World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [52]
2 Although the United States was involved in Angola’s strife in the 1970s and 1980s, it lost interest when the Cold War ended.
The question for the other countries of southern Africa—all of which still have starkly market-dominant white minorities—is whether they can avoid Angola’s fate. In Zimbabwe, millions of dollars worth of sugar, tobacco, and maize has gone up in flames as gangs of landless “war veterans” continue to invade, loot, and burn white-owned commercial farms. In Namibia, widely praised for its racial harmony, President Nujoma recently condemned his country’s white farmers for their imperialist exploitation. “We have the capacity to fight you,” he declared at another point. “We will get you. I warn those whites it is the first and last time I hear you insulting us.”
Meanwhile, all hopes are on South Africa. Perhaps, inspired by Nelson Mandela’s inclusive vision, the country can beat the region’s bloody record. This was not the view expressed by the African National Congress (ANC) official who, stopped in November 1997 for driving while intoxicated, told the policeman: “When Mandela dies, we will kill you whites like flies.”
3
Market-Dominant Whites in Southern Africa
In September 1997, I was invited by a young Afrikaner professor whom I’ll call Lucien to give some lectures at the University of South Africa, better known as UNISA, in Johannesburg. When I walked into UNISA’s lecture room I was taken aback. I had of course expected racial imbalance. Everyone knew that seventy years of white-minority rule would have lasting, nefarious effects. Still, I was not prepared to see an entire room filled with only white faces (and perhaps one person of South Asian descent). South Africa’s demographics are roughly the opposite of America’s: 77 percent of the population is black and 11 percent is white. In 1997, Mandela and his ANC party had been in power three years. Yet in one of the country’s major universities—at a lecture on democracy and race, no less—there was not a single black professor or student in the room.
After the lecture I asked to see Soweto, one of the unimaginably squalid, teeming black “townships” that surround South Africa’s urban centers. (Soweto, whose name originated as an abbreviation for South Western Township, was the site of the famous 1976 police massacre.) My hosts looked stricken. This could probably, possibly, perhaps be arranged, they equivocated, mumbling something about the difficulty of finding cars and drivers. But for the moment something else had already been planned. Along with a few other professors, I was going to Lucien’s house near Pretoria, the country’s genteel capital, for lunch. Lucien’s wife and family were waiting.
I’m not sure exactly what I expected Lucien’s home to be like, but I wasn’t close. Lucien’s “home” turned out to include a private safari park, covering not tens or hundreds, but thousands of acres of breathtakingly serene grassy slopes filled with waterfalls, streams, zebras, giraffes, hippo pools, ostriches, kingfishers, impala, kudu, gemsbok—seemingly every species of bird and antelope. Lucien’s wife Marina, a beautiful woman with some Italian ancestry, greeted us at the lodge with a rifle and three adorable daughters and gave us a private tour in a jeep she drove herself. We picnicked outside an 1800-era stone and timber-beamed farmhouse, which Marina’s brother operated as an inn. Lunch was grilled cheese sandwiches and warthog pie—I thought they were kidding, but it was a specialty of the house—served to us by a black manservant in a white jacket.
The really amazing thing was that, among whites in South Africa, Lucien and Marina didn’t count as wealthy. Lucien described himself to me as a struggling, middle-class descendant of Boer farmers. Land, yes, they had—he and his family never ceased being grateful for, and humbled by, the beauty of their surroundings.