South Africa Between Apartheid and Democracy

...Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi is one obvious person, since he is prime minister of the kingdom of Zululand and leader of the Inkatha movement...

...The problem is all the more insoluble in a situation like that in South Africa today, where political organization of the blacks has been forbidden...

...Originally, its clergy claimed to find authority for apartheid in Scripture and in Calvin's teaching, but in forty years of prolonged debates and reflection they have come to condemn it...

...Although the blacks have recently returned to live in "gray areas" in cities like Johannesburg, no less than three million were uprooted in forty years of apartheid resettlement...

...P resident Botha's intentions were undoubtedly good and the West owes him a great debt for going to the aid of the peoples of Angola and Mozambique when everyone else seemed willing to let them have Communism forced upon them by Cubans, Russians, and East Germans...

...His intervention in Angola alone cost millions in taxpayer money and the lives of many of South Africa's conscript soldiers...

...This is one reason why De Klerk took a calculated risk in releasing the African National Congress leaders from prison...

...Moreover, they include, out of 64,000 officers, more than 40,000 who are either black or Colored (the South African name for the community of mixed-race people who for the most part inhabit the Cape...

...Racial discrimination and separation were well and truly installed under earlier regimes...

...The framers of the American Constitution were much exercised by this problem, and it has taxed the ingenuity of political scientists down through the ages...

...He allowed antiapartheid marches of the kind his predecessor, President Botha, always suppressed in the big cities...

...A white veteran of two World Wars, aged 76, named Hechter Schultz, greeted them with the words: "I am happy to see that my ideal of living alongside our black brothers as equal citizens is gradually reaching fruition...

...in the plebiscite on the transformation of South Africa from a British dominion into a republic, 850,458 voted for a republic and 775,878 voted against...

...More recently, trade unionism has been developed among blacks, so that unionized black workers in South Africa are today relatively better off and unionized white workers relatively worse off and among those voting for.ihe Conservative party are undoubtedly a fair number of English-speaking blue-collar workers...

...Since the original inhabitants, the Bushmen and the Hottentots, have long since faded away, the Afrikaners can claim to have been in South Africa longer than anyone else who is there now...

...But it was a precarious victory for the Nationalists, who promptly made systematic efforts to consolidate their supremacy by keeping English-speakers out and the non-white races down: the first by blocking European immigration so as to perpetuate the Afrikaner majority on the electoralroll, and the second by depriving blacks of the status of nationality so that they could never be promoted to citizenship...

...What has made this possible, indeed what has made possible the whole new direction that events have taken in South Africa, is the running-down of the Cold War as a result of the Gorbachev-Reagan accords...

...They were forbidden to own property even in their homes, their industries were collectivized, their commerce regulated...

...Thatcher stopped short of telling them how it might be done...

...Inflation is running at 11 percent and the banks are so short of liquidity that they offer 17 percent on time deposits...

...Some people say De Klerk never will...

...The ANC leaders already released have made gestures toward a negotiated settlement...

...The history of South Africa has always been one of conflict between whites no less than of discrimination against people of other races...

...One of the first steps De Klerk took on assuming office was to take back that power and restore the rule of politicians...

...Indeed, Buthelezi is opposed by left-wing elements in his own kindgom, and shooting has already started in the hills of Natal...

...The original settlers, having achieved a distinct identity as Afrikaners, resisted and moved north on "treks" to found new republics in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State...

...The truth is that the police forces are, seriously undermanned...

...But this is the great dilemma that meets anyone who wants to introduce democracy: until you have democratic elections you cannot know who represents the people, and unless you have democratic institutions you cannot have democratic elections...

...A spokesman of the Zulu race would not be accepted as a spokesman by the Sotho, Swazi, Xhosa, or other races into which the blacks of South Africa are ethnically divided or by the Indians and Coloreds...

...Asquith, which instituted the Native Land Act of 1913 forbidding the sale of land to blacks, except in reserves which covered only eight percent of South Africa's surface area...

...When the British pursued them they had to fight for their independence in two Boer Wars...

...I t is generally agreed that E W. de Klerk has made a good start as president of South Africa...

...The first Dutch rulers in the seventeenth century planted groves to isolate white habitations from those of blacks and made racial intermarriage illegal...

...The lucky ones are those, such as the Ivory Coast and Malawi, which have benevolent and efficient despots...

...Young Franklin Delano 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 Roosevelt, for example, was so moved by the Afrikaners' cause that he conceived that lifelong hatred of European imperialism which prompted him to side with Stalin against Churchill and De Gaulle during World War H. Defeat in battle, however, forced the Afrikaner leaders to agree in 1910 to the merging of their states in a Union of South Africa, as a dominion of the British Empire...

