Can Jonathan Jansen succeed where Mandela failed?

BLOEMFONTEIN, SOUTH AFRICA—It was as clear as the film’s most famous scene: The work of reconciliation in South Africa is not done yet. In February 2008, a video appeared online showing four white students from South Africa’s University of the Free State (UFS) hazing their black janitors as if they were new freshmen. There’s a beer-drinking contest, a footrace to “Chariots of Fire.” Near the end, the boys appear to pee into bowls of stew and urge the janitors to eat up. It was supposed to be an in-house joke, a protest against a plan to integrate their dorm, a student residence called Reitz. But one of the Reitz boys gave it to his girlfriend, then dumped her--that classic error of the Internet age--and she vengefully posted it on YouTube, where it drew one million viewers. For months, South Africa couldn’t look away. It was the same urge we have to touch a bruise even though it hurts. The video seemed like a flare-up indicating a deeper national disease.

It may be hard to hear over the World Cup plastic trumpets, but there are whispers here that the aftermath of apartheid isn’t working out as planned. Clint Eastwood’s recent movie Invictusreintroduced Americans to the South Africa that was supposed to be: Mandela, played by Morgan Freeman, walks onto the field in front of a virtually all-white crowd at the 1995 Rugby World Cup in Johannesburg--a year after South Africa’s first democratic election--wearing the green-and-gold jersey of the team that had long symbolized Afrikaner aggression and power, figuratively embracing his former jailers and establishing the template for national unity. But the reality looks a little different. The weekend Invictus opened on some 2,000 screens, the 29-year-old heir apparent to Mandela’s African National Congress, Julius Malema, sent a text message to the country’s foremost liberal white politician that read, “Wait until you see what is coming your direction.”

It’s strange, since they grew up without apartheid, but young South Africans seem to be growing more conscious of race as time goes on, not less. White kids are reclaiming “kaffir,” a derogatory term for black people, and circulating the theory that, on the day Mandela dies, blacks will rise up and kill the whites in an auto-da-fé already named the “Night of the Long Knives.” Meanwhile, Malema’s taste for Moët-drenched parties and cryptic sayings--“Don’t come here with that white tendency,” “This is not America, it’s Africa,” “Go out, you bloody agent”-call to mind less Mandela and more Robert Mugabe.

Like the rest of the country, UFS was, for a few golden years after the fall of apartheid, an outward success story. The Free State, a province of huge Montana skies and dust and cattle, got its name from early Afrikaner settlers who left Cape Town to set up their independent nation, and the university, located in the regional capital of Bloemfontein, didn’t enroll its first black undergraduate until 1988. But, by 1992, the number of black students had begun to double every year, and, soon, the school was winning a reputation for successfully navigating the post-apartheid world. “Everybody else was talking about us, that we were dealing with race so well,” says Billyboy Ramahlele, a black liberation activist who joined the senior staff in 1994 and is now UFS’s diversity director. Blacks began to move into the white dorms en masse, and Ramahlele designed a student parliament to give the students a chance to practice the techniques of multiracial cooperative self-governance. Mandela came to campus to declare UFS the very model of post-racial transformation.

But, behind the scenes, the students were finding it harder and harder to live together. In one dorm, residents hammered up plywood between black and white corridors and labeled it “emergency exit.” By the turn of the millennium, the dorms had become completely segregated. Sometimes, administrators called them “cultural houses,” but even they knew they were kidding themselves. The emergence of the Reitz video seemed to represent the culmination of a slow backward slide.