3,000 to train his brother,
Bongani, in information technology. "I will get a pain if I
saw that they didn't go to school," she said. "So I will
work the rest of my life for these children."
Bongani dropped out, but Ms. Ndlovu persevered. Inspired by
Soshanguve's reconstruction, she quit her salon in 1999 to
form a women's construction cooperative named Bakoni -
Tswana for "we can do it."
For three months, she hitchhiked 150 miles weekly to
Nelspruit, in the subtropical east, to study construction
management and skills. Prodded by government incentives to
train blacks, a major South African construction company
footed the bill.
Ms. Ndlovu timidly warned her teacher that her spelling and
math were lacking. "He was a white guy," she said. "But he
was a good guy." He stayed after class to tutor her.
Black subcontractors became in demand from white firms,
which saw that their cheap labor offered an edge in bidding
for government jobs. One hired Ms. Ndlovu to erect
guardrails and pave toll plazas and underpasses on freeway
projects. Lacking even a truck, she hand-carried tools,
cement and poles to her first job, and hand-wrote invoices.
But her work was impressive. "Excellent," her evaluator
wrote.
Ms. Ndlovu replied with a thank-you note that read, "We
hope to continue working with you in the extreme."
Facing the Present
As Ms. Ndlovu set down roots in
Soshanguve, John Henshall quit a management job to start
from scratch with Li, selling and renting forklifts. They
had few illusions about the risk: apartheid was crumbling,
and the economy with it. "The whole place could've packed
up," he said.
But he was impressed by an argument advanced by one white
businessman for burying apartheid. "You could have the
whole of nothing, or a piece of something," he said. "Two
cakes."
In part, John Henshall's upbringing made him sympathetic.
Even at apartheid's pinnacle in the late 1950's, in his
childhood home of Nelspruit, the Henshall family was an
exception. Racial castes may have been inviolate, but
apartheid was not.
The black servants "never sat in our chairs, and never ate
off our plates, never," Mr. Henshall recalled. But his
father, Richard, ignored a ban on hiring black mechanics
and painters, training them and paying them a white man's
salary. His mother, a British nurse, ran a feeding program
for malnourished black families.
"You had a system, but you didn't have to live by that
system," said Richard Henshall, now 82. Apartheid, he said,
"was absolutely damned ridiculous."
As democracy arrived, Mr. Henshall held his breath. But the
family business prospered. Fearing the consequences of
white flight and economic ruin, the new government bent
over backward to keep white businesses alive. Few of their
nightmares came to pass.
"The only problem we've suffered as white people," Mr.
Henshall said, "has been major crime."
In 1995, the Henshalls settled in Morningside, a northern
Johannesburg suburb about a mile from Alexandra, an
impoverished black township.
As the couple lay in bed late one night, a black face
appeared at their bedroom window. "He'd jumped the wall -
we didn't have electric fencing, just the razor wire," Mrs.
Henshall said. "I could have taken a gun and shot him, I
was so scared."
The man fled, but Mrs. Henshall stopped letting her
children play alone in their backyard. "Five years in that
house, I never slept," she said.
Five miles away, on Alexandra's other border, Li's brother
Hayden Goldman and his wife, Barbara, shared those fears.
The Goldmans lived with their teenage children, Kirsty and
Andrew. Andrew, 19, was a budding geophysicist, winner of a
four-year university scholarship from Anglo-American, the
gold-mining empire.
In June 1994, he cast his first vote. "He was so excited,"
Mr. Goldman said. "We stood in the queue together, and we
were so happy that things were going to become normal."
Six months later, Andrew drove to his girlfriend's home
nearby. As he drove past the driveway's sliding gate, two
men darted in. They shot him in one leg through his closed
car window. Then they shot him in the head.
The Goldmans raced there. Ms. Goldman heard screaming, then
her husband's shouts to stop. "Eventually," she said, "I
realized it was me screaming. So I stopped. It was my worst
nightmare."
The killers were never found. Ms. Goldman, who now counsels
crime victims of both races, has since been robbed at
gunpoint twice. Her husband was robbed in their garage -
unable to remove his wedding ring, the thieves tried to
bite off his finger.
