Terror in the Townships : A South Africa Update
Muravchik, Joshua
Joshua Muravchik TERROR IN THE TOWNSHIPS: A SOUTH AFRICA UPDATE And the wife of the mayor of Cape Town has just been chosen South Africa's best-dressed woman. I have always tried to ignore...
...The other half, whose loyalties are less certain, are dispersed among the nation's urban areas...
...The favored form of killing is to place a gasoline-filled tire around the victim's neck and ignite it...
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...During our visit, on the eve of the Indaba, simultaneous firebomb attacks destroyed the home and the office of a Buthelezi adviser who is one of the intellectual architects of the Indaba...
...A former intelligence officer in the South African security forces told us that nineteen of the thirty members of the ANC's executive committee, including all five of its white members, are Communist party members, although others say as few as twelve belong to the party...
...Sometimes the victim is stoned as well...
...There are, however, still rays of hope for peaceful change and a better ending to the sad story of apartheid...
...Schwartz serves both as parliamentary leader and as an active officer of the Jewish Board of Deputies, a dual role that few if any American Jews have been able to play...
...President Botha stands in the ideological center of his party's parliamentary contingent, with some party colleagues feeling that he has set too fast a pace of change, while others find it too slow...
...Perhaps as a result, it relies heavily for crowd control on the use of severe and often deadly force...
...Most Jewish children in South Africa attend Jewish day schools, which, unlike the country's public schools, are racially integrated...
...Pictures: 1966 United Artists Corporation, all rights reserved...
...they are drawn to work for whites by economic incentives, as are "guest workers" from other African states...
...I imagined a traditional tribal leader of people not yet fully in the grip of the revolution of rising expectations, easily manipulated by whites...
...The Conservative party was formed in 1982 by a group of National party MPs that split away in protest against President Botha's program of reform...
...Despite their visibility, and their prominence as opponents of apartheid, South African Jews told us that they experience no anti-Semitism in their daily lives...
...The townships have indeed become ungovernable...
...As one contemplates the pathology now plentifully in evidence in the townships, it is hard to fathom the stupidity of a system that created this vast urban underclass while deliberately sundering the bonds of family within it...
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...He shuffled along, bent almost perpendicular at the waist, pushing his can with one outstretched arm while picking up trash with his other hand...
...President P. W. Botha (no relation), who leads the 125 National party MPs in a parliament of 180 seats, publicly chastised his minis-ter for the remark, but resisted pressure from the right wing of his party to remove him from the cabinet...
...No successful solution to South Africa's problems can much indulge white greed and bigotry...
...On a street in Johannesburg, I watched an old black streetsweeper push a garbage can on wheels along the curb...
...Therein lies a trap for the politically unwary that I have preferred to avoid...
...I asked him what was wrong with social integration if it was not linked to black enfranchisement...
...They seem to be influenced as much by New York (or Hollywood) as by the bush whence their forebears came...
...We met with the head of Azapo, an intense young intellectual named Seths Cooper...
...A group of middle-of-the-road National MPs with whom we met spoke of the planned lifting of "in-flux control laws, which would allow blacks to move freely from their homelands to the urban townships...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 23 of South Africa's four provinces and the home of the big bulk of South Africa's Indians...
...We met with Dr...
...Notwithstanding these semantics, the experience of Indians in other African states raises questions about how far the "blackness" of South Africa's Indians will go...
...This was all wrong...
...Treurnicht greeted us with charm...
...Where would a black man sleep while he worked in a white area hundreds of kilometers from his "homeland...
...But the challenge the center faces is daunting because the spectrum is so much broader than our own...
...In the American system, their counter-parts wield considerable influence, no matter whether the party they vote for is out of office or the opinions they hold are out of favor...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 HOME VIDEO path that the government was on, he said, could end with blacks in our neighborhoods, schools, and homes...
...Blacks" of various shades would get the rest in the form of tribal homelands...
...And they are as prominent and visible in their society as American Jews are in ours...
...A wealthy and generous community, they donate more money per capita to Israel than do American Jews—without the incentive of tax deductibility...
