(Dobbs) South Africa: Promises Unmet, Expectations Unfulfilled.
But thank Nelson Mandela for how much better it is today than before.
I read a report the other day that young South Africans are souring on the father of black majority rule, Nelson Mandela. Young black South Africans. Although the white minority’s system of racial separation, apartheid, ended almost 30 years ago, whites’ incomes are still more than three times as high as blacks’, white citizens still own a disproportionate share of the nation’s land, unemployment among young black citizens is higher than 45-percent. They argue, Mandela didn’t do enough when apartheid died to prevent that.
If I could somehow communicate with these young people, I would tell them, cut him some slack. There is no denying that their lives are still hard. There is no denying that the dream of a prosperous black society has not come true. But from all the trips I’ve made there, although this is a simplistic explanation, here’s the reality: when apartheid was abolished and Mandela became the nation’s first black president, he was up against almost insurmountable obstacles to give his people not just freedom but affluence.
He was up against a business community, a civil service, a police force, and a military, that had been run almost entirely by whites, which meant blacks had no training, no experience. That alone can take decades to reverse. He was up against an educational system that had served no useful purpose for generations of black students. As the chancellor of the University of Cape Town told me when I shot a documentary there, “Many of the children who are in school today are the so-called born-frees, they were not part of the apartheid system, but they have inherited the legacy of apartheid.” That is a legacy of teachers who were taught to underperform, a legacy of parents who didn’t push their children to learn in the post-apartheid world because it had made no difference in their world when apartheid was still in force.
That too can take decades to reverse.
I have seen the nation both before and after apartheid. Before, for blacks, it was a life of almost unmitigated hardship and unending tragedy. Now, it is a mix of tragedy and triumph. What I would tell these disillusioned young people is that things don’t change overnight, but they are immeasurably better than they were before Nelson Mandela reshaped the nation. Today, blacks no longer need to step aside when passing a white citizen on the sidewalk. Or to have a pass, just to be out at night. They have the opportunity, if not the knowhow, to do something more than sweep the streets and mop the floors and collect the trash.
I would tell those young people, that is the triumph, thanks to Mandela.
But there is still tragedy. Like the “informal settlement” outside Cape Town— better known as a squatters camp— called Khayelitsha.
I was there during apartheid and again after it ended. It was impoverished then, it’s not much better now. The latest estimate says some half-a-million people live in Khayelitsha. Many homes still have no internal source of water. People still haul buckets to public taps. Many have no electricity. Nor even their own toilet. In one neighborhood called Endlovini, an estimated 20,000 people share fewer than 400 communal outhouses.
Khayelitsha is the outcome of social engineering by the apartheid government. Like the better known Johannesburg suburb of Soweto (which stands for South West Township), Khayelitsha was built close enough to the city so that laborers could get to work, but far enough away so that when they weren’t working, they were out of sight.
In the new South Africa, the one run by the black majority, the tragedy is that people are still trapped in places like Khayelitsha and Soweto, if not by law, then by circumstance.
On the upside, some South African blacks have used their freedom to grab the brass ring. They have leveraged their education and climbed the ladder and attained a comfortable life in the middle class. As one young entrepreneur said to me, “There’s equal opportunities for everybody, everybody has a fair chance, it’s just how you use it.”
But most haven’t figured that out, at least not yet. A white economist at Stellenbosch University explained it to me. “They inherited a very bad socio-economic legacy from the apartheid regime. The lower 50-percent was already very poor. Poverty was like a snowball rolling in its own momentum from a mountain. Perhaps they have succeeded to slow down the speed of the snowball, but not stop it or succeed to roll it back.”
But what I would tell the young people so unhappy today is that Nelson Mandela at least put the brakes on that snowball and created the foundation for a better life, beginning with the nation’s constitution. A man named Ahmed Kathrata, Mandela’s longtime cellmate from Robben Island off Cape Town, where political prisoners were locked up, once told me how the constitution came about. “We’d be chopping rocks in the quarry on the island, and at Nelson’s signal each of us would go to a different guard and tell him, ‘Gotta piss.’ Then we’d furtively meet in a limestone cave and steal ten minutes together to have our clandestine talks about the South Africa of our dreams.”
At Mandela’s insistence, those dreams became a constitution committed to equal rights for all. Not just all blacks, he argued, but all peoples of the nation. Then, he almost singlehandedly persuaded his fellow prisoners— who wanted to take revenge on their white oppressors— that their hunger for vengeance was the way to war, not peace. When I used to go down to South Africa during apartheid, it was expected that if a revolution came, the swimming pools of white South Africans would run red with blood. But it never happened. Ultimately, thanks to Nelson Mandela, the black majority chose reconciliation over revenge.
I would tell the young people of South Africa today to thank him for that.
But it’s still true that while the preamble to the constitution says, “We will heal the divisions of the past… and free the potential of every citizen,” too many people there still aren’t feeling it. And they blame that on the performance of the black majority that Mandela empowered. Sometimes they seem no better at improving the nation than the whites who came before them.
One of the greatest men I ever met, the late Bishop Desmond Tutu, told me why. “I think many of us, I think we were naïve, many of us thought that because the cause we were striving for, this cause against apartheid was such a noble cause, and during that, people were incredibly altruistic, but come freedom, these noble attributes and values would be transferred automatically to the post-freedom faith. It hasn’t happened.” Then he filled the room with laughter and said, “In fact we are human. Original sin has in fact also infected us."
The University of Cape Town chancellor took it further. “Because we had the bravado of people who had fought our struggle and won our freedom,” she told me, “we denied the fact that we were wounded, we denied the scars of social engineering, and so we thought all we needed to do was put black people in charge of the wheels of government and things are going to move in the right direction. It actually takes a lot more than that.”
South Africa’s majority is free now from the shackles of the once-legal policy of racial separation, but many are still imprisoned by promises unmet and expectations unfulfilled.
Bishop Tutu summed up that conundrum: “Some crossed over the Jordan to the promised land, but many many others are still languishing outside the promised land.”
That today is the triumph and the tragedy of South Africa. What I would tell those young people is, before Nelson Mandela, the promised land was never even on the horizon. If they look today, maybe they can see it. Maybe their children will inhabit it.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Thanks again, Greg. I sensed such progress in my visit to South Africa.
Very Stirring 😘👍🏼