Apartheid starts to crack

Ian Waller

Visiting South Africa arouses deeply conflicting emotions. The sybariatic pleasures of the warm sea and a relaxed life under the sun. Anger at the cruel and degrading humiliations apartheid inflicts on the Majority of its citizens. Bewilderment at the contorted logic behind the doctrine that creates ever greater contradictions. Contempt for the cocktail party prattling by many of the English-speaking South Africans who spend their time denouncing the regime that keeps them in comfort but that few would lift a finger to change. Increasing admiration for the courage and intellectual Vigour of the younger Afrikaners who are now questioning the whole basis of the faith they have been brought up on.

Returning recently I found a very different atmosphere from four years ago. The economy, after twenty-five years of expansion and ever-increasing prosperity, is stagnant and inflation rampant (a measure of the difficulties is that the sale of petrol is now banned from midday on Saturday to 6 a.m. on Monday morning). The selfdefensive confidence that South Africa's critics could be written off as communistinspired trouble-makers like Peter Hain or bloody-minded Labour governments has gone, and a harsh and shattering reality has arrived.

The collapse of Angola and Mozambique has brought Black Power to the doorstep. Soweto has erupted and is like a powder keg ready to go off again. Scarcely a week passes Without reports of disturbances in other Darts of the country. A new generation of black leaders, articulate and determined, IS emerging, and it is, paradoxically, the cult of separate development that is giving them their power bases.

The logic of creating the nine Homelands, in the belief that the Blacks in the Republic can be turned into foreigners and somehow cease to be a problem, is that the Homeland leaders must be seen to be independent and as much on a par with white politicians as, say, President Banda of Malawi.

The ablest of their leaders, Chief But helezi of Kwazululand, has exploited his position With dignity and skill. He has asserted his right to speak for all Zulus in the Republic, not merely those in his Homeland, and Dr Vorster cannot deny him it without undermining the theory. He cannot be regarded as head of a government and yet denied admission to segregated restaurants, so a special class of hotel has had to be invented. These are usually luxury hotels, listed as International and licensed to allow Blacks Iii against the law.

True, these are only small cracks in apartheid but cumulatively they both high light its inherent contradictions and absurdities and, more important, contribute to the growing Black sense of nationhood. The Black man can see his leaders being treated as equal to the Whites and questions why he has to remain an outcast. Pretoria's response to the Soweto riots was to arrest every Black leader there; Buthelezi's reaction this week has been to form the Black Unity Front along with two other Homeland Chief Ministers, Ntsanawisi of Gazank ulu and Phatudi of Lebowa.

More significant has been the response of the young Afrikaner intellectuals—and to talk to them is a totally different experience from the crude racialism of the older generation still living mentally in the Lager. And nothing is more remarkable than the call this week by the editor of Die Burger, Mr Piet Cillie, who is one of the most influential Afrikaner thinkers, for Blacks and Whites to be given equal citizenship in what would then be a multi-racial society : the clearest challenge there hss ever been from Afrikanerdom to Apartheid.

The purpose of my visit was to go to the Transkei for the independence' celebrations of what, to its sponsors in Pretoria, is the fiftieth and newest African state; to 'its critics a client colony designed to provide a supply of cheap labour for the white man's land, and the first practical application of separate development and the ultimate denial of Black political rights in the Republic.

No act of decolonisation could have been greeted with such world-wide ridicule, and I shared the scepticism when I arrived in the capital Umtata. It is a totally unviable territory divided into three pieces ( better than Kwazululand which is made up of twenty scattered fragments), although, were it not for tribal land traditions, it has a climate and soil that could make it the market garden of Southern Africa. Its income depends largely on the earnings of the 300,000 who work in South Africa as transient labour. Attempts at industrialisation have produced a mere 5,000 jobs in the last few years; /5,000 people are coming on the labour market each year. It is a oneparty dictatorship led by Kaiser Matanzima ----reviled by his fellow homeland leaders as a traitor, for doing a deal with Dr Vorster that conceded the principle of separate development.

But I left convinced that something significant had happened. Not, I hope, beguiled either by propaganda or the generosity of the South African government, who spared neither trouble nor expense in entertaining 160 journalists from all over the world in their attempt to launch the foundling state. But the reverse of what they had hoped to convey.

For what happened, as the South African flag was lowered, and the Transkeian raised is that two million people, and a land the size of Denmark, were freed from the shackles of apartheid. 'What difference does independence make to you ?' I asked a Black nurse. Her reply: 'Now I can talk to you as an equal.' Four years ago—as today 200 miles away in the Republic's East London—there were separate queues at the post office and in the shops. In Umtata on 26 October Blacks stood with Whites, drank in the same bars, used the same hotels, strangely enough without embarrassment or resentment on either side. It was like a breath of fresh air after the claustrophobic race-obsessed Republic.

The political reality is that Matanzima now has de facto political power, a Black spokesman in the heart of South Africa. Dr Vorster's predicament is that he dare not allow the new state to fail or be seen to put economic and military pressure on it, while to win acceptance from the OAU and the rest of the world, Matanzima has to prove his political virility. How will heuse it ?

He is an essentially conservative figure and many would say of dubious political morals. Certainly his brothers and their friends are revelling in the pleasures of power. A string of presidential and ministerial homes have been built on Umtata's outskirts. Mercedes are doing well in selling official cars. Matanzima does not like criticism, and is deeply sensitive to the world's refusal to recognise him and his government.

But he is also aware that there are younger, more militant figures off-stage ready to challenge him, and it was revealing to listen to his first speech on taking over the reins of power; a bitter diatribe against his sponsors' racial policies. He then indicated that he was ready to accept aid—Russian or Chinese—providing there were no strings; fourty-eight hours later he announced the repeal of the Mixed Marriage Act and the Immorality Act, which, to put it simply, make sex between the races a criminal offence, and are at the very heart of Apartheid—actions that angered Pretoria and are regarded as a breach of the undertakings he is said to have given Vorster.

It would be foolish to imagine that Matanzima and his infant state are going to launch a crusade against South Africa, but it has already become a focal point for the accession of Black rights and undermines still further confidence in the cult of separate development. The white man will not easily surrender his privilege. But the history of Africa shows the speed with which events can develop a mere decade after Macmillan's Wind of Change speech. The past four Years have seen significant developments both inside South Africa and on its borders, and the impetus is growing apace. The question is whether further progress comes from the Afrikaners or from the blacks—by force.