...We drove past some long, rectangular buildings, two or three stories high, surrounded by tall chain-link fences...
...They constitute 60 percent of the whites, but their political parties hold 80 percent of the seats in parliament, which is chosen by district, not by proportional representation...
...The play made me wonder whether the condonation of white liberals and radicals encourages black violence in South Africa's townships, just as it has at times in our own ghettoes...
...The vast majority of English speakers I met were prepared to accept the notion of living in a state governed by blacks...
...Right now, much milder forms of intervention are at issue, economic boycotts and "disinvestment...
...We met with the executives of large corporations, the editors of prominent newspapers and magazines, professors at the leading universities, and parliamentarians, and they all spoke of their isolation from political power...
...Surprisingly, the police force in South Africa is much smaller proportionally than in most parts of the United States...
...The South African Defense Force, we were told, is the only army other than the Israel Defense Force in which observant Jewish soldiers can receive kosher rations even on the front lines...
...Of the 6 to 7 million Zulus, about half live in KwaZulu where Buthelezi's supremacy seems unquestioned...
...But despite its lack of overt organization, and despite its traditional base in the Xhosa nation, just one of several main tribal groups, the ANC has captured the imagination of most South African blacks as the symbol of their resistance to the system that oppresses them...
...KwaZulu is located in Natal, one As one contemplates the pathology now plentifully in evidence in the townships, it is hard to fathom the stupidity of a system that created a vast urban underclass while deliberately sundering the bonds of family within it...
...During our stay a 16-year-old girl was burned to death, apparently for having ignored a school boycott...
...During World War II the Afrikaners sympathized with Germany, and anti-Semitism remained an explicit part of the National party program until six months before it came to power in 1948...
...When a waiter in South Africa brings you something, you do not thank him, he thanks you...
...Fifteen hundred worshipers were in attendance...
...The Jews are also fearful that a growing backlash on the Afrikaner right will revive the old tradition of anti-Semitism...
...He may have done more than anyone else to foil the master plan of apartheid when he refused to allow KwaZulu to make the transition from an autonomous region to an independent state like Transkei and Bophuthatswana...
...Among them was the mayor of Cape Town, whose wife had just been chosen South Africa's best-dressed woman...
...Running time 1 hour, 36 minutes.blacks would probably welcome revolution, and, in a sense, because they are disenfranchised they are entitled to it...
...This has apparently been accomplished...
...One who worked for a quasi-governmental agency said: "Either you support the ANC or you condone killing children"—a reference to the numerous deaths of adolescent demonstrators at the hands of police...
...The KwaZulu Legislative Assembly elected Buthelezi as its head...
...An alternative scenario suggested by one savvy South African was that the Communists in the ANC, if they achieved power, would no longer have use for youngsters grown accustomed to being a law unto themselves, and would have no scruples about liquidating the lot of them in order to build the new society from more malleable human material...
...A "near-Marxist paradigm" dominates South African studies...
...But no, they were workers' barracks—symbol of one of the mostpernicious features of apartheid...
...He did not refer to his own racial status until asked, although it was not obvious from looking at him...
...The black man is different...
...Frightened by the experience of much of the rest of Africa, they are searching for formulas that will protect the white minority: federalism, cantonization, bills of rights, decentralization, bicameralism...
...But by depressing the economy and raising the already high rates of black unemployment, disinvestment makes an explosive situation even more volatile...
...Everywhere we went, nervous whites told us of the hopes they place in "black moderates," but no urban black can afford to be moderate as long as he must live, as all are compelled to do, in the townships under the reign of the "young comrades...
...The Afrikaner political spectrum, except for a few individuals, begins where the English spectrum leaves off and travels rightward...
...I have always tried to ignore South Africa...
...But these legitimate fears, if I may call them that, are en-twined with other motivations not easy to empathize with...
...The South African Communist party has worked hard to make itself a majority black organization...
...I call him a streetsweeper, but he had no broom, only gloves...