...This perhaps did more than anything else to nourish the passions of Afrikaner nationalism, which was directed first by the clergy of the Dutch Reformed Church and afterward by the semi-freemasonic cultural society, the Broederbond...

...none can boast of liberty...

...The liberalism of Asquith's England was wholly directed to reconciliation with the Afrikaners, and the top brass of the Afrikaner military, including the philosopher-general Jan Smuts, responded eagerly to those advances...

...and since the climate is ideal and the magnificent natural beauty of the land is matched by no other country except the United States, it has much that would attract the visitor—if the immigration laws, on the one side, and the anti-apartheid boycotts on the other, did not keep people away...

...The first European settlers were Dutch Calvinists, who colonized the Cape with the aid of French and German Protestant refugees...

...The almost mythical Mandela remains the unpredictable one...

...In fact one has hardly any sense of racial tensions in South Africa today such as one observes, for example, in Washington, D.C...

...The more he needs them, the stronger will be their pressure to speed up change...

...Meanwhile, the bureaucracy and all the nationalized corporations have been packed with Afrikaners, who have also maintained their old supremacy in agriculture, which is itself so regulated and so heavily subsidized as to count as a part of the state...

...Even the army, to whichwhites alone are drafted for compulsory service, is heavily dependent on black volunteers...

...It is ironic to reflect that if the British had given votes to the blacks, the Nationalists would never have come to power, and the world would never have heard the word "apartheid...

...senator Lowell Weicker, it is hardly surprising that their arguments were not heeded...

...He is also a moderate, and an eloquent opponent of sanctions...

...A ltogether, the economy of South Africa today is unhealthy, despite all the riches of the country...

...But the predominant swing in the election was to the Democratic party, which calls for universal suffrage in a federal republic...

...There is indeed a small group of out-and-out fascists, the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, much photographed on foreign TV, which has a flag like a swastika and is led by Eugene TerreBlanche, a faintly ridiculous figure more like Mussolini than Hitler...

...The black population thereupon took to non-violent protest and kept away from all the stores and shops owned by whites, with the result that many had to close down...

...The Democratic party has suggested that De Kierk should leave the choice of black and minority representatives to the chief justice, who should also organize talks to fix the agenda for further talks...

...Even so, the Nationalist majority remained slender...

...She opposes theextension of sanctions, but she has received black journalists from South Africa and told them what she told De Klerk in person—that the South African government must mend its ways, abolish every vestige of apartheid, and introduce democracy...

...D esides, the British in their wisdom .1...

...Even if worse things are done in other parts of Africa, the fact remains that South Africa is judged by Western moral standards, and it is only fair to note that the Afrikaners, as thoroughbred Calvinists, judge themselves by those standards too...

...The majority of ordinary Afrikaners, however, unable to forget the 26,000 who had died during the second Boer War in British concentration camps, were no more disposed to yield to the British blandishments than were the Catholic Irish in Ireland...

...He reprieved several terrorists from the death penalty...

...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 but it might well be persuaded that non-violence is more effective...

...But who is to rank as a representative...

...At the same time Botha enraged the vastly more numerous black community—their population being 15 million compared to the 2.5 million Coloreds and 700,000 Indians—by denying them even a dummy legislative chamber...

...Although it's unclear what increased liberty will bring, for the time being it's possible to be optimistic...

...In any case, the conception of apartheid itself has changed...

...had installed in South Africa as governor another philosopher, one Alfred Milner, who, having been born and schooled in Germany, tried to be more British than the British, and set about forcing everyone in South Africa to learn to speak English, prohibiting the use of the Afrikaans language in schools and other public institutions...

...So long as politics in South Africa could be limited to white men, the Afrikaners had numbers on their side...

...The Founding Fathers were afraid of the tyranny of ignorant men and perhaps also that of the landless poor who might vote down the rights of the propertied...

...There are,for example, non-whites to be seen on all-white beaches on the Cape peninsula, and their presence seems to be in no way resented by the white bathers there, who are in any case the young and affluent, whereas the white racists tend to be the poor, the old, and the least educated...

...He opened a dialogue on reform with religious dignitaries, including Desmond Tutu, Allan Boesak, and Frank Chikahe...

...But he comes from a family that is both cultured and enlightened...

...But my reading of the situation, touring South Africa after the September parliamentary elections, is that the momentum toward democracy is irreversible...

...If the clergy could defend apartheid in theory, they could not defend it in practice...

