Apartheid South Africa looked after
white people and nobody else. Now some of its white communities face a level of
deprivation, or of violence, which threatens their future in the country. Everyone here, regardless of colour, tells you that white people are still
riding high. They run the economy. They have a disproportionate amount of influence in
politics and the media. They still have the best houses and most of the best
jobs. All of this is true but it is not the only picture. Look below the surface and you will find poverty and a sense of growing
vulnerability. The question I have come to South Africa to answer is whether white people
genuinely have a future here. The answer, as with so many similar existential questions, is "Yes - but…" Working-class white people, most of them Afrikaans-speakers, are going through
an intense crisis. But you will not read about it in the newspapers or see it
reported on television because their plight seems to be something arising out of
South Africa's bad old past...
But the people who are suffering now are the weakest and most vulnerable members
of the white community.
Ernst Roets, a leading Afrikaans campaigner from the AfriForum organisation,
took me to a squatter camp outside the country's capital, Pretoria. A white
squatter camp. Semi-skilled white people have little chance of getting a job when so many
black South Africans are unemployed. There is another group of white Afrikaners, far higher up the social scale,
who are deeply threatened - in this case, literally. Virtually every week the
press here report the murders of white farmers, though you will not hear much
about it in the media outside South Africa. In South Africa you are twice as likely to be murdered if you are a white
farmer than if you are a police officer - and the police here have a
particularly dangerous life. The killings of farmers are often particularly
brutal. Belinda van Nord, the daughter and sister of the men who died, told me how
dangerous the lives of white people in the countryside have become. The police,
she said, had seemed to show little interest in this case. In the little graveyard where her father and brother are buried there are two
other graves of farmers murdered recently. The wonderful landscape which
surrounds it has become a killing ground. There used to be 60,000 white farmers in South Africa. In 20 years that
number has halved. In the old days, the apartheid system looked after whites and did very little
for anyone else. Nowadays white people here are on their own. Those who fit in and succeed will certainly have a future. As for the rest,
there are no guarantees whatsoever.
