This intransigence by whites was also underscored by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which investigated apartheid-era crimes. It is also common knowledge that black people have been more willing to forgive whites for what they did to them than whites have been in acknowledging guilt for the mistreatment and racial injustices perpetrated with impunity against blacks and other nonwhites during the apartheid era. It is common knowledge among many South Africans and even among foreigners that many whites, if not the majority, are unrepentant and don't feel they did anything wrong during apartheid. Therefore, much of the success, and failure, of the government's policies will depend on the cooperation – or lack thereof – from this hostile civil service and the rest of the white community, the vast majority of whom have only grudgingly, if at all, accepted black-majority rule. Many of them were racist diehards – and they still are – fully committed to the ideology of white supremacy even in the new dispensation of a multiracial democratic South Africa.
The democratic government which assumed power after the end of apartheid inherited a bureaucracy dominated by male Afrikaners most of whom, as supporters of apartheid, had no interest in implementing the policies of the new government aimed at achieving racial equality. There is no such thing as a Bantu race.Ĭoloureds also have challenged the legitimacy of the assumptions articulated by the authorities during the apartheid era who used the term arbitrarily as a descriptive category to define them in spite of the differences among them in terms of racial identity.īut, in spite of their newly won freedom, the extent to which they will be able to translate that into reality will, to a large degree, depend on what whites do. They also rejected it simply because it was wrong. So are the Coloureds and the Indians.Įven the terms which were used by the apartheid regime to describe them are no longer much in use.īlack people never accepted the term “Bantu” which was used as a racial category to define them because of its derogatory connotations. BLACK PEOPLE in South Africa are now legally free.
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