...Curiously enough, these demands are identical with those made in a petition of the protest marchers who took to the streets of Johannesburg and Cape Town in September...

...Kelloggs, for example, was a model employer, providing educational as well as medical and welfare services for its black workers, of a kind that no local employer could afford or perhaps would wish to afford...

...South Africa is a rich country, enjoying excellent universities, schools, mines, factories, roads, refineries, vineyards, hotels, and restaurants...

...The British went even further, notably under the high-minded Liberal government of Mr...

...Black farmers who had previously prospered on holdings of many hundred acres were allowed to hold no more than ten acres, and that on lease...

...Although the British now berate the Afrikaners for not giving the vote to every black, they did not themselves, when they were in command, allow the natives, as they were then called, to have anything more than token representation by white men in parliament...

...The two main organs of the National party in the South African daily press, Beeld and Die Burger, have openly urged the release of Nelson Mandela, the ending of the state of emergency, the "unbanning" of the African National Congress, and the abolition of all apartheid laws, which the new minister of law and order, Adriaan Volk, has described as an "albatross" around the neck of Afrikaner nationalism...

...De Klerk very sensibly does not wish to have one democratic election in South Africa that would be the last as well as the first...

...Unfortunately, modifications in the official Communist line cannot discipline the far left and the new left factions, who are as President de Klerk looks as if he's becoming one of those enigmatic figures in politics, such as Disraeli and De Gaulle, who come in from the right and steal the clothes of the left...

...In the election, the National party campaigned under De Klerk on a platform that repudiated apartheid, leaving the Conservative party to collect the votes of those who wanted to keep it...

...The Afrikaners are afraid of the ideological passions of the masses that might allow a Marxist or some other such faction to secure the unreflective assent of a majority...

...Capitalism was for the whites, socialism for the blacks...

...W e can expect the struggle to become fairly embittered, even in a parliamentary body composed exclusively of whites...

...No doubt disinvestment has given American shareholders the comfortable feeling that their hands are unsoiled by apartheid...

...That, she feels, must be decided by the people themselves...

...Blacks even lost the economic freedom enjoyed by whites...

...There is no reason to doubt Mr...

...Botha's creation in 1984 of parliamentary houses to represent the Indians and Coloreds notoriously failed to satisfy those two communities because the powers assigned to their houses were vacuous—so that only 20 percent of those eligible chose to vote in the last elections to them...

...Both these ideologies have had their moments of triumph, and both are now history...

...But of course he has not yet introduced that thing which people in South Africa, like those in China and Poland and East Germany, have been demanding so forcefully this past year: democracy...

...What is clearly needed is a constitution that will introduce democracy without destroying freedom through the tyranny of the majority...

...after another in his climb to office...

...Modified apartheid turned out to be a policy of blacks and whites living under the same government with the whites having every privilege and the blacks no rights, the whites residing in the good areas and the blacks relegated to walled townships and forced to use separate and inferior schools, colleges, buses, trains, hospitals, beaches, libraries, pools, and all other public facilities...

...The state became an Afrikaner state...

...The currency, the rand, grows ever weaker on the foreign exchange market...

...They have cut off their links with Holland, and could not simply go back to a second home, as other whites might simply leave for England or Israel...

...To visit South Africa is, in a curious 1 way, to step back in time to the 1930s, to a world where maids still bustle about the house and gardeners tend old-fashioned gardens, where school children wear uniforms and learn Latin, where adults smoke more Camels and Chesterfields than are good for them, where automobiles have stick-shifts, where there is no rock music, but tangos and foxtrots, to be heard in tearooms, where no business is done on Sundays, and where nothing much but Noel Coward plays are to be seen in the theaters...

...But its most obvious beneficiaries are the German and Japanese industrialists who have taken over the export market that the Americans have vacated, just as Lufthansa, British Airways, Alitalia, Swissair, and the other competitors have taken over the air routes abandoned by Pan Am and TWA...

...Machiavelli said that if people who are unused to freedom are suddenly given freedom, they will jump into the arms of despots—which is exactly what happened in all those other countries in Africa that were once European colonies and then briskly decolonized...

...in principle the ANC is still committed to violence, The West owes Botha a great debt for going to the aid of the peoples of Angola and Mozambique when everyone else seemed willing to let them have Communism forced upon them...

...There was no police interference...

...There is no inseparable barrier, such as that of religion in Ireland and Sri Lanka, to hinder a negotiated settlement...

...De Klerk clearly wishes that there were more black leaders like Buthelezi, but he is in fact unique...

