The Cadets from Soweto

As racial tensions rise, a white capitalist grooms a black elite

After hours of skirmishes with police, tensions ran high outside the high school in the "colored" (mixed race) Cape Town suburb of Elsie's River. Bands of youths pelted passing cars with rocks. Then someone threw an unlit gasoline bomb at a truck driven by two white plain-clothes policemen. Two other officers in camouflage riot gear suddenly sprang from the rear. Without warning they fired directly into the crowd, wounding six and killing two 15-year-old colored students.

The bloody clash was the latest and most violent to arise from six weeks of school boycotts and demonstrations protesting the blatant racial discrimination of South Africa's educational system. The volatile conflict was hauntingly reminiscent of the black school protests that had exploded in Soweto four years ago--except that this time the movement was led by coloreds. Responding to the boycott, the authorities last week arrested more than 248 people--including black Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu and 52 other religious leaders who had joined him in a peaceful protest march in Johannesburg.

The government of Prime Minister P: W. Botha blames the unrest on unnamed "agitators," but it can hardly deny the gross educational inequalities that separate the country's racial groups. White students in government-supported schools enjoy annual per capita expenditures of $677; coloreds get $227; blacks $66. Resentment over these glaring imbalances is coupled with an even deeper sense of frustration at the all-embracing system of apartheid that perpetuates the inability of nonwhites to compete on an equal footing with whites.

One ambitious private effort to balance the scales--at least for a chosen few--has been launched by the Anglo American Corp., South Africa's gold-mining giant. The company has so far committed more than $3.5 million to carrying out a plan that will train just twelve black students a year for the next five years. The avowed aim of the project: to produce an elite generation of black management leaders. TIME Johannesburg Bureau Chief William McWhirter was allowed unique access to the program last week. His report:

Anglo American has shown a devotion to liberal causes. Prominent among them is the goal of "black advancement," which the company has sought to promote through various recruitment schemes over the past five years. To the dismay of Chairman Harry Oppenheimer, 71, consultations with the company's black employees last year exposed most of those efforts as ineffective. A subsequent study came up with 33 recommendations for new programs. The blunt response from the chairman's office: "Accept them all."

The boldest of them was the so-called undergraduate cadet scheme. On the one hand it laid bare the bankruptcy of Anglo American's earlier tokenism and potentially threatened the job security of white managers by challenging the complacent assumption that blacks were incapable of mastering the complexities of finance and engineering. On the other hand it also raised serious questions about inequality and elitism by its implicit dismissal of the goal of broad educational reform in favor of a tiny black superclass. Declares Oppenheimer's son Nicholas, 34, the program's overall director: "In South Africa you have to produce a privileged few. You can't wave a magic wand and uplift everybody."

Anglo American's nationwide talent search turned up 4,000 black applicants for an irresistible opportunity: one year of intense general preparation, followed by four years of engineering or three years of commerce at the level of Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand. In addition to free room and board, the cadets were to receive the standard management trainee's starting monthly salary of $393--four times more than the average black miner's wages. After a numbing battery of exams and interviews the golden twelve were finally chosen. The group, ranging in age from 16 to 22, comprised two women, four students from rural tribal homelands and six street-smart residents of urban ghettos

Their curriculum was custom designed by six professional educators. Since apartheid laws bar their official entrance into Witwatersrand without special ministerial permission, the cadets attend classes in a university building leased by Anglo American. Their university instruction has so far ranged from game theory to designing cranes and reconstructing automobiles. In parallel training at Anglo American, the cadets have been exposed to mine operations, gold and currency trading and group projects.

For all its largesse, Oppenheimer's philanthropy has not entirely won over the black cadets. Most say that they are troubled by the corporation's historical ties to South Africa's white capitalist establishment. The cadets do not question the sincerity of their mentors, but one 21-year-old student from East London sums up the underlying skepticism: "I don't feel any overwhelming sense of gratitude in being here, because they are suddenly paying back the wages they should have been paying to the miners for so long." One telling comment on the cadets' ambiguous position as privileged blacks in an apartheid society: they are housed in a Salvation Army hostel in the black ghetto of Soweto.

The architects of Anglo American's unique program defend it as a prototype that may be applied to a new black generation. It also carries inherent risks Concedes Anglo American's manpower development officer, Richard Reese: "If the thing fails for any reason, it's going to be difficult to convince anybody to try again. The conservatives will only say we were wrong all along."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.