-Caveat Lector-
White Anxiety: Tensions Manifest in a South African Minority
AP
28-APR-99
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) -- The adults balanced on tiny chairs, knees
sticking up awkwardly like the legs of a praying mantis.
Seated in a classroom where their 5-year-olds squirm and chatter all day, the
parents in a white neighborhood of Johannesburg were holding their annual
meeting -- discussing curriculum changes and whether to end the school's
policy of wearing smocks. On the walls around them, construction-paper Easter
bunnies and glittery collages hung gaily.
So to an outsider the level of tension among these mainly white South Africa
moms and dads was startling. It was the kind of white anxiety that frequently
confronts an observer here ahead of South Africa's second all-race election on
June 2.
We are in the new South Africa and must adapt, some parents said. Others
worried that traditions and academic standards are being threatened. Left
unsaid was that the new South Africa is governed by blacks, and the new
government-mandated curriculum is aimed at the country's black majority.
Speakers interrupted each other. Voices rose in anger. One mother said she
made a mistake in sending her child to the private nursery school.
Since the 1994 elections that ended apartheid, one therapist says she has seen
an "exponential increase" in white anxiety. Such stress is typical of a
society in change, said Natalie Edkins, who practices in Johannesburg's
northern suburbs.
"Very often people feel angry when they are out of control of their
circumstances, and I think white South Africans feel this way," she said.
White anxiety surfaces in the constant episodes of minor road rage along the
tranquil streets of all-white suburbs. Or in the passenger loudly denouncing
the lack of luggage carts at Johannesburg airport as typical of South Africa,
as though no other airports in the world run out of carts. Or in the resentful
tone of voice in dealings with black bureaucrats.
The impressions can't be quantified. But the tension seems more palpable among
whites used to privilege and control than the less affluent black population,
which has shown a remarkable patience in waiting for their lives to improve.
Many whites, to be sure, display pleasant behavior, and people tend to be more
serene in the coastal cities where the pace is slower.
But the sense of a white society on the edge is inescapable.
Such anxiety is not entirely new.
Before the end of apartheid, there was the constant fear of black rebellion,
of losing power to the majority. Belonging to the oppressor group -- whether
guilty of specific acts or not -- also can twist psyches.
In his 1986 book "Waiting," a study of whites in South Africa, anthropologist
Vincent Crapanzano wrote of the "primordial fear that comes from the absence
of any possibility of a vital relationship with most of the people around
one."
Marthinus van Schalkwyk, leader of the New National Party, put in this way in
Parliament last month: "Apartheid was the Afrikaners' self-imposed
concentration camp of the mind." The party imposed and maintained apartheid,
and was dominated by Afrikaners, who make up 3 million of the country's 4.5
million whites. Whites comprise 11 percent of South Africa's population.
White anxiety past and present, of course, is an insignificant burden in the
face of what the nonwhite population suffered _ systematic deprivation of the
most basic of freedoms and services, violent repression, strict segregation.
Millions of blacks today still live in terrible poverty.
For them, change usually means hope. Not so for many whites.
More change is on the way. The June 2 election will mark the departure of the
familiar, conciliatory Nelson Mandela. The African National Congress will win
overwhelmingly and promises to accelerate the pace of promoting black
opportunity and ending white privilege.
Afrikaners were always assured of jobs for life in the bureaucracy. That
certainty is over.
Crime, often gratuitously violent, has moved into formerly immune white
neighborhoods with a vengeance. At virtually every all-white social gathering,
people talk about the latest assaults on friends or family like Manhattanites
discussing co-op prices.
The parents at the nursery school were no different. The committee chairman
started off the meeting with the announcement that the principal's house had
broken into the night before and her 60-year-old housekeeper raped.
As more and more whites emigrate, those left behind see their peer group
shrinking and, according to Edkins, ask themselves, "Are we staying behind on
a sinking ship?"
One place where the anxiety level seems to be low, not surprisingly, is among
young people who have come of age in the post-apartheid world.
An Afrikaner student, talking recently with an American about going to college
in the United States, showed a refreshing bit of optimism about his country.
"I really believe we will get there," he said.
Copyright 1999& The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may
not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Robert F. Tatman
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