CLUBBING: Businessmen Nazeer Camaroodeen, Don Ncube and Alwyn Martin wait as Judge Dikgang Moseneke tees up at Wanderers Golf Club
Posted Sunday, April 11, 2004; 2.15BST
And nothing escapes the issue of race. For a country that officially embraces nonracialism, South African life is often still dictated by the color of one's skin. From the selection of a football team to relations with a neighboring regime, race is an unspoken but omnipresent factor. Occasionally old wounds reopen. Two months ago, a white farmer allegedly ordered his workers to beat a former black employee and feed him to a pack of lions. When the farmer appeared in court, protesters, including local A.N.C. supporters, chanted "Kill the farmer, kill the Boer [Afrikaner]" a slogan the South African Human Rights Commission describes as "hate speech." For the most part, though, South Africa's two worlds get along. "If reconciliation means coming to love one another, it's not going to happen," says white writer and political scientist David Welsh. "But if reconciliation means staying off one another's necks, then that's largely happened."
It's not just black South Africans who are grappling with change. At the height of apartheid's power in the 1970s, the ruling Afrikaners seemed invincible. Africa's white tribe controlled the most potent military machine and economy on the continent; an Afrikaner surgeon had performed the world's first heart transplant; Afrikaner scientists were building nuclear weapons. Today, Afrikaners are out of office, out of favor and still searching for their place in the new South Africa. As the rest of the country celebrates a decade of freedom, apartheid's architects seem lost and besieged. Younger Afrikaners and businessmen have made peace and found places for themselves in the life of the country, but many of their elders have not. The Afrikaans language has almost disappeared from public life, and Afrikaner workers must now compete with the growing black middle class and affirmative-action policies that work against them. Most are still privileged compared with the black majority, but "the psychological devastation is remarkable," says Danie Goosen, spokesman for the Group of 63, a collective of Afrikaner academics and intellectuals. "It's amazing to see the extent to which the community has collapsed."
Even in the occasionally painful reality of daily coexistence there are moments of transcendence and even romance. When white multimillionaire Mark Shuttleworth became the first African in space two years ago, his journey on a Russian spacecraft was tracked by millions of South Africans, black and white alike. Last year, they cheered for Sibusiso Vilane when he became the first black man to conquer Mount Everest (never mind that he was born in Swaziland). And there was more happy hysteria in February, when actress Charlize Theron triumphed at the Academy Awards. Back home with her Best Actress Oscar, the blond beauty from working-class Benoni met with both Mbeki and Mandela. Mbeki called Theron, who at 15 saw her mother shoot her father dead in self-defense, "a grand metaphor of South Africa's move from agony to achievement." Theron welled up when Mandela said she had put the country "on the map." (It was, after all, Mandela who did that.) She started to cry, turned and hugged him tight. "I love you so much," she said. "I love you, too," said Mandela, with a look of gentle surprise.
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though, South Africa's two worlds get along. "If reconciliation means coming to love one another, it's not going to happen," says white writer and political scientist David Welsh. "But if reconciliation means staying off one another's necks, then that's largely happened." 
