Dialogue: South Africa - changed, unchanged, still curious

Why are so many South Africans emigrating to New Zealand? BOB WALLACE* says the answer lies in the paradoxes of what has always been, and still is, a very strange society.

In 1967, novelist Allen Drury, famous for his American fiction works Advise and Consent and A Shade of Difference, wrote a non-fiction book which summed up South Africa in the title A Very Strange Society. In 2001 it remains thus.

Drury placed his title in quotation marks deliberately, because the words were extracted from a comment made to him by a liberal young Pretoria professor. At the time, South Africa hung heavily at the bottom of the dark continent in the miasma of apartheid.

Today the odious policies of separatism have been broken up, but the enigmas and paradoxes continue. It is a land that is at once First World and Third World, and sometimes in between.

Drury saw good and bad in South Africa in the apartheid era. The same can be said today, under black rule.

Try telling that to the many thousands of South Africans who now live in New Zealand and you are unlikely to get a positive reaction.

That is why they are here for one reason or another. They have made what is usually the traumatic decision to pull up their roots, replant themselves in another society and find another way of life.

Debate has focused on whether they are driven here by anathema to being governed by a non-white regime or by the daily fear of being unable to sustain their own personal and property security.

Security is almost universally put forward as the reason for their flight, yet there is no doubt that, for some emigrants, the deep-seated driver is the reversal of racial power, as some of those who stay will aver.

For all that, there can be little dispute that the key factor for most is an escape from the security problem.

Ironically, the emigration wave is sweeping along with it many South Africans who were liberal enough in apartheid days to push for change. Personal danger transcends racial and political leanings.

But, in keeping with this different land, the security situation can leave people either devastated or untouched.

Provided reasonable precautions are taken (avoid taking taxis, lock yourself in if travelling in a private car, make sure you know where you are going, and so on), tourists can move around this still attractive and economical ($1 equals 3.5 rand) destination with little more concern than visiting, for instance, many Asian countries.

Most of the striking and well-manicured city of Cape Town, draped around the lower flanks of Table Mountain, is still readily accessible, although these days fewer whites use the suburban train service and the Cape flats remain an amber-light area.

The northern suburbs of Johannesburg are still opulent and bustling, with clear signs of development and economic activity.

There are vast upmarket shopping precincts, such as those at Sandton and Hyde Park, where fashionable people cruise and take coffee.

There are also beggars of all colours at traffic lights. Turn the coin over further and you uncover darker stories.

One friend said he had been car-jacked at the gate of his Bryanston home and had narrowly escaped a second attempt.

Now his street containing 40 homes has a single guarded barrier entry point, and other former access roads have been sealed off.

Yet locals, including women on their own, appear to have no more qualms about driving to and from homes at night than they would in Auckland.

The African driver of an airport shuttle bus, like many others, cautions against visiting the formerly trendy dormitory and entertainment areas of Hillbrow and Berea, let alone the city centre, where deserted former office blocks, complete with their workspace partitions, now provide cheap accommodation for black workers. His own choice of residence is the north-western suburb of Randburg.

A young Indian man on a flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg describes Johannesburg as a hellhole. His family still live in the southern area of Lenasia, designated for Indians in the apartheid era, because their Muslim friends are there.

In the country areas of the KwaZulu Natal midlands and further south near the Drakensberg, racial relationships appear largely unchanged from earlier days, yet white-owned cane farms north of Durban are burned out and there is a fear of the spread of Zimbabwe-style farm invasions.

In the underberg, the farmers' concern is for unchecked cattle rustling by thieves from the independent neighbouring mountain kingdom of Lesotho. The same thing was going on in the 1950s and 60s.

Former President Nelson Mandela remains the nation's steady beacon, while his successor, Thabo Mbeki, is seen as an erratic light.

After 10 years of racial freedom that have been calmer than many expected, there is among some a concern about what the next 10 years will bring, particularly from the ever-assertive Zulu faction.

Everywhere there is talk of the excesses of Government ministers, or of symbols of the present regime such as the Employment Equity Act, under which employment of workers has to reflect the demographic balance.

While some still gripe about the act, others point out that the Government has effectively abandoned enforcement because finding blacks to fill many positions is not feasible.

Paradoxically, whites can now be seen working as waiters and carpark attendants, jobs that were once almost totally the preserve of blacks.

Population figures remain a guess. There has been a significant outflow of whites, and an even bigger inflow of blacks from neighbouring countries as well as states as distant as Nigeria.

Aids, the 21st-century scourge of Africa, has scythed through the black population, accounting for as much as 60 per cent of deaths.

This epidemic disease has put the brakes on population growth, holding the figure below 40 million.

Combined with an increasing tendency to birth control, the effect of this means that it is now predicted that the country's population is unlikely to exceed 50 million for many years.

The elements that make up South Africa today would not be complete without another oddity.

While whites fly to other lands to escape burglary, assault and worse, and seek a better future for their families, some of their young are returning, with new hope and open minds about the future - whether their country is simply as it was liberated, the rainbow nation, or whether it continues to remain a very strange society.

* Public relations consultant Bob Wallace, a former foreign correspondent and Herald journalist, has just returned to South Africa after a gap of 25 years.