Afrikaners adjust to life in the political minority
PRETORIA -- As workers washed his white
After Thabo Mbeki is inaugurated this week for a second five-year term as South Africa's president, Parliament will open and the two traditional Afrikaner political parties will hold 11 of 400 seats in the legislature, just 2.75 percent of the power.
In the 10 short years since the end of apartheid, the nation's Afrikaners, whites of Dutch and German descent, have gone from rulers to political paupers.
"There's going to be a little bit of bitterness among some Afrikaners, which I hope doesn't turn into aggression at the end of the day," said Marais, a Pretoria resident who owns two companies and employs 84 people. "But I've got this saying that I live by: 'If you can't beat the system, join it.' "
He is not alone. Many political analysts say that sizable segments of Afrikaners cast their votes for the ruling African National Congress, which won 69 percent of the total vote, or the leading opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, which represents a spectrum of voters of mixed races.
In addition, Afrikaners have increasingly moved from the world of public powerbrokers and civil service bureaucrats into the world of continental commerce; some have become economic kingpins around Africa, traveling the continent as accepted Africans, no longer as apartheid outcasts. The result, say political analysts, is that many Afrikaners have apparently adjusted from their loss of political power to focus more on economic power.
"In the last 10 years, the Afrikaner community has had considerable success in the economic realm inside and outside South Africa," said Paul Graham, executive director of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, a think tank in Pretoria and Cape Town. "If you go to the Abuja Sheraton [in Nigeria], you're going to find a lot of Afrikaans-speaking people in the lobby."
Nonetheless, the change in their political influence has been dramatic for the Afrikaners, who first came to South Africa in the mid-17th century and later ruled the country with an iron fist. The half-century era of the Afrikaner-dominated National Party apartheid system denied basic human rights to the majority black population as well as to those of mixed races and Indian descent, cramming them onto small areas of land, arresting and sometimes torturing dissenters, and pitting those of color against one another.
In 1999, the New National Party, the successor to the National Party, held 28 seats in the Parliament; in this month's election, it won just seven. In addition, it had representation in all nine provincial legislatures in 1999, but held onto seats in just two this year, the Northern and Western Cape. The other Afrikaner party, Freedom Front, or Vryheidsfront Plus, won four seats in this year's election, up from three in 1999.
Some observers believe that the change is what the constitution's framers had in mind all along for the Afrikaners, who make up just 5.5 percent of South Africa's population. Afrikaners speak their own language, a derivative of Dutch called Afrikaans, and have kept relatively separate culturally from English-speaking whites, who make up 3 percent of the population.
One prominent Afrikaner, Roelf Meyer, helped negotiate the end of apartheid with Cyril Ramaphosa of the African National Congress. After a 1992 breakdown during the negotiations on the future of South Africa, Meyer said, both sides embraced a new way of thinking that focused not on preserving a minority group's right, but the individual rights of all.
"I think we are seeing here the result of what I believed was the essence of the change, the paradigm shift, that took place during the negotiations," Meyer said. "We are seeing more specifically in this election than ever before that individuals are concentrating on their own interests, not on the interests of a minority group. People no longer feel they have to vote for a certain party to protect them."
But some analysts contend the long-held divisions among Afrikaners have in the last decade simply become more public.
"The Afrikaner always has had this mythology of unity," said Greg Mills, national director of the South African Institute of International Affairs, a Johannesburg think tank. "But the history of Afrikaner politics has traditionally been one of fissions and frictions and fractures and divisions."
And yet another perspective is that many Afrikaners were so fed up with the country's direction, or so apathetic, that they decided not to vote in this month's election.
"I hate politics," said Mark Drake, 28, an Afrikaans-speaking handyman of English descent. He said he voted only as a favor to his father, who had his identity card stolen on the eve of the elections. "I voted as my father would have, for the Democratic Alliance."
Drake said there are deep generational splits among white South Africans.
"Modern Afrikaners, people my age, are pretty liberal," said Drake, after installing a water pump at a Pretoria house. "The old generation, like my folks, are very against what is happening. There are still people who see South Africa as a country taken away from them."
Not Marais, the owner of the Porsche and two businesses.
"You have to be a little streetwise now; you have to get to know the system," he said. "You need to look differently at each situation, and you operate accordingly. The Afrikaner, what's happening now is that some are crawling back into the shell, and some are out there operating as an individual in a big society. Some of it is sad. But my feeling is, you learn nothing in life in good times; you only learn in bad times."
John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com
