South Africa The New Black Middle Class

By Sandra Burton

In the townships on the outskirts of Johannesburg and Pretoria, where the urban black labor force is required by law to live, many of the roads are littered, unpaved and scarred with potholes. Increasingly, however, they lead to the gates of grandiose homes built amid the matchbox slums by a new class of upwardly mobile black professionals and entrepreneurs known, like their American counterparts, as "buppies." Inside exclusive enclaves with up- market names like Siluma View and Beverly Hills, the new black elite is enjoying amenities once reserved for whites only: "his" and "hers" Mercedes, live-in black servants, Jacuzzi baths.

This newly affluent class is spearheading a peaceful but dramatic revolution in which blacks, who outnumber whites nearly 5 to 1 in South Africa, are starting to flex their economic muscle as earners and consumers. Blacks will pay an estimated total of $350 million in taxes this year, up from $58 million two years ago. Increasing numbers of blacks are working in middle-class professions as lawyers, doctors, psychiatrists, engineers, tax consultants and stockbrokers. Black businesses, large and small, are sprouting like mushrooms. The South African Black Taxi Association, for example, has increased its + membership fivefold, to 45,000, since 1983 and last year made an abortive $75 million bid to take over the country's largest white-owned bus company. Last month the black-owned Soweto Investment Trust Co. acquired PepsiCo's independent South African subsidiary for $2 million.

The rise in black purchasing power is having a marked impact on the national economy. More and more companies are boosting their sales figures by targeting their products to the black consumer, who now buys almost half of all items sold at retail. Kellogg's, one of the few U.S.-linked companies that continue to maintain a high profile in South Africa, last year established an annual "excellence in achievement award" to encourage black entrepreneurship. New organizations, such as the Business Achievers Foundation and the Black Management Forum, are promoting black business and financial interests.

Black-owned shopping centers are fast replacing the corner groceries and market stalls that until recently were the main stores catering to township residents. The new $2.8 million Lesedi City mall, east of Johannesburg, the largest yet built in any urban black area, houses 53 black businesses, including a supermarket, video library, disco and off-track betting parlor, as well as the local witch doctor and herbalist. Says Lesedi City Developer Gray Thathane, 56: "That's the march to freedom."

These nascent signs of change on the landscape of apartheid have been a long time coming. In the wake of the bloody 1976 uprising in the sprawling township of Soweto, outside Johannesburg, angry young radicals trashed many black businesses, along with government-owned liquor stores and beer halls, as symbols of white oppression. At that time they could find relatively few such targets, since the law impeded black ownership of homes and businesses in urban areas. Only gradually were free enterprise and limited schemes for home ownership extended to the townships on the basis of 99-year leases. In April 1986 the government scrapped the hated pass laws, which required blacks to carry documents stating where they could live and work. That tended to give blacks increased confidence about trying to build, buy and develop properties and businesses in districts where they were permitted to live. Late last year the first black freehold properties were registered.

The result has been an extraordinary construction boom, bolstered by urban black improvement schemes that were developed, often under international pressure, by local and foreign South African business organizations. Even before the lifting of residence and property restrictions, blacks were beginning to enjoy better wages, job opportunities and employment benefits. Expanded credit to township homeowners and developers, totaling some $30 million a month, has helped catapult large numbers of blacks from low-income to middle-income and even luxury housing. A Cape Town conference attended by government officials and political leaders two weeks ago held out the promise of even greater progress, as successive speakers called for economic reforms aimed at giving blacks a bigger share of the country's wealth.

In Soweto suburbs that were once flash points of unrest, signs now advertise dozens of new residential developments. Almost every other house in the black townships has a fresh look. Some feature do-it-yourself extensions; others are brand new, built on cleared lots or over old foundations. This home-ownership drive has produced profitable spin-offs for black businesses, ranging from contractors and suppliers of building materials to dealers in instant lawns and burglar-alarm systems. Moses Mahlalela, 41, a design engineer with offices in one of the new Soweto shopping centers, can hardly keep up with demand. "I'm so busy I haven't had time to build a place of my own," he says, pointing to the dozen or so blueprints on his drawing boards. "But I intend to do that before the end of the year."

The government of South Africa was not exactly motivated by altruism when it relaxed the apartheid laws restricting black businesses and property rights, thereby fostering the rise of a black middle class. "It hoped the ownership of palatial homes and heavy mortgages would create a class of black people that would have too much to lose to help the masses in the struggle for liberation," says Aggrey Klaaste, editor of the black newspaper Sowetan. "It has not worked out that way. Not at all." On the contrary, the material success of a growing number of blacks has reinforced demands for economic and political freedom by contributing to a sense of pride and rising expectations.

This new black consciousness has found an editorial voice in several magazines. The best is Tribute, a glossy full-color monthly that profiles successful blacks and plays to their growing taste for the good life. It features splashy articles about fashion and travel interspersed with ads touting expensive perfumes and sports cars. Two years ago, says Tribute Editor Maud Motanyane, black radicals would have dismissed buppies as "irrelevant to the struggle." Not anymore. "Black businessmen are not apologizing for what they have and what they have achieved. They are saying, 'We might own our own big cars and houses, but like you, we really don't own the freedom we all want.' " Builder Mahlalelae agrees that there has been a "change in attitude" among the young radicals. "Now," he explains, "they are not trying to intimidate me because I have a business and I am making money. They're saying, 'This is black money coming back home.' "

The present truce between the black revolutionary movement and the black middle class is not without precedent. The founders of the now outlawed African National Congress were professionals, teachers and churchmen who lobbied for civil rights in white-ruled South Africa 75 years ago. Later A.N.C. leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu were members of a black middle-class community that challenged the apartheid government after 1948.

Today's black business class contributes generously to antiapartheid organizations, and many militants now accept it as the protagonist in a new form of confrontation with whites that is taking place in the boardroom. "At one time black managers in South Africa were little more than token blacks in white business," says Morakile Shuenyane, a spokesman for the independent Black Management Forum. "Now it is the responsibility of black management to play a role model with the intention of melting white attitudes." Far from serving as quislings for the white establishment, the new black elite is emerging in its own right as a powerful arm of the liberation struggle.

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Johannesburg