IN A SOUTH AFRICAN PRISON

...Ireland, nemesis of the pragmatists, reminds us how much human beings will sacrifice to keep the warm familiarity of ancient hatred amid the cold uncertainties of change...

...His wife, Anne, is permitted to visit his cell for only a half hour each Monday and Friday...

...Afterward, Qoboza was dated...

...She has organized the wives of imprisoned blacks to pressure the government and to monitor the situations of the jailed men...

...Well, the government nailed Percy Qoboza first...

...Without the simultaneous release of the others jailed with him, Qoboza could well elect to remain behind bars...

...Both the U.S...

...But the black editor was a prophet, too...

...It would, moreover, take a long time to bring about, and Israel would need better guarantees than pledges from Arab governments for her immediate security...

...Also quashed was a still undetermined number of white South Africans sympathetic to the goal of black majority rule...

...In fact, even successful economic modernization is no panacea...

...He wrote about his American experience in a letter last year, " . . . for the first time in my life I could distinguish between right and w r o n g . . . (before that) I had accepted injustice and discrimination as part and parcel of our traditional way of life...

...The man who so eloquently phrased the question that morning in a suite in Boston's Ritz-Carlton Hotel now sits rotting in a South African jail cell...

...The editor and more than 60 other blacks were caught in the government's net of oppression that day...

...In a speech before a National Council of Churches convocation, Andrew Young, U.S...

...After that, it could be extended...

...Comrnonweal: 809...

...Last October 19, Percy Qoboza, always a voice of hope and reason in stormy South Africa, was hustled out of his office in Johannesburg and clapped into Modderbee prison...

...There is a real question, too, whether Qoboza would accept his own freedom if the South African authorities should eventually bow to public opinion and grant it...

...Authorities justified the massive raid 23 December 1977:808 as an attempt "to combat criminal elements...

...People and nations can be given reasons to put old animosities aside...

...Bloody memories die hard...

...He felt uncomfortable, he explained, at being allowed to try on the suits...

...Percy was immediately caught up in covering the the rioting that broke out in Soweto, his home township...

...The nearly unanimous tide of world opinion has washed over the perverse whiteminority regime, only to leave the perpetrators of such massive inhumanity high and dry, still safe in a dream world of their own where 4.3 million whites control the wealth, politics and power while 18 million blacks labor in poverty, restricted in where they may live, work, or be educated...

...He asked an American black journalist to accompany him one day on a shopping trip...

...The black editor found himself being quoted in newspapers around the world as he furnished day-byday assessments of the situation in South Africa...

...Such a transformation would be delicate and costly, and America must expect to be asked to pay a good part of the bill...

...We are an angry newspaper...

...Although I am not yet fully informed on all aspects of the issue," Kissinger replied to his questioner...

...which now seems unlikely), Begin could agree to sit down with them as a courtesy to Sadat, not because he accepted their claim to speak for the Palestinian people...

...Many of my friends are now in jail, held without trial," he wrote...

...If Israel is to give up the military security afforded by the occupied territories, she will probably need a very firm and relatively permanent military guarantee from the United States...

...At first he would pause outside restaurants in Harvard Square, looking in the windows to s e e if blacks were admitted before he went in...

...One month after the October jailings, South African police swept down on a black township near Pretoria and, in a house-to-house search with military helicopters hovering overhead, arrested 626 more blacks, including 198 schoolchildren...

...chief delegate to the UN, and an ordained minister, prayed: "Lord have mercy for the hell which falls on John Vorster, not after death, but in the day-to-day sinful life that he has adopted as national policy in that government...

...He had predicted it...

...Since American promises are at discount these days, we must expect Israel to ask for commitments which are both public and explicit...

...Kissinger, the student of European politics and the caretaker of U.S.-Soviet d~tente, appeared not at all at home discussing the volatile South African situation...

...He realized that his own prominence had "made it difficult for people to arrest me...

...The World, voice for an estimated million blacks, was closed...

...WILSON CAREY MCWILLIAMS (Wilson Carey McWilliams, author ot The Idea of Fraternity in America, teaches in the Political Science Department of Livingston College, Rutgers University, New lersey...

...White foreign correspondents, barred from the black riot areas, depended on Qoboza's staff of black reporters for news of the quickly changing events...

...Even upon his eventual release there is little hope that he will ever practice journalism again in white-ruled South Africa...

...The problems of the Middle East have been decades---if not centuries--in the making...

...Though that hell will ineluctably fall one day when the black majority finally loses its incredible patience in the face of repression, for the present, Percy Qoboza and all the nameless others remain jailed...

