This book ingeniously attempts to answer the nagging question: ‘Is there still white in the rainbow’ – the provocative title of Southall's concluding chapter. Amazingly, given the obsessive cruelties of apartheid, whites still for the most part live comfortably in South Africa. They constitute about 8% of South Africa's 55 million population, control some of the pinnacles of economic and professional power, and are even active politically, albeit in a distinctly minor key. For all kinds of structural as well as path-dependent reasons, the white colour not only remains in the vaunted ‘rainbow’ but also contributes to the state's understanding of its mature self as a complex, still troubled, largely under-performing leader of free Africa.
Settler whites in Kenya and Zimbabwe, fewer in number than in South Africa, quickly experienced diminished status and efficacy in their new states. In Zimbabwe, they even lost their economic potency when President Robert Mugabe forced them off their prosperous farms and into exile, crippling the nation's economy and contributing to massive black unemployment and impoverishment.
Nelson Mandela wanted something very different for South Africa. Reconciliation between peoples of diverse skin hues was critical. And that meant doing nothing overt to generate too much white backlash. Mandela knew that whites could help Africans grow economically and provide skills that Africans would only develop over time. Today's position of whites as an integral part of the rainbow coalition is Mandela's legacy. Southall explores to what extent that legacy is real and whether it endures meaningfully.
The author's opening chapters masterfully show how the white right plotted and then gained political and economic control throughout the years of Union and then, decisively, under apartheid. Southall demonstrates how liberals and liberal ideology were submerged before 1990, only to have critical elements of liberal representative democracy re-emerge as a helpful bridge to the exile African National Congress (ANC)'s expectation of state-dominated socialism. Moreover, Southall provides a very skilled dissection of today's Democratic Alliance, the now key black-run opposition to ANC political hegemony and successor to white political progressives under apartheid. His chapter on Afrikaners in 21st century South African life is also powerful.
Two chapters examine the questionable results of the elaborate Truth and Reconciliation Commission proceedings. As Southall shows, too few upper echelon perpetrators of apartheid cruelties were ever named, much less prosecuted for their heinous acts. Whites, more generally, learned in some detail how the authorities had brutalized Africans, but those revelations hardly led – as Archbishop Desmond Tutu wanted – to meaningful societal reconciliation or ‘rainbow’ togetherness. Moreover, amnesty procedures were applied inconsistently and reparations were never agreed.
Southall well handles President F.W. De Klerk's failed attempt to transfer less than complete authority to the ANC and asserts on good evidence that Mandela and his ANC team, especially Cyril Ramaphosa, thoroughly outmanoeuvred the outgoing white regime in so many determining respects; nevertheless, those final arrangements still benefited whites.
Under Mandela, from independence in 1994 to his retirement in 1999, whites felt most connected to and welcoming of an African democracy under which they would be much less privileged than before, and possibly marginalised, status compressed and agricultural land deprived; Mandela's gifts of emotional intelligence and his instinct for inclusionism enabled the ‘rainbow’ nation to begin on a high note of reconciliation and promise, one that it alas soon lost.
What works less well are chapters in the middle of this book that attempt to employ focus group opinion gatherings to reveal what representative whites think and feel about relatively contemporary South Africa, its democracy and its myriad defects: crime, rampant corruption, schooling lapses, massive electricity shortages and more. One of the results of these focus discussions and Southall's penetrating analysis throughout, however, is that English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking whites have distinct perspectives and different interests, with Afrikaners much more ethno-aroused than their Anglophone compatriots.
African numbers will grow, whites will decline demographically. Southall's excellent examination of colour and race from a rare angle of analysis provides an innovative and welcome accomplishment that stands out among the abundant literature on today's still evolving rainbow nation.
