South Africa has rarely been out of the headlines in 2018. In late February, the South African government voted to amend the constitution to allow for the expropriation of land from white farmers without compensation. The vote put an international spotlight on the many problems plaguing the country. In January, President Donald Trump was reported to have referred to several countries, including African ones, as “shithole countries.” This prompted a representative from the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa’s largest political party, to issue a response which opened with the words “ours is not a shithole country.”
I recently moved out of South Africa with my husband and our two young children. We had arrived there in late 2015 for my husband to start a postdoctoral fellowship. Our home was in a small city called Potchefstroom, located about two hours by car from both Johannesburg and Pretoria, the capital of South Africa.
Donald Trump had yet to utter his infamous phrase, but I had not lived in South Africa long before I started to concur. To me, everything in Potchefstroom was dirty and broken. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do. The tap water was not safe to drink, so each week we schlepped big containers of water from one of the “water shops” located on virtually every street corner. Whenever I went out, I was solicited for money by beggars. Potchefstroom locals told me the streets were divided up by local “begging gangs.” A new beggar who ventured onto someone else’s turf would be beaten.
The few children’s amenities I encountered fell far short of basic standards of health and safety that we take for granted in America. Next to a church near our home was an ancient rusty swing set that looked as if it would break my children’s arms and give them tetanus at the same time. We still went there occasionally for lack of any alternatives, but later it was locked to the general public because of problems with theft.
I had to instruct family abroad never to mail us gifts. The post office was in the habit of slapping huge “customs duties” on incoming packages, even if they were clearly marked as gifts.
The tension between blacks and whites was almost palpable. We lived in a dingy, older apartment, but when I walked out my front door, the black people in the street looked at me the way French peasants must have looked at Marie Antoinette walking out of Versailles. Once, we were in a supermarket when a white man observed a black man shoplifting. He grabbed hold of the man and started calling for security. A crowd gathered and it seemed as if the races might come to blows. Fortunately, security arrived quickly, and the incident blew over.
The fact that South Africa has problems is well known; it did not surprise me. What did amaze me, however, was the way most of the white South Africans I met truly loved living there. Shortly after we arrived, a lady said to me, “Isn’t it great around here? The weather is good. There’s so much space. We have such easy living in South Africa.” I regularly heard comments like that over the two years we lived there. And I should note that I mostly associated with middle-class people, not the mega-rich. Huge numbers of white South Africans moved abroad after the end of apartheid. But my impression is that the ones who remain will be almost impossible to dislodge. They are in it for the long haul, and they are doing what it takes to carve out a life for themselves. They have a sense of mission in trying to keep their country from total collapse.
Their devotion to South Africa has deep historical roots. Potchefstroom is a center of Afrikaner cultural identity. Afrikaners (also called Boers) are white South Africans descended from the Dutch, German, and French Huguenot settlers who arrived in the 17th and 18th centuries. Initially, they farmed the Western Cape. Later, English settlers arrived there, and the British government took over. As a result, in the 1830’s and 40’s, Afrikaners started loading all their belongings into wagons and moving to the frontier. This is called the “Great Trek.” The freedom to practice their Reformed Protestant faith without interference from the “worldly” English was one of the main reasons why they left the Western Cape. In the personal mythology of the Afrikaners, the Great Trek is a bit like the ancient Israelites’ Exodus. Cities like Potchefstroom are part of their promised land.
Afrikaners are fiercely proud of their culture. This is often manifested in their protection of their language, Afrikaans, from being swallowed up by English. Afrikaans—sometimes called “Kitchen Dutch” or “Pidgin Dutch”—is largely derived from Dutch, but with a drastically simplified grammar and a different accent. Dutch speakers from the Netherlands often find Afrikaans a bit silly, but Afrikaners will proudly assert that great works of literature and poetry have been produced in their language.
I have blond hair and blue eyes like a typical Afrikaner, so people in the street usually addressed me in Afrikaans. When I indicated I speak English, their response could be distinctly unfriendly. This hostility toward the English language is both historical and contemporary. During the Boer Wars between the British and the Afrikaners, Potchefstroom was a significant location. British concentration camps—one of which was located in Potchefstroom—killed tens of thousands of Afrikaner women and children. Understandably, Afrikaners still bear hard feelings about this. Their reaction is similar to the way some Americans from the South still feel about the Civil War. A colleague of my husband told us that his grandmother lost her husband in the Second Boer War. When he was a child she admonished him that he should never learn to speak “the language of the enemy.”
But the issue is also relevant in a modern way. Afrikaners believe the current government of South Africa is trying to marginalize their culture—and replacing Afrikaans with English is part of their strategy. We witnessed this up close at North-West University, where my husband did his postdoctoral work. Public universities are required to offer all courses in English. The government bills this as a way of making higher education available to black students, but it also pushes the Afrikaans language out of an important sphere of life. The Potchefstroom campus of North-West University is officially bilingual, but English is quickly becoming dominant. Some students are taking a stand. My husband taught a class—in English—and one of the Afrikaners insisted on getting simultaneous translation into Afrikaans even though she spoke perfect English. She seems to be fighting a losing battle, though.
Replacing Afrikaans with English is just one of the ways the government is overhauling the Potchefstroom campus of North-West University. The school was founded in 1869 as a Reformed seminary to train pastors to shepherd the souls who had arrived in the Great Trek. Afrikaner lore tells of poor farmers who scrimped and saved to donate to the seminary. They believed their land needed good pastors. The seminary eventually grew into a full-fledged private university, the Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education , which educated luminaries like F.W. de Klerk. However, in the 1990’s, the university became a public institution and subsequently merged with two other universities under the name North-West University. Depending on whom you talk to, the decision to go public was motivated either by the legitimate fear of losing the university’s charter or by greed for government subsidies. Either way, the outcome was predictable enough. Today, the South African government is busy appointing Marxists to leadership positions, imposing racial quotas, and mandating that the curriculum be “de-colonized.”
