“The white people are running away. They don’t want to be our neighbors.”
/Ventersdorp, South Africa — On the edge of this rural town, poor blacks have been moving into a line of new tin shacks across the road from an affluent white enclave. Now, the whites are taking action. “For Sale” signs are posted on many of their large brick houses.
“The white people are running away,” said Sara Letsie, who moved into her shack two months ago. “They don’t want to be our neighbors.”
Lea Victor is one of the few whites remaining in the neighborhood. “They are afraid of the blacks on the other side,” she said, pointing one by one toward five of her neighbors’ houses. “All of them are selling. They have started to take their stuff out.”
When Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first black president in 1994, one of his biggest challenges was bringing his ideals of reconciliation, tolerance and forgiveness to hundreds of conservative, white-run towns. In rural areas, where 40 percent of the country’s population lives, the apartheid system of racial segregation was deeply entrenched, more so than anywhere else in the nation.
Today, blacks live in town and are free to eat and drink anywhere, and they go to school with whites. But as in most parts of the country, whites still dominate the local economy. Whites own nearly all of the most lucrative farms around Ventersdorp, with blacks working as their laborers or servants.
The white community is a meld of liberals and conservative Afrikaners, many of whom mourned the death of Mandela.
Blacks say they no longer fear attacks or evictions by white extremists. But many still don’t enjoy, or can’t afford, the same privileges as whites. A private primary school, the town’s best, is all-white because few blacks can afford the fees. Only two of the 65 members of the Golf Club are black. And blacks say whites still move to the front of the line in stores.
Blacks and whites say they never socialize with each other. At restaurants, it’s rare to see people of different races sitting together. That is true in other South African towns and cities as well. Less than 40 percent of South Africans interact socially with people of another race, according to the SA Reconciliation Barometer, a public opinion poll on race, political and social relations.
“I have no white friends,” said Tommy Lerefolo, a black municipal official.
Many blacks still depend on whites for jobs in Ventersdorp. But black residents and community leaders say many have been fired and evicted from white-owned farms since Terre’Blanche’s murder. White community leaders deny that. “We don’t employ a lot of blacks anyway. Because they steal,” De Bruin said.
ANC officials are still struggling to redress the inequalities of apartheid. In Tshing, electricity, clean water and other basic services have improved. A few thousand houses have been built, but more are needed. Officials plan to relocate more than 1,100 families to the edge of Ventersdorp, essentially joining it with Tshing.
