Black Challenge to South Africa

...Submarines and military aircraft are being imported, principally from France, while smaller armaments (and napalm) are being manufactured locally...

...For example, 62 per cent of Lesotho's adult males are working in South Africa at any given time...

...Rhodesia and Mozambique, and added that "provocation can lead to hard retaliation...

...Thus the three countries have merely exchanged British protectorate for South African suzerainty...

...Today he is not so sure...

...The Afrikaans paper Dag-breek, certainly with government approval, has urged full-scale South African engagement, while the opposition Sunday Times has spoken of "garrisoning the whole of Southern Africa in defense of a local Monroe Doctrine...

...Only one piece of this intricate jigsaw is missing: Zambia...

...A proportionate manpower investment by the U.S...

...The South African Broadcasting Corporation, a state monopoly, recently presented a special program informing listeners of how reconnaisance flights had revealed the presence of training camps in Zambia...

...A worried government has introduced a universal draft for all white male school dropouts, and will shortly be extending Ian Robertson, now a Harvard graduate student, is a former President of the South African National Union of Students who was exiled in 1966 for inviting tlie late Senator Robert Kennedy to his country...

...Their leader, Dr...

...Swaziland, although it has the highest illiteracy rate in the world, is the most advanced: It alone possesses a set of traffic lights...

...He will not get them, but South Africa has responded by establishing an experimental missile station of its own...

...They are determined to prevent the Republic from consolidating its sphere of influence, and are committed to ending white BALTHAZAR VORSTER minority rule in Southern Africa...

...In Mozambique in particular the potential for a major South African involvement is great...

...He has banned miniskirts, declared himself a capitalist, and even directs his UN representatives to vote with South Africa when apartheid is on the agenda—unlike the representatives of Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland, who are usually discreetly absent...

...On either side of the subcontinent lie the two Portuguese territories of Angola and Mozambique, now the scenes of a major guerrilla war...

...for by the early 1970s it will require twice the present output...

...All are pitifully undeveloped...

...Rhodesia, too, is heavily dependent on South Africa for its very survival, in both economic and military terms...

...THREATENING VORSTER'S EMPIRE Black Challenge to South Africa In 1966, I attended a political meeting in South Africa at which Prime Minister Balthazar Vorster was asked about the potential military threat posed to the white South by the newly independent black states of the North...

...In consequence, their relations with him are cool, while South Africa is lavishing more favors on Malawi than on any other state in its sphere of influence...

...It is from there that guerrillas are infiltrating into Angola, South-West Africa...

...Caborra Bassa...

...South Africa's empire is fast becoming a reality, and Vorster now speaks habitually of Southern Africa in the same proprietary terms which his predecessor, Hen-drik Verwoerd, used in speaking of South Africa itself...

...The comment, as Vorster's pungent public statements are wont to do in South Africa, evoked a prolonged standing ovation from his all-white audience...

...Housewives are being encouraged to join pistol clubs, where they tote their guns in florally embroidered holsters...

...Once a month, a council of military representatives from South Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal assembles...

...The bulk of the power generated will be conveyed 800 miles south to meet the Republic's growing demands...

...There would be a howl of indignation around the world, but the Republic has emerged unscathed from so many of them in the past that the prospect is not a particularly daunting one...

...The rebels control large tracts of land in both territories, and it is taking the efforts of 60.000 troops in Angola and 45,000 in Mozambique to prevent them from striking at urban centers...

...In fact, the possibility of South Africa striking by air at guerrilla training camps in Zambia, and even Tanzania, is being openly canvassed in the Republic...

...More and more Portugal is looking to South Africa for military aid...

...The continent is dividing into two hostile camps, with Zambia crucially but uncomfortably placed as the spearhead of the guerrilla offensive...

...And from Zambia's recalcitrance stems the current sabre-rattling which could easily escalate into open warfare...

...Moreover, Zambia claims that Portuguese aircraft bombed Zambian villages near the Angolan border in April and May 1968...

...technical assistance is provided...

...and military aid is becoming available to those who need it...

...Malawi's reduction to the role of vassal state has been the most significant triumph for the Republic...

...Significantly, he went on to draw the analogy of Israeli raids against Al-Fatah bases across the Jordan...

...Inevitably, it can only be matter of time before either South Africa's fear is aroused or its patience exhausted...

...Already it has suffered for harboring guerrilla training camps...

...President Kaunda takes these threats seriously and has asked the West for missiles with which to defend himself...

...The Prime Minister has publicly warned Zambia that "we will hit you back so hard that you will never forget it...

...Other African states have suggested that South Africa's heavy investment in nuclear research cloaks an attempt to build an atomic bomb, and certainly there is nothing but the Republic's own discretion to prevent its building one: It has all the necessary uranium resources, a nuclear reactor, technology and finance...

