White flight could spell trouble for a black president. “We appeal to whites not to desert us at this critical time,” African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela said last summer. That was just as he entered final talks that produced an agreement to hold the country’s first all-race elections in April. The sheer number of emigrants is not the issue; 1,500 more people moved to South Africa last year than left, again mostly whites and Asians. The problem is that the most mobile South Africans are just the ones the next government will rely on to buffer the transition to majority rule: young people with professional skills and older ones with money. Nearly half of every medical-school class at the top-rated University of the Witwatersrand makes “the run.” “I can’t afford to wait eight or 10 years and see how things pan out,” says Gavin Kleiman, 24, a physical therapist who moved to San Diego last year. “After a while, I said, ‘Screw it’.”
A worsening crime epidemic leads many others to the same conclusion. “You are seven times safer in New York City than you are in Johannesburg,” says Tony Leon, a liberal parliamentarian. Most emigres choose still safer destinations: Britain, Canada and, recently, New Zealand. But the most conservative South Africans, the Afrikaners, are largely trapped because they usually don’t have the special skills or second passports they must have to leave. So far the white exodus is minuscule compared with what happened in such postcolonial African nations as neighboring Zimbabwe, where it was called “taking the gap.” But if “the chicken-run” becomes a stampede, it will leave South Africa dangerously polarized and certainly poorer.
