We sometimes miss undercurrents when all seems glassy-calm on the surface. One such has been picked up the New York Times and most South African swimmers in the daily social media waters probably missed it completely. The NYT seems to make a belated meal of a well-publicised 2017 racial incident at a Johannesburg Spur outlet where the household-name, kid-friendly restaurant chain banned an aggressive-behaving, white-parent patron and apologised to their black-parent patron after a nasty confrontation. Yet the valence of the NYT’s story is in highlighting the deeply emotional subsequent reaction of organisations representing increasingly popular conservative white minority groups. They successfully organised a nation-wide boycott of Spur Steak Ranch outlets by similar-minded whites, costing the company nearly 10% losses in sales and putting some unfortunately-situated franchises out of business. As you read, you realise that the restaurant chain’s clientele has changed dramatically, today being supported by more blacks than whites, regardless of location. This has touched a nerve among the increasingly less-privileged white income groups as they collide with black people on their way up the legally-bolstered income ladder aimed at addressing apartheid’s legacies. The political dynamics thus unleashed deserve careful monitoring. – Chris Bateman
By Thulasizwe Sithole
There are few more delicately-placed restaurants in the still residentially and thus racially-divided new South Africa than the Strand Spur Steak Ranch.
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It’s less than 11km away from the Cape Metropole’s largest black township, Khayelitsha, whose nearly two million residents live in homes ranging from tin and plastic shacks sprawling across hectares of beach dunes, to lesser-density, double-storied brick homes. By contrast, the Strand, is a typically First-World beachside town, with high-rise, sea-facing apartment blocks, hotels and swimming-pooled homes. (No Khayelitsha resident can see the sea, hidden behind a line of sand dunes)). Add to this the history of the Wild-West-themed Spur Steak Ranches being situated in South African towns and cities very demographically similar to the Strand, (aka white suburbs), and the views of former loyal Strand Spur Steak Ranch patron, Keith van Eeden, start to make sense.
The New York Times says many other historically-loyal former Spur patrons like Van Eeden also speak in emotional terms of a “betrayal” by a cherished brand, whose outposts were effectively barred to blacks during apartheid because of their locations. It quotes the father-of-three as saying; “I’ll never set foot inside that place again – the Spur is only for blacks now – they don’t want the whites.”
Van Eeden is almost certainly referring to a widely publicised racial confrontation at a Johannesburg Spur Steak Ranch in 2017, caught on a video that went viral. In the spat, which prompted a nation-wide boycott among more conservative white groupings and cost the restaurant chain more than nine percent in takings, two customers argue over the behaviour of their children. The white man yanks the arm of a black boy, before threatening to hit the black woman and trying to overturn a table where her small children are sitting. A few days later, Spur issued an apology to the woman and banned the man for his “aggressive manner” and “unacceptable” actions. According to the NYT, the Spur’s chief operating officer, Mark Farrelly, said in a radio interview at the height of the boycott that the company was facing a “rabid right-wing backlash.” Farrelly said that the hardest-hit franchises were located in former strongholds of the Conservative Party, the right-wing party that opposed the end of apartheid. In response, reports the NYT, the leader of an influential white-minority trade union, Solidarity, wrote in an open letter: “This is about a community that feels estranged in the country. Now, they feel strange in their favourite restaurant as well.”
The Spur Steak Ranch’s strong response reflects the reality that Black South Africans today account for about 65% of their customers at the nation’s more than 280 franchises, according to an internal report prepared for the company. The NYT adds that South Africa’s white population, now around 8 percent, is shrinking; and that for all the country’s deeply rooted income inequality, the share of middle-class black consumers is growing. However, individual Spur franchises still depend heavily on white customers. Sales have slowly recovered nationwide – but it took nearly three years. The restaurant chain has never followed the former government policy of racial segregation and is regarded favourably by the black people whose predilection for things American stems from a highly effective cultural boycott by the United Kingdom and several European nations for decades at the height of apartheid.