...Some of these non-white officers have lately protested openly against police brutality, and it is doubtful that President de Klerk could rely indefinitely on such a multiracial force to put down rebellion in the way that President Botha did, even if he wanted to...

...Afrikaners and blacks seem to work well together on all sorts of local councils and consultative bodies, and to understand and respect each other as individuals however much they may be divided as tribes...

...Kruger's ideal of an all-Afrikaner state is doomed today by the force of numbers...

...He is a man of cosmopolitan culture, often seen on television in Western countries...

...There is nothing in De Klerk's previous record to indicate that it would be his destiny to initiate such a transformation of the country...

...For forty years, the South African regime has been an all-Afrikaner regime...

...He was once a Communist, but who knows what he has become in his years of meditation since he was first imprisoned for terrorism in 1964...

...M rs...

...Church leaders in South Africa have emerged in the cities as political leaders, as they have in East Germany, but whatever their authority, they have not shown great political skill...

...The Afrikaners are deeply rooted in Africa...

...The cultural boycott imposed by American and European trade unions at least preserves South Africa from the worst as well as the best in the contemporary art scene...

...In one country town in South Africa the local authorities have tried to turn back the clock in another sense: in Boksburg a Conservative party council restored segregation where it had been abolished in parks and pools and other public places...

...In September, a group of South African businessmen, representing the civil society of South Africa and not the state, tried to explain to a panel appointed by the United Nations in Geneva that sanctions were doing more to prolong than weaken apartheid, but as the United Nations panel consisted of such persons as Judith Hart, veteran British left-wing feminist, Canaan Banana, former black nationalist president of Zimbabwe, Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian champion of cultural boycotts, and former U.S...

...The age of liberal imperialism ended when the National party won the election of 1948 and transformed the Union into a Republic...

...He allowed black demonstrations to take place on "whites-only" beaches...

...Condemnation of the kind expressed at the British Commonwealth conference by Australians and Canadians—who are thought by South Africans to be simply hypocrites in view of their own treatment of their indigenous populations—is not heard in Pretoria as the voice of conscience...

...Gorbachev's sincerity in speaking of peace in southern Africa...

...President de Klerk looks as if he's becoming one of those enigmatic figures in politics, such as Disraeli and De Gaulle, who come in from the right to steal the clothes of the left...

...and if liquor is cheap enough to be consumed as liberally as it was in the heyday of the British Empire, hard drugs are unknown, which is surely one reason why it is safer to walk in the gray areas of Cape Town or Johannesburg than in Los Angeles or New York...

...The Afrikaners have been calledan African tribe, and it is clear they have a closer rapport with other African tribes, including the Coloreds, who share their Afrikaans language and their Calvinist religion, than do the reserved and standoffish English-speaking whites, who preserve the liberal imperialist tradition...

...Recently, taking advantage of what they have come to call De Klerk's "Pretoriastroika," several thousand blacks marched peacefully to the Town Hall...

...The party that calls itself Conservative, although it is really a reactionary party, opposed to any dilution of apartheid, captured from the National party six out of thirteen seats in the Orange Free State alone and won 457,966 votes in the Transvaal compared to the National party's 534,138...

...Several generations later a new wave of English-speaking immigrants arrived and the British government promptly annexed the Cape to its empire...

...Some of this is the result of sanctions, although their impact has yet to be thoroughlyresearched...

...He made their release "unconditional" and so allowed them to resume political activity, but he authorized the release first of subordinate figures Wilton Mkwayi, Elias Motsoaledi, Andrew Mlangeni, Raymond Mhlaba, Ahmed Kathrada, Oscar Mpheta, and Walter Sisulu, while delaying that of Nelson Mandela...

...If the independence process after the recent elections in Namibia goes well, that, too, is likely to make South Africans more confident about the democratization of their own electoral system...

...In its original form it was not necessarily unjust, for it proposed nothing less than the partition of South Africa into two sovereign states, the blacks to have one, the whites another...

...In both cases what was asked for was not so much democracy tomorrow as liberty today...

...Civil war there would depress the price of gold, which would be as bad for the Soviet economy as for that of South Africa, and national liberation movements everywhere are a palpable menace to Russia's own stability...

...It must be said, however, that although the Afrikaner Nationals introduced the word, they did not introducethe practice it names...

...The Afrikaner cult of the state produced a situation in the townships as wretched as that in Eastern Europe...

...This is especially noticeable in cases where, as a result of "disinvestment," former black employees of American companies have found themselves either unemployed or employed by less solicitous bosses...

...All three of its leaders—Zac de Beer, Denis Worrall, and Wynand Malan—are now M.P.'s and De Klerk is sure to find himself increasingly dependent on their support in parliament...