It must be painful for Afrikaners to witness the abolition of the university that used to be the pride of their culture. But if it is getting them down, they rarely let it show. Their optimism is relentless. They truly believe things can still get better. And that’s not just talk. Many of the Afrikaners we knew had lived abroad at some point but chose to return.
We were good friends with an engineer and his wife, who have two young daughters. They told us he did not have many prospects for career advancement because he is white. At one point, he was offered a job in the United Kingdom with a good salary and relocation package. So we were astonished when they turned it down. His company in South Africa made a decent counterproposal, and they preferred to stay in their homeland.
And it is not always just Afrikaners who love living in South Africa. We knew a couple from Italy who had moved to South Africa shortly after the end of apartheid. I once asked them if they intended to return to Italy when they reached retirement age. They said no. The standard of living they enjoyed in Potchefstroom was much higher than what they could expect on a retirement pension back in Italy.
That standard of living can be considerable. A middle-class salary can buy a sizeable house with land. Almost everyone we knew employed both a cleaning lady and a groundskeeper (known as a “garden boy” even if he is in his 40’s). The minimum wage for a domestic worker is currently $1.20 (15 rand) per hour. These people bring costs beyond their wages, however. Our pediatrician told me that if I hired a cleaning lady I should get my children vaccinated for tuberculosis. A woman from an impoverished neighborhood might bring TB germs into our apartment. One older Afrikaner lady I knew needed to simplify her life after her husband died suddenly. One of her first moves was to dismiss her garden boy. “He always needed help with a problem. He always needed a loan. And we had to help him because we were all he had in this world,” she said.
A nice house and garden can only go so far in shielding Afrikaners from the deteriorating conditions in their country. But they are finding ways to make life bearable. One thing we noticed is that they look out for one another in informal ways. Our car once stalled by the roadside. As we waited for a friend to pick us up, other white drivers were constantly stopping to ask if they could assist. It felt like “white solidarity.”
Afrikaners are also organized in their efforts. They have established private organizations to do things the government is failing to do—fix potholes, run neighborhood watch groups, monitor drinking-water quality, and even manage landfill sites.
In Potchefstroom, the local private security company, Mooirivier Beskerming, functioned as a kind of private police force. The real police in South Africa are unreliable. People told me that reporting crime is a waste of time. Mooirivier Beskerming is used by about 75 percent of the white population of Potchefstroom. I regularly saw their cars patrolling the streets. I almost never saw the real police—except when they were handing out traffic tickets. Mooirivier Beskerming officers regularly intervene in situations they encounter while out on patrol, even if the people involved are not clients. They are essentially the only force for law and order on the streets.
Private security is a booming industry all over South Africa. The country has one of the world’s highest rates of violent crime. Last year, an average of 52 people were murdered there each day. Afrikaners turn to private security companies because highly restrictive gun-control laws make it difficult legally to own a firearm for self-defense. And one friend told us he believes the government is working on disarming the population by quietly rescinding existing gun permits as they come up for renewal.
The laws regarding shooting burglars are another reason for the popularity of private security companies. In South Africa, if you shoot and kill a burglar in your home you may face murder charges. If you only wound him, you might be ordered to pay his medical costs. One friend told me she prefers buying a comprehensive package from Mooirivier Beskerming to owning a gun because of the legal nightmare that would ensue if she shot a burglar. Another friend was less moderate in his remarks: “If you kill a burglar, the incentive is to drive out to the desert and bury the body.”
The vote for expropriation of land from white farmers was a significant symbolic move, but it is still unclear what will happen next. Cyril Ramaphosa became president of South Africa and head of the ANC in February. He ousted the hopelessly corrupt President Jacob Zuma. Our Afrikaner friends were optimistic that Ramaphosa would be a voice for reason. Thus, they were disappointed when, just weeks into his tenure, Ramaphosa supported the expropriation vote. One Afrikaner friend described it as “a rude surprise.”
The vote was a political expediency for Ramaphosa. South Africa will hold elections in 2019, and the ANC is expected to take a beating thanks to Zuma’s unpopularity. The biggest electoral threat to the ANC is the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, which describes itself as a “radical, leftist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movement.” Members have been calling for land expropriation for years. Even before the vote, the EFF was encouraging its followers to seize and occupy white-owned land.
The EFF won only six percent of the vote in the last national election, but the party is expected to make significant gains. Media-savvy leader Julius Malema made international headlines in March when he told supporters, “We are cutting the throat of whiteness.” EFF campaign material often features headshots of Malema in a beret, an image clearly intended to evoke Che Guevara. The EFF has little traction in Potchefstroom, but we once drove by a homeless encampment next to a major highway; it was full of EFF posters, including one huge one that read “Flushing toilets for all.”
The vote for land expropriation took place after we had already moved out of South Africa. But my impression from Afrikaner friends I am still in touch with is that their community is taking it in stride. This is just one more setback among many. One Afrikaner told me South Africa has vast tracts of land that are white-owned but unused. He hopes Ramaphosa will focus expropriation on that type of land. This could placate ANC voters who are considering defecting to the EFF. My Afrikaner friend said Ramaphosa is a former businessman, and thus he must understand the importance of maintaining stability.
And so it goes. The Afrikaners keep holding on to hope in the face of relentless adversity. They have the same indomitable spirit as their ancestors who made the Great Trek. I hope for their sake that their optimism turns out to be justified.
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