Waiting

The Whites of South Africa

Plot

4e de cou. : To the average outsider, South Africa is viewed as the proverbial land of plenty, a country where sunshine, mineral and agricultural wealth have combined to provide a minority, white population with an unprecedented standard of living. Most consider the system an oppressive one; some consider it a besieged bastion of Western democracy, the last outpost of reason and efficiency against the chaos of black subversive nationalism. Waiting: The Whites of South Africa is about the effects of domination on everyday life - not the everyday life of those who suffer domination, but of those who dominate, the life of seventeen per cent of the population (the Whites) who control the fate of the remaining eighty-three per cent. The people whose voices are heard in relative ease, some in considerable luxury, in one of the oldest colonial settlements on the African continent. Some are the descendants of the earliest settlers, the Afrikaners of the Boer War, of Dutch, German or Huguenot origin, others are of nineteenth-century English colonial stock or are immigrants from Zimbabwe or Zambia; there are the descendants of Jews who migrated from Lithuania at the end of the last century and some who fled to the Cape to escape persecution in Nazi Europe. These groups co-exist in some hostility, united by a common fear of the downtrodden majority; the Coloureds, the Asians and the Blacks. All talk of their expectation of change, of imminent bloodbath, of hate and revolution; for most Whites, waiting is compounded by fear; for most Blacks, however great their misery, there is a belief that time is on their side; for the Coloureds and Asians, fear and hope. Through this reportage, the White South Africans reveal themselves in their vulnerability.