...Since Afrikaner families produced more children than English-speaking families, the Afrikaner electorate had become more numerous than the English-speaking electorate by 1948, and this enabled the Afrikaner National party to win its majority...

...Of course, it is necessary that South Africa should be made aware that public opinion abroad disapproves of its undemocratic and discriminatory practices...

...His National party saw its majority reduced from eighty to thirty, and even that majority is fragile...

...The Dutch Reformed Church, which has always had an enormous influence over Afrikaner thinking, must be given much credit for the change...

...Generally, De Klerk seems to have learned the lessons of Botha's failures, both in the use of violence and in the introduction of fruitless reforms...

...The white trade unions reinforced this policy...

...White men in South Africa were long divided by these two ideologies: the liberal imperialism of the British promising to unite all races in common subjection to a distant sovereign, and the republicanism of the Afrikaners aiming to build a Christian commonwealth on the model of Calvin's own Geneva, in which citizens would rule themselves as free men and others for their own good...

...The blacks are cheerful and friendly, and •although South Africa is a "police state" with a shocking record of repression, one seldom sees a policeman...

...Until Mr...

...He saw to it that Johannesburg desegregated the buses, swimming pools, and other public facilities...

...Hence, although Smuts was able to carry South Africa into the two World Wars on the British side, his overthrow by the Nationalists in 1948 was not wholly surprising...

...What caused the Nationalists to abandon a policy that had once been a central part of their ideology...

...At that time they were universally admired for their plucky resistance to the mighty British army...

...In Pretoria today there are two buildings that can be seen as symbols of this conflict: the grandiose imperial palace in Roman style overlooking the fertile and gold-rich acres of the Transvaal and, down in the city itself, the modest house of Paul Kruger, the hero of Afrikaner independence, filled with the emblems of republican liberty and works of Holy Scripture...

...de Klerk formed his administration there was never more than one English-speaking minister in the cabinet...

...Originally organized by Communists, the unions proved as racist as any Afrikaner nationalist, as they fought to prevent black workers from being given any job that a white worker wanted...

...The injustice emerged when this project proved impracticable simply because the whites could not do without the labor of blacks to maintain their mines and farms and factories and their comfortable domestic life-style...

...Elsewhere in South Africa apartheid is being whittled away in practice before it is abolished in law...

...One thing that is clear is that they have hurt the non-unionized blacks most of all...

...There are simply too many people of other races in South Africa for the Afrikaners, or even the entire white minority of 4.5 million, to keep a whole nation of 24 million in tutelage, especially as that percentage is predicted to fall progressively with every new generation...

...It is clear that having released them from prison De Klerk will have to talk officially to the leaders of the African National Congress, including, sooner or later, Mandela, with whom De Klerk is already said to be negotiating secretly in his comfortable prison...

...Thatcher, on the other hand, has considerable influence...

...It is not simply a question of what De Klerk wants to do, but of what he will have to do after the September elections...

...Political science owes to Alexis de Tocqueville the observation that in critical situations ill-judged reforms generate revolution rather than tranquillity...

...He has said he is willing to meet representatives of blacks and other groups...

...The Democratic party leader Denis Worrall suggested to me in conversation that if Mandela emerges from internment to plead for dialogue there is every likelihood of swift and peaceful change, but that if he comes out and calls for the "armed struggle" to continue, the impact will be disastrous...

...Racism is no longer smart or fashionable...

...His elder brother, Professor W. A. de Klerk, is a founder of the Democratic party and in October took part in a meeting in London with exiled officials of the African National Congress, the black nationalist body that has long been banned in South Africa...

...He was always the pragmatist and visibly ambitious as he sided with one faction Maurice Cranston is professor of political science at the London School of Economics...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 25 active in Africa as they once were in Chile and Grenada...

...it also led Botha to let inordinate power pass into the hands of the service and security chiefs...

...It was because the Soviets were believed to have called off the dogs in neighboring states that so many South African whites felt able to vote, as an election slogan put it, according to their hopes and not their fears...

...He released leaders of the African National Congress from prison and allowed their supporters to hold a mass rally in Soweto...

...the English-speaking whites held on to what Hegel called civil society—the industrial, commercial, cultural, and academic institutions which have continued to be run for the most part by non-Afrikaner whites, including those of Jewish origin...

...The more the defenders of apartheid frustrate his reformist plans, the more he will need the votes of the thirty-three Democrats who now sit in the House of Assembly in order to keep himself in office...

...He abolished the use of whips by the police in controlling riots...