White Roots: Seeds of Grievance

Robert van Tonder, 54, is a 14th generation Afrikaner whose Danish ancestors arrived in the New Cape colony in 1700. He lives with his second wife and his six children in a rambling, thatched-roof farmhouse on a 100-acre homestead 20 miles west of Johannesburg. It is a peaceful countryside of rolling brown hills, white fences and grazing cattle. In Van Tonder's home, his small study is crammed with books in Afrikaans on the Great Trek and the Boer War. In the Afrikaner tradition, extra places are always set at meal times for neighbors who may unexpectedly call. Van Tonder is proud of his heritage, but worried about his country's future: one of his sons is serving on the Angolan front in the army. Last week TIME Johannesburg Bureau Chief William McWhirter spent a day with the family and filed this report:

Like many Boer Afrikaners (Boer is the name taken by the Voortrekkers and their descendants), Van Tonder is troubled by the stigma that has become attached to their history. "We were people who did not want to enslave a black tribe," he says. "We are being accused by every country on earth of being Nazis and oppressors. We came here alone. We never conquered any other nation. We have no blood on our hands."

As proof, Van Tonder refers proudly ; to "Danger" Mahlangu, his farmhand, who is paid $120 a month. Van Tonder also supplies a house for Mahlangu and his family, plus board, fuel and medical care. Mahlangu's grandfather, who was also born in this area, belonged to the small Ndebele tribe which came under the "protection" of the Boers when they were threatened by the warlike Zulus. Says Van Tonder: "My people saved the Ndebele from extermination." Last weekend there was a three-day feast and tribal dancing in honor of Mahlangu's 13-year-old daughter, who was welcomed into adulthood by delegations of Ndebele from nearby farms and villages. The Mahlangus' house of thick adobe, which has running water but no electricity, had been exuberantly painted in bold white-and-yellow designs. Two oxen and four goats from Mahlangu's herd had been slaughtered (some of the meat was brought up to the Van Tonders' house as a gift; in return the Van Tonders brought meat of their own to the feast). The women sat in one group, the men surrounding them. The women would rise and, chanting slowly, dance before each group as it presented gifts of platters, bowls, squash, bread and beer to Mahlangu's daughter. Then the men followed, leaping and kicking their heels.

"The modern world has changed relationships like those between Danger and ourselves," says Van Tonder. "Although this is a lovely friendship, it can't last always, and it would be unfair for it to last. Danger's children will become educated and Westernized. They will want their country. My descendants would also like to have their country."

Proud Afrikaner though he is, Van Tonder is scornful of South African policies. "It's a police state," he says. "It's putting my culture into a straitjacket." Van Tonder, who has now joined the right-wing Herstigle Nasionale Partie and is standing as one of their candidates, has had issues of his own personal newsletter, Die Stem (The Call), banned. He believes, perhaps unrealistically, that the old Boer republics--the Transvaal and the Orange Free State--should be left on their own, allowed to preserve their language and culture in the midst of a predominantly black Africa. "Integration will be the ultimate destruction of the whites," he says. "I would like to see them [blacks] free and happy. I would like to see them preserve their own culture. It is just not in our nature either to integrate with them or oversee them. We only want to live among our own people, to live our own religion and to lead a rational, happy life."

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