I spent most of the last two days hanging out with two white Afrikaans men. They are both dedicated educators working at Tiger Kloof, a Round Square school located outside Vryburg. South Africa looks different when at their side than when hanging out with a black Tswsna woman.
I got to know Eddie when I brought an Athenian group to Vryburg five years ago. He and his wife, Ansie, invited me over for a brai on Wednesday evening. They have a lovely four-bedroom house in town, beautifully decorated, and we had a great time siting outside talking. Eddie said that 70% of the municipalities in South Africa were bankrupt or in danger of going bankrupt. (And my online research since suggests this information is accurate.) I found this stunning and asked Eddie what it was about. He said that in post-apartheid South Africa, municipalities almost all have more employees than their budgets can support. Eddie described this as ‘revolutionary rewards.’
The next day I visited Tiger Kloof. I spent most of the day with Chris, the Round Square Coordinator there. Tiger Kloof’s student body is 100% African or coloured. The faculty includes white and Indian faculty members. Chris and Eddie are two of the three white Afrikaans men who work there. Apparently the school has more support staff than it needs, but that the school keeps them on.
Like Eddie, Chris is helping to build a new South Africa. He said that a white farmer is murdered every week in South Africa–partly it’s robbery but partly it’s racial retribution. He knows 25 white couples from Vryburg, a small town, that have left South Africa in the last three to four years. Many are farmers who have gone to Canada. He said that not a day goes by when he and his wife don’t talk about moving out of the country for a few years.
When I got back to Claire’s place that day, she told me about a conflict that she had with two sets of parents. The parents came to school to complain about their children’s teacher. Claire said that she would meet with each set of parents separately, at which point one of the parent’s–a local politician–went off. He insulted Claire, said he would contact the ANC education office to complain, that he was going to go on Facebook to say the school was rubbish, that Claire was trying to be a white person, that white people took the African people’s land… Claire is a black Tswsna woman, but her husband is white man from the Netherlands. Eventually the politician calmed down, they had a meaningful conversation, and he apologized. Apparently, this kind of entitled behavior on the part of some black Africans is a feature of life in post-apartheid South Africa.
These seem like a kind of reparations and it’s interesting to think about what this might look like in the United States.
And many white people in South Africa are frightened.
No Foreign Lands 