Berkley Center

Following the rest of the crowd, I quickly stood up as the South African national anthem began to play. I was about to watch my first rugby game at the University of the Western Cape. Sitting beside me was my newest South African friend, Francis. As I strained to hear the national anthem, I realized that the majority of the song was not in English, but rather a mixture of other languages that I could not decipher.

Sitting back down, I turned to Francis and asked him what languages I had just heard in the national anthem. He responded, “There are five different languages in the song, brother. Xhosa, Zulu, Sesotho, Afrikaans, and English. It’s supposed to create unity, but brother, the people here, they are not unified. No one knows the words.”

Language is one of the most obvious indicators of South Africa’s incredible diversity. The national anthem may be composed of five different languages, but the country has 11 official languages in total. In Cape Town, Afrikaans, English, and Xhosa are the most widely spoken languages, but you encounter many other indigenous languages as you travel further outside the city.

Despite its infamous history of apartheid, skin color is another marker of South Africa’s diversity. Making up almost 80 percent of the population, blacks are the largest racial group; even so, there is incredible heterogeneity within the black population, with each group speaking its own languages and practicing its own distinct culture.

South Africa is also religiously diverse. As I unpacked on my first night here, I was taken aback to hear a muezzin reciting the call to prayer from a mosque that I soon discovered was just around the corner from my house. Mosques abound in Cape Town, along with countless churches from a variety of Christian denominations. Just within the suburb of Mowbray, Anglicans, Methodists, Catholics, Presbyterians, Seventh-day Adventists, and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have all erected churches. On the whole, South Africa is 80 percent Christian, but its absorption of peoples from around the globe has created immense religious diversity, which ranges from traditional African religions, to Eastern traditions like Hinduism and Buddhism, to Abrahamic faiths such as Christianity and Islam.

Returning to Francis’s quote, the major task facing South Africa is achieving unity out of such a diverse population. What complicates the matter further is the country’s history of apartheid, which systematically enforced both physical and psychological division among South Africans.

The country finally reached compromise and peace in 1994, with the creation of the Government of National Unity and the election of Nelson Mandela to the presidency. The “rainbow nation,” a phrase coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, had been formed. But what is the state of the rainbow nation 18 years later?

The question is a complicated one with no easy answers. In honor of the archbishop’s retirement in 2010, the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre sponsored a public debate entitled “Rainbow Nation: Myth or Reality?” The purpose of the debate was to assess how well South Africa has managed to embrace its diversity, forge unity, and create an egalitarian society despite its history of injustice under apartheid. During the debate, former anti-apartheid activist Mamphela Ramphele said that South Africa is still a “deeply wounded nation” and that she “can’t see any rainbow” in the new South Africa.

Unfortunately, this was same somber attitude that I had heard from Francis. In his mind, South Africa has yet to really come together and resolve the tensions that exist between the country’s different races and economic classes. He described how the white population lives in the hills of Cape Town, while the majority of the black and colored populations continue to inhabit the poor area outside the city known as Cape Flats.

As in the United States, vestiges of white supremacy still exist, but they seem to be more prevalent in South Africa. The February 24 edition of the Mail & Guardian, South Africa’s weekly newspaper, detailed a right-wing organization called the Kommandokorps, which is supposedly providing military training to white teenage Afrikaner boys so that they can defend themselves and their families against the threat of the black population. The article created quite a stir that caused the Mail & Guardian to publish a follow-up article the next week that detailed various experts’ opinions on the far right in South Africa.

While the strength of reactionary groups is hotly debated, an “us against them” mentality can also be found among segments of the black population. Recently expelled as the leader of the Youth League of the African National Congress, Julius Malema generated controversy when he led his followers in chanting, “Kill the Boer!”; Boer is a term that refers to a section of the white population.

Further racial issues arise when considering the place of coloreds in South African society (in South Africa, colored refers to people of mixed descent from black and white families). One often hears that the coloreds weren’t white enough during apartheid, and now they aren’t black enough. The government has enacted several economic policies, such as the Black Economic Empowerment program, that seem to benefit blacks much more than coloreds.

Eighteen years after the advent of South African democracy, the struggle continues to forge a harmonious and united “rainbow nation.” Reconciliation will certainly take time, but that does not mean the country is without hope. If anything, South Africa’s fight to cultivate solidarity amongst its diverse population is what makes it such an extraordinary place.