Johannesburg — IT TOOK a sport, rugby, to return white citizens briefly to centre stage in public life.

A decade after their liberation from the burden of being oppressors, whites have been disappearing fast from the public sphere and taking up residence in a parallel political universe that operates according to a moral logic of its own. In a first development, whites have been the primary agents and beneficiaries of the post-1994 privatisation of apartheid. A new politics of private space has allowed them to retreat into office blocks, suburban entertainment complexes and gated communities, where armed mercenaries can shield them from the world outside.

A near-monopoly of access to quality education has meanwhile allowed them to dominate well-paid employment in the knowledge economy. And the African National Congress's (ANC's) policy of white economic empowerment has pampered established elites on condition that they direct a modest proportion of their inflated earnings into politically connected black businesses or even, some allege, into the liberation movement itself.

Second, there has been a privatisation of white politics. Whites are understandably unconcerned about the quality of public services they do not use, and instead they manage the parallel universe they inhabit using homeowner associations and contracts with private service providers.

In party politics, the National Party became a vehicle for the interests of just one man, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, before vanishing into the past. The Democratic Alliance, which cannot be accused of ignoring whites' interests, may soon be confined to Cape Town. The Freedom Front Plus has shrunk further still to become a pressure group for gated communities and white commercial farmers. Even the ANC's "nonracialism" is in danger of fading into history.

Whites' political interventions nowadays tend to veer towards self-parody, their focus being on emotive distractions such as deteriorating public services in the white suburbs, the evils of employment equity and the threat that aspirant black school pupils supposedly pose to the "language rights" of Afrikaners.

Philosopher Dan Roodt exaggerates, but also illuminates, the irrational persecution complex around which such debates turn when he comments that whites are "on the receiving end of ethnic and racial persecution as bad as that suffered by the Jews in 1930s Germany".

Third, as a result of failures in their political leadership, whites have drifted into historical amnesia about the apartheid era. English-speakers dismiss apartheid as a product of Afrikaner racism that had nothing to do with them.

For their part, Afrikaners rely on a selective memory that embraces British scientific racism and the confinement of Afrikaners in concentration camps, but recalls more or less nothing at all about the 100 years that followed.

As then ANC secretary-general Cyril Ramaphosa told scholar Padraig O'Malley in May 1996, "Bigotry manifests itself in many, many ways (including) this well-practised and well-finessed way of white people just hiding their heads in the sand like an ostrich, completely oblivious to what is happening in this country. They were (supposedly) not aware (of apartheid abuses) and some of them did not even want to know. I think the same is happening again with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They don't want to know."

Ramaphosa's prescient warning was that "this is something that is going to catch up with us as a nation".

SA cannot succeed without whites, despite their refusal to confront unpalatable historical truths that place upon them unwanted moral obligations.

It is the very privileges that they have enjoyed as a result of their history that make them irreplaceable national assets: the skills and capacities that result from many generations of public investment in their education, and the self-confidence that makes them such good managers and innovators.

It is all too easy for citizens who know they are indispensable to slip unthinkingly into implicit blackmail: if you do not cosset me and praise me, I will leave these African shores, taking my skills and assets with me.

White exclusion becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because black political leaders -- who have more profoundly deprived constituencies to consider -- cannot easily invite what appear to be amnesiac white blackmailers to participate fully in national political life.

Recent outpourings of emotion over rugby coach Jake White on occasion exemplified just this combination of amnesia and victimhood.

The real reasons behind White's departure doubtless concern the various odious machinations of regional rugby barons.

Much of white society, however, has preferred to construct a morality tale in which blacks have once again pressed the white man too far with their "transformation agenda".

In this parable, blacks' obsession with race threatens to reduce everything good to ruins.

What if the architects of transformation refuse to defer to White and by extension to all other whites? The victims of "racial politics" are morally entitled to turn their backs on SA, to leave with their skills and assets, and to make for themselves a new and more remunerative home in a country in which "race does not matter".

The tournament also more hopefully revealed among whites an extraordinary intensity of emotional commitment to SA, and a desire that their country should be one of which they can be proud.

Yet only a more capable and determined political leadership than SA currently possesses, both black and white, would be able to draw upon such sentiments in order to drag whites towards the centre ground of national life where they belong.

Butler teaches public policy at UCT