...We drove briefly through some distinctly poorer areas, rows of shacks made largely of corrugated metal, but these, we were told, were by Sowetan standards middle class...
...The violence is carried out mostly by teenagers...
...California residents add 6' 2'1, Sales Tax...
...Even saying that, though, makes one appear to have some patience for the evil...
...Such thoughts in turn raise questions of foreign intervention—by the Soviets or the Americans or the U.N...
...These are densely packed shanty towns, located at safe distance from where white people live...
...At the liberal end is Foreign Minister R. F. (Pik) Botha, whose recent statement that he could foresee serving under a black State President constituted a landmark in Afrikaner politics...
...I prefer to charge this purchase to: ^ VISA ^ Mastercard ^ American Express Acct ° Exp Date Signature ------------------------See the "Gipper" in Knute Rockne - All American Starring Ronald Reagan as George Gipp and Pat O'Brien as Knute Rockne...
...Some upwardly mobile blacks send their children to these schools, and one Jewish business leader told me with delight that in his daughter's class a black African girl had taken honors in Hebrew...
...The South African system is much more balkanized...
...But it no doubt reflected the fact that the poorer whites are the ones most afraid of integration...
...This is probably true, but most blacks don't care...
...Buthelezi favors a negotiated transition to majority rule, opposes violent revolution and "disinvestment," and advocates a capitalist and democratic future for South Africa in some kind of federal system de-signed to allay white fears...
...power has flowed away from the legislature into the hands of a small executive body, the Counsel of State...
...Pik Botha is the public face for a group ofsome thirty to forty of the National party MPs who are said to be in their private views as liberal as the representatives of the Progressive Federal party, the main party of English speakers, which is anti-apartheid and holds twenty-seven seats...
...Buthelezi, himself once a leader of the ANC, is neither an Uncle Tom nor a political naif...
...They are not, however, as concentrated in the professions, but are mostly involved in business...
...Whites of all shades of opinion told us that disinvestment would hurt blacks the most...
...Forty years ago, I was told, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo, now the president of the ANC, sponsored a resolution that would have barred Communists from membership in it...
...Although apartheid means "apartness," the first thing that struck me as we entered Johannesburg was that the blacks are not apart at all...
...And not only because there are infringements of democracy...
...population...
...It includes Buthelezi's forces and most English-speaking whites...
...and the press is censored...
...Although the attack could conceivably have come either from the left or the right, Buthelezi later pointed an accusing finger at the ANC...
...But whatever its wishes, one of the striking things about the Englishspeaking community is how powerless it feels...
...Groups of them have designated themselves "the young comrades," but it is not clear whether they have much formal organization or much that could be called political opinions, nor whether they receive direct leadership from Umkhonto we Siswe (Spear of the People), the clandestine cell network of the African National Congress (ANC...
...In 1959, a group broke away from the ANC and formed the Pan African Congress (PAC), with an ideology more racial than that of the ANC...
...One drag on the pace of change is the Conservative party, which has a lot of National MPs looking over their right shoulders...
...The narrator, a white woman lawyer who was clearly the voice of the playwright, speaks of her wish to see a burning tire placed around someone's neck...
...Those who feel compelled to tip are urged to keep it below 10 percent...
...But then the scenarios become dizzying...
...The English speakers, who constitute 40 percent of the white populace, and who are economically rooted in the private sector, array themselves along a spectrum of political opinion not that different from our own...
...You go in there, you don't come out," he said...
...The prospects may not be good, but only there rests the hope that years of suffering can end in amelioration and justice rather than, as has happened so often elsewhere, in still more suffering...
...More important than the fact that they are not "apart" physically, these urban blacks are not very much apart culturally, either...
...In Cape Town, we attended Friday evening services at an orthodox synagogue, one of fifteen that serve a community of 27,000...
...The most famous of these is Soweto, and that's where we were taken our first morning in South Africa...
...I am registered as an Indian," he replied...
...The A township resident coming home with groceries from a white-owned store may be forced to eat the raw meat on the spot or drink down the cooking oil...
