Middle East & AfricaApr 10th 2004 edition

South Africa
A town like Alice

Once a model apartheid town, Alicedale shows the impact—good, bad and ugly—of South Africa's first decade of democracy

A QUARTER of a century ago, P.W. Botha, then South Africa's prime minister, ordered his flunkies to make a video showing that apartheid worked. He told them to find a model town to illustrate the idea that “separate development” was good for both black and white South Africans. After a long search, they chose Alicedale, a quiet riverside settlement in what is now the Eastern Cape province.

Alicedale's propaganda value lay in the fact that the adjoining areas where blacks lived were less miserable than average. In its latter days, the apartheid regime often tried to buy black acquiescence with small public-works projects. Alicedale's blacks may not have had the vote, but they enjoyed tarred roads and good sanitation. The video was shown to civil servants across the country, some of whom may have been convinced.

It is now ten years since South Africa became a proper democracy. Next week, the country will hold its third election at which all adults can vote, regardless of colour. The petty restrictions on where non-whites can live, travel and eat are long gone. The main liberation movement, the African National Congress (ANC), is sure to be re-elected with a huge majority.

And yet, at first glance, not much seems to have changed in Alicedale. The town is still divided, de facto, though not de jure. The whites still live mostly in the centre, with its tall gum trees, sturdy brick homes and shady verandas. The people of Transriviere, a township of smaller homes across the river, are almost all “coloured” (ie, of mixed race). Up the hill is Kwanonzwakazi, where blacks live mostly in corrugated-iron shacks. Nearby is the Mandela squatter camp, which is really poor.

Black families in Mandela camp and Kwanonzwakazi are mostly unemployed, speak Xhosa, play soccer and send their children to a school with no white pupils. In the last decade, the government has built them 200 new homes, but they are still far less prosperous than the Afrikaans-speaking coloureds of Transriviere.

The coloureds tend to own their brightly painted homes, with flowery gardens, telephones and, for some, satellite dishes on the roof. Transriviere has a new clinic, a library and an ambulance station. The school is reserved for Afrikaans-speaking pupils, who wear starched black-and-white uniforms and play rugby and cricket, not soccer.

And whites? Though few admit it, most backed apartheid, by voting for the National Party. Many have now emigrated, complaining that multiracial rule has brought unchecked crime and the “reverse apartheid” of positive discrimination. In Alicedale, the owner of Fox's café says the town now has “no people”. She means almost no whites. In the past decade all but a dozen white families have left. The red-brick whites-only school has closed.

Race relations have improved for those who stayed, but they could hardly have been worse. In the old days, non-whites entered the butcher's shop by a side door, and none could sit in restaurants or use white public toilets. They could not own property in the white zone, and they had to leave the town centre before dark. “In the past we wouldn't even look at a white man,” says a coloured resident, “or he would shout: ‘I'm your boss!'”

“We no longer fight with each other, we know each other. We live in a just society, where one is equal to the other,” says Andile Ncula, renovating his small house on the edge of Mandela camp. “Now all people are free to stay in town and to move around at any time. Life is a bit better.”

Facing the beast

Rather than seek revenge, South Africans have “looked the beast [of history] in the eye,” says Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, over which he presided, helped heal some wounds, by granting amnesty to the perpetrators of politically motivated crimes, so long as they confessed, and by compensating some of the victims. Both the commission and South Africa's impressive constitution, which enshrines individual and property rights, helped bolster the country's most important achievement since 1994: political stability.


With re-election assured, President Mbeki is feeling sprightly

Ten years ago, civil war seemed possible. In the 1980s and early 1990s, thousands were killed in clashes between Zulu supporters of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and backers of the multiracial but Xhosa-dominated ANC. Today, though politics is still split along ethnic lines, there is virtually no political violence.

The ANC is popular and in charge almost everywhere (including Alicedale). It has over 70% of the seats in the national parliament, and may do as well at the election on April 14th. The president, Thabo Mbeki, is certain to win a second (and final) five-year term. His party may even win outright control of the two provinces out of nine where it now rules in coalition: KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape.

