An election next week will cap South Africa's move to democracy and the real battle
by Eric Ransdell, Jerelyn Eddings
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A pink bunny rabbit and a pair of porcelain baby shoes are the only tangible memories of the wife and child Jeff Sibiya left behind when he came to Johannesburg six years ago in search of work. His tiny room in the Bayafuthi migrant worker's hostel in Katlehong township, some 20 miles east of Johannesburg, is decorated with a postcard of rural Zululand, a peace monitor's jacket emblazoned with the white dove of South Africa's National Peace Committee and a dozen newspaper clippings about Sibiya and his efforts to make peace between the hostel dwellers, who support the Inkatha Freedom Party, and the residents of Katlehong, who mostly back the rival African National Congress.
Despite the best efforts of peacemakers such as Sibiya, the political violence that has claimed more than 13,000 lives since 1990 threatens to derail South Africa's four-year-old transition from apartheid to black majority rule. Five rounds of peace talks between ANC leader Nelson Mandela and Inkatha leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, including a recent "Big Four" summit with State President F.W. de Klerk and Zulu King Goodwill Zwelethini, and a try at international mediation last week all have failed to stop the bloodshed.
The transition is scheduled to reach its climax next week, when South Africa is to hold its first all-race elections. But with Inkatha refusing to take part in the elections and the white right wing still demanding their own homeland, many fear next week's balloting will only bring more bloodshed. The country is perched on the eve of the greatest changes in its history, and whether they lead to freedom or more violence will be determined largely by the answers to four questions:
Can the ANC-led government that is expected to emerge from next week's elections fend off the violent rejectionists in both the black and the white communities and halt the country's growing epidemic of violent crime?
Has South Africa's political evolution been accompanied by a revolution in the thinking and emotions of its 40 million citizens?
Can South Africa's new leaders prevent the hemorrhaging of capital and talent that has crippled other African nations, stimulate the continent's most advanced economy and also meet the rising expectations of the country's black majority?
Can the country's tribes, factions and geographic regions cooperate to tackle a host of contentious issues?
LAW AND ORDER Violence is the most pressing issue. One recent night inside Bayafuthi hostel, Jeff Sibiya talked of his attempts to bring peace to his area. His voice filled with resignation, he admitted that the gulf was too wide and the anger too deep to return to the days when hostel dwellers and township residents played soccer together. Yet the next morning he put on his suit, stuck a white dove of peace pin in his lapel and left for yet another peace meeting. Two weeks later, Sibiya was shot dead during an Army raid on Bayafuthi.
According to the Army, Sibiya was killed during a gun battle with hostel residents who opened fire when an Army patrol entered Bayafuthi in search of weapons. Inkatha officials say he was gunned down while wearing his peace monitor's jacket and trying to mediate.
The political violence has raised a host of questions about who is responsible for it. Sibiya admitted to U.S. News that white men, whom he refused to identify, came to Bayafuthi at night to advise hostel dwellers on military strategy. A commission of inquiry headed by Judge Richard Goldstone recently confirmed what millions of South Africans suspected all along: that a renegade "Third Force" in the security establishment has been fueling "black-on- black" violence. The Goldstone Commission outlined a conspiracy of gun running and military training for Inkatha members by senior officials in the South African Police.
With the political violence has come an explosion of crime. According to police statistics, 17,467 South Africans were murdered in 1993, an increase of almost 9 percent from 1992. Reported incidents of rape increased by 11 percent over the past year, although analysts say the real figure is much higher. Johannesburg, with a per capita murder rate 7.5 times New York City's, is the murder capital of the world.
In many black townships and rural areas, the simplest acts of everyday life, from commuting to churchgoing to attending school, now carry the risk of random, brutal death. Pretoria's Human Sciences Research Council has identified 12 distinct types of massacres, ranging from drive-bys to "knock knocks," in which occupants of a household are slaughtered after opening the door.
On the front stoop of a matchbox house in Soweto's middle class Pimville section, 11 tsotsis (township gangsters), who refuse to give their real names, smoke marijuana and drink from communal bottles of beer. "Nzakes," 24, explains smoke marijuana and drink from communal bottles of beer. "Nzakes," 24, explains what it's like to kill. "You get a little bit of a scream, you get them begging for their life, `Please, please don't shoot me, please don't kill me,'" he says in a falsetto voice that sends his friends into convulsions of stoned laughter. "Panache," 22, says that when burgling homes in Johannesburg's white suburbs he often kills the family pet and leaves it baking in the oven for the owners to find on coming home. "If you find your little dog roasted, you're going to be hurt," he says. "It's a sense of revenge, because they love their dogs more than us."
The election has only heightened white fears. Travel agents report that this month's flights to Europe, Israel and America were filled months ago. Capital is also believed to be flowing out of the country at a rate that, should it continue, will surpass last year's record high of $4.5 billion, or almost 5 percent of the entire economy. A pharmacist in Pietermaritzburg says the wealthy housewives who frequent her store have been stocking up on lipstick, makeup and tranquilizers in anticipation of a civil war in the Zulu-dominated province of Natal. One woman even asked to buy cyanide, she says.
Some whites are convinced their country is destined to become yet another African basket case. "We're in a situation where our ideology is directly colliding with Mandela's," says avocado farmer David Groebblar, who took part in a white right-wing incursion into Bophuthatswana that left as many as 100 dead last month. "This thing's going to boil down to a horrible bloody fight."
The South African Defense Force is said to support the transition, but questions remain about the national police. Last month, when top policemen named in the Goldstone report tried to defy de Klerk's orders suspending them, fears were rife of an open split between the government and police.
The real fear is that the security forces will be overwhelmed if violence explodes throughout the country. The white right wing and Inkatha are believed to have built up military strength, although neither has exhibited a willingness to use it. But security sources have recently ascertained that Inkatha's military capacity is much greater than had been estimated: The group is said to have land mines, rockets, bazookas and other infantry weapons. "They have enough weaponry to sustain a guerrilla war for 10 years," says one source.
HEARTS AND MINDS Despite the violence, the four-year negotiating process leading up to next week's election has brought blacks and whites together in ways that were unimaginable four years ago. In Stellenbosch, whose university supplied the intellectual underpinnings of apartheid, a poster in a campus video store advertises Spike Lee's interracial love story, "Jungle Fever." In the northern town of Messina, ANC election posters showing a smiling Nelson Mandela share tree trunks and telephone poles with posters decla
