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Yet the lives of tens of thousands of blacks and whites remain intertwined. Every weekday a black woman in her early 60s, whose first name is Aletta, goes from her home in Soweto to the Parkwood suburb of Johannesburg, where she works half a day for a white family. She is one of thousands of black women who work in white homes and provide the main income for their families. She has been a domestic servant in white households for most of her life. Her husband is dead, and she lives in a four-room house with her three daughters, two of whom have two children each. She earns $60 a month, and she gives her earnings to her eldest daughter, who pays the rent and keeps the rest for housekeeping expenses. Aletta's passbook, the identification blacks must carry at all times, has not been properly endorsed by previous employers for many years, and so she is not legally registered with her present employer. Occasionally she stays at the big house when the white family goes away, and she knows that if inspectors come around to check her identification she must hide from them. "When there is trouble in Soweto, I don't worry too much," she says. "Nobody bothers an old woman. But on the last Friday of the month, the tsotsis [thugs] are out to rob people who have been paid. They don't care if you are an old woman or a young man. If they think you have money, they will kill you to get it."
That is something Aletta shares with her countrymen of every race: a fear of violence, a drive for survival. The Afrikaner right wing is particularly concerned, watching with a sense of both worry and self-justification every development in black Africa, and especially in neighboring Zimbabwe, where the remaining whites are concerned about unrest between black tribal groups, erosion of their own political position, and the plans of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe to turn the country into a one-party state. The creation of South African parliamentary chambers for colored and Indian representation, not to mention the repeal of the racial sex laws, may not amount to much in terms of political power for nonwhites, but the Botha reforms have helped convince the right wing that the President is not sufficiently aware of die svart gevaar (the black peril). Some political observers believe that in the next general election, to be held within five years, the Afrikaner right wing could supplant the relatively liberal Progressive Federal Party as the largest opposition group in the white Parliament.
Like their English-speaking compatriots, the Afrikaners share an unresolved dilemma: how to prepare their country for the future. The Afrikaners in particular are frozen in a time frame by their dour Calvinist faith and their history. Immigrants who first arrived from Europe almost 350 years ago, they are most conscious of the fact that, unlike the former colonialists of the Gold Coast or Mozambique, they have no place to go back to. Out of hand they reject all talk of one man, one vote, maintaining that it would be "one man, one vote, one time," and then black tyranny forever after.