...And a gentle, likable black character graphically describes his fantasy of wading among a school yard full of young white girls, swinging a baseball bat and beating them all to death—a fantasy that seemed intended as metaphorical justice...
...The Jews of Cape Town sustain a network of some fifty to sixty organizations, devoted to causes ranging from Zionism to social welfare to "Palestine Philately," the society for the promotion of which, quipped Mar-tin Peretz, sounded suspiciously like the name of a PLO front group...
...We have more than 300 years of contact with these people," he said...
...I felt that if they could have their way, most of the English-speaking community would prefer to see power handed over from Botha to Buthelezi, while they themselves went about their business in the private sector at arm's length from the affairs of state...
...A guide-book given incoming tourists aboard South Africa Airlines explains that tip-ping in South Africa is neither as common nor as generous as in the United States...
...There is apparently little social friction between the English- and Afrikaans-speaking communities, but politically they seem worlds apart...
...The current period of urban unrest began with the constitutional reforms of 1983' that extended the franchise to coloreds and Indians, but not to black Africans...
...And in all disciplines there is pressure to make courses "relevant" and "Africanized...
...And along with the portents of violence from the left, there are nightmarish scenarios of violence from the right...
...These protestations could have been self-serving, but we heard it from too many different mouths to believe that it was a "line" rather than a reality...
...A large portion of the officers of the chambers of commerce are Jewish, as are the mayors of several cities and two of the top spokesmen for the Progressive Federal party, Helen Suzman and Harry Schwartz...
...A couple of blacks lounged on the front steps of the building, but the office had no visible security, and the controversial apostle of apartheid followed us down after the meeting and seemed to have no body-guard...
...Black and white...
...We were taken to a theater in Cape Town to see a currently popular play, Born in the RSA, which turned out to be a political tract set to stage, reminiscent of the most ideological products of the WPA...
...We heard many complaints that the police themselves often act without civilian control, thus adding to the general climate of lawlessness...
...An intriguing question is whether at some point in the hastening evolution of South African politics some of the non-Communists in the ANC could break off from the Communists...
...Treurnicht spelled out, in a tone of soft-spoken but confident reasonableness, his plan for reconstructing apartheid...
...The theory of the system held that whites and blacks were too culturally disparate to form a single polity...
...When their shifts are done, the streetsweeper and the waiter and thebellman and the concierge all must leave the city to sleep within what are quaintly called their "townships...
...Some voices in the security services speak of an "Argentinian solution," referring to the clandestine, extra-legal acts of the Argentine military which broke the back of the leftist guerrilla movement by causing tens of thou-sands of its members and sympathizers to "disappear...
...Buthelezi is at this moment the key figure in an experiment which if successful may have important ramifications...
...The PAC is associated with the "black consciousness" movement, whose leading advocate, Steve Biko, died in police custody in 1977...
...Black violence in the townships has for the most part targeted blacks...
...White South Africa is a democracy, but its political dynamics strike an American as unfamiliar...
...Only after ten years in the barracks did he become eligible to rent a cottage or shack within the black township, and only after that were his wife and children allowed to leave the "home-land" and join him in the township...
...They fear rule by black radicals, and they fear socialism...
...Not only the choice of victims, but also the methods of violence are often grotesque...
...At a glance it seemed a bad situation more likely to worsen than to improve...
...I met several black professionals who ought to have been prototypical "moderates," yet each professed hissupport for the ANC...
...The people who hold the most power in South Africa are Afrikaners...
...In a men-only barracks in a black township within commuting distance of the white area...
...To succeed it will have to win support from some Afrikaners and some of the non-Communists now in the ANC/ UDF orbit...
...Even the more moderate, non-ANC leaders in the UDF, like Bishop Tutu and Alan Boesak, speak harshly of Israel and have spurned invitations to visit there...
...Despite the way the system under-mines urban black moderates, there is one "moderate" force that plays an important part in the black political picture: Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, chief minister of KwaZulu, the largest of South Africa's autonomous tribal regions...
...The land would have to be partitioned...
