18th Of July - Mandela Day

Arthur Goldreich (RIP)

In the midst of one of the tensest periods of the anti-apartheid struggle, a single-winged Cessna aircraft carrying two priests in dog collars took off from an airstrip in Swaziland and flew across South African territory to British Bechuanaland. The "clerics" stepped out to a rapturous welcome from the local African National Congress. The escape of the freedom fighter Arthur Goldreich while on remand in a Johannesburg prison had been accomplished.

Goldreich, who has died aged 81, was part of the underground leadership of the ANC's liberation army, Spear of the Nation, that was captured in a police raid on Liliesleaf farm, Rivonia, in July 1963. Goldreich was the tenant of the property and had been living a seemingly harmless existence with his teacher wife, Hazel, and two sons, Nicholas and Paul – horse riding in the countryside and holding a job as a designer for a Johannesburg department store. (He designed the sets for King Kong, the black musical that played in London in the early 1960s.) So integrated were the Goldreich family in the secret life of the farm that on one occasion, as the high command met to discuss tactics, five-year-old Paul was found crawling around under the table.

Living at the farm, too, in the early 1960s was "David", purportedly a domestic servant but otherwise known as Nelson Mandela, the guerrilla commander-in-chief. Mandela discussed tactics with Goldreich, explaining in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (1994), that "Arthur had fought with the Palmach, the military wing of the Jewish National Movement in Palestine. He was knowledgable about guerrilla warfare and helped fill in many gaps in my understanding."

Mandela was already in prison by the time the raid on the farm took place, but was brought back to court and put on trial alongside others arrested that day. The following year, at the conclusion of what became known as the Rivonia trial, he and seven other defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Goldreich was born in Johannesburg, the son of a furniture dealer. The family moved to Pietersburg (now Polokwane) in the northern Transvaal. At his Afrikaans school, his German language teacher gave out Hitler Youth magazines for the class to read. Arthur wrote to the pro-British prime minister, Jan Smuts, demanding to be taught Hebrew. The wish was granted.

On leaving school, he enrolled as an architectural student in Johannesburg, but as a dedicated Zionist he gave up his studies in 1948 to fight in Israel's war of independence. The war coincided with the Afrikaner nationalist victory in the South African general election. Goldreich later said that he was driven by "the Holocaust and the struggle against British colonialism, but the Nats winning the election left me in no doubt about what I had to do".

He left Israel to study industrial design in London before returning home. He had married Hazel Berman, who was active in the Young Communist League. Goldreich, though still preoccupied with Zionism, was moving to the left, and joined the underground Communist party. As the ANC prepared to launch its armed struggle, the Goldreichs were persuaded to rent Liliesleaf as the headquarters of its high command. Goldreich was the ideal cover. "A flamboyant person," Mandela said of him, "he gave the farm a buoyant atmosphere."

After the police raid, the Goldreichs were held under the 90-day law at Marshall Square, Johannesburg's main police station, but discipline there was surprisingly lax. One day Johan Greeff, a teenaged policeman with no idea of the importance of his charges, was switched to overseeing the "political" cells. The detainees found him obliging. He would collect food and cigarettes, and on one occasion a pair of shoes and a new suit. Goldreich even persuaded the station commander to allow him out of the building, accompanied by Greeff, to visit his barber. "Arthur could charm the birds out of the trees," Hazel says, "and Greeff was easy meat."

Greeff was interested in fast cars, and had his eye on a Studebaker Lark. He agreed to facilitate their escape for 4,000 rand (then £2,000) in cash. One quiet Saturday night, he opened the inner and outer doors, then faked an injury. Goldreich and a civil rights lawyer, Harold Wolpe, made good their escape and, despite a furious nationwide manhunt, were smuggled into Swaziland, where they lay low in the home of a sympathetic Anglican priest before setting out for London.

Goldreich returned to Israel, becoming a professor at the Bezalel academy of arts and design, part of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He later spoke out firmly against the brutality and inhumanity imposed on the people of occupied Palestine. Hazel was released after three months, having refused to join the escapees because of concerns about her children. The couple later divorced and Goldreich remarried.

