White racism lives on in S. Africa, commission hears

By Philippe Bernes-Lasserre

JOHANNESBURG (AFP): White racism lives on in South Africa and is still taken for granted by many blacks 10 years after the abolition of apartheid laws, the South African Human Rights Commission is hearing as it prepares for a major conference.

Older blacks explain the racism by saying: "We have to live with it. It is inborn, it is philosophical, it is part of our life," Moses Khorowmbi, a student collecting witness accounts, told AFP.

"Racism and tribalism won't end ... You are a young man, you can't understand," they tell him, often refusing to allow him to quote them by name.

The commission, sitting in Bloemfontein, Nelspruit, East London, Johannesburg is hearing the same stories everywhere: insults at work; entry refused to restaurants and nightclubs, racial slurs, casual violence.

At Mafikeng, about 400 kilometers (250 miles) northwest of Johannesburg, some 300 people showed up on Thursday. Only one was white.

The most blatant racism often takes places on huge white-owned farms in the hinterland, where little has changed.

There, farmworkers are routinely beaten, given degrading jobs as punishments, or attacked for crossing a farm without permission; they are thrown into rivers and dams, humiliated, even covered with paint.

"I've been with the commission for five years. Through the media and through the complaints that reach us, I had a sense that the situation in farms was very bad. But yesterday it was shocking," a commissioner told the South African Broadcasting Commission the day after the Mafikeng hearing.

"People have lost legs, people have lost eyes, people's ears have been bitten by dogs, it's just an awful, awful situation of vicious racial attacks that are taking place in the farms in the North West (province)," he said.

Few complain in person to the commission, however, because they are so used to the racism, or because they depend on an abusive white employer for a job in a continent where each wage- earner generally supports about 20 people.

In towns and offices, "there are no (whites only) signs any more, but it is a code of conduct, a rule of practice," said one witness at the Johannesburg hearing.

That means that in at least one company the black employees still dare not use the toilets once reserved for whites.

In the central city of Bloemfontein, a number of witnesses recounted similar stories.

Welcome Kanto said he had lost two jobs in succession in the building industry after lodging complaints with the police over racism.

In the first case, he was refused a safety helmet because it was reserved for whites; in the second, he was beaten up by white colleagues.

Ngceke Mohgezi told the Bloemfontein hearing how he and a group of friends were assaulted by whites while crossing a farm in May.

"They took us in their cars to a neighboring farm where they ordered us to take off our clothes and get into the dam," he said.

Once in the water, the men were allegedly ordered to sing, before being assaulted with iron pipes and sjamboks (whips).

In Johannesburg, the South African Prisoners' Human Rights Association told of everyday racism in the nation's jails.

In the women's prison in Pretoria, the organization said, "there are jobs for whites and other jobs for blacks. White inmates are given all soft jobs, black inmates are given all hard jobs. The only office where there is a black doing something soft is the store-room."

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) meanwhile warned at the Johannesburg hearing that many black South Africans resented immigrants from other African countries.

"There is racism among black people themselves -- it is called xenophobia, which is hatred and discrimination so it can be dealt with as another form of racism," the IOM said.

"Black South Africans do not easily accept (other) black Africans -- they are at best tolerated and at worst brutalized and marginalized ... subjected to generalized stereotyping depicting them as 'job-stealers,' 'women snatchers,' criminals and border-jumpers."

The reports of the human rights commission will serve as a basis for a National Conference on Racism to be held from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2, and which will be opened by President Thabo Mbeki.

Next year, South Africa will host an international conference on racism being organized by the United Nations.