South Africa is hard on Americans. We stay, or we keep returning, because of the beauty of the land, the insane plenty of its resources, the fascination of its diverse cultures, and its spiritual wealth in the form of people of depth and conviction. We sometimes think that, with some tidying up, this could be America. But many of us are getting frustrated, or at least coming to the realization—which battles the Walt Disney ethos of our upbringing—that progress is not inevitable, in spite of a lot of peoplebest efforts; that things could even get much worse. There is an undeniable distance between the personality of Nelson Mandela and media images of multiracial ecstasy on the one hand, and the actual probability of lives improving on the other. Optimistic forecasts of economic growth are for 3% a year. The available workforce is growing at about 6% a year, so that there is probably not going to be any drop in the unemployment rate of more than 30%, or any decrease in crime and other unemployment-related social problems.

But I shouldn't write about the economy: I really don't know anything about it, and I am just quoting the statistics I keep seeing in newspapers. I came to this country for the first time three years ago after completing a humanities doctorate in America, and I teach literature at a South African university. I could write about the education system, but it will still be hard not to generalize too much, not to pretend I know what I don't. Three months before the first multiracial elections in 1994, and a week after I got off the plane, I secured the right to vote that some people had been waiting sixty years for; that was because whites, even—or especially—new immigrants, were supposed to know what was going on. Things have not changed all that much since then. The maid still calls me in as an expert at opening my washing machine door, which does not even stick. It has been easy for me here to forget my essential stupidity. But all whites have this problem. I try to persuade myself that I have less of it in that I've been here a shorter time. I will go ahead and give my impressions.

Schools and universities were among the most effective tools of apartheid, and now some of the bitterest fights are taking place around education reform. To the whites outside it, the new African National Congress regime seems to be running amok. Education officials are going ahead with their plan to "re-deploy" teachers from traditionally white public schools to remedy under-staffing in poor black rural areas, some of which have no schools except buildings which function as livestock sheds at night. Selected teachers, most of them married women, many with children, will have a choice of pledging themselves to take up any assignment in any area of the country or leaving the system. Those who leave will get a "retrenchment package" of up to a million Rand (about $225,000) in exchange for a written declaration that they will never work in public schools again. (I have met some who were already training as tourist guides, and some who were planning to emigrate.) Whites protest, and officials dismiss them as "racist" and "elitist." There is some truth in this, but truth of a kind nobody will admit: whites are so secure in the inexperience and hot-headedness of the new government that they can ignore any need for reform—in the case of education, any need to reform a system spending hugely more on a white child as on a black one.

I'm glad I'm not the government. The inequalities of schools are visible to a large part of the ANC's constituency every day. Many blacks come to menial jobs in the suburbs from squatter camps; there the children of the luckier neighborhoods, which actually have schools, attend classes in discarded shipping containers, for example, and may have to sit on the floor between each other's knees for lack of space. Comparisons between white and black lifestyles here usually sound melodramatic; I apologize for not offering any relief from this, but I am stating a fact when I say that on first seeing a traditionally white public school in a middle-class suburb I wondered what an embassy was doing way out here: the building was a garden-bosomed mansion out of a Merchant-Ivory film, except that there was a six-foot wall of brick and spiked iron bars, and a security guard at the gate. Then, in early 1994, there were already a number of "colored" (mixed-race) and a few black pupils playing with blond classmates in the garden. School integration in university neighborhoods like this one, and in areas where the new black businessmen and civil servants live, is cheering in its peace and simplicity; but it also provides whites, and even the colored and black middle class, with arguments against further integration, which the poor black majority desperately needs.

More integration means a totally new system. No schooling in South Africa is free; among "public" schools, those whose pupils' families can add only small fees to government funding are the ones with classes of up to eighty and possibly a few secondhand books or desks—these are the 100% black schools. Most formerly all-white public schools, like the one with the garden, retain their "Model C" structure, in which substantial fees from parents supplement government funding, and a board made up largely of parents makes all of the important decisions, such as admissions and appointment of staff. The deal is essentially government-subsidized private education on the primary and secondary level. To get an idea of how much worse this all is than the education crisis during the civil rights era in the American South, you would have to imagine blacks three times poorer than Mississippi sharecroppers having to raise money on their own for erasers and paper, and whites twice as well-off as good ol' boys threatening to move to Australia if the government did not promise to keep helping to pay for their separate white or off-white system.

Things are about as ratchety on the university level. At black universities large numbers of students have no place to sleep indoors, and since it is not safe to sleep outdoors they walk around all night and sleep through their classes in the daytime. On colored campuses food riots keep happening, because meal plans are not universal or required: many students cannot afford them, scholarships being still in a half-formed state. The government is partly to blame, in its use of university admissions as pork barrel for the young black and colored constituency; but the contrast with traditionally white institutions—all publicly funded—like the one I teach in, is damning of whites. In my university department last year one undergraduate course had five instructors, including one Oxford and one Harvard Ph.D.—and one white student; there is no minimum enrollment requirement. I taught in the course during the first semester, and found the student godawful. I would ask, "What does this word mean?" and he would say, "I was hoping you would tell me." He seemed surprised when I told him that I wouldn't let him keep showing up half an hour late every day. By protesting to my colleagues, I placed myself on the side of the Cultural Revolution: this was a good university, and I was trying to destroy it; just look at the black schools—was that what I wanted? I had to admit to myself that if I wanted to turn missionary, I wouldn't know what to do. We had all been shaken the year before by one colleague's attempt to cultivate a promising black student in a graduate program. The student returned cheerfully pregnant from one vacation, and a cheerful homeless mother from another, before disappearing. Which student got less out of us, I'll never know, but the young black woman caused us a lot more pain. We were happier with the status quo.

