S. Africa as Seen in a Mirror
A reporter returns a decade after apartheid's fall to find blacks and whites taking different roles in a country with pride in its transition.
By Scott Kraft
Times Staff Writer

…As a correspondent in South Africa from 1988 to 1993, I watched the dying breaths of apartheid: The failed attempt to force blacks into autonomous "homelands." The dismantling of laws imposing racial separation. The week in 1990 that the African National Congress was unbanned and its leader, Nelson Mandela, freed. And I returned in 1994 when the black four-fifths of South Africa's 45 million people got their first chance to cast a free vote.

When I returned again recently, I found a country that, at first, felt and looked familiar. The haze of coal smoke and mining dust still carpeted the mile-high metropolis of Johannesburg. The combis, vans packed with black commuters, still speeded to and from the sprawling township of Soweto. Thickets of squatter shacks still pressed against the road from Cape Town's airport to Table Mountain. And the singular beauty of this land, from its shimmering veld to its pristine beaches, was undiminished.

But, on closer inspection, it was clear that 10 years of black majority rule had brought profound change. An aggressive affirmative action program had lifted blacks into private industry and swelled the black middle class. All-white schools had become predominantly black schools. All-white suburbs were deeply integrated.

What was equally remarkable, though, was what the black majority had not done. It had not used its new upper hand to crush the white minority. It had not taken property from whites or jailed leaders of the former regime. It had not erased the achievements of white rulers from its history books. In fact, the victors had displayed a confidence and magnanimity rarely seen in post-revolutionary societies.

Race once dominated conversations here. But no longer. Today, South Africans complain most frequently about crime, and they've built higher security walls and hired more private guards. They criticize the government's mishandling of the AIDS epidemic that now claims 600 lives a day. They lament the persistent poverty, fed by an unemployment rate of more than 20% — twice that, by some estimates.

And, when asked, they look back in surprise that their country has undergone a peaceful transition from black oppression to multiracial democracy.