Barely a ripple of white flight has materialized. The quiet has been thundering. With trepidation and misgiving, but without incident, doors of formerly all-white schools are being thrown open to children of all races. Housing patterns, transportation costs and political resistance make it unlikely that the ratios will rise much further, unless the new government embarks on a far more ambitious course of social engineering than generally is contemplated. For most white families, even this dose of forced integration marks the first time that last year's epochal political transformation from the apartheid system of racial separation to democracy and black rule has hit home.
Some white extremists find it too much.
If this is jammed down our throats, I don't want to be pessimistic, but there will be civil war. To most blacks, integration rates rather far down the list of educational priorities in post-apartheid South Africa. They are more concerned with dilapidated schools, unqualified teachers, overcrowded classrooms, poor discipline and a culture of protest that continues to bedevil black education. Decades in the making, these circumstances are the most corrosive legacy of the apartheid era. And the new democratic government has made clear that it has little money to throw at these problems.