CAPE TOWN, South Africa — When the Greater Cape Town morgue started looking for a new superintendent in 2000, police Capt. Ricardo Schouten was convinced he would get the job. A medically trained cop skilled in autopsies, he had already been the acting superintendent for three years.
Furthermore, his experience and police service grade placed him first on a list of potential candidates, the local police union confirmed.
But Schouten, who is white, was passed over. The position was awarded to a less qualified candidate of mixed race, union bosses acknowledged.
Schouten felt betrayed.
"There was not even a call to say, 'Thanks for the past three years,' " said Schouten, who believes he was denied the promotion on racial grounds.
When the government labor court referred him first to the national arbitration commission, Schouten decided to drop the case. He was subsequently assigned to investigate illegal pornography outlets and secondhand shops.
As South Africa grapples to redress the legacy of inequality and prejudice against the country's black majority, many South Africans feel that they are being unfairly penalized.
The affirmative action policies, they charge, have resulted in reverse discrimination against the country's white and other nonblack minorities.
"What has happened here is that an image has been created of a new power system," said Lawrence Schlemmer, the Cape Town-based vice president of the South African Institute of Race Relations. "The image is that in all spheres there is a greater tendency to provide greater opportunity to the formerly disadvantaged, so that the minority is now at a disadvantage."
Critics also argue that affirmative action policies are causing increased racial tension that threatens to derail any progress made toward racial harmony in the eight years since apartheid was demolished.
"The emphasis is by far no longer on reconciliation. The central concept is now transformation," said Koos Malan, an executive member of the Group of 63, a movement of Afrikaner intellectuals. Afrikaners, descendants of 17th century Dutch settlers to southern Africa, represent one of the country's minority groups. The then-ruling Afrikaner National Party instituted apartheid in 1948.
But government officials defend the transformation as being key to South Africa's development as a democracy, and they praise legislation that has been introduced to level the racial playing field and counter discrimination in all areas of society.
