In Nation Remade by Mandela, Social Equality Remains Elusive

By LYDIA POLGREEN and MARCUS MABRY

When Freddy Kenny started his business selling vegetables out of a battered pickup truck in the 1970s, a siren used to sound over this city, his hometown, every night at 9, signaling to him and every other black person that they must leave the city limits immediately or face arrest. These days, the only thing looming is a 20-foot statue of Nelson Mandela, the man who led South Africa out of apartheid and into an era of democracy, his fist raised in a black power salute. Mr. Kenny, now a supermarket magnate, donated the bronze likeness of Mr. Mandela, South Africa’s first black president, and had it erected atop the city’s highest point, Naval Hill. “Madiba always watched over us when he lived,” he said Saturday, referring to Mr. Mandela by his clan name. “Now he will watch over us for eternity.” Mr. Kenny’s new life, with the perks of privilege of his white counterparts, is a testament to the commitment Mr. Mandela, who died Thursday and whose funeral is next Sunday, placed on making racial reconciliation the centerpiece of his presidency. He led a party that had fought an armed insurgency against the apartheid government, yet when he emerged from prison he preached forgiveness and harmony. Stripped of bitterness, Mr. Mandela negotiated a peaceful end to white rule, giving birth to the rainbow nation. But racial equality at the ballot box has proved much easier to achieve than social and economic equality. While Mr. Kenny, a regular at the bar of the Schoeman Park Golf Club, a formerly all-white watering hole for the city’s elite, has caught up with and surpassed many white South Africans, he is an exception to a rule of lopsided opportunity and advancement that remains one of the most daunting challenges facing the nation today. Since the end of apartheid, the government has built well over two million homes, brought electricity to millions of households and vastly increased the number of poor people with access to potable water. The average annual incomes of black-led households almost tripled from 2001 to 2011, according to census figures released late last year, and a growing percentage of the adult black population has gone to high school, with an increasing sliver going to college. But black South Africans are still very far behind whites, and by some measures falling further back. In 2001, white-led households typically earned close to $17,000 more than their black counterparts, at current exchange rates. By 2011, that disparity had grown to nearly $30,000. And while the nation has made headway in reducing the number of black people with no education or only a few years of primary school, very few whites have that barrier to overcome; to the contrary, they have advanced to college and beyond at higher rates since apartheid ended. The nation remains deeply divided in social spheres as well. According to the SA Reconciliation Barometer, a survey of racial and social attitudes, less than 40 percent of South Africans socialize with people of another race. Just 22 percent of white South Africans and a fifth of black South Africans live in racially integrated neighborhoods. Schools remain heavily segregated, too: Only 11 percent of white children go to integrated schools, and just 15 percent of black children do. During his presidency, Mr. Mandela helped keep decades of oppression and imbalances from boiling over. He encouraged blacks to be patient about acquiring the material goods and services that even lower-class whites took for granted. He asked whites to have faith in multiracial democracy and not flee the country. But through the long years of his declining health, many asked what would become of South Africa’s relative racial comity once he was gone. Both through his words and his actions, Mr. Mandela gave South Africans “something to live up to,” Chanter Jacobs, 19, a white fashion student in Johannesburg, said before Mr. Mandela’s death. “He’s like a beacon, and you want to make him proud because he’s done a lot for our country.” Without Mr. Mandela’s living example, Ms. Jacobs worried that South Africans would not try as hard to live up to his ideals. She feared relations between the races could worsen, leading the economy to decline, too.

“I think something might change,” she said. “I just don’t know how or what.”

Others were more sanguine.

“I have a 9-year-old, a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old, and I’m very happy to stay in this country,” said Debbie Angus, a white property manager in the upscale Johannesburg suburb of Sandton. She credited Mr. Mandela with uniting multiracial South Africa into one people and said: “I think things are going to just carry forward like they are at the moment. I think he’s laid the groundwork for future generations.”

In few places is the legacy of racial separation in South Africa more bitter than in the city of Bloemfontein. In the second half of the 19th century, it was the capital of the Orange Free State, an independent Afrikaner republic that was in some ways a prototype of what would become apartheid. It was the city where a group of Afrikaner elites gathered at the all-white Ramblers Hall in 1914 to form the National Party, which would win power in 1948 and entrench racial separation and white supremacy as official government policy. But it is also a city with a rich history of black activism. It was in a church school here that a group of black community leaders met in 1912 to form the precursor to the African National Congress. In a speech delivered on a visit to the city in 1997 while he was president, Mr. Mandela hailed Bloemfontein as a symbol of the country’s extraordinary transformation.

“Here the forces and the peoples who make us what we are today interacted and clashed,” he said.

He continued: “Bloemfontein has come full circle. Once an outpost of an invading colonial force and then the capital of a republic that excluded the majority, today it is the seat of a democratically elected nonracial provincial government.” Yet deep fissures remain, and long-held prejudices are not easily papered over. A crude video made by residents of an all-white dorm at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein in 2008 showed the students berating and humiliating black domestic workers in their dorm, forcing them to eat stew into which one student appeared to have urinated. The students in the video, which was apparently made to protest the planned integration of the residence hall, were expelled and faced criminal charges.

“Racism is never very far below the surface in Bloemfontein,” said David Muthavhatsindi, a retired insurance broker who now runs a computer training school. “It is always with us, waiting to pounce.”

But even once all-white institutions, like the wood-paneled Ramblers Hall are eager for black members as membership has declined and a new black elite has arisen.

“It isn’t like the old days,” Johan Van Standen, the club’s manager, said recently as he restocked the beer fridges in a bar lined with dusty, sepia-toned photographs of rugby teams from decades long past. “We need everyone to survive. This is a place for anyone in the community to come together.”

Men like Mr. Kenny, with their wealth and status, live easily in a multiracial world. But for most black South Africans, race remains a formidable obstacle. Like many young, poor blacks, Mamello Tlakeli, 27, said she had no meaningful contact with white people. In her last job, as a waitress at a chain seafood restaurant, she said racial prejudice from whites was a constant irritant. Afrikaans-speaking customers would sometimes demand that she speak Afrikaans, even when they could clearly speak English, she said. Most young black South Africans do not speak the language, though many of their parents were forced to learn it in school, a policy that became a rallying point in the anti-apartheid movement.

“Even ice they would order in Afrikaans,” she said.

During staff meals, white and black employees would sit separately, not by force but by habit.

“It was always very uncomfortable with white colleagues,” she said.

Recently unemployed and working as a volunteer at a charity in the hope of getting some professional experience, Ms. Tlakeli said white people in South Africa continued to prosper as they did before apartheid, but blacks remained in the rear.

“There is a huge gap between black and white,” she said. “The rainbow nation is a dream, not a reality.”