GOODBYE TO SOUTH AFRICA

Stephen Robinson on the growing conviction among English-speaking white South Africans that the country is no longer worth living in

Cape Town GOOD news for the South African gov- ernment was undoubtedly hard to come by in 1985, but two events in the last week of December at least suggested that the National Party had no monopoly of wick- edness. The bomb blast which killed six whites in a shopping centre near Durban two days before Christmas, followed almost immediately by yet another out- break of tribal faction fighting in Natal, were timely propaganda windfalls. National Party politicians cannot be matched for their performance after a civilian bomb attack. Louis le Grange, the redoubtable minister of law and order, shrugs off the effects of his apparently inoperable cancer of the prostate gland and rushes to the scene of the outrage to promise the capture of the villains. Doesn't it make you puke, he tells the cameras of the state broadcasting corporation, that Western governments allow these mon- sters to maintain offices in their capital cities?

Where previously P. W. Botha was looking increasingly flat-footed, as the world and his wife flocked to meet the ANC leadership in Lusaka, and the local press screamed for genuine negotiation, the nationalists now seemed right after all: hands up, please, all those of you who were in favour of talking to the ANC. The newspapers realised which way the wind was blowing, and hurriedly pasted up outraged front-page editorials denouncing the merchants of terror; the cuddly, grand- fatherly figure of Oliver Tambo, who spoke to South Africa with such eloquence and moderation through the pages of the Cape Times newspaper only a few weeks before, was transformed into public enemy number one.

Similarly, the brutal outburst of tribal fighting in Natal, which so disquiets and confounds liberal whites here, came as a godsend to a government whose raison d'être is the 'perennial ethnicity' of the African soul. The South African Broad- casting Corporation's man on the spot will surely be rewarded in heaven for stepping nimbly over the 63 Pondo and Zulu corpses to find a chieftain who understood the real issue. 'Make no mistake,' he said darkly, `it's unemployment that causes this, and I just hope that those people who agitate for disinvestment understand the consequ- ences of their actions.'

The Durban bomb blast will inevitably have profound consequences on the notor- iously fickle attitudes of the English- speaking white South Africans, especially if it heralds the beginning of the long- expected tactical shift to soft targets. But the recent landmine attacks in the North- ern Transvaal along the shores of the Limpopo will worry the government much more. Already the beginnings of what one white Zimbabwean lady recently described to me as a classic Rhodesia situation are in evidence. The guerrillas are using land- mines to create no-go areas along the border, allowing infiltration from the north. Farmers in the region have been allotted heavily armed soldiers to guard their properties, and use two-way radios to maintain contact with the Defence Force. Plans have been drawn up to bus the children to school.

While bombs in supermarkets unite, landmines in the border regions can divide, especially if the victims are the families of backwoods Afrikaans farmers who might just start voting for the far-right parties which advocate all-out war against neigh- bours harbouring terrorists. At the funeral of one of the young victims the bereaved father warned the ANC not to wake the tiger in the Afrikaner soul, but those words `Would you mind saying "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" sir? must have reverberated around the Union

buildings in Pretoria too.

But where does all this leave the rest of the white population, or at least those who still remain in the country? The Depart- ment of Home Affairs insists that the mass chicken run has been greatly exaggerated by the foreign and local press — but the most successful Christmas present I gave this year was a slim volume entitled Leav- ing South Africa. The book offers the twitchy South African all the information he could possibly want about residence requirements for a host of Western coun- tries, and assesses his chances of gaining acceptance in each of them. The lady in the shop told me I was lucky to secure my three copies as she had been forced to re-order several times.

Poring over the family tree in search of a long-lost Irish relative has become a national pastime. The newspapers are full of advertisements placed by Australian, American and British companies anxious to pick up talent on the cheap. The advertisements often conclude with a pointed 'We will be travelling to South Africa to interview applicants at the end of the month.' Most worrying for the govern- ment, though, is that those who are leaving are highly qualified and difficult to replace — doctors, accountants, engineers, com- puter programmers. The vast majority are under 35, and many have young children. It is believed that a million white South Africans, almost all of them English- speaking, can lay a tenuous claim to a foreign passport, and a recent national opinion poll revealed that nearly 20 per cent of English-speaking whites had plans to leave the country over the next five years. Since the Sharpeville and Soweto migrations, South Africans