Greeff did not fare as well. He was arrested within the hour, before he was able to collect the bundle of notes from a go-between, Paul Joseph. He was sentenced to six years in prison, paroled after serving two years. Thirty years later, with apartheid ended, Joseph raised the matter of his payment. The escapees, as well as the ANC, said the debt should be settled. Goldreich said Greeff was "a kind man and paid a severe price. We owe him a lot." More than 40 years after the debt was incurred, it was at last settled when a courier arrived at Greeff's motor repair shop in the remote northern Cape to deliver an amount believed to be in the region of SAR110,000 (£10,000).

... And White

An award-winning writer has provoked fierce debate in South Africa after candidly saying that she does not like black people.

Annelie Botes, a leading Afrikaner novelist, said she would invite a white, coloured (mixed race) or an Indian man in for a drink, but would "feel threatened by a black man".

The comments, quoted in South African newspapers, have caused a storm in a country still sensitive about race relations 16 years after the end of apartheid. Botes claims she has received 1,000 supportive emails but there was also widespread condemnation of her views.

The row began when Rapport, an Afrikaans paper, asked her to name people she does not like. Her reply: "Black people." Soon after, she was sacked as a columnist for another newspaper.

Then South Africa's Mail & Guardian contacted the author, whom it says is probably the most popular contemporary female writer in Afrikaans, the language of the descendents of Dutch and other European settler farmers. Botes recently won the Afrikaans category of the K Sello Duiker Memorial Literary award for her novel, Thula-thula, which tackles child abuse and incest.

The 53-year-old stood by her original comments. "I'm scared," she told the paper. "In my daily life there's no one else that I feel threatened by except black people. If a courier comes to my door and he's white, coloured or Indian, I'd have no problem inviting him in for a glass of water. But I would feel threatened by a black man."

She added that two years ago her laptop, containing a manuscript, was stolen while she was asleep and a neighbour was murdered. "You tell me what the face of crime is in South Africa. If you hear the window shatter and confront the perpetrator, who do you expect that crook to be?"

Asked about challenging racial stereotypes, she replied: "I don't have the means to get my head around that of a black man. I can't understand that.

"As a writer, I write what I see, what I experience and put it into context. It isn't my job to be politically correct."

Botes also said she would never appoint a black gardener. She is planning to emigrate to Britain, where her children already live, as soon her husband goes on a pension.

She added: "Here in Port Elizabeth, I wouldn't go to a deserted beach alone. It's simply too dangerous. The English villages where my kids live don't even have streetlights and I would walk there in the middle of the night without fear."Her interview triggered dozens of comments on the Mail & Guardian's website, including one claiming to be one from Botes herself.

The article had chosen to "emphasise the negative", she wrote, and contained "nothing about my anger regarding the government closing down thousands of farm schools in remote areas and thus depriving black children from an education.

"Nothing about how I as scribe of a village church stood up against the white elders because they treated the church cleaner like scum, and how I lost my job because of my persistent view. Nothing about how I admitted that whites committed unthinkable monstrosities against blacks under the old regime. Or about my acknowledgement that the old government were thieves too. Or how we as whites tend to humiliate "incompetent" blacks at cash points. Or about me having no problem sharing my table and toilet with a black person."

But there was criticism from other readers. Fungayi Dzvinyangoma posted: "Someone needs to tell this bigoted woman that there are a lot of black people in England. However, if you get burgled in Britain the face is most likely to be white. She seems to forget the history of South Africa so quickly which could explain why the blacks have to resort to criminality. She benefited from state criminality for decades."

There was support for Botes, however, from a user called George S. "I think the lady should be applauded for her courage in speaking out instead of being vilified. Perhaps she only expresses fears that many whites harbour. Perhaps she generalised this issue but then I say these things work both ways."

Despite Nelson Mandela's efforts at reconciliation, racial tensions in South Africa surfaced earlier this year when white supremacist Eugene Terre'Blanche http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/eugene-terre-blanche was hacked to death in his bed, allegedly by black workers on his farm. But the majority of crime victims are poor and black. Last week Brandon Huntley, a South African who argued that whites are targeted by black criminals, lost his refugee status in Canada and now faces a new hearing.

Marga Collings, a manager at Botes's publisher NB, said today: "We believe that all our authors are entitled to their own views.

"In this case, the publisher does not share the author's view."

Botes herself declined to give further interviews. "I regret to say: No further comments," she wrote in an email to the Guardian.

Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert (RIP)

World Cup Champion

Eugene TerreBlanche (RIP)

From Terrorist To Global Icon

A Very Good Film

Elections: South Africa 2009

The struggles of a young democracy

By John Humphrys

“ Perhaps it is unrealistic to have expected all of South Africa's many problems to have been solved in a mere 15 years ”

It's an odd business returning to somewhere you lived when you were a relatively young man, bringing up children who now have children of their own.

I was in my late twenties when I first reported from South Africa. I moved here to set up a television news bureau in 1977 and lived here for three years.

Those were the dark days of apartheid when only white people were allowed to vote and the only black people you saw in the posh suburbs were servants.

I came back again for the Today programme in 1994 to watch that depraved system buried for once and for all in the first free elections. On the night of 2 May 1994, I was in the ballroom of Johannesburg's biggest hotel to join the party at which the guest of honour was Nelson Mandela - the first black president of this country.

So, 15 years later, here I am again. And what do I find? Well, on the face of it, many things seem unchanged.

I went back to my old house in the posh suburb of Saxonwold and just about the only black men I saw were walking the streets wearing bright yellow jackets with the word "security" printed in large letters on the back - private guards hired by the rich whites to help them sleep easier in their beds at night.

And in the houses - black maids, black gardeners and black chauffeurs. Nothing changed there then.

It was the same in the smart hotels and restaurants - almost all whites sitting at the tables and almost all blacks serving them.

Wrong colour

But when I left the city and drove out into the high veld towards Pretoria, I saw hard evidence that some things really have changed.

Rough squatter camps have sprung up - whole families living in tiny, tumbledown shacks with no running water and no decent sewage systems.

These sorts of places have existed in South Africa for as long as I can remember. The big difference is that it is white people living in these particular squatter camps now, not black.

One burly Afrikaner with a huge white, bushy beard told me with more sorrow in his voice than anger: "Yes, it's true. Everything is turned upside down. Now it's the blacks that are on top and we are on the bottom."

He told me that people like him needed help from the government to survive. I asked him why he couldn't get a job and help himself.

He looked as me as if I were stupid: "Wrong colour, wrong skin. Ja?"

I wondered if he accepted that hard-line whites like him had it coming - that the tables had been turned and they were now getting a dose of what they had been dishing out for half a century.

He shrugged: "Ja. I guess you could say so…."

Township squalor

Their camp was a pretty squalid place, but at least it was surrounded by grassland and trees.

For real, unimaginable squalor you need to go to the townships. Alexandra is home to more than 800,000 people, the majority of them living in shacks squashed so close together a rat can barely squeeze between - and God knows there are plenty of rats.

And yet, on the outer edges of this township are row upon row of brand new homes standing empty. In heaven's name why?

They may be modest but they are palaces compared with the shacks. They have plumbing for toilets, running water - unimaginable luxuries.

The local authority says they are still empty because they ran out of money to complete them. The shack dwellers say it's because of corruption - they are being saved for friends of the powerful and ANC party officials.

I spoke to a group of women who had taken over the homes and squatted there until they were thrown out by the police. They were planning another raid as I left them. They told me they would not be voting in the election.

"Why bother?" one tough old woman demanded of me.

"It changes nothing that we have the vote. If we want something, we have learned that we must take it."

She went further than that. She talked about the start of a new revolution to overthrow the ANC and give power back to the people.

I heard that from others, too, including the bishop of the Central Methodist Church Paul Verryn.

He has allowed his church to be used as a sanctuary by thousands of refugees from Zimbabwe who sleep there every night. We watched them crowding into the building as it grew dark - so many of them that they covered every square inch of floor, including the stone steps. That's where they slept, night after night after night.

And they were the lucky ones. Another couple of thousand can't get in. They have to find somewhere else to sleep. It is strange and deeply unsettling to see this expression of utter poverty in the heart of what is potentially the richest city on the continent of Africa.

Rewards of power

But perhaps it is unrealistic to have expected all of South Africa's many problems to have been solved in a mere 15 years. And there is no doubt that progress has been made - millions of new homes built, power and running water supplied to many more.

But the anger of the poor people I spoke to was made much sharper because they suspect that while they live in squalor, many of their leaders - the men and women who fought for their liberation - are reaping the rewards of power.

The man who will almost certainly become president, Jacob Zuma, has himself been under a cloud of suspicion for years, facing charges of corruption.

When the prosecuting authorities decided not to put him on trial there was a great deal of anger from people who suspected that political pressure had been brought to bear. He and his colleagues deny it fiercely.

