Old attitudes die hard in Ventersdorp, as Justin Pearce discovered
VENTERSDORP looked as if it were hosting a foreign correspondents’ convention on Wednesday. The town of the AWB had a date with the new South Africa. It was surely a story to make soundbites throughout the world, and the media were there to tell it.
But the AWB’s former headquarters are now an insurance broker’s office. Eugene Terre’Blanche showed his face briefly in town, but with no sign of banners, rhetoric, or the khaki-clad henchmen that make for good photos. Anyone who had come here on the basis of Venterdorp’s reputation as the monkey-cage in the great zoo of South African politics must have gone away disappointed.
Yet the shrivelling away of the AWB has not turned Ventersdorp into a beer-advert model of national unity. In Tshing township, black voters may talk about the whites becoming more reconciliatory than before — but this observation seems to be based on the fact that the white thugs no longer beat them up whenever they show their faces in the town.
Meshack Mbambalala, the 26-year-old ANC candidate tipped to become the town’s next mayor, confesses to knowing little about the white section of the town which he will be heading — in the old days, it was a place where blacks simply never went. Now that blacks do shop in town, they stand aside to let whites be served first.
There are even conclusions to be drawn from the ward numbers. Wards one and two are in the white town. Three is mostly white but a bit coloured. Four, five and six are in Tshing.
On Wednesday, wards one and two featured a straight fight between the Conservative Party and Ventersdorp First, a strategic alliance of the National Party, the Freedom Front, and independents. In four, five and six the ANC stood unopposed. Three was the interesting ward: it had many conservative elderly white voters and the most charismatic of the CP candidates. But it also incorporated the tiny coloured residential area of Uitvlug. Consequently, the battle for ward three involved the ANC, the CP, Ventersdorp First, and two independents.
But on the lawns outside the municipal offices — where residents of the first three wards cast their votes — it was immediately obvious which party formed the political establishment in the town. The CP had a khaki military tent where plates of dainty sandwiches were passed round. Ventersdorp First had plastic chairs under a couple of sun umbrellas. Eddy Martin and Vincent Schalkwyk, respectively ANC and independent candidates in the vaguely-grey ward three, hung out on the pavement next to their cars.
So it’s not surprising that CP members were upbeat in the face of the prospect of being a minority on an ANC- led council. Ward two CP candidate Albertus van Zijl described the party’s intentions as “looking after the white people, and representing their interests on the council.” But equally, he wanted to maintain “good relationships with other population groups”. He explained this apparent contradiction as “very logical — the black candidates won’t care about the white population, so we must look after them. Politics are not so important. It’s about looking after our own people.”
Voters can interpret this message as they wish. There is little doubt as to the kind of future envisaged by the elderly white man who declared: “I’m not voting for myself. I’m voting for my children, so that the whole town of Ventersdorp may stay white.”
The CP’s claims to have put politics on a back burner were echoed with more conviction by Ventersdorp First, formed as a “non-political pressure group”, in the words of candidate Gawie Yssel, to unite smaller parties in effective oppostion to the ANC. Yssel acknowledged the ANC “has some good principles” and looks forward to a good working relationship on the council: “at local government level it is practicalities, not ideology, that matter.”
The ANC, too, is facing the future with an open mind, Mbambalala humbly acknowledging the need for some members of the old CP-dominated council to stay on so that the new incumbents may profit from their experience in local government.
The will to work is there. But practicalities could yet scupper the fragile detente of the new council. Ventersdorp is poor. There is little commercial activity in the town besides cafes and butchers’ shops, and even in the torpid white areas the pavements are cracking. The population, black and white, is ageing, and those young people who remain hope the new council will reverse the town’s reputation as a hotbed of right-wing militancy, which has discouraged businesses from investing there and made job prospects bleak.
When asked how the new council hoped to balance the books, Mbambalala shook his head and sighed. The ANC had promoted the Masakhane campaign, but it was difficult to get people to pay service charges before they had started receiving services. So the development of Tshing will have to proceed on the scanty resources of the old white council. It’s hardly surprising that the CP’s promise to look after its own has earned a substantial following among whites.
In Tshing, the hopes are for running water, santiation, electricity, tarred roads — the catalogue of needs common to most of South Africa and reeled off during countless voter awareness ads. The only visible opposition to the ANC is represented by a handful of youths who form a PAC and a still-unofficial Azapo branch, and who claim to be saving their energy for the 1999 national election.
While in other places opposition parties have capitalised on the ANC’s failure to meet such needs in 18 months, Tshing residents have not set their sights so high. The 1994 elections meant they could go shopping without getting beaten up. If the ANC could achieve that, the logic runs, then it can achieve anything.