...After my year (at Harvard) the things I'd accepted before made me angry...

...But that will come one of these days . . . . " Today, for all h i s prominence, courage and optimistic humanity, Percy Qoboza finds himself in the same desperate predicament as his 18 million mostlY unknown black brethren: in hell in South Africa...

...and the UN reacted sharply, imposing an arms embargo and threatening an oil boycott...

...I cannot imagine any circumstances under which we would recognize or support subsequent United Nations membership for the Transkei...

...For her part, Anne, a quiet woman of tremendous dignJty, has become radicalized...

...But Prime Minister John Vorster has answered the outrage with scorn, stating flatly before cheering crowds of his white supporters, that South Africa would not be "ruled" from abroad...

...Living, for the first time in his 39 years, in a society where blacks and whites were equal under the law was a revelation...

...His newspaper, The World, became a crusading voice in the turbulence...

...It is because of this that the character of my newspaper has changed tremendously...

...Most black Africans considered the government-rigged autonomy of this black region a severe blow to the aspirations for real majority rule for South Africa's 18 million blacks...

...Kissinger had agreed to meet with the Niemansml 8 journalists from the U.S...

...The Vorster government's record on keeping detained blacks healthy is appalling: twenty-one such prisoners have died during the last 20 months, including "black consciousness" leader Steve Biko, whose death last September now looks more and more like homicide, the judicial decision notwithstanding...

...Negotiations at Geneva will be futile without a long-term strategy for peace capable of addressing the real conflicts and dilemmas of Middle Eastern politics...

...The National Council of Churches, the American Newspaper Publishers Association, Sigma Delta Chi (the professional journalists' association) and a host of other groups, both public and private, have condemned the desperate acts of the desperate men who run South Africa's white minority government...

...and abroad who were spending the year studying at Harvard--and the question-and-answer session had been rather routine until Qoboza rose to speak...

...These whites--newspaper people, intellectuals, ordinary citizem were "banned," a curious South African custom which effectively silences the voice of dissent by forbidding people to write or speak for publication and which sharply circumscribes where they may travel...

...Getting the lsraelis and the Arabs to Geneva, however, is hardly enough...

...Shortly before he left Cambridge for home he quipped to a friend: "I think I'm beginning to live like a white man...

...Percy Qoboza's nine months' stay in America changed him...

...In the wake of those repressive actions in South Africa has come a worldwide flood of outrage...

...The portly black journalist asked the American Secretary of State if the U.S...

...His five children have not seen their father since his jailing...

...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 PERCY QOBOZA IN A SOUTH/IFBICAN PRISON It was at an off-the-record briefing in March 1976 that then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in reply to a question, first signaled a dramatic tilt in U.S...

...would recognize the Transkei when it became nominally independent of white-ruled South Africa in October 1976...

...Well, we finally got something out of him," the black editor jubilantly told Nieman curator James C. Thompson, as Kissinger and a phalanx of aides swept out of the room...

...policy toward South Africa...

...Yet the faith of the devoutly Roman Catholic editor and his hope for peaceful change continue...

...In his regular column, "Percy's Pitch," he daily did battle with the forces of apartheid, at one point vowing in print to "nail" any government official responsible if foul play were discovered in the death of Steve Biko...

...But as Sadat's example teaches, peace, like war, demands dangers and discomforts, and if we are serious about peace in the Middle East, we will be willing to pay the price...

...He asks his wife to bring food when she visits--not for himself but for the more than 50 other unknown blacks jailed with him...

...Once back on Johannesburg, though, all the joviality died...

...For this reason we have made some formidable enemies and my own personal life is not worth a cent...

...But he quickly began to enjoy the open social system...

...Economic and social change may, in the long term, be Israel's best hope for security, especially if it makes Arab governments less dependent on anti-Zionism as a justification for sacrifice and an excuse for failure...

...In letters to American friends, Qoboza wrote eloquently of the situation in South Africa and of his growing fear...

...In 1975-76 Percy Qoboza, editor of The WorM, South Africa's largest and most influential black newspaper, was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard...

...All of those blacks, including the children, were held on flimsy charges or no charges at all...

...Americans, so often blind to the burden of the past, are prone to the delusion that the future will take care of itself...

...New economic patterns and interests, new horizons and new fears make old animosities fade and new loyalties seem attractive: politics, as they say, makes strange bedfellows...

...Qoboza's jailing, without charges or trial, will last at least until next August...

...RON aAVERS (Ron layers, a Nieman Fellow with Percy Qoboza, is now on the editorial staff of the Philadelphia Daily News...