Freedom's Promise - South Africa

Wearing hard hats, with searching hearts and minds, the citizens of today's South Africa are building a multiracial democratic nation while the world watches and learns

Charlayne, now Johannesburg Bureau Chief for CNN, became a U.S. Civil Rights Movement heroine in 1961 when she and the late Hamilton Holmes integrated the University of Georgia. She has continued to break racial and gender barriers in a distinguished career as a journalist. Now, six years after apartheid's end, ESSENCE asked to draw on her experience with social change and racial justice in the United States to give us her unique insight into the progress of South Africa's multiracial democracy.

THANDI WAKES UP AT DAWN, rolls out of the double bed that takes up most of the space in her tiny bedroom and slips into a pair of paint-stained, dusty blue pants and a blue-and-red-striped pullover. Walking barefoot into the tiny adjoining room that serves as a kitchen, dining room and living room, she slips into a pair of worn black sandals and then, just before leaving the house, plops a white plastic hard hat over her close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. Thandi is ready to spend another day building the new South Africa.

Since the end of apartheid six years ago, millions of South Africans have been engaged in building a new nation--not always as literally as has , who's a partner in a new construction company putting up low-income housing. But the whole nation is working from a foundation of democratic principles enshrined in a constitution, drawn up and affirmed by all its people. For the first time in the history of the Republic, South Africans have a document guaranteeing that Black people are citizens and that all citizens, regardless of color or gender, have the same rights. It is as if historic racial achievements in the United States had happened all at once instead of stretching across more than a hundred years: Congress's adding the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing citizens the right to vote, regardless of race, color or previous condition of servitude (1870); the Supreme Court's handing down the Brown decision outlawing separate and unequal schools (1954); and the federal government's passing sweeping civil-rights legislation (1963-1968).

Now, well into the second political season led by a Black government, South Africa is in a different place from where it was when its constitution was written. It is in a place called Transformation, which seeks to take a society that was once "brutal and brutish in the extreme"--as the country's second Black-president, Thabo , called it in his first parliamentary address last year--and elevate those who were its victims to their rightful place in a new society they will help create. Like when she picks up her shovel and drives it into the rock-hard earth of Thembisa, South Africans of every class and stripe are busy making the legal promises of the last six years real. They are rolling up their sleeves and tackling issues of justice and equality and human rights--issues that have proved difficult, if not unyielding, all over the world. It is a noisy, sometimes deafening process, but there are dynamics here that seem to be delivering something new not only for the continent but also for the world in the coming century.

Already, the process that took the country from apartheid to democracy has yielded a model for other African countries that are still in some stage of conflict, and for nations everywhere. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission's approach of granting amnesty even to brutal killers of children in exchange for their "truth" about why they did it has surfaced as a possible route to restoring some semblance of peaceful coexistence in strife-filled countries from Sierra Leone to Kosovo. It has even resonated in America's body politic, fueling the call for an apology for slavery to be made to many of the descendants of slaves who--even after all this time since the Emancipation Proclamation--have yet to find a real comfort zone in a country controlled by a majority who do not look like them or think of them as they think of themselves. That South Africa is now governed by people who look like the vast majority (some 80 percent, though figures vary) of its more than 40 million people is one of the distinguishing features of its grand democratic experiment. For all its similarities to the civil-rights struggles in America, the fact of those demographics makes South Africa's predicament vastly different. For one thing, a broadly shared history and struggle has bought the African National Congress--led government time and space to negotiate a new reality, especially for "the weakest who were denied access to power, who became the landless, the unemployed, the uneducated, the surplus people deported to the so-called homelands, the victims of abject poverty," as has put it.

Indeed, when took over the reins of state from Nelson Mandela, he already had established an impressive track record for his hands-on day-to-day management of Mandela's government. The 57-year-old called for an African Renaissance, a rebirth of the whole continent as well as of South Africa. It would be a rebirth that would see Africa emerge from the trough of dependency brought on by colonialism's legacy, and it would see Africans themselves take the lead in restoring the continent to a state of self-reliance and prosperity that it had known in the days of the West African kingdoms, like the Ashanti or those in Benin and Dahomey, dating back to the beginning of the last millennium, or even more recently, the nineteenth-century Zulu kings Shaka and Cetswayo. Having called for the twenty-first century to become The African Century, has also called on the continent's leaders to deal with crime, corruption, coups and an immorality that betrays the values of their ancestors.

And while there has been a widespread embrace of the Renaissance idea, there is also a robust civil society with a mind of its own, and it takes to the streets whenever it feels the government is not being responsive. Advocates for change have campaigned for higher wages for civil servants (they lost, but didn't go away too mad). They've spoken out on AIDS, especially over what they regard as the government's too-cautious position on the antiretroviral drug AZT and its unavailability to pregnant women; on rape, where the bad news is that a woman is reportedly sexually assaulted every 36 seconds; on domestic violence (one in four women is said to be abused) and many other issues.

The pages of newspapers that once carried white space to avoid reports that either attacked or reflected badly on the apartheid regime are now filled with a wide variety of hearty, sometimes over-the-top, name-calling debates. (One example: The Black Justice Minister told a White female opposition-party member that the only disadvantage she had suffered under apartheid was that she "had been unable to enjoy sex across the colour line.") And while the government has been accused of being "prickly" about criticism, no reporter, columnist or letter-to-the-editor writer has been threatened or jailed for his or her opinion (unlike the case in neighboring states Mozambique and Angola). A recent bill that some feared might empower the government to restrict freedom of expression was vociferously attacked by media groups and opposition parties and, as a result, underwent modifications that seemed to mollify the critics.

