Day of Reconciliation

I am a great fan of of Barry Bearak, part of the husband and wife team that covers South Africa for the New York Times and a Pulitzer prize winner for his coverage of Afghanistan. But, as they say, even Homer nods, so Bearak can be forgiven the occasional lapse which would include  his piece on the Day of Reconciliation, December 16, in today’s paper.

He uses the fact that some Afrikaners still celebrate the Day of the Vow at the Voortrekker monument to suggest to his readers that they should not buy in to the message of the film Invictus. South Africa, he reports, is still a deeply troubled country. In further token of which, he trots out the recent poll by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation and interprets its findings to back his thesis.

If you are a glass half empty kind of person, and let’s face it that is what most journalists are by both training and temperament, the temptation is to emphasise the finding that 31% of South Africans do not believe race relations have improved since the end of apartheid and that 16% think they have deteriorated. But, surely, the more striking number is that 50% think race relations have improved. That percentage has been higher in the past and I strongly suspect correlates with national mood generally. In a recession, people tend to take a gloomier view of everything. Next year, it is highly probable that the World Cup will brighten spirits and that you will see the proportion of people who think race relations are getting better rise significantly — which is one reason for hosting the Cup.

Getting a good handle on race relations anywhere is difficult. It is particularly problematic when you only talk to members of one race in the equation, and even more so if you treat the people you talk to as if they were representative of all members. Frankly, Afrikaners attending celebrations at the Voortrekker monument on December 16 are scarcely a scientific sample  for gauging the attitudes of Afrikanerdom generally. It would also be good to hear more black opinions. Bearak spoke to a member of the crew he found picking up trash at the monument and that, unless his editors left things on the cutting room floor, was that. It might have been interesting, for example, to hear from President Zuma how a Zulu traditionalist sees the slaughter of his ancestors at Blood River 171 years after the fact and 15 years after the end of apartheid. Had I been in Bearak’s shoes, I think I would have also put in a call to Pallo Jordan.

Is South Africa still a divided nation? Of course it is. For all its having made Barack Obama its president, so is America, but if I was trying to paint a fair picture of the state of race relations here I am not sure that I would want to base my conclusions on the Martin Luther King Day I spent some years ago talking to black and white people in Jackson, Mississippi.

The South African miracle was and is as much about what did not and hasn’t happened as about what did and has. Few nations have been able to extricate themselves from histories as cruel as South Africa’s without first reducing themselves to ashes. Invictus, as much as one may quibble with its Hollywood-ness, does as much as any artefact of popular culture to explain why South Africans managed to pull it off. Tolerance, forgiveness, magnanimity, ubuntu, pragmatism. These are all essential components of South Africa’s DNA. That doesn’t mean that every South African is a saint or that everyone is now perfectly reconciled or seamlessly integrated (is anyone anywhere?), but it does dramatically shorten the odds on South Africa fulfilling the promise of 1994.

To me, the more important story yesterday was that Afrikaners who wished to continue celebrating their heritage at the Voortrekker monument were able to do so, completely unmolested.