ELIZABETH MOROENYANE, a mother of six, sits on a blanket in the dirt plot she can now call her own. She traces a small square in the dust with her fingertip, fills it with an X, and describes the day three years ago that she queued for 10 hours to vote for the first time in her life.
She makes a thumbprint next to the square: “Mandela,” she says. She is proud to have “done a wonderful thing to choose Mandela and bring him to power”.
Regardless of class or colour, lives have changed dramatically, for better and for worse, in this farming community in the northern Free State. Some residents are philosophical, others still hopeful – and others still angry.
Viljoenskroon is probably as typical a small town as anywhere in South Africa. If changes brought by democracy can happen and succeed here, they can happen anywhere.
Three years on, the town still has distinct divisions between black and white. There is a “white” town and, across the R59 highway, a “black” town.
Rammulotsi, the sprawling township with 102 000 residents outside the main town, is growing rapidly every year.
The 7 000 white residents in the town are more empathetic to their fellow black residents. Emily Ramile, a social worker in Rammulotsi, says : “They have come to understand that this country is changing and they must go along with the change.”
Moroenyane is pleased with the material changes in her life since 1994. She no longer walks 12km to fetch water, but points to a tap in her yard. Her shack has electricity. Nurses regularly come to treat residents.
She says black residents now have the right to walk through the town whenever they please. In the past, they had to heed a 9pm curfew.
She says she paid R10 a month and now owns the land on which her corrugated-iron shack stands. But a shack is still a shack. By now, she expected her family of 12 would have had a real house. She believes violence and crime are worse.
Children are sexually abused by men who are home all day as a result of worsening unemployment.
Some turn to crime because jail, with free food and warm clothes, beats starving and freezing in the squatter camp.
“We see some fruits of the changing – the old authority and the new authority are joined together to be one,” says pensioner Nathaniel Seobi (79). After all, this former church leader explains, a three- year-old child doesn’t learn to walk, run and talk immediately.
Other Viljoenskroon residents are not as satisfied with the new South Africa. “Mandela gets paid lots of money but we, we’ve got f-all.” says an angry Abram de Jager (27). “Parliamentarians only look out for themselves, but here in the squatter camp, we work very hard but we get nothing.”
De Jager supports a family which includes uncles, cousins and aunts on the R200 a month he earns as a farm labourer.
He paid in blood for democracy – two of his brothers were killed in the struggle against apartheid. De Jager is angered to see those he fought still benefiting while he has few options.
“Those who killed my brothers are still working in nice offices,” he says.
The President still has a debt to pay, he warns. “Mandela must remember … a lot of people spilt blood for him. He would not be where he is now if we didn’t do that.”
Meanwhile, the government is preoccupied with the ghosts of apartheid activists. “They dig up bodies of old fighters, but what about us? We have problems here and they don’t help us.”
Three years ago a farmer, Louis Botha, was the acting chairman of the Viljoenskroon branch of the National Party. He saw change coming and prepared for it.
“I was in favour of a new dispensation and I worked for it, so in a sense I got what I worked for,” Botha says. “There’s no room in this country for the type of democracy that allows whites to rule themselves as a separate entity. I accept the fact that I’m in an African country – I don’t mind being ruled by a government that is democratically elected.”
Yet, Botha says, unemployment has increased since 1994 and union policies are contributing to the problem: “Farmers are afraid and are holding back [on hiring] right now … because of concerns about the unions.”
Although Botha says he saw it coming, crime has hit hard. And it hits across the board. The Viljoenskroon police force seems paralysed to fight it. Botha suspects the police were involved in the theft of some of his cattle.
This week Botha’s son, a computer scientist, is emigrating to California’s Silicon Valley. Botha is happy for him, and confident that one day he’ll return and that South Africa will be worth returning to.
“If it is not normal at the moment,” he says, “we are heading for a normal life.”
Mohau Moirapedi (20) has recently had his efforts thwarted by vestiges of the apartheid mindset. It’s not white youths but their parents, he says, who are making it difficult for him and others to start a sports club for youths.
Too young to vote in 1994, he supported the ANC although he’s not a member.
Moirapedi wants to be an office administrator. He is very satisfied with the secondary education he received. “Now even in the black school we’ve got a white principal and white teachers.
“I was thinking a black president would get us out of the oppression my parents lived under. The new government must try to work harder to see how many they can help to be in tertiary education. If not, some are going to be thieves or join organisations that make our country corrupt.”
He’d like to continue his education but he can’t afford it. “The problem is financial. I was thinking that money is not the real problem and now I see that it is.”
Bryden Leather sits drinking beer at the Birds Bar at the Hotel Mahem in the white town with his AK-47 on his knee – one of 107 guns he owns and collects on his 4 300- hectare farm. When not farming, he organises private hunting trips for Americans around Southern Africa.
A former Koevoet soldier who saw action in Namibia (which he still calls South West Africa) and an ex-policeman, he calls a former police buddy on his private cell number when he needs the police. No one answers the phone on the regular line, he says.
What has improved in his life in the past three years? “Crime,” he says, without making clear exactly what he means.
“All the shit they expected to happen before the elections – it’s all happening now,” he says. “Crime has doubled – and he [Mandela] can do nothing about it.”
Leather says farmers have been left out in the cold by government policies over the past three years, fuel prices have skyrocketed, the Maize Board was demolished leaving farmers to market their harvests with their own rand, and that rand is worth considerably less than three years ago.
Blacks “have been promised everything” and the goods have not been delivered. They have to resort to crime to survive, he says.
“I’ve got nothing against the black person,” adds Leather, even though he often uses less than flattering (unprintable,actually) words to describe blacks.
“I cannot exist in my farming operation without him.”
Ask Viljoenskroon people what has changed the most in their lives over the past three years since the election. The resounding answer, regardless of colour or class, is the same: crime.
However, the town’s mayor, Pule Mokitlane, believes residents are exaggerating the crime problem, although his house was recently deliberately burnt to the ground. He now lives in the “white” town.
“Serious crime is not that bad. There has been an increase in house-breaking, but our police force is handling that very well,” he said.
But it’s the sage-like Nathanian Seobi who sums up Viljoenskroon’s adjustment to democracy.
“Everyone is free to live, not free to make violence, to be a thief,” he says. “Freedom is to know each other and respect each other.”