ANOTHER VOICE
Seeing the future in black and white
CHARLES MOORE
The press is often attacked for refusing to tell the good news. It is less noticed
when it refuses to tell the bad. So I suspect that people in the West will receive it as a bolt from the blue when South Africa plunges into civil war after its first all-race elections this spring.
This prediction is not expert or based on secret knowledge. I have not been to South Africa for five years, although I have just been in neighbouring Zimbabwe. In fact, I should not dignify what I am saying with the word 'prediction'. It is no more than a hunch, but a hunch which I think most peo- ple would share if the newspapers pointed them towards it.
The hunch is based not on the belief that a black majority cannot run a country prop- erly, but on the fact that South Africa with- out white rule will turn out not to be a country at all. The Union of South Africa is a British colonial construction, alien to the blacks who inhabit it and originally hated by the majority of whites — the Boers who were pressed into it by force. The Boers only finally accepted it because, after 1948, they took it over. Now they are relin- quishing it. Why should it survive?
The answer might be made that the blacks want South Africa to survive and that it will therefore do so, since they will be in control. It is true that no important black politician has yet said that he wants South Africa destroyed, and probably true, too, that these politicians, being the most sophisticated in black Africa, are attached to the western idea of a multiracial, mod- ern, non-tribal state. But of course 'the blacks' will not be in control, because there is no such political entity. One party, or coalition, will win, and the others will lose. Presumably the ANC will win the election. Inkatha is not even taking part, and so will defy the new government. A very large number of blacks will have an interest in ensuring that the majority's writ does not run in their areas. So will many whites. The Afrikaners are, as has often been said, a tribe rather than a colonial people. From this April they will be a tribe with consider- able power but permanent minority status. The logic of that is that the system will gradually exclude them. In the unitary state constructed by the new constitution, the Zulus and the whites and the Indians and the coloureds and many of the smaller black tribes will be oppressed by the Xhosas. So they will secede or fight, or both.
The equivalent has happened in most African countries. The white man invented them as political communities and so they have not survived his passing, even when the boundaries have remained formally unaltered. Zimbabwe, for example, is the `jewel of Africa', exceptionally humane and orderly, but even there the manners of a multi-racial democracy only thinly clothe what is really a one-party dictatorship in which one tribe rules the others. Perhaps, in Zimbabwe's case, it does not matter too much: the country is relatively small and the dominance of the Shona — about 70 per cent of the population — is natural. But South Africa is infinitely more compli- cated, more artificial and more frightening.
In the West the matter is debated in western terms. You like Nelson Mandela if you are a socialist or a liberal, Chief Buthelezi if you are a conservative. You worry about whether or not there will be a planned economy or a free market, interna- tional investment or state corporatism. All of this makes a difference, and the history of post-colonial Africa certainly shows how the doctrines of Harold Laski can make the straight crooked and the plain places rough, but it is not the main point. Western political categories do not apply. I once attended a dinner in London given by Mr John Aspinall, the famous zoo-keeper, in honour of Buthelezi. The chief gave a long and impeccably liberal speech on some- thing like 'parameters for a multiracial South Africa' and the collective attention wandered. Then Aspinall spoke. He had been to Zululand, he said, and had met the ministers of tourism, of housing and so on. He respected them for their work, he said, 'but that is not why I revere you. I revere you because you are a race of warriors and heroes, the descendants of Dingane, of Cetewayo, of Shaka Zulu, because you defeated the entire British Empire at Isan- dlwana and washed your spears in our blood. Worthy foes!' By this time the pre- dominating Zulu section of the company were on their feet, cheering and whooping and stamping, waving assegais which, fortu- nately, were present only in their imagina- 'Of course, I wouldn't be telling you all this if you were really here.' tion. The scene told one what one needed to know about the character of Zulu poli- tics.
My feeling is not that Buthelezi is 'better' than Mandela, but that Mandela will do more harm because he is the repository and begetter of more illusions. He will win, and then spend the autumn of his years receiv- ing awards and honorary degrees and the Freedom of the Cities of Stockholm and Havana and Ottawa while the freedom of the cities of the Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban becomes daily less real. The irony of the drama will be that the last and greatest triumph of multiracial liberalism will lead to the creation of a warrior state in Natal and a white republic somewhere to the north which disinters the doctrines of Dr Verwoerd.
It may not happen. One of the many things for which South Africa is remarkable is a goodwill which persists despite all the bloodshed, a determination to succeed against the odds which is born of the improbability of its history. But the chances are that it will happen and so people ought to be saying so, so that they can work out better how to avoid it.
Whenever I go to southern Africa, I have the (for me) unusual experience of thinking that each point of view I hear is right. 'Of course you're right, Ian Smith,' I thought when I met him last month. 'Of course Rhodesia was the creation of the white man and Zimbabwe lives off and fritters his inheritance.' Of course, you're right,' I thought as I listened to liberal whites who explained how Smith's intransigence had plunged Rhodesia into isolation and stag- nation. 'Of course, you're right,' I thought when I heard leading blacks explain how they had been kept down and held back in the native land they felt ready to lead. Southern Africa is tragic in the sense that the destinies of its inhabitants are noble and yet fated to conflict. This is most painfully true in South Africa, scene of the first important revolt against colonialism on the continent, of the only serious, large- scale attempt that white men made to settle in the continent, of the development, through Gandhi, of Indian nationalism, and, through Rhodes, of British imperial-
ism. It is the best of places and the worst of places in Africa. The latest turn of the tragedy is that the great thing that has to be done — the enfranchisement of the blacks — is likely to occasion the most misery yet.
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