Investment or Disengagement

...However, as the state reasserted its apartheid policies, a consortium led by the Chase Manhattan Bank put together an emergency loan to support the South African government in its moment of trial...

...Am I to conclude that Harry on the Bluffis some superior kind of being...

...Today more than three hundred and fifty United States corporations function within the apartheid system, although three-quarters of the total American investment is in the hands of a handfulof corporations: General Motors, Mobil Oil, Exxon, Standard Oil of California, Ford Motor Co., ITT, General Electric, Chrysler, Union Carbide, Firestone, Goodyear, 3-M I Ill I I IIII I I I III Why I stay in South Africa I I I II I I ALAN PATON I HAVE an acquaintance, Harry, who lives on the Bluff...

...It is because of the total irrationality of this hope that I sometimes feel there will be no reasonable future at all, not until people have lived many Commonweal: 714...

...I was asked the question in Washington D.C...

...The headline "Paton thinking of leaving SA" can have two interpretations...

...A third--in my case the mo~t powerful--is the knowl- edge that one would be leaving the country of the Mandelas, Buthelezis, Suzmans, Naudes, Meers, and my friends of the outlawed Liberal Party...

...Others leave because they foresee a future of war and desolation which might or might not last for many years...

...But the heart has reasons also...

...Some months ago P. told me in despair that he could no longer hope at all, .and I told him--with a probably unjus- tified assumption of authority, based on age, I presume--that so long as he was a member of the PFP he just had to hope...

...After he had read the headline "Paton thinking of leaving SA" he tele- phoned to say that I was a rat...

...Some leave the country because their sons are about to come of military age...

...I do not think the Prime Minister and his Minister of Justice have any understanding of the depth and strength of the Western revulsion against the detention laws themselves, which because they deny access, encourage the use of brutal- ity...

...Have I a right to choose not to end my life in desolation...

...I did not like the headline very much...

...But I do not deny that I have thought of it...

...He want off with a grim and unhappy face, but when I returned from America I found he had fought an election, and in a most unlikely seat, and had made a splendid fight of it, although he had lost...

...That is what I mean by the sort of hope that is a kind of courage...

...Is the Prime Minister outraged or is he not...

...And the better kind of rat has this twofold hope, that which is based on grounds of hope, and that which is a kind of courage...

...There are also powerful reasons for not going into exile...

...The question of going into exile is highly complicated...

...But I do not believe in hoping without grounds, and I,do not find the grounds very promising...

...It is this conflict that is so painful...

...Am I to conclude that most of my friends are rats...

...Another is the dread of admitting a kind of I I I ALAS PATON...

...and I answered that the first time I had ever thought of it in my whole life was when the unrest began in Soweto on 16 June 1976, and the small boy Hector Peter~on was killed...

...But their hope is very different from that of Harry...

...Ill I Illlllllll failure...

...One would imply a firm intention, which I do not have...

...Yet others leave so that they can join outside forces whose pressure grows ever more inexorable...

...West European, Japanese and American corporaA PATRIOT'S DILEMMA tions increased their capital and trading commitments...

...To Harry of the Bluff, P. would no doubt be the better kind of rat...

...I have never met him, but he telephones me when something I have written or said makes him mad...

...I am called a Jeremiah...

...I believe his hope to be based on the totally irrational grounds that the present National Party has the key to a secure future, that the Afrikaner can maintain an identity over which no other person or group can have any say whatever, and that ten different nations can realize ten separate destinies in one phys- ical country with one indivisible economy...

...the author of Cry the Beloved Country and other well-known books, was national president of the South African Liberal Party until it was declared illegal in 1968...

...A more correct headline would have read "Paton has thought of leav- ing South Africa...

...It is often called hope against hope...

...One is the painful change of life, the leaving of the country where one was born and where one learned the deepest mean- ings of one's life...

...I should like to discuss this proposition...

...they have no wish to have any part in it, and they cannot predict what its outcome would be...

...My reason tells me that I have...

...I have often said that I would not leave South' Africa u~til I was convinced that change would come only by war, a war that in my view would mean the death of Afrikanerdom, the de- struction of the economy and years of desolatibn...

...There are very few of my friends who have not...

...Others leave because they can no longer endure the status of privilege which history has created for them...

...Repression was further increased and the rule of law de- stroyed by a series of draconian statutes, but for the remainder of the sixties the apartheid system appeared to be a safe investment...

...It is the fear that he is not that kills hope in us, But there is another sort of hope, which is in a way a kind of courage...

...The other would imply a continuing selfexamination, which I am certainly not conducting...

...This article is reprinted from The Tablet,Lohdon...

...And there are some--whites, Indians, and colored people too (though fewer of these than before)--who fear black government and black revenge...