I have known Archbishop Desmond Tutu for more than 30 years and I wanted to hear what he made of it all. Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in the struggle for black liberation and has the respect of millions around the world.

They don't come more ebullient and charismatic than Tutu. His dynamism, energy and enthusiasm is infectious and his chuckle is enough to bring a smile to the stoniest face.

But he was strangely subdued when I met him. He once said - after Mandela came to power - that he expected to spend his old age sitting on the sidelines because his job had been done - democracy would do the rest.

Instead, he is clearly concerned that Zuma has not stood trial and faced up to the allegations in a court of law.

When I put that to one of the most senior figures on the ANC executive, she got very angry.

It was typical, she said, of the colonial attitude people like me bring to a country like South Africa. Her message was clear - we foreigners should keep our noses out of her country's affairs.

So, for my last interview, I went to see the man who made democratic elections possible - the last white president of South Africa, FW de Klerk.

It was he who freed Nelson Mandela and brought about the constitution under which he became president. Mr de Klerk, too, is clearly worried about the consequences of a Zuma presidency.

He hopes the elections will result in a sharp fall in support for the ANC which, he believes, is too powerful. But he told me he is not pessimistic for the future of South Africa.

Both he and Tutu believe democracy will survive. And so long as it does, there is hope. That, for what it's worth, is the message I take away from my visit here too.

Maybe I'll come back again in another 15 years and be proved wrong, but I hope not.

Helen Suzman (RIP)

APPEARANCES deceived where Helen Suzman was concerned. The petite and elegant figure, clad in two-pieces or nicely pressed slacks, her hair Thatcher-perfect, was clearly a denizen of the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, where discreet black domestics clipped the acacias and golf was played at weekends. Houghton, rich and Jewish, was indeed her constituency, and privilege was her life. But there the comfortable impression ended. Among the solid and overwhelmingly male Afrikaners in Parliament, “baying like hounds at a meet”, she was noisy, rude, contemptuous, “thoroughly nasty when I get going”. “A vicious little cat”, said P.W. Botha, South Africa’s prime minister, who often felt her claws in him. “The honourable member does not like me,” he observed once in Parliament. “Like you? I can’t stand you,” came the spitting reply. Verwoerd, an earlier prime minister, a man she admitted she was “scared stiff” of, fared no better. “I have written you off,” he told her. “The whole world has written you off,” she retorted.

Then there were her questions: as many as 200 of them a year, asked in Parliament and recorded in Hansard, on any subject that might embarrass South Africa’s white rulers. How many people were being held without trial? How many blacks were arrested each day for violating the Pass Laws? Why were they being forcibly removed to areas with nothing but rows of tin latrines, where only wattles grew in the sand? Why did the police turn up to remove them at four in the morning? Why did they use rubber bullets to disperse protesting crowds? Was it true that prisoners were kept in solitary confinement, beaten with straps, made to sleep on the floor? On, on, on. One National Party MP said she reminded him of “a cricket in a tree when it is very dry in the bushvelt. His chirping makes you deaf but the tune remains the same.” Botha said her “chattering” was like water dripping on a tin roof. Mrs Suzman was delighted to annoy them in the cause of justice.

Good liberal instincts

In a parliamentary career of 36 years, she spent only six in a party of any size. She quit the paternal United Party in 1959, frustrated that it was so wobbly against apartheid, to join a Progressive Party of 12 members that was wiped out in an election two years later. She was the sole survivor, for 13 years a one-woman opposition to the relentless consolidation of white rule. The small but determined voice of the “neo-communist” and “sickly humanist” would call out “No”—to the Sabotage Act, the Terrorism Act, the Ninety-Day Detention Law—and she would be left sitting alone in a sea of empty green benches.

Her strength was that she knew the facts, and knew her rights. South Africa’s devotion to the Westminster parliamentary system, a figleaf of democracy over barbarism, meant that the Speaker was bound to let this “lone Prog” speak, and ministers had to answer her questions. She was allowed to bring one Private Member’s Motion a year, so she would try single-handedly to repeal the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, or propose a minimum wage for blacks. As an MP, she could also visit prisons and “black spots” barred to the public; which was how she found herself talking to Nelson Mandela in his cell on Robben Island in 1967, or tramping through squatters’ camps of plastic sheets and corrugated iron. She was a precious mouthpiece to the world, as she was also the first resort for communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, banned people, Coloureds resentful of their racial classification, and all the “sad harvest of the seeds of apartheid” that drifted through her office.

