Cape Town | Tuesday
A majority of black South Africans surveyed believe that whites are racist and untrustworthy and find it hard to imagine ever being friends with them, according to findings of a poll released on Monday.
The survey, carried out for the Cape Town-based Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR), also found that 81% of black respondents had never eaten a meal with a white person.
The poll was aimed at evaluating people’s opinions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and its effect on South African society.
In their analysis of the findings, researchers James Gibson of Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, and IJR staffer Helen Macdonald said this “racial isolation” impeded reconciliation.
“Black South Africans do not understand whites, they feel uncomfortable around them,” they said.
“We do not argue that to ‘know’ one’s counterparts is necessarily to ‘love’ them … but it is difficult not to be suspicious of groups with which one has had little personal contact and experience.”
But they also said it was important to put the data into perspective by imagining what responses might have been a decade ago.
“From the perspective of the vitriolic debates about race that are so prominent in South Africa today, these data portray substantially more racial reconciliation than would be expected.
“South Africa is far from being a contented ‘rainbow nation’, but it is also a country in which many seem to reject the intense racial animosity of the past.”
The survey, based on 3_727 interviews, found that fewer than a quarter of blacks said they understood the customs and ways of whites. Roughly half of the whites, coloured (mixed-race) and Asians asserted they did not understand blacks.
Fifty-six percent of black South Africans believed whites were untrustworthy, while a third of whites believed the same of blacks.
Just over half the blacks found it hard to imagine ever being friends with a white person. For whites, the figure was 19%.
But Gibson and Macdonald said the survey showed most South Africans were hopeful about their future.
“Important issues face the country, and many of these issues divide South Africa by race. But at the end of the day, most seem committed to a multi-racial South Africa, and many hold attitudes compatible with a harmonious future for the country. Few would have predicted such findings a decade ago,” they said.
They found “vast racial differences” in how people evaluated the TRC, which gave amnesties for political crimes.
While 76% of black South Africans approved of the work of the body, only 37% of whites supported it.
Most South Africans of all races agreed that apartheid as practised in South Africa was a crime against humanity.
However, half of the white respondents, and a “somewhat surprising” 36% of blacks, believed that though there had been abuses, the ideas behind apartheid were “basically good”.
“This most likely means that the ‘separate development’ aspects of apartheid are endorsed, rather than the idea that a racial hierarchy is acceptable,” said the authors. – AFP