Rejoice, beloved country!

Our war - South Africa's liberation struggle - is over. On 2 June we peacefully cast our votes in our second democratic elections. We were led to that day by one of the great men of this century, Nelson Mandela. He now displays the ultimate wisdom in closing his era at the peak of his accomplishments, the final one being the assurance that his successor is the man for this second season of our transformation to democracy - a man of outstanding intellect and capability, Thabo Mbeki. We have lived five years of freedom. It is an achievement placed toweringly beside the years of apartheid racism and before them the years of colonial racism - five years against three centuries.

Whenever I am interviewed by European and American journalists, or find myself in encounters with other people from their countries, the burning question is: "What is happening to whites?" Again and again, my genuinely surprised response is: "What about blacks? Don't you believe there are challenges to be met in their new lives?"

There are two obvious assumptions to be made of this approach to South Africa by Europeans and North Americans. The majority of them being white, they identify only with whites, whether consciously or subconsciously. Because I am white, they assume I do the same. It's the Old Boys'/Old Girls' Club producing its dog-eared membership card. The projection is of the priorities of their lives, along with the old colonial conditioning that these belong with whiteness and are incontrovertibly, for ever, threatened by Otherness - Black.

Five years into freedom. What kind of fossil should I be, unearthed from the cave of bones that was apartheid, if my essential sense of self were to be as a white?

There are some who still have this sense - suffer it, I would say. I don't posit this in any assertion of smug superiority; I would just wish to prod them into freedom from confinement. And there is also the other - unadmitted - side of feeling superior as white: being ashamed of being white.

We South Africans are going as best we can about the business of living together. Being white as a state of determining my existence is simply not operative. I was privileged through racism, I rejected and actively opposed racism, I played my small part in the liberation struggle. And I know that as a result I am a South African and nothing else, living in a country we are in the difficult, thrilling process of creating. That we must create; for despite its natural resources, its sophisticated infrastructure, its advanced technology, what we want never existed for us before: a truly human society.

Grand words.

How does it feel to live day to day under their imperative? For me, the great change comes from others, from the change in atmosphere in the cities, the crowded streets, in the contexts in which I meet or work with people. It is nothing new for me to "mix" with people of all colours. But the old life existed counter to everything that defined and characterised the country. It was - even if triumphantly always in opposition - surrounded by laws, the state, secular and religious traditions that represented everything it was not. Although we talked of "our country", this was in reference to the country that people were suffering, striving to bring into being - there was no identification with the official entity then called South Africa. We had no country.

I am aware now, in so many ways, big and small, happy and troubling, that I can speak of "our country". If the air of taking possession can be palpable, I feel it when I walk out of my gate, I hear it in the volume of traffic, I know it when I pick my way down the pavement between vendors of everything from cellphones and fake French perfume to tomatoes and toilet rolls. I see it out of the corner of my eye when I stand in a queue at my local post office and eavesdrop on the black postmaster giving instructions to the young Afrikaner employee at the counter. I hear it in the accents of our many languages, listeners speaking English on radio phone-in programmes, coming out with forthright views on political and social issues. It is that indefinable quality called confidence.

The second question fired by individuals from abroad is one with a target that can't be missed. Johannesburg, where I live, has one of the highest crime rates in the world.

The curious view from abroad is that only whites are threatened by and concerned about street crime, hijacks and housebreaking. Again and again, there are descriptions of suburban razor wire and Rottweilers as the prevailing flora and fauna of the white suburbs. The fact is that homes, humble as well as substantial (and even complete with swimming pools), in what are still the black townships of greater Johannesburg are also armed with wire and dogs. Black professional people who now take their place among the affluent owners of fine cars (regarded primly as suspect conspicuous consumers by observers who do not make the same moral judgment of whites driving the same models) are also victims of hijacking. We face the problems together.

But if you move about in my city you don't need a criminologist to identify the reason for the prevalence of crime. And it is not a bleeding-heart, apologist response when the blunt answer is: unemployment.

There has been an immeasurable influx of people to Johannesburg since freedom was confirmed at the ballot box in 1994, the trek of many thousands who come to find work and for whom there will be little possibility of finding it. When the humiliation of begging fails, desperation offers one way to survive - crime.

This phenomenon of crime is not the phenomenon of freedom. Things were not better in the old days of the apartheid regime: they were kept out of sight. The unemployed and underemployed who came to the city hungry in every way for a better life now were corralled in that extraordinary experiment in social engineering - poverty-ridden "ethnic homelands". The social disease, unemployment, was quarantined; migratory labour from the rural areas, and from one province to another, was permitted to enter the city only in numbers determined healthy by the needs of industry. And these workers were regally forbidden to bring their families with them.

It is not a politically correct convenience to blame unemployment on the past, on apartheid. As a direct result of the policies of the past, black people come to the city doubly disadvantaged. First, industrial development, hampered through the sanctions that were necessary to end apartheid, can provide only limited employment in a period which, despite every effort towards expansion, is affected by quaking conditions in world finance. Second, the majority of the unemployed do not have the education or skills to take such jobs as are available because of the contemptible level of education that apartheid decreed for blacks.

I cannot shrug and dismiss them as a lost generation. I am one who will press for innovative, large-scale government projects that will institute both skills-training and employment at the same time: when the adults are providers, the children will not be on the streets. And I am encouraged by the government's chivvying of business to provide training in financial processes, and the condition laid down to foreign investors that there must be a training component in their most welcome decisions to profit from the investment opportunities here.

The levelling of material conditions I seek cannot possibly be brought about in five years. Nor can it ever be completely achieved, on the evidence of the chasms between the lives of rich and poor in developed capitalist countries that have declared themselves dedicated to it for several hundred years, and the failure of socialist countries (of socialism - so far in human history, but not for ever, in my belief) to avoid making freedom a prisoner of its own dictates. But Mbeki is dedicated to giving legal equality meaning in material form for the impoverished majority.

Community of purpose is particularly decisive for us, coming as we do, rawly, from our divided, racist past. I reflect on my feelings when I pass a school at the hour when classes end. It was a whites-only school I knew well. I see the kids coming out, the small boys scuffling with one another, the little girls tangling hands and giggling together. They are all shades of colour - South African black, South African Indian, South African Coloured, South African white. They are growing up with a common initiating experience into life. They will never be subject to the unspeakable horrors that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has exposed to us, and that have been so vital for us to face - the horrors we committed or those we allowed to happen. These children are not being kept apart to learn to hate, to fear the unknown, the untouched in each other.

One of the generation that suffered the horrors of apartheid, Tokyo Sexwale, lately premier of Gauteng, of which Johannesburg is the capital, and now a black empowerment crusader married to a white woman, said something recently that could be our rubric, a slogan to live by: "If blacks get hurt, I get hurt. If whites get hurt, that's my wife, and if you harm coloured people, you're looking for my children. Your unity embodies who I am."