Did it make any difference? By 1974, after 20 years in Parliament, Mrs Suzman felt she had achieved little except identity-numbers for policemen, “because it helps to know who is beating you round the head”. She had stopped no law, and white rule was to run on for 20 more years. Her critics on the left always said far more force was needed to remove it. But she did not believe in force. Outsiders thought economic sanctions were the answer: but she did not believe in those, either. Her principles, to which she was always truthful, were those of a good old-fashioned liberal. Free markets, capitalism, the paramountcy of democracy and civil institutions, equal opportunity. She had always argued with her father, Sam Gavronsky, who had emigrated from Lithuania and made a success of the leather-and-soap trade, that blacks were oppressed rather than lazy, and couldn’t build a new life as readily as he had done. But when the African National Congress, once in power, began to impose quotas for blacks in jobs, she naturally and ferociously opposed it.

In many ways black rule proved “a huge disappointment” to her: corrupt, spendthrift, anti-white, and doing little to help the millions of poor blacks whose lot she had tried to improve. Thabo Mbeki’s wilful ignorance over AIDS appalled her. She spoke out about all of it, though the ANC seldom deigned to notice or reply. She was the past. In old age she sometimes seemed just another rich white suburbanite, comfortably behind her security fence, sighing over her whisky and soda about “that president of ours”. But the claws on her “pretty little pink hands” had drawn blood, and they were never retracted.

Two Down...

Sppliting ANC

Another political heavyweight has quit South Africa's ruling African National Congress as dissidents prepare to launch a rival party after the former president, Thabo Mbeki, was toppled from power by supporters of Jacob Zuma.

Mbhazima Shilowa, a former trade union leader and ex-premier of the country's industrial and financial heartland around Johannesburg and Pretoria, resigned from the ANC over what he called the "putsch" against Mbeki, who was ordered by the party leadership under Zuma to resign as South Africa's president last month.

Shilowa said he was backing Mbeki's former defence minister, Mosiuoa Lekota, who announced he was "serving divorce papers" on the ANC last week. The party suspended Lekota this week.

The rebels plan to call a national convention "in defence of democracy" on November 2 which is expected to be the launch pad for a rival to the ANC as the party fractures over political and, to a lesser extent, ethnic differences.

Shilowa said he would establish a preparatory committee of "prominent individuals" ahead of the convention to tour the country and generate support.

The ANC's national executive held a special session yesterday to discuss the split. The leadership said it would act "very decisively" to rid the party of factionalism.

Zuma claimed the new party would get nowhere. "It's cold out there if you are out of the ANC, very cold," he said.

There is little likelihood of the ANC losing next year's general election, but if Lekota and his allies can get a serious breakaway movement off the ground, it could eat into the ruling party's two-thirds majority in parliament.

Two of the ANC's provincial ministers are expected to quit in the mostly Xhosa eastern Cape, where there is discontent not only because it is Mbeki's home province, but because of unhappiness at the Zuma camp's emphasis on their leader's Zulu roots. Lekota condemned the T-shirts worn by Zuma's supporters at the ANC convention in December that declared him to be "100% Zulu", a jibe at accusations that Mbeki headed a "Xhosa nostra" at the top of the ANC.

SA: A Rainbow in B&W?

White flight from South Africa

Between staying and going

Violent crime and political turmoil are adding to South Africa’s brain drain

FIRST he thought it was a mouse, then a rat—and then the rat shot him in the face. That is how André Brink, one of South Africa’s most famous novelists, described the recent killing of his nephew Adri, at home at 3am in the morning. The young man was left to die on the floor, in front of his wife and daughter, while his killers ransacked the house.

Such murders are common in South Africa. According to Mr Brink’s account, published later in the Sunday Independent, 16 armed attacks had already taken place in a single month within a kilometre of the young couple’s plot north of Pretoria, South Africa’s capital. Soon afterwards—this is more unusual—the police arrested a gang of six. They recovered a laptop and two mobile phones. That was the haul for which Adri paid with his life.

A decade-and-a-half after the end of apartheid, violent crime is pushing more and more whites out of South Africa. Exactly how many are leaving is impossible to say. Few admit that they are quitting for good, and the government does not collect the necessary statistics. But large white South African diasporas, both English- and Afrikaans-speaking, have sprouted in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and many cities of North America.

