Destiny's Children
10 Years After The End Of Apartheid
Zoid embraces her audiences' new-found powerlessness and without bitterness tells them to forget about politics with lyrics like "maak nie regtig saak nie," Afrikaans for "it doesn't really matter." Such apathy and disenchantment have prompted hand wringing among community leaders, intellectuals, and some in government. Jonathan Jansen, the dean of the school of education at the University of Pretoria and a leading black intellectual, argued on the op-ed page of a South African daily paper last year that there is "a deep and disturbing frustration among young white Afrikaner men. It is a frustration rooted in a sense of personal and group emasculation."
Jansen proposes offering young Afrikaners hope by increasing slots for them at schools and in the civil service, a radical proposal given that black unemployment remains about 35 percent, while white unemployment is still in the single digits. Max du Preez, the country's best-known Afrikaner newspaper columnist, urged the government to be more sensitive to Afrikaners. He wrote in a column last year: "They feel unloved and they feel unwanted."
It may seem irrelevant how the children of South Africa's notorious oppressors feel or fare, but it's an indication of whether the lofty goals professed by the "rainbow nation's" new Constitution can be attained. And it may tell us a thing or two about the possibility of resolution of conflicts worldwide, showing whether children of the oppressors and the oppressed can truly work together to build a positive future.
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