Racial harmony? Not yet, but SAfrica makes strides

World Cup fever, and the racial harmony it has inspired in her country, is something
Caroline Motholo has experienced only from afar.

On the periphery of her more-than-full life - she runs a day-care center catering mostly to orphans whose parents have died of AIDS - she has seen the images: white and black South Africans side by side in the stadiums and fan parks, cheering together for their national team before its ouster, sharing pride that their once-shunned homeland is host for such a grand event.

Yet virtually everyone she sees in Vosloorus, a dusty township of 150,000 people on the outskirts of Johannesburg, is black. The community has vast tracts of small homes, and a jobless rate above 40 percent. Few whites ever set foot in it.

"I wish that spirit would stay," Motholo said, sounding hopeful but not confident that the World Cup euphoria will live on.

She's lived in Vosloorus for 16 years, but said she knows no white people from Boksburg, the nearby city where - during apartheid - blacks performed the low-level jobs but only whites could live.

The images of racial goodwill conveyed via the World Cup to a global TV audience aren't false. They embody the profound changes that have transformed race relations in South Africa in the two decades since apartheid began to dissolve.

But to declare South Africa a unified rainbow nation, as President Jacob Zuma did last month, is premature. For a reporter returning here for his first long visit since covering the anti-apartheid unrest of 1987-90, the progress is striking - but so too are the yawning divides that remain, the fears and resentments, the lingering scars of the bad old days.

The progress and the long road ahead both become apparent in a visit to the mostly white Boksburg district of Sunward Park, 20 minutes drive from Motholo's hard-scrabble neighborhood.

There, Bernard Coetzee is the pastor at the local branch of the Dutch Reformed Church - the largest denomination among the Afrikaners who held political power during apartheid.

Many young Afrikaners feel comfortable under a black-led government, the 48-year-old Coetzee said.

"But for my generation, the change is more difficult than for them," he said. "We grew up in apartheid."