When I first arrived in the country, I imagined (like the rest of the world, I gather) that blacks, once enfranchised, would take over everything; hungry and restive, they would descend on the inert, isolated culture of the whites and eat it to the bones. As it turns out, people like my non-student are anything but wounded wildebeest. There is actually a disturbing convergence, especially at universities (which are quickly becoming integrated), between the attitudes of whites and blacks; whites have always felt entitled, and now blacks feel the same way. The security and privileges of whites have for the most part not inspired a conventional challenge from blacks, a move to appropriate positions and possessions through competition. Instead, blacks, particularly the young, see privilege and security as what they should get in exchange for the hardships and injustices of apartheid, and they couch their demands in these terms. At American universities, black activists lobby for better opportunities, such as scholarships, and remedial facilities for students whose secondary education was inadequate. In South Africa, black activists tend to campaign for guarantees of success and inclusion. Instead of more or better scholarships, they want promises that debts for tuition and fees will not be grounds for withholding degrees. At the university where I teach, black students have rejected remedial courses and demanded automatic access to regular ones, though blacks are admitted with standardized test scores as low as half the score which is the minimum for whites.

For the most part, the university is complying, and the reasons seem to go deeper than apartheid guilt, into a layer of false complicity. The privileges demanded—if they worked out as publicly planned—would only allow blacks to get away with the financial and academic shrugging off that whites have been getting away with for decades. Rather than admit to continued white perks, the perks their own children enjoy, white authorities pretend to open up the system as if it were a just and efficient one except for being exclusive up to now. As long as this pretense holds, there are few real changes threatening the academy; without extra help, which they seldom get, blacks are privilege-intolerant; they tend to vomit up their "opportunities" and retire mumbling, leaving whites to recover from the brief disturbance. About half of the black students at my university leave without a degree. (This is my estimate. The university balks at giving the numbers out.)

It is a shame that so many guests, however insincerely invited, have to hide in the bathroom from such a great party. For decades, a higher education has been almost a prize to whites for existing; undergraduate tuition at the priciest universities comes to around US $2000 a year, or roughly 10% of a middle-class South African income; academically, the dull and the unmotivated get through, even in demanding technical fields. (I shared a house with a young man who was in his sixth year of an undergraduate chemical engineering program that normally takes three years; he studied about once a month, eventually passed, and got a good job. This cleared up a big mystery of my first year of teaching here: why students never seemed worried when they were failing courses.) Given strict new immigration controls and the more serious underpreparation of blacks, there is for now almost no one to compete with whites in any kind of specialized training. This leads me to the glum conclusion that the white cartel which makes daily life here such a hassle is going to be around for a while longer. South African friends tell me that it isn't worth fighting with a bank that mislays your checks and demands that you make good the loss, or with a carpenter who leaves a piece of your interior woodwork in a raw sawn-off state, with jagged splinters projecting. Just pretend that you are Buddha, and that these people are an illusion. Those are only images of police turning on your TV and settling into your living room to watch rugby after they arrive hours too late to help in your emergency. But I am getting off track. The point is that I have learned to view with a certain irony whites' angry remarks that blacks "want special privileges"; this irony has grown stronger with the recognition of the willingness of whites to take aboard unqualified blacks—not as window dressing (the government is not powerful enough to enforce affirmative action goals in most institutions), but because a confused and inarticulate black person can be blamed for everything that was wrong with the organization before he was born, and that would now have to change if whites were to take responsibility. If not for blacks, whites would have to arraign themselves for the "decline" of universities, though all of the evidence says that at least on the research level performance is actually much better now, and that the main problems throughout come from apartheid—in other words, from the fact that whites have had the universities they wanted.

To sum up, blacks know what whites have been up to, and how to make use of this knowledge. As I've tried to show, though, such knowledge gives only a temporary and tainted advantage. It is almost impossible for the helpless and exploited to see the oppressor's power in any real proportion or context, and it is natural to think that justice can transfer the oppressor's advantages to the oppressed. My few black students react the same way as my white ones when I tell them that they need to work hard to develop the writing skills necessary for a professional career. They don't believe me. And they are right in a way: even print journalists here can't write. (One thing they do all the time, is put a comma between the subject and the predicate. But it wouldn't make sense for them to take more trouble; I know from head-achey experience that editors and printers ignore corrections on a manuscript, even on page proofs.) The snag, of course, is that this can't last: international newspaper conglomerates are coming, for one thing. How are South African columnists going to persuade their fellow-citizens to read them and not Dave Barry? Issues of productivity and competitiveness come up constantly in official discussions of the country's future—but only there. Ordinary people have nothing to tell you about the Rand's fall except that the world is ganging up on South Africa, or that a race other than their own is not pulling its weight.