...The implications for a full-scale South African military intervention, if there is the slightest possibility of its power supply being endangered, are obvious...

...By Ian Robertson HASTINGS BANDA it to females as well...

...The state held most closely to Pretoria's bosom is South-West Africa, which is now being treated more than ever as an integral part of the Republic...

...A strange fraternity comprising Southwest Africa, Rhodesia, Angola, Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, and Malawi has evolved...

...bridges, communications and power lines have been affected...

...Eduar-do Mondlane, has made it clear that he will do all he can to obstruct and even destroy the project...

...There is no formal pact between the three white supremacist countries ("Good friend's know their duty when a neighbor's house is on fire," Vorster says ominously), but tactics are discussed and information on guerrilla movements exchanged...

...As part of an ambitious development plan for the remote Caborra Bassa region, Portugal intends to build the largest hydroelectric dam in Africa, transforming the area into an industrial heartland populated by a million fresh Portuguese immigrants...

...Botha speaks darkly of "secret weapons" to be installed near the northern frontier...

...Spurred partly by the need to secure her northern borders from guerrilla attack, partly by the prospects of a lucrative economic domination of the region, Pretoria has been steadily extending diplomatic and economic influence through the sub-continent, making client states of eight countries to the north...

...They were not rash words...

...He is on record as saying that he will if necessary commune with the devil for the sake of Malawi...

...South Africa and Portugal will pool $550 million to finance the project...

...Portugal has decided that the economic potential of the mineral-rich colonies justifies hanging on to them at all costs, and is pouring well over 40 per cent of its annual budget into an attempt to confine the insurgents to the rural areas...

...however, is precisely the region in which the Mozambique insurgents are at their strongest...

...Several of his own northern neighbors may not mind him supping with the devil, but they draw the line at his doing so with Vorster...

...Pretoria is perfectly capable of seeing an attack on Zambia as being in the latter's own interests, particularly in the purely African context: The Republic has already demonstrated the advantages which accrue to cooperative black states, and a further demonstration of the disadvantages which come of not doing so is precisely the kind of kragdadigheid (toughness in action) which appeals so noticeably to the Vorster mentality...

...South African Foreign Minister Hilgard Muller has warned that thousands of guerrillas will soon be infiltrating the country, and in Zambia President Kenneth Kaunda has spoken of "a developing Vietnam in Southern Africa—a full-scale racial war...

...Rhodesia, and Mozambique...

...The Republic has already cornered 76 per cent of the inter-regional trade, and the first black diplomat from an African state—Malawi—is safely ensconced in a Cape Town residence...

...They are utterly dependent on South African goodwill for their continued existence and survive only by exporting produce and labor to their white neighbor...

...The Portuguese have issued perfunctory denials, but the South African press makes no pretense of doubting it...

...Massive loans are being offered...

...The point is not lost on Pretoria, which is sufficiently impressed by the consequences of guerrillas slipping into South-West Africa via rebel-held Angolan territory to realize the implications for South African security of a total Angolan collapse...

...It would be rash not to recognize that South Africa may calculate that she can strike at Zambia—probably from the strategic Caprivi Strip?and get away with it...

...The program spoke specifically of the possibilities of an air strike...

...Zambia and the other black states to its north—particularly Tanzania —have embarked on an irrevocable course of confrontation with South Africa...

...The Prime Minister secured the satisfaction of a second round of applause by adding: "We'd be in Cairo before the Israelis...

...There have been a series of presumably retaliative acts of sabotage over the past few months...

...One item must continually recur on the council's agenda: Zambia...

...The black states...

...The whole of Southern Africa will then be plunged into prolonged and bloody racial warfare...

...food supplies have been donated in time of famine...

...Defense Minister Piet Botha has said that South Africa has an interest in what is happening in Angola...

...Guerrilla forces, probably numbering hundreds of thousands, are mounting an increasingly vigorous attack on South Africa and those states whose interests are becoming identical to those of the Republic...

...Over the past three years, the Republic has been engaged in building an empire in Southern Africa...

...South African troops are assisting Rho-desian forces in their combat against guerrillas in the north, and Ian Smith's regime knows it can have as much military aid as it needs...

...Enclosed within "white" territory are the three hapless former British protectorates of Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland...

...Pretoria is making economic aid available, and the recipient governments are making their gratitude felt by a staunchly pro-South African attitude and a refusal to countenance the use of their territories by guerrilla movements as bases for incursions into the Republic...

...In the Transvaal, the largest explosives factory in the world has been erected...

...Hastings Banda is a highly conservative and atypical African leader...

...replied Vorster, "I could finish them before breakfast...

...in Vietnam would be 2,500,000 troops...

...South Africa's military expenditure has rocketed in six years from $62 million to $350 million a year, making the Republic substantially the most powerful country on the African continent...