White Walls Waiting: the Whites of South Africa

By Pico Iyer

Emotionally cornered and widely condemned, the whites of South Africa are the prisoners of a status quo that is murderous to sustain and suicidal to abandon. Their response to this dilemma is not in itself surprising: the more their racist system is branded as offensive, the more defensive, and dangerous, they become. "The first habit we instill," says Hennie van der Merwe, "is the habit not to ask questions."

Hennie is the pseudonym of an outspoken Anglican priest in Wyndal, a pseudonymous white settlement in a lush, isolated valley north of Cape Town. His audience is Vincent Crapanzano, an anthropologist at New York City's Queens College, who assembles in Waiting an oral biography of South Africa's white community, the 16% minority that rules a nation at once divided and single-minded. Over the course of the book, Van der Merwe and more than 30 other Wyndal residents vent their passions, explain their prejudices and in effect deliver their own eulogies. "We lack (tribal ritual) so terribly in our society," laments Peter Cooke, an English farmer, in confessing his envy of a nonwhite childhood friend. "We have no order. We drift about. We are lost."

Not all Cooke's compatriots are so self-critical. Indeed, Crapanzano begins his study by explaining the rift within the white community, which separates the Afrikaners from their neighbors of English descent. So profound is this mutual resentment that many Afrikaners championed Hitler during World War II rather than support what they considered a British cause. Conversely, some English speakers will drive miles out of their way rather than patronize an Afrikaner store.

Despite their differences, however, the two groups share the anxiety of outnumbered usurpers. They dwell in the past, using jargon and jingoism, history and mythology to erect walls around themselves and ward off the unknown. The white South African, contends Crapanzano, exists in a state of suspended animation. His waiting produces "feelings of powerlessness, helplessness . . . and all the rage that these feelings evoke."

In response, many of Wyndal's whites lose themselves in fantasies of an apocalyptic day of reckoning. One of Waiting's most unsettling achievements is its revelation of how distorted forms of religion become essential to a community that takes itself to be God's elect. In the book's most chilling scene, 40 middle-class citizens quietly file into a gaslit packing shed to hear a tirade against the agents of the Antichrist. First they hear a harangue, then on cassette the voice of an American who claims to have defected from the forces of darkness. The agents of Satan, he rants, include the Kennedys, Sears, Roebuck, the Rothschilds and the Council on Foreign Relations. On and on the babble continues: "Elton John and the Beatles actually sang in the secret language of witches . . . The pyramid on the dollar bill was the Illuminati's seal: The blocks of stone symbolized its organization."

Crapanzano registers both dark rites and white lies with scrupulous calm. Every now and then, he cuts loose with supple analytical turns on the nature of waiting, of being colored or of creating myths of violence. But for the most part, the author is content with a tone of measured outrage. So measured, in fact, that his own misgivings about the South African system are often drowned out by the whites' disarming pleas for sympathy.

As a result, the black majority is apprehended here as no more than a shadowy danger somewhere in the background. By skirting apartheid, South Africa's most urgent problem, Crapanzano sometimes seems to be leisurely taking the temperature of a patient who is burning alive. Yet much of the time, he succeeds in catching racial hatred through a few terrifying flashes of white self-disclosure. One man warns a child to beware of the Bible because it fails to explain that blacks evolved from baboons. Another, after pronouncing that he sees no solution to South Africa's racial problems, adds, "Actually there is one. The world needs a Hitler in every country." And a policy report of the National Institute for Christian Teaching and Education states that "the Coloured man can and only be truly happy when he has been Christianized and (made) proof against his own heathen ideology." Pride, they might have added, goeth before destruction (Proverbs 16: 18).