To the extent that South Africa's future depends on mostly communal and institutional activities like education, things do not look good. The greatest achievements of the nation so far have been individual, or at least embodied in individuals: Mandela, an aging man breaking limestone in a prison quarry; Helen Suzman, for years the sole voice of opposition in the Nationalist parliament; J. M. Coetzee, probably the greatest living novelist, and Athol Fugard, probably the greatest living playwright, both voices of the individual against society; George Ellis, the renowned cosmologist and philosopher; an endless succession of inventors, entrepreneurs, even indestructible black share-croppers like Kas Maine, the subject of Charles Van Onselen's striking biography.[*] South Africans excel separately, but when they get together in public they tend to make things ugly. Derelicts, laborers, professors and Quaker elders throw litter down in the street. As an old and experienced multiracial society, they depress the hell out of me, bringing into question such homey notions as "prejudice." What has been "pre-judged" here? Because of domestic service, South Africans know each fairly well, better than the races do in America: blacks know that whites kiss pets; whites know that blacks take other people's property home. Perhaps the preference of sensitive and ambitious people for lofty and solitary—or else solitary and practical—activity has to do with the unsayable, which in any kind of real community always risks getting said: here, the unsayable is that maybe the races couldn't work together even if they wanted to. I listened to a young white lecturer in architecture describing her new affirmative action students. "We can't get the blacks to understand perspective. We show them what we mean, and then we try to get them to draw a brick, but it usually comes out looking like a pizza slice. It must be terrible not to have had crayons or pens to play with as a child. We've had to lower standards a lot." She was speaking more directly than most educated, liberal whites do; many say "people" when they mean "blacks," and few acknowledge stubborn problems. But there was still the unsayable whirling in her coffee cup. What if crayons or pens for black children did not close the gap? What if genetics were at fault, and blacks could never compete as architects or engineers? What if she got tired of wondering and gave up on her career as an educator in order to stay home behind a security gate, raising children and kissing pets?

The ultimate unaskable question is whether more educational achievement among blacks, if it happens, will only firm up social problems. In the Third World, "empowerment" of the poor is different: men take all of the power and use it against women. At a typical South African university, black men outnumber black women about two to one. (Excuse me for flashing statistics again and again; this one is only my own observation.) Harassment and rape in the dormitories, the men's abhorrence of condoms (0% reported use, according to Planned Parenthood), and their insistence that women take pregnancies to term without any support rather than "waste the sperm"—all this looks almost like a black male conspiracy against black women. Conspiracy or not, the lack of mercy is disturbing: South African black women are struggling out of a culture where they are more vulnerable to violence than any creatures on earth except animals raised for slaughter. There's worse: unlike in the West, black men here have more sexual partners the higher their socio-economic status, and they already have far too many. A friend of mine, a religiously committed nurse, fights her anger in the face of male insouciance in making a series of girlfriends and wives and children HIV-positive. The prospect of helping in the empowerment of black men gives me a Greek tragedy feeling, as if injustice were not a problem game people can fix, but a disease; if you go near it, whatever your intentions, you'll end up contributing to it. Better to let it alone. Better to hike in the mountains and think that, anyway, this is the most beautiful country on earth.

From several places up there I can see the utter blue of two oceans at once. Sometimes there are whales relaxing in the bays. In September, the Cape vegetation flowers into dyed artichokes, geometric pranks, blossoms frustrated in their evolutionary development into insects, reptiles, striped and fanged mammals. Arum lilies (the giant, military-procurement version of lilies) and "birds of paradise" (the spiky orange and blue flowers that form the flagged masts of extravagant flower arrangements in America) are weeds here. What threatens my equilibrium is not the fact that some of the worst slums in the world are a fifteen-minute drive away. I can cope with that, though I have seen the places, and I coped fine before I visited one slum's own green hill, a park with trees and benches and playground equipment and a recreation hall. The park was spotless and peaceful—though full of children—in the middle of hovels and drifts of trash, endemic TB and recreational violence; but this had all been worse before the park existed; its neighbors now came there to talk over their problems and carry on community activities. I learned that the mother of the park is a black woman from a neighboring slum, who had negotiated for years with touchy politicians, finally persuading them to cede vacant land and allow foreign development organizations to donate materials and expertise. The woman has a son in prison, no husband—among middle-aged black women husbands are as rare as opera careers—and has probably never been up on the mountains in her life. Thinking of her strength and success, I am ashamed of my frustration with the education system, but I do not feel encouraged. South Africa leaves you like this; the richest and most cosmopolitan nation in sub-Saharan Africa exhausts you with its possibilities and near-impossibilities. Since I came here, I am no longer puzzled by a line in Aeschylus' tragedy Agamemnon: "A harsh thing is the favor of the gods on their high seat."

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    The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Share-Cropper, 1894-1985 (Cape Town: David Philip, 1996).return to text