The Next Step for South Africa

...He had no choice, of course...

...Clearly no love is lost between Mandela, first among Xhosa (whose clicking language Miriam Makeba made famous with her songs a generation ago), and Mangosuthu Buthelezi, first among Zulu, who have never forgotten that their impi (warriors) defeated Britain's "thin red line" of Gatling guns at Rorke's Drift in 1879...

...Western democracy did not come overnight either...

...Although gradualism must be a good deal less gradual today, Mandela surely does not want Africa's richest, most infrastructurally developed nation to founder...

...These are naturally the ones for whom white nationalism makes the most sense...

...More than in the United States, Europe or anywhere else, whatever integration occurs will be a factor of wealth...

...They also slept with the Hottentot women and produced the second-class citizens known as Eurafricans, or "Colored...

...When I lived in Lagos in 1960, the news was read on different radio stations across the country in 44 languages, including English...

...English is not (or not only) a relic of the British empire or a symbol of American Big Brotherism...

...Indeed, the issue of greatest immediate concern to Mandela will be African tribal politics, which white governments have always exploited yet did not invent...

...The parochial American view of a sort of super-Dixie doesn't fit...

...In an article in these pages some years back ("A Way Out in South Africa," NL, July 14-28,1986), I suggested a transitional meritocracy franchise, based mostly on different degrees of education, and partly on property, with the details geared to ensure that the first multiracial parliament would still have a white majority...

...Partition has been discussed in the past...

...There are parallels with Algeriain the 1950s, where a large white establishment also was unwilling to come to terms with a nationalist revolution...

...That this American tendency is misguided should be clear from the demographics: Native blacks constitute 65 per cent of South Africa's population...

...After Mandela emerged from over 27 years of incarceration on February 11, he made a skillfully balanced speech that praised all elements of the armed struggle, including the South African Communist Party, while calling for "one nation...

...Nevertheless, to hear him declaiming in Xhosa in public was as chilling to Zulu, and other Africans who could not understand what he was saying, as it was to European South Africans...

...The beleaguered country's history, moreover, since it ceased to be a galaxy of principalities and chieftaincies, is unique even in Africa...

...That brings us to a point that I think has received too little, if any, attention: In the long run, knowledge of English among the literate will be what produces a national black South African identity...

...Eurafricans, who have separate housing, education, hospitals, and other facilities, 11.5 per cent...

...But highschool graduates should have, say, two votes and university graduates more, with the same holding true for industrialists and wealthy illiterate African chiefs or owners of taxi fleets...

...and those of Asian settlers fill out the rest...

...The overwhelming majority of South African whites have no other motherland...

...housing and jobs were found for those too poor or unskilled to look after themselves...

...If violence can be avoided, South Africa's wealth could help to minimize thepainthat will inevitably accompany its movement toward equality for all of its peoples...

...They grew vegetables and raised mutton for the scurvied crews...

...So one basic problem is that the whites a black South Africa will need (industrial managers, doctors, etc...

...There will certainly be integration at the university, and in high-skills plus other elite levels of society...

...Many of these, particularly the young, could afford to start new lives elsewhere...

...Even if there were a nation ready to accept the illiterate refugees, most could not afford to take their families to Europe, Australia or North America—and South Africa is too far from anywhere for them to become boat people...

...But the difficulties of achieving true racial integration, particularly given the realities of the population distribution, should not be allowed to prevent important initial steps toward this objective...

...I said at the outset that South Africa's situation is sui generis...

...But in that case the mother country, France, took the 1 million European citizens (10 per cent of Algeria's population) home—free of charge on trans-Mediterranean ferries, if they couldn't pay the air fare...

...What was historically noteworthy, however, was that he spoke two languages: English, for the world, South African whites and 50 per cent of black South Africans, and Xhosa, his mother tongue, understood by less than 10 per cent of the country...

...It bears no relation to the American scene and is more complex than any other in Africa...

...Any practical solution to the situation South Africa faces has to be humanistic...

...What sort of accommodation can an African leadership sell to its electorate when it gets the vote...

...Big separate nations have thus grown up in South Africa, vastly unequal...

...A franchise of the kind I have proposed would encourage that...

...As the father of a Eurafrican family, I discussed this option with some of my wife's old classmates in Capetown in 1986 and found the essentially bourgeois community up in arms at the notion of absorbing white refugees from the Orange Free State or the Transvaal...

...Had it been offered a generation ago, the Eurafricans (who are dominant in the Western Cape) would have seen a European-Eurafrican state in the Cape as preferable to living under something like the Nigerian government...

...It would not be easy to get my idea past prominent Africans who are more divided by tribal than policy unes, yet it would perhaps not be impossible—at least while Mandela remains the country's Gandhi...

...Zimbabwe—admittedly under pressure from London—gave a weighted franchise to whites for an interim 20-year period that is now drawing successfully to its close, so a precedent exists that might be acceptable to all sides...

...On the other hand, the country has immense natural resources, beginning with gold, diamonds and the best tourist facilities on the continent...

...The first Europeans to arrive were colonists, not colonialists—men sent from Holland in 1652 to establish a chandlering and revictualing station for seamen doing the long haul around the Cape of Good Hope to Asia...

...may leave, and the ones it doesn't want will have to stay...

...They all spoke French...

...it is an accident of political history (the Latin languages would be easier for non-Europeans to learn) that has become an instrument of cohesion...

...ANC leaders have usefully been appealing in recent weeks for the violent street activists, mainly unemployed teenage youth, to go back to school or technical training, and build a future for themselves and their country...

...Now it's read in only 11...

...A substantial number of Anglos (English-speaking whites) have British passports, and better-educated (Dutch-descent) Afrikaners speak English as well...

...There must be an accommodation...

...The problems attending President Frederick W. de Klerk's recognition that apartheid's day is over cannot be understood, let alone dealt with, in terms of theU.S...

...Sixty per cent speak only Afrikaans, a pidgin-Dutch not easily understood in Holland and certainly nowhere else, while 7 per cent (as opposed to 2 per cent in America, 1 per cent in Europe) cannot read or write...

...The base line is equal opportunity...

...Europe and the United States originally had a property franchise, and only in this century were women granted the vote...

...the descendants of European settlers, 20 per cent...

...English is what has held Nigeria together, despite its 43 main indigenous languages and about 600 dialects...

...Like all politicians (witness West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's pre-election wriggling on the Polish border question), Mandela cannot go too much ahead of his constituency—and others who might follow this physically ailing man are unlikely to possess the charisma to go as far as he can...

...A generation later, the Dutch courts began deporting convicted prostitutes who, likeNorthCarolina'srevered Virginia Dare, became the fabled forebears of the white South African nation (community is too small a word for 5 million people...

...Anything else would have made no sense, and those are the only two languages he knows...

...Russell Warren Howe, a frequent contributor to The New Leader, is a veteran observer of African affairs...

...Partition is dead, and integration, as Americans understand it, is a chimera at least for as far ahead as anyone can look...

...Everyone, I now suggest, should have the vote...

...civil rights struggle...

...The middle-aged people I talked to, their friends and their ethnic press looked forward to imprisoned African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela or some equally reasonable black as their prime minister...