But it’s also becoming clear that the war for economic parity in South Africa could be as long and hard as the half-century struggle against apartheid. Though blacks have the vote, “the corporate world belongs to the other side,” says Sam Tsi-ma, head of the Johannesburg branch of the Black Management Forum. And that side, he insists, is behaving badly. “Appointing a black person to a position is becoming a business must,” he argues. So companies appoint blacks to lucrative but powerless positions and “parade the people on the outside and say, “Yes, we do have black people’.” Brigalia Bam, general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, says the new black middle class has been played for fools, used “for tokens in companies everywhere.” “The anger and frustration is growing,” she said. “You have no power base. You are just there for the company to look good.” She is under no illusions about why she holds a seat on the boards of three large corporations. “The in thing now is to get a black woman,” she said.
More than pride is at stake. A vigorous middle class bent on consumption is essential to rebuilding an economy that was ruined by sanctions and by the inefficiencies of apartheid. Common sense argues for tapping the talents of blacks, who outnumber whites by 6 to 1. The rise of a black middle class also makes a powerful argument for Mandela’s vision of a multiracial democracy. “All poor people have traditionally been black and all less-than-poor people have tended to be white, and this is very bad for a democracy,” says Lawrence Schlemmer of the South African Institute of Race Relations.
But it’s one thing to hire black executives, quite another to listen to them. Whites simply have trouble accepting that blacks can lead, says Tsima. Bam hasn’t gotten anywhere arguing for job-creating expansion at board meetings she attends. The response is, ““Don’t you see that we are having a lot of problems with unions in this country – we have to retrench’,” she says. Typically, educated blacks land “soft” corporate assignments like human resources and community relations – not line executive positions. And many fail to stay in a job for long, further diminishing their influence. As the country’s most-sought-after employees, they’re regularly being lured away to new jobs. “People being recycled through poaching and premium payments,” Mamphela Ramphele, vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town, calls it. It can be hard to resist – every move means a sweetening of their compensation package.
Joseph Thloloe knows about salary escalation. The deputy editor in chief of the South African Broadcasting Corporation and a former managing editor of the black-oriented Sowetan newspaper, Thloloe participated in SABC’s recent search for a financial manager. “Every time we spoke to black applicants,” he says, “their salary demands were, frankly, outrageous.” Blacks were asking for much more than their white counterparts. “Expectations are very high,” Thloloe explains. “They think, “We’re now liberated. We should be taking over’.”
Social lives, as well as professional ones, are a challenge. For many blacks, suburban life has failed to meet their expectations. “You actually come and squat there,” says Tsima. “You don’t become integrated into the community.” If their new white neighbors can be cold, their old black ones are increasingly distant. Nyami Mandindi, a building project analyst, fled Soweto in 1994 for a high-security development north of Johannesburg, where hers is the only black family. “As more educated people move out of the townships they become a poverty trap,” she says. “When I was growing up there was a teacher, a minister, a doctor, a nurse. These were the role models, and they are starting to move out.”
Black parents also fret about the effect on their own families of leaving the townships. Last fall Lulamile Ndizana, a 35-year-old chemical engineer, pulled into a service station near Durban to buy some gas. He was chatting with the attendants when he noticed a well-dressed black boy of about 10 standing beside his father’s Mercedes-Benz. The boy pointed to a half-dozen black laborers at a nearby bus stop and observed, “They steal almost anything.” Ndizana hopes that his 3-year-old son won’t learn similar attitudes from his white playmates. “The fact that we are educated and live in a nice house does not change where we came from,” he says.
Such complaints echo some of the grievances of blacks in corporate America. But there is a huge difference. It’s our country, South African blacks can now say – and ultimately, many believe, business will have to recognize that. Tsima is such an optimist. He says he dreams of a day when black people in corporate South Africa “can proudly say, “I am going to work for my company’.” That’s a modest dream. Still, it’s a sign of how far South Africa has come that he can even harbor it.