The South African Institute of Race Relations, a think-tank, guesses that 800,000 or more whites have emigrated since 1995, out of the 4m-plus who were there when apartheid formally ended the year before. Robert Crawford, a research fellow at King’s College in London, reckons that around 550,000 South Africans live in Britain alone. Not all of South Africa’s émigrés are white: skilled blacks from South Africa can be found in jobs and places as various as banking in New York and nursing in the Persian Gulf. But most are white—and thanks to the legacy of apartheid the remaining whites, though only about 9% of the population, are still South Africa’s richest and best-trained people.

Talk about “white flight” does not go down well. Officials are quick to claim that there is nothing white about it. A recent survey by FutureFact, a polling organisation, found that the desire to emigrate is pretty even across races: last year, 42% of Coloured (mixed-race) South Africans, 38% of blacks and 30% of those of Indian descent were thinking of leaving, compared with 41% of whites. This is a big leap from 2000, when the numbers were 12%, 18%, 26% and 22% respectively. But it is the whites, by and large, who have the money, skills, contacts and sometimes passports they need to start a life outside—and who leave the bigger skills and tax gap behind.

Another line loyalists take is that South Africa is no different from elsewhere: in a global economy, skills are portable. “One benefit of our new democracy is that we are well integrated in the community of nations, so now more opportunities are accessible to our people,” Kgalema Motlanthe, now South Africa’s president, told The Economist. And to some extent it is true that the doctors, dentists, nurses, accountants and engineers who leave are being pulled by bigger salaries, not pushed by despair. But this is not the whole story. Nick Holland, chief executive of Gold Fields, a mining company, says that in his firm it is far commoner for skilled whites to leave than their black and Indian counterparts. “We mustn’t stick our heads in the sand,” he says. “White flight is a reality.”

Another claim is that a lot of leavers return. Martine Schaffer, a Durbanite who returned to South Africa herself in 2003 after 14 years in London, now runs the “Homecoming Revolution”, an outfit created with help from the First National Bank to tempt lost sheep back to the fold. And, yes, a significant number of émigrés do come home, seduced by memories of the easeful poolside life under the jacaranda trees, excited by work opportunities or keen—perhaps after having children themselves—to reunite with parents who stayed behind.

In some cases, idealism remains a draw. Whites who left in previous decades because they were repelled by apartheid, or who expected apartheid to end in a bloodbath, can find much to admire. Whites build tall walls around their houses and pay guards to patrol their neighbourhoods; they consider some downtown areas too dangerous to visit. But on university campuses and in the bright suburban shopping malls it is still thrilling to see blacks and whites mingling in a relaxed way that was unimaginable under apartheid.

Reasons not to panic?

So South Africa certainly has its white boosters. Michael Katz, chairman of Edward Nathan Sonnenbergs, a law firm in Johannesburg, hands over a book with the title “Don’t Panic!”, a collection of heartwarming reflections by disparate South Africans on why there is, even now, no better place than home. Mr Katz ticks off the pluses as he sees them: minimal racial tension (a third of his own firm’s 350 professionals are black); a model constitution that entrenches the separation of powers and is “revered” by the people; a free press and free judiciary; a healthy Parliament; a vibrant civil society; good infrastructure and a banking system untouched by the global credit crunch. The “one major negative” Mr Katz concedes is violent crime. If only this could be brought under control, he says, the leavers would return.

But would they? Violent crime is undoubtedly the biggest single driver of emigration, the one factor cited by all races and across all professions when people are asked why they want to go. Police figures put the murder rate in 2007-08 at more than 38 per 100,000 and rape at more than 75 per 100,000. This marks a big fall over the past several years, but is still astronomical by international standards (the murder rate was 5.6 per 100,000 in the United States last year). It has reached the point where most people say they have either been victims of violent crime themselves or know friends or relatives who have been victims. Typically, it is a break-in, carjacking, robbery or murder close to home that clinches a family’s long mulled-over decision to leave.

All the same, crime is far from being the only cause of white disenchantment. Some say that 2008 brought a “perfect storm”. A sequence of political and economic blows this year have buffeted people’s hope. Added together they provide reason to doubt whether the virtues ticked off by the exuberant Mr Katz—a model constitution, separation of powers, good infrastructure and so on—are quite so solid.