The couple nearly emigrated to New Zealand, Ms. Goldman
said. Li Henshall also pondered leaving. In the mid-1990's,
she said, her children came home reporting another friend's
departure almost daily.
Instead, the Henshalls moved in 2000 to Kyalami Estate,
where a 24-hour security force patrols and a gated
guardhouse screens visitors. John Henshall jokingly calls
it "our prison."
Ms. Ndlovu does not joke about prison. In December, her son
Bongani, the 23-year-old dropout, was arrested in a robbery
in which the black victim was killed. Bongani Ndlovu swears
that his friends duped him into driving the getaway car,
Ms. Ndlovu said. The police charged one friend with murder.
His brother, Johnathan, studying pre-law, despairs that
Bongani has sunk from helping paint their dining room to
living in prison. "I am ashamed," he said. Bongani's legal
bills also worry him: "Now the car we have to fix. She is
paying for my studies, and the utilities, and also the
outstanding debts."
Ms. Ndlovu is distraught, but firm. The trial begins next
month. Bongani will stay in jail until then.
"He said, `Mama, I won't do it anymore,' " she said. "I
wanted to put up bail."
"But when I look at that mother" of the slain young man,
she said, "I really cry."
"They do this, they must be punished."
Ms. Ndlovu agrees
that crime is government's biggest challenge. Driving from
her home one afternoon, she pointed to the silver cellphone
under her dashboard. It is her fifth. Her workers stole the
others.
"They come at night and steal the petrol," she said. "I
find out in the morning when I try to go to work."
Hope for a New Generation
Still, Meisie Ndlovu has hopes.
She wants to move from subcontracting to better-paying
contracting. She wants a computer and a fax machine. She
wants Johnathan to break into the ranks of white lawyers
and Bongani to get a second chance.
She would like another husband. But she fears AIDS, so "I
just keep myself busy with work," she said.
She believes that "some whites have changed." But her
church, her daughter's high school, her town - in fact, her
whole world - is black, save the whites who monitor her
work. She figures she is too old to see that change.
"The new generation is the one that is going to get the new
world," she said. "They are going to work together. Not the
old people. The young generation is the one who is going to
know the truth."
Her son Johnathan agrees. The ranks of the legal profession
are lily-white, but he hopes to break in. He is not sure
what to think of white people yet. "I take a person as I
find them," he said. "I have never interacted with many
whites."
John and Li Henshall have hopes, too, for a safer and more
harmonious nation. They say Mr. Mandela's message of
tolerance is firmly imprinted on their three children. "You
say one thing negative about the blacks, they will shout
you down - `You are a racist!' " Mrs. Henshall said. "It is
actually quite good."
Their world is somewhat less monochrome than that of the
Ndlovus: their children's school is integrated, and their
firm's black employees and customers are acquaintances.
They feel regretful, not guilty, about apartheid. "You
know, it wasn't my fault," Mrs. Henshall said flatly.
Still, they plan to educate their maid's grandson.
"That is how we come to terms with it," Mr. Henshall said.
"Privately."
Ten years ago, they say, whites endlessly bemoaned South
Africa's irreversible descent. But no more.
"There isn't that hatred that there was at first," John
Henshall said. "Things haven't really improved, but they
haven't gotten that much worse. Perhaps all the promises
are futile, and nothing is going to come of it, and
everybody has just settled down and said, `We've got our
life.' "
Or perhaps, says Ms. Ndlovu's brother Thomas, people need
not only to forgive, but also to forget - not forever, but
long enough for wounds to heal.
"I still remember my kid asking me, `What was that thing
you called apartheid?' " he said.
"I said, really, I don't know, too. All I know is, we were
just separated - those were blacks, those were whites, and
whites were living alone.
"That's why say I don't like to talk about it, because I
want to forget it," he said. "I want to start from right
here, going forward, and teach my kids: No, those people
used to do that. But it was that time."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/26/international/africa/26AFRI.html?ex=1084011403&ei=1&en=2a1604e2bed57328
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