A tough new domestic-violence law has also recently been enacted. Activists have been vocal about their worry that there hasn't been enough training for law-enforcement officers who have to implement the act. But the fact that the new law extends the definition of domestic violence to include the elderly, gays, lesbians, children, parents, girlfriends and boyfriends has led advocates to hail the statute as "progressive."

As an African-American journalist, I am particularly struck by the rapid transformation of the media in South Africa. I was one of the first wave of Blacks and women to enter U. S. mainstream media in 1963, fully nine years after the landmark Brown decision outlawing school segregation. But it took still another five years and an outbreak of riots in cities and towns across America before any real movement occurred, thanks in part to a searing report by a presidential task force known as The Kerner Commission. The Kerner report looked into the causes of the riots and concluded with an indictment of White media for its failure to cover conditions in Black communities. Those conditions and a simmering rage about them were what ultimately led to those explosions, the Kerner Commission report determined. It also criticized White media for its failure to hire and promote Blacks, for who better to report on those conditions? It was only then that the U.S. White media began to bring Blacks into their ranks.

But in South Africa it seemed to happen overnight. Certainly within the first five years of the new democratic dispensation, the face of change is on South Africa's television screens, and it comes in all colors. But in the media, as elsewhere, the changes are more than cosmetic. Behind the scenes, Blacks are in the seats of power, with the power to make policy, the power to change things, the power to build a different looking and profoundly altered South Africa. Affirmative action is not a dirty word among most South Africans; it is official government policy, along with Black Economic Empowerment--the policy calling on business to do business with Blacks or lose the government's business. Though a few Black women have penetrated the White male world of commerce, and there is at least one Black female-headed company now listed on the Johannesburg stock exchange, generally Black women are at the bottom of the bottom, with most employed as domestics or in other menial capacities. Still Black women can look with some hope to a new equality law that targets the development through training of employable workers for new openings in the marketplace in the next five years. (This, of course, heavily depends on the government's ability to enforce "voluntary" business efforts required by law.)

The era of Transformation and Empowerment is still far from perfect. "Bantu" education, the substandard instruction Blacks received under apartheid, has left far too many Black South Africans unprepared for the opportunities that the new South Africa has to offer, resulting in a big training gap for the new equality law to fill. Moreover, while the economy is doing far better than many expected, it's not doing well enough yet to provide satisfactory opportunities to everyone with skills. Full employment is hostage to the global economy that so far has been less than kind, if not hostile, to developing economies, even advanced ones like South Africa's. Corruption also is a fact of life, though the government has put eradicating under-the-table dealings by government officials high on its agenda of action items.

Thandi echoes many South Africans who say that while the "new" South Africa has afforded her opportunities that she once only dreamed of, vestiges of the "old" remain. Pausing to rest on the handle of the shovel she is using to mix concrete under the heat of South Africa's sweltering summer sun, says: "It is a challenge for us when we are working with men. Many still don't want us here." Though she is the only woman on her crew, the number of women's construction firms is growing, and more and more Black women are getting involved in the field. also says that in many ways, "apartheid is still there. You can't be the boss in the White areas, but they do get the jobs in our areas."

Yet the 49-year-old widow and mother of four, who seems to be in perpetual motion, is confident that in time this, too, shall pass. Her job building houses emancipated from the domestic servitude that once forced her to leave her young boys at home in the rural areas--miles away from her to fend for themselves--looking in on them only once a month. And in the past, she had been left at the mercy of capricious White employers for whom the concept of overtime just didn't compute. For the first time in her life, now she is working overtime because she chooses to. What's more, as a full-fledged partner in the construction firm where she works, she is her own boss. got start-up financial help from the Development Bank of Southern Africa as well as technical assistance and other advice (such as how to prepare a bid) from a relatively new multiracial organization, South African Women in Construction.

It's still unusual to find women construction bosses. But with the appointment of a Black female Minister of Housing (with a reputation for being tough), strong, gender-conscious housing policies have been put in place, and a growing number of women are taking advantage of them. "It's our culture," says . "All of the men used to come to Johannesburg to the mines, then the mothers used to build the houses."

While Black women like aren't the only beneficiaries of the new South Africa, they were one segment of the most disadvantaged of the disadvantaged during the "old" South Africa. What is happening to them today is a good barometer of how far the "new" South Africa has come--that and the more than 100 houses she has built to help move her friends and neighbors out of the airless tin-and-cardboard boxes they have been forced to live in until now.

is the first to admit that women still have many rivers to cross before they reach the land promised in the new constitution. But, like most South Africans, whose now-legendary patience during the long voting lines of May 1994 moved the world, says she's seen enough and done enough to believe that transformation is real, and that patience, along with hard work, will be rewarded.

"I see it different now," she says. "In the future, if things are going like this, it will happen slowly, slowly, slowly. But I think it's going to be all right. And it is impressing me because sometimes I know that when I am getting very old, I can point to something. I can point and say this house was built by me."

If this is to be the century of the African Renaissance that Thabo has called for, South Africa has the building materials to make it happen.

Charlayne first covered South African politics in 1985 and has lived and worked there since 1998.

CNN correspondent Charlayne looks at the changing face of South Africa in "Freedom's Promise" She says, "Watching the birth of a new nation is amazing."