Good infrastructure? At the beginning of the year South Africa’s lights started to go out, plunging the thrumming shopping malls and luxury homes into darkness and stopping work in the gold and diamond mines. This entirely avoidable calamity was caused by a distracting debate about the role of the private sector in electricity supply. Eskom, the state-owned utility in which many experienced white managers had been too quickly pushed aside, is now investing again in new plant under a new chairman, Bobby Godsell, a veteran mining executive. But for the time being power will remain in short supply and rationing and blackouts will continue.

As for that model constitution and the separation of powers, Desmond Tutu, the retired Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, was moved this week to describe the sordid battle between Jacob Zuma, Thabo Mbeki, the party, government, prosecuting authority and courts as suggestive of a “banana republic”. As well as being appalled by events at home this past year, whites have watched Robert Mugabe’s pauperisation of neighbouring Zimbabwe and wonder whether South Africa will be next to descend into the same spiral.

Besides, fear of crime cannot be separated from the other factors that make South Africans consider emigration. People who do not feel safe in their homes lose their faith in government. John Perlman, who worked for the SABC, the state broadcaster, before resigning in a quarrel over political interference, does not believe that most people leave because they are afraid. “I think they leave when they lose heart,” he says. One white entrepreneur about to leave for New York says that it was not being held up twice at gunpoint that upset him most: it was the lack of interest the police showed afterwards. Tony Leon, the former leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance, claims that policing has been devastated by cronyism and that the entire criminal-justice system is dysfunctional. The head of the police, Jackie Selebi, is on leave pending a corruption investigation.

How much does the outward flow of whites matter? South Africa can ill afford the loss of its best-trained people. Iraj Abedian, an economist and chief executive of Pan-African Capital Holdings, says a pitiful shortage of skills is one of the main constraints on economic growth. He concedes that the ANC has pushed hard to give every eligible child a place in school, but argues that a “politically correct” focus on expanding access has come at the expense of quality. With virtually no state schools providing adequate teaching in science or maths, he says, the country has added to its vast problem of unemployment (every other 18-24-year-old is out of work) a no less vast problem of unemployability.

The gap they leave behind

On Mr Abedian’s reckoning, about half a million posts are vacant in government service alone because too few South Africans have the skills these jobs demand. Not a single department, he says, has its full complement of professionals. Local municipalities and public hospitals are also desperately short of trained people. Dentists are “as scarce as chicken’s teeth” and young doctors demoralised by the low standards of hospital administration. Last May Azar Jammine, an independent economist, told a Johannesburg conference on the growing skills shortage that more than 25,000 teachers were leaving the profession every year and only 7,000 entering.

A blinkered immigration policy makes things worse. Nobody has a clue how many millions of unskilled Africans cross into South Africa illegally. But skilled job applicants who try to come in legally are obstructed by a barricade of regulations. Mr Abedian says that the ANC used to think that relying on foreigners would discourage local institutions from training their own people. Now at least the government earmarks sectors where skills are in short supply and for which immigration procedures are supposed to be eased. In April, however, an internal report by the Department of Home Affairs showed that fewer than 1,200 foreigners had obtained permits under this scheme, from a list of more than 35,000 critical jobs.

In fairness, South Africa has been through far worse times before. Whites streamed out during the township riots of the 1980s. It is far from clear how much of the present dinner-table talk about leaving ends with a family packing its bags. Alan Seccombe, a tax expert at PWC in Johannesburg, says that many affluent whites have moved money offshore and prepared their escape routes, but that his firm’s emigration practice is doing less business today than it did in 1995.

Perspective is necessary in politics, too. Raenette Taljaard, previously an opposition member of Parliament and now director of the Helen Suzman Foundation, a think-tank, says that events this past year have raised profound concerns about the rule of law and the durability of the constitution. But Allister Sparks, the author of several histories of South Africa (and a former writer for The Economist), maintains that the ANC has done as well as anyone had a right to expect after apartheid’s destructive legacy. Some whites even express enthusiasm about the advent of Mr Zuma. How many other African liberation movements, they ask, have been democratic enough to vote out an underperforming leader, as the ANC has Mr Mbeki?

For the average white person, South Africa continues to offer a quality of life hard to find elsewhere. And there are other compensations. Mr Brink says in the article on the murder of his nephew that people who ask when he will be emigrating are perplexed to hear that he intends to stay. There is, he says, an “urgency and immediacy” about life in South Africa that lends it a sense of involvement and relevance he cannot imagine finding elsewhere.