A recent survey found that two-thirds of the population think the ANC is too strong, though they will still vote for it. To be fair, it is a broad church, including not only communists and trade unionists but also pragmatic capitalists, such as Mr Mbeki. It makes alliances of convenience, even joining with the New National Party, the remnant of the one which dreamt up apartheid, to rule the Western Cape.

The opposition is weak but not insignificant. The main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, which appeals largely to whites, has made an electoral pact with the IFP, though the two parties have little in common besides a desire to slow the ANC juggernaut. Confusingly, the IFP is currently allied with the ANC in the national government, but that awkward marriage may not outlast the election. In practice, the most effective opposition often comes from single-issue activists such as the Treatment Action Campaign, which lobbies for better AIDS treatment.

The ANC is popular in large part because it is the party of liberation. The generation known as the “born frees”, who have no memory of apartheid, could eventually drift away from it; much will depend on how it handles the economy. To date, its record has been mixed.

The growth rate has more than doubled in the past decade, though that sounds better than it is. Misrule and international trade sanctions had kept the apartheid economy stagnant. Since 1994, average GDP growth has been 2.8% a year—better, but not stellar, given population growth of perhaps 2%.

The government has enacted some wise and painful reforms. The old state-heavy, debt-ridden, tariff-protected economy, where profits from gold-mining paid for a bloated civil service, has gone. Trevor Manuel, the finance minister, has long boasted that South Africa could more easily meet the Maastricht conditions for Europe's single currency than many European countries. National finances are in order, and debt payments no longer suck up the largest share of government spending (education does). Tiny foreign reserves are growing, which should make South Africa's currency, the rand, less volatile.

Though foreign investment is sluggish, it is widely agreed that the economy is in competent hands. Inflation, interest rates, marginal tax rates and the deficit are at historic lows. A poll of business confidence touched a 15-year high in March. International investment ratings, productivity, exports and tax revenue are surging.

An economy whose fortunes once rose or fell with the gold price is increasingly diverse. Minerals still matter, but services (60% of GDP and growing) and manufacturing are far more important. Tourism, banking, car exports and insurance are flourishing. But cutting tariffs and subsidies has had a cost.

With its large reservoir, Alicedale used to provide a watering–stop for steam trains owned by Spoornet, the national rail firm, which was notorious for employing any ill-educated white person who otherwise could not find work. Spoornet ran labour-intensive steam trains as recently as two decades ago but closed its operations completely in Alicedale in 1996, as in many small towns.

“After the railways went, everything collapsed,” says a resident. Almost every small business shut. By 2001 unemployment in Alicedale was over 90%. “There are people of 28 years who have never worked a single day,” says a resident. Large numbers of bored young men and women sat idly in the shade watching days pass.

Nationally, things are not so bad, but still grim. Counting only those who are actively seeking work, the jobless rate fell slightly, to 28%, in March. By a broader measure, unemployment remains stuck at over 40%. Informal work is being created; there was a net rise of 2m jobs between 1996 and 2002, says the government. But the labour force is growing faster, swollen by migrants, including perhaps 2m Zimbabweans fleeing tyranny.

In Alicedale, as in South Africa generally, people increasingly depend on the dole. Africa's most generous welfare state now provides pensions, child grants and aid for the disabled and those with acute forms of AIDS. A monthly old-age grant of 700 rand ($110) is often shared by a large extended family. Without faster growth, small towns will be sustained only by such welfare payments, subsidised housing and crime. Everywhere in South Africa, violent robbery is distressingly common. As a young man lounging on a street corner puts it, “We survive from stealing, that's the truth, because there's no jobs.”

Crime also flourishes because the police and the justice system are overwhelmed. Only when residents hired a private security firm a year ago did crime start to fall in Alicedale. And only when huge court backlogs are cleared will the justice system start to work.

Rapid economic growth would solve a lot of problems. Will it happen in the next decade? Optimists can point to Alicedale. Barely a year ago it was a ghost town. But now, its main road is being resurfaced, dozens of defunct businesses are re-opening, and house prices are up tenfold in the past year. Whites are reappearing, too.

