Justin Pearce: Bloemfontein
THEY always wait for the green man in Bloemfontein. Even if there isn’t a car in sight, pedestrians won’t step off the pavement while the signal is still red.
To do so would be to disrupt the relentless orderliness of a city dominated by government buildings: sandstone monuments from the 19th century boer republic, and the sky-punching monoliths of apartheid planning. These days fruit and vegetable vendors may crowd the rectilinear streets — but they meticulously sweep the pavements when they shut up shop in the evening.
This, after all, was once the capital of a state which school history books dubbed the “model republic”. Now, almost a century after the Free State lost its independence, all the signs are that the model republic is making a comeback in a new, non-racial form, confounding the prejudices of outsiders who see the Vrystaat as a backwater full of verkrampte whites and hopelessly downtrodden blacks.
In fact, while the rest of South Africa has been bogged down in taxi conflicts and bickering over local government plans, the Free State has quietly got on with things: it was the first province to have transitional local government structures in place, and in the provincial parliament members from the ANC through to the Freedom Front approach the task of implementing the RDP in the province with a remarkable degree of consensus.
“It is the conservativeness of the Free State that has helped make the transition easier,” says Thabo Liphoko of Project Vote, a voter education project now preparing for the local government ballot. He means conservativeness with a small `c’ — and his opinion is widely shared.
The OFS’s African population is overwhelmingly ANC- supporting, but until the late 1980s they largely kept quiet about their loyalties, and confrontations with the state were rare. And it was the deep-seated loyalty of Free State whites to the National Party that made it easier for them to accept the move to democracy, says provincial NP leader Inus Aucamp.
Though the NP lost support to the Conservative Party in the 1989 election, most whites were back in the NP fold by the time of the 1992 referendum. With most of the province loyal to either the ANC or the NP, the commitment to negotiations expressed by those two parties translated into action by their members.
A Free State negotiating forum was planning the nitty gritty of the province’s future even before the Kempton Park negotiators had finished hammering out the country’s constitution. “April 27 was a graduation — the process had already unfolded,” says Housing MEC Vax Mayekiso. The process was made possible by the fact that the province retained its original boundaries, apart from absorbing the backyard-sized Qwa-Qwa, and Thaba Nchu (a remote outpost of Boputhatswana).
Similarly, when it came to organising transitional local government structures, the process was facilitated by the existence of the well-established OFS Municipal Association, a network of white local authorites which negotiated with the South African National Civic Association at provincial level to establish transition guidelines for all the towns in the province.
The manageable size of the Free State’s cities and towns, and its relatively low crime rate also helped the transition to proceed smoothly.
“We have been able to get the white population sympathetic to our cause,” says Agriculture MEC Cas Human, the Harrismith farmer who was ostracised by the white community when he first joined the ANC, but who has since regained their confidence. Winning the whites was a crucial task for the provincial government given the economic clout wielded by farmers.
The militant rightwing in the Free State is confined to small isolated cells, and even the Freedom Front is less of a force here than in the Northern and Eastern Transvaal. The two FF members in the provincial parliament are happy to make their contribution to the ANC-dominated provincial government: “We will give our support to the RDP, because South Africa must become economically stable and without that we cannot have a stable, peaceful Volkstaat,” says Kobie Gouws, provincial deputy chair of the FF.
She admits that her party, and the Volkstaat ideal, may lose support as more whites see that racial co-existence can work — though she is confident they will come back as soon as they realise that “they’ll lose their language, their way of life and their culture”.
In fact, the provincial government has been noticeably cautious about taking any action which might be construed as a threat to Afrikaner culture: the removal of the Verwoerd statue which prompted a rightwing demonstration seems to have been a one-off gesture. Post-election plans to restore Bloemfontein’s Sesotho name, Mangaung, have not yet materialised, and receptionists at the provincial administration building still refer to it as the Verwoerd Building pending a decision on a new name.
Bloemfontein whites, meanwhile, are enjoying the novelty of the new South Africa: a white tannie has set up a stall to sell knitted jerseys alongside the purveyors of Basotho crafts; another white couple have opened a coffee shop called Egoli.
The reconciliatory approach of the government has prompted speculation — mostly from outside the Free State — that Premier Patrick Lekota has alienated his black constituency, and that this cost him the provincial ANC chair at last month’s provincial congress. In reality, Lekota has an almost presidential status in the Free State, a mini-Mandela who is respected by left and right alike. People may talk of disappointment that election promises have not ye materialised — but the disappointment has not yet become disillusionment.
There is a general acknowledgement in ANC circles in the province that Lekota’s reconciliatory role as premier is a necessary one, but that the person playing that role is not necessarily the most appropriate person to head the ANC. Lekota’s supporters point out it is inaccurate to talk of him being deposed as provincial chair: it was only this year that the ANC in the Free State was united into one region, and Lekota was only ever chair of the Northern Free State region.
For all Lekota’s efforts, the farmers are not universally committed to change — and nor do the sentiments always translate into practice. Liphoko recalls that while some farmers were willing to let Project Vote’s educators speak to farmworkers before the April elections, a minority refused — Project Vote got round the problem by holding Sunday workshops in the townships where the workers went to church.
Activists tell of Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging thugs trying to enforce petty apartheid in the small towns — though this is becoming more rare as police lose their scruples about laying charges against rightwingers. Phillip Majara, who is working to set up a farmworkers’ union in the province, tells stories of wages as low as R50 a month, and abuses such as a farmer firing a worker, evicting him from his house on the farm and keeping the worker’s cattle which grazed on the farm land.
Human believes it is important to break the paternalism which is blocking the empowerment of farmworkers: the previous system whereby farmers were subsidised by government to to provide housing, schools and other services to their workers was open to corruption, and gave farmers control over the lives of their employees. The provincial government and the South African National Civic Association have plans for what Housing MEC Mayekiso calls “agri-villages”, small settlements located where the boundaries of several farms meet and administered by rural local councils. This would give workers a secure place to live independent of the good will of their employers. Mayekiso says future state housing money will go into such schemes rather than into farmers’ pockets in the form of subsidies — and farmers have already expressed willingness to contribute land and money to such projects.
Human tells how the OFS Agricultural Union, which launched the careers of the province’s white farmers, is now helping black farmers to gain a foothold in commercial agriculture. The same principles of collective responsibility which built the model boer republic of the 19th century still apply.
It’s just that you no longer have to be white to qualify as a boer.