| CAPE TOWN, South Africa — When South Africa celebrates its10th anniversary of democratic rule on April 27, it will do so in a spirit of triumph.
Once one of the world’s most bitterly divided countries, it narrowly avoided civil war, dismantled the officially-sanctioned racist policy of apartheid, it launched a non-racial democracy and now lays claim to Africa’s most robust economy.
“Fortunately, we survived,” said Cynthia Mose, an elementary school principal in one of Cape Town’s black townships. “We are trying to build a nation, reconcile, patch whatever was wrong.”
But the anniversary will also provide a moment for sober reflection, and even South Africa’s most committed supporters acknowledge the country still faces considerable challenges.
“South Africa finds itself at a critical juncture, a time both of great opportunity and a great number of missed opportunities,” the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, a Cape Town-based organization with church ties, said in anticipation of the 10th anniversary.
Despite progress, including the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which met from 1996-98 and was headed by Anglican archbishop and Nobel Laureate, Desmond Tutu, the Cape Town institute said “talk of the ‘South African miracle’ oftenmasks the level of resentment, alienation and disillusionment with which people view the political transition.”
The resentment is visible not only by bitter conservative whites who stubbornly cling to memories of an era black South Africans would rather forget. Alienation, some of it subtle but still discernible, is often expressed by blacks, such as the cool, thinly-veiled resentment of a tour guide showing a group of visitors the prison on Robben Island. There, former president Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) served years of imprisonment.
“Some are in the government; I am still here,” the guide, a former prisoner and himself an ANC member, said recently.
The remark was not a swipe at Mandela, who remains a revered and almost untouchable figure of adulation. Rather, it seemed directed at key ANC leaders — such as Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki — who spent years in exile while much of the hard political work in the country was carried out, often at great personal risk, by now-forgotten activists.
The remark also points to economic resentments: while the ANC-led government can point with pride to housing and public service improvements in black townships and the growth of an expanding black-middle class, a third of people in South Africa are jobless. Economic disparities between blacks and whites also remain considerable.
And, tellingly, in a country which is now touting itself as a burgeoning high-tech paradise, positions go unfilled because thousands of young people do not have adequate job experience or educational backgrounds.
In a 2002 survey of Cape Town residents, Wired News reported recently, two-thirds of respondents said they had never used a computer; barely one in 10 had any access to the Internet.
“The primary challenges remain economic,” said Donald Shriver, former president of Union Theological Seminary in New York. Shriver, a scholar who studies the politics and theology of forgiveness and reconciliation, recently participated in a conference at Robben Island on historical memory and healing in South Africa.
Like other people who have visited South Africa before and after the end of apartheid, Shriver said the changes under way should not be minimized.
“It’s a lot better country than it was in 1986,” the year he first visited South Africa, Shriver told Ecumenical News International, crediting Mandela “a secular saint” and Tutu “a religious saint” for a transition that avoided major bloodshed.
But Shriver, like others with religious ties to South Africa, sounded a note of regret that one of the key players in the struggle against apartheid — the church — is searching for a role in a changed environment.
“If you are criticizing the ‘sins of power,’ what in contemporary South Africa constitutes sin? That’s an open question, and church leaders and theologians are struggling with that,” Shriver said.
Church leaders who once denounced apartheid now feel sidelined, and are having to address a new and truculent set of problems and concerns, whether they be an horrific AIDS epidemic or the mounting political crisis in neighboring Zimbabwe. That has sometimes pitted them against the South Africa government — a new, and often uncomfortable, role.
“The challenge is to engage with the government critically but not act as if the solidarity we share with them is lost,” said Joseph Mdhlela, an editor and spokesman for the South African Council of Churches (SACC), the country’s biggest ecumenical organization and which had a prominent role during the years of struggle against apartheid.
Sometimes the benefit to society at large has been the churches’ loss: a number of prominent black theologians are now serving in government, as is Frank Chikane, the former SACC general secretary, who is Mbeki’s chief of staff.
One result? “The church,” said Charles Villa-Vicencio, the director of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, “has lost many of its prophets.”
|