...The strongly Zionist Jewish community resents this and fears that it is a harbinger of anti-Semitism...
...Natal might be the easiest place to take such a leap, but if the plan works it could be a model for the rest of the country...
...Treurnicht's remarks reflected one of the central characteristics of the South African enigma...
...In 1936, before it reached power, the National party proposed a bill classifying Jews as Asians, so their status would have been equivalent to that of the Indians...
...How will it all come out...
...But the former intelligence officer estimated that half the members of its politburo are white and only 20 percent black, the others being "colored" or Indian...
...Civilian control of the military and security services is uncertain...
...neither can it entirely ignore white fears...
...There would be some precedent for this...
...There is more of a democratic center to the South African political spectrum than I had imagined...
...A kind of constitutional convention—called by the Zulu word, Indaba—is now in progress, the aim of which is to create a single multi-racial political system for all Natal...
...But it is very doubtful that change brought about through violence would yield a happier, more just South Africa...
...The sadistic, nihilistic practices of these teenagers, tethered loosely to vague Communist rhetoric, made me fear for what might happen if a revolutionary movement triumphed in South Africa with them as its shock troops...
...As a group they are poorer than English speakers, and they are economically dependent on the public sector, where more than half of their work force is employed...
...There are lesser punishments for lesser infractions...
...If blacks were enfranchised they would overwhelm whites, he said...
...The principal legal organization of the black consciousness movement is called Azapo, short for the Azanian People's Movement...
...The Zulus form the largest ethnic group in South Africa, and were once the most powerful...
...But these townships are already terribly congested, and we asked about ending housing segregation completely so that blacks could seek housing in white areas if they could afford it...
...This sounded like a crude trick: how many blacks could afford high-priced housing...
...The MPs answered that this could not be done at once, but perhaps in stages, beginning with the most expensive housing and gradually working down...
...This seemed remarkable in a society so race-conscious, and all the more so when we learned that there is a deep history of anti-Semitism...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 25...
...Andries Treurnicht, the leader of the Conservatives, at his party's central headquarters in a rundown office building in Pretoria...
...During our visit, consumer boycotts in some areas were specifically targeting Indian merchants as well as white...
...Many Ronald Reagan's most famous role . . . . as ill-fated gridiron star George Gipp, whom Rockne quotes, UNCUT, in Gipp's famous farewell, "WIN JUST ONE FOR THE GIPPER" ©1940 Warner Bros...
...Its white population is predominantly English, not Afrikaner, making it relatively liberal...
...We went around the table introducing ourselves, and when Nathan Glazer's turn came, a mischievous light of recognition came into Treurnicht's eyes...
...Before we flew to KwaZulu to meet Buthelezi, I suspected that his opponents' characterization of him as an Uncle Tom might be accurate...
...They want every possible pressure for change, and relentless pressure on the government is needed...
...They are frightened of the ANC and the United Democratic Front, a broad coalition widely seen as the legal voice of the ANC...
...The police or army can enter in force to break up demonstrations or riots, but except for such displays of muscle the townships seem largely lawless...
...There is in the English-speaking community, for instance, a distinct leftcurrent among intellectuals, students, and professionals...
...Nine out of ten people on the streets, it seemed, were black, as were some of the customers and most of the people working in hotels and restaurants...
...Umkhonto, which embraces both a clandestine cell network within the country and several thousand fighters at training bases outside it, is in practice a joint enterprise of the ANC and the South African Communist party...
...Apartheid is evil, but that is easier to know than to know how to assure that it is replaced with something better...
...Yet South African Jews are frightened...
...Sitting by his backyard pool and tennis court, an English-speaking journalist quoted something a top National party leader recently said to him: "It's all very well for you to welcome the thought of a black neighbor, but my Afrikaner constituents in little boxes are frightened...
...Asked to distinguish the stand of his group from that of the ANC, Cooper referred to the ANC's pro-Soviet alignment and said that his group opposes "Stalinism" and "any ideology that excludes democracy...
