Raw Tensions Over Race Fester in South Africa

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/02/world/africa/raw-tensions-over-race-fester-in-south-africa.html

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JOHANNESBURG — It would be hard to find a land so steeped in the torments and conflicts of race as South Africa. Apartheid’s ghosts still stalk the land, conjuring dire warnings about its very fabric. For those who yearned for a rainbow nation, it was not supposed to be this way.

When Nelson Mandela was freed from prison in 1990 and went on to become president in the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, he offered a narrative of racial inclusiveness as an antidote to a poisoned past in this regional and continental powerhouse.

But, since January, a series of bitter controversies, inspired and sometimes accelerated by social media, have shown that two decades of democracy have muted neither the perception nor the reality of inequality. Long after political power shifted to the majority, time may have instead amplified them.

In many ways, the debate is far more nuanced than in the supremacist past, exposing myriad resentments of privilege and entitlement, victimhood and reward, and even raising the question of who may set the racial agenda and on what terms.

“Not all whites were or are perpetrators of anti-black racism,” Eusebius McKaiser, a prominent author and social commentator, wrote in a new book, “Run Racist Run: Journeys Into the Heart of Racism.”

However, he said, “all whites benefited and still benefit from the history of anti-black oppression.”

“Many whites are blind to racism’s continued presence,” he added, “and, related to this blindness, many whites rationalize their ignorance by thinking that black people are ‘race-obsessed.’ ”

It is axiomatic, of course, that the question looks different from other perspectives in South Africa’s splintered prism. As a white, said Gerhard Papenfus, head of an employers’ group, “I understand that I cannot claim a future for myself unless I strive to create the space for all other South Africans to do the same.”

But, he wrote, when the conversation turns to race, “what is meant is that I, branded as the perpetrator, must sit back and listen, whilst my victim explains my historical sins to me.”

The debate has erupted since a series of social media outbursts and musings that began when Penny Sparrow, a real estate agent in Durban, used a posting on Facebook to liken blacks she accused of littering the city’s once-segregated beaches to “monkeys” strewing garbage.

Then, Velaphili Khumalo, a government employee in the wealthy province of Gauteng, said he wanted to “cleanse this country of all white people.”

“We must act as Hitler did to the Jews,” he said.

At around the same period, Chris Hart, a banking analyst, said on Twitter that “more than 25 years after apartheid ended, the victims are increasing with a sense of entitlement and hatred towards minorities.”

That remark brought a suspension from his job at Standard Bank and an acerbic rejoinder from its chief executive, Sim Tshabalala, that “entitled is often a key word in racist thinking” — either by whites accusing blacks of claiming undeserved privilege, or by blacks arguing that “white people are not entitled to be full citizens because they are ‘all racists.’ ”

The statistics drive the passions: Whites account for slightly less than 9 percent of the population of 50 million; yet 70 percent of top managers are whites. Among blacks in South Africa, Mr. Tshabalala wrote, the unemployment rate is 28.8 percent, compared with 5.9 percent among whites. Almost two-thirds of whites spend more than 10,000 rand, around $625, on their monthly living costs, compared with 8 percent among blacks, sometimes described as an emergent middle class.

Those disparities reflect the incomplete redistribution of wealth and land along with many other equally intractable challenges, including corruption and mismanagement, prompting the journalist Shaun de Waal to raise two questions that haunt the race debate as much as its subject. “Where to from here?” he asked, and “Is this the death of the ‘rainbow nation’ dream?”