All the same, he is staying on bereft of some former illusions.

The myopia and greed of the country’s new regime of rats have eroded my faith in the specific future I had once believed in. I do not foresee, today, any significant decrease in crime and violence in South Africa; I have serious doubts that our rulers can even guarantee a safe and successful soccer World Cup in 2010; I do not believe that the levels of corruption and nepotism and racketeering and incompetence and injustice and unacceptable practices of “affirmative action” in the country will decrease in the near future.

The famous novelist will stay. Many other whites are making plans to leave, and will be taking their precious skills with them.

Rugby & Politics

Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation.
By John Carlin.

TOWARDS the end of his 27 years in jail, Nelson Mandela began to yearn for a hotplate. He was being well fed by this point, not least because he was the world’s most famous political prisoner. But his jailers gave him too much food for lunch and not enough for supper. He had taken to saving some of his mid-day meal until the evening, by which time it was cold, and he wanted something to heat it up.

The problem was that the officer in charge of Pollsmoor prison’s maximum-security “C” wing was prickly, insecure, uncomfortable talking in English and virtually allergic to black political prisoners. To get around him, Mr Mandela started reading about rugby, a sport he had never liked but which his jailer, like most Afrikaner men, adored. Then, when they met in a corridor, Mr Mandela immediately launched into a detailed discussion, in Afrikaans, about prop forwards, scrum halves and recent games. His jailer was so charmed that before he knew it he was barking at an underling to “go and get Mandela a hotplate!”

Mr Mandela’s story never fails to inspire. As a young man, he started an armed struggle against apartheid. It went nowhere, and he went to jail. While maturing behind bars, he decided that moral suasion might work where bombs had failed. It did. South Africa’s white rulers surrendered power without a civil war. Several books have been written about Mr Mandela’s crucial role in coaxing his countrymen towards a more civilised form of government. John Carlin’s is the first to tell the tale through the prism of sport.

This premise is not as odd as it sounds. It was not only Mr Mandela’s regal charm that won over white South Africans. It was the fact that he took the trouble to study and understand their culture. At a time when many blacks dismissed rugby as “the brutish, alien pastime of a brutish, alien people”, Mr Mandela saw it as a bridge across the racial chasm.

The game is not an incidental part of Afrikaner culture, like cricket is to the English. To many Afrikaners, who have grown up playing rough games on sun-baked ground so hard that every tumble draws blood, rugby is little short of everything. Mr Mandela knew that if he was to convince these people that one man, one vote would not mean catastrophe, he had to “address their hearts”, not their brains. If the fearsome terrorist on the other side of the negotiating table was a rugby fan, could he really be as bad as they thought?

Mr Carlin focuses on the decade after 1985, when most blacks thought the country was sliding into war. He draws on his experiences as the South Africa correspondent for the Independent, a British newspaper, during the transition to democracy. But the book does not climax, as a standard historical text might, with South Africa’s first proper multi-racial elections in 1994. Instead, it builds up to the rugby world cup final in 1995, which was held in South Africa and which the home team won.

This makes sense. Elections are all very well, but the moment when black South Africans started cheering for a mostly-white rugby team, when white fans in the stadium tried gamely to sing a Zulu miners’ anthem and when Mr Mandela donned the green jersey of the Springboks—“It was the moment I realised that there really was a chance this country could work,” gushes a teary-eyed rugby official.

Mr Carlin brings the story alive by telling it through the eyes of a broad spectrum of South Africans. Among these is Desmond Tutu, the Nobel prize-winning archbishop of Cape Town, who was in America on the day of the final and had to find a bar that would let him watch it at an ungodly hour of the morning. Also, Niel Barnard, a former chief spy for the apartheid regime, who used to keep a thick file on Bishop Tutu. And Justice Bekebeke, a young township firebrand who killed a policeman for firing at a child during a riot and spent time on death row.

Mr Bekebeke is the most interesting of Mr Carlin’s portraits. On the morning of the match, he is still too bitter about a lifetime of injustice to support the Springboks. But then, something changes. The surging emotion of the event sweeps him along. “I just had to give up, to surrender,” he says, “And I said to myself, well, this is the new reality. There is no going back: the South African team is now my team, whoever they are, whatever their colour.”

Many writers reveal the nuts and bolts of South Africa’s transformation to non- racial democracy. But few capture the spirit as well as Mr Carlin.