...Buthelezi is a hereditary chief of one of the many clans that make up the Zulu nation, but he is not the hereditary leader of the nation, or the king, which is now a purely ceremonial role...
...The targets are those deemed collaborators—policemen and township officials, but others as well...
...We did not venture very deep into Soweto, but kept mostly to the more affluent areas where some of the small cottages were surrounded by carefully tended flower beds...
...Whites, who made up 15 percent of the population, would get 80 percent of the land...
...But since then the party has become quite solicitous of Jews...
...Orchestrated or not, the violence works brilliantly to exploit a critical vulnerability of the apartheid system...
...So far, reform has increased expectations faster than it has effected actual changes...
...It is not hard to empathize with the fear that white South Africans feel about the prospect of black rule, given the experience of other African states and the long history of grievances inflicted against blacks by whites...
...Most of the English-speaking community, although much more moderate, seems to be unanimously opposed to the social policies of apartheid...
...In ordinary life the gist of the matter is we're not acceptable to each other...
...Their dress and manner is Western, their language is English, and their favorite television program is "The Cosby Show...
...Of course they are not en-slaved...
...This makes it hard to believe that their aspirations and sensibilities are that different from our own, hard to comfort oneself by imagining that they can bear with indifference the status of conquered nations serving their conJoshua Muravchik is the author of The Uncertain Crusade: Jimmy Carter and the Dilemmas of Human Rights Policy, just out from Hamilton Press...
...Tall, thin, bearded, brown-skinned, with non-negroid features, Cooper spent alarge part of the 1970s in prison for his revolutionary views...
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...The ANC is an illegal organization, and has no structure in South Africa, except Umkhonto we Siswe...
...He must have been at least as concerned about his own safety as about ours...
...he asked...
...Yet some of the customs of the serving trades bespeak a tradition of servility...
...To encourage violence, the ANC has taken up the slogan, "Make the townships ungovernable...
...As Harry Schwartz, a relentless foe of apartheid, put it: "Disinvestment is good for revolution and bad for peaceful change...
...The austere institutional design made me wonder at first if they were a prison or large police station...
...Some in our group wanted to go deeper into Soweto, but our black driver refused...
...Its chief of staff is Joe Slovo, the white Communist boss who is reputed, the editor of a white liberal paper told me, to be a colonel in the KGB...
...The approximately 120,000 Jews in South Africa constitute a percentage of the white population exactly equal to that of Jews in the U.S...
...At the University of Cape Town, we were told by faculty members that "to be a liberal in an English [language] university today is to be a conservative" relative to the spectrum of academic opinion...
...querors...
...The obvious irony is that should the ANC triumph the real rulers of South Africa might once again be white...
...Yetmost had some qualms and caveats...
...And how are things in the melting pot, Professor Glazer...
...Blacks could work in white areas, but not live there...
...That an Indian could be head of the black consciousness movement is not as odd as it sounds...
...In South Africa, "black" is used to designate what are officially three racial groups: Indians, "coloreds" (those of mixed blood), and black Africans, who are called merely "Africans...
...Some are shifting their support from the Progressive Federal to the National party in order to strengthen it against the challenge from the Conservatives...
...A township resident caught coming home with groceries from a white-owned store may be forced to eat 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 the raw meat on the spot or drink down the cooking oil...
...The color bar for most public facilities has been dropped, as have restrictions on interracial marriages and sex...
...So when curiosity impelled me to accept an invitation to travel there on a study mission of American Jewish intellectuals sponsored by the South Africa Foundation and the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, I went bearing more than my fair quota of ignorance, or, to put the best face on it, ready to view the situation with fresh eyes...
...The difference, in short, between Buthelezi and more radical black leaders is not that he is less sensitive than they to present in-justices, but that he is more wary of future dangers...
...But what is odder about South African democracy is the striking lack of integration of the white polity...
...Every Jewish family seems to have discussed contingency plans in case it has to flee, yet the community's size re-mains stable...
...You don't under-stand, he replied, the very reason for the fear of black political power is that it would lead to social integration...
Vol. 19 • July 1986 • No. 7