The lifeline was a mixture of private and public investment. A joint-venture by a luxury safari group called Bushman Sands and the Eastern Cape provincial government is tapping into South Africa's fastest-growing industry, tourism. Disused farms have become a safari park. The abandoned whites-only school is now a luxury hotel with an 18-hole golf course watered by the reservoir that once served steam trains. The old station is a tourist centre and restaurant. One permanent job is said to be created for every eight foreign visitors to the country: over 6.4m tourists came to South Africa in 2002, vastly more than in the days of apartheid isolation. Last year the industry again grew slightly, despite a strong rand.

But the lack of skills is a worrying bottleneck. The developers in Alicedale pledged to employ only local (by implication, black) workers. This is politically astute: the government urges and obliges firms to pursue “black economic empowerment” by hiring more blacks and transferring equity into black hands. But Bushman Sands has found (as have many South African firms) that too few blacks have the right qualifications. It has trained locals as chefs, carpenters and dancers, but hired outsiders, almost all white, for many managerial or technical roles.

Nationally, some 300,000 skilled vacancies are unfilled, estimates Iraj Abedian, an economist at Standard Bank. A decade of efforts to train and educate more workers has achieved little. The proceeds of a payroll tax for skills-training have been poorly spent. On-the-job training would be more useful, but firms are reluctant to hire, because labour laws make it so hard to fire bad workers. Labour costs are also higher than in many middle-income countries: strong unions run a centralised bargaining system, which imposes wage settlements agreed with large firms on small firms in the same industry.

Ghost at the table

To make matters worse, many skilled workers are disappearing. Nurses, teachers and computer experts, among others, are lured abroad by higher wages. Other educated young people are being buried. When your correspondent visited the overflowing cemetery in Kwanonzwakazi, two new graves were being dug into a pathway between other graves. One was for a 17-year-old boy who had “become very thin,” said the grave-diggers. Metal signs show that most of the recently deceased were under 40. Nine were buried in the first two and a half months of this year, an awful rate for a town of barely 5,000.

A tragic waste of freedom

Unbelievably, some still doubt that AIDS is a big problem. Sceptics include Mr Mbeki. Some 11% of South Africans, 5m, are infected with HIV: the disease threatens, literally, to decimate the population. A study of death certificates published in March by the Medical Research Council confirms the nature of the epidemic. More South Africans die aged 30-34 than in any other age group. For that age, deaths rose 15% last year. South Africa is in the “death phase” of its epidemic, as more people die than are newly infected.

The victims are mostly young, active people. A government report leaked in late March says that 100,000 civil servants are HIV positive. That threatens the state's capacity to function. New figures show school enrolment rates stopped rising five years ago, after HIV cut fertility. Life expectancy is tumbling.

The government does, at last, have some good policies in place to treat the sick. It said in November that modern anti-retroviral drugs, finally, will be provided in clinics and hospitals, to keep the HIV-infected alive and to make them less infectious. This month it announced 23 sites where drugs will be handed out. But years of delay mean too few places are ready to do so.

“The government gave the go-ahead but nothing has come. There is no place here to get those drugs,” says Marcello Fritz, Alicedale's young postmaster. He offers to name “30 to 40” people who he thinks died of AIDS in the past two years. “My friends are dying like flies. They lose weight, get sores on their body and die.”

While they wait for drugs, the people of Alicedale can do little more than deal with the symptoms of the epidemic. Flora Louw, who runs the town's clinic, says AIDS is the biggest killer; but without anti-retrovirals she spends her time instead battling tuberculosis, and other diseases that exploit ailing immune systems.

The reason for delays in the distribution of anti-retrovirals is the dithering leadership (with Mr Mbeki's approval) of the health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who continues to recommend quack remedies to HIV patients. Let them eat African potatoes and olive oil, she says.

Alicedale's prospects, and by extension South Africa's, are coloured by the impact of AIDS. If Mr Mbeki fails to tackle the epidemic during his second term, the future looks grim. But if he succeeds, it may be time to order another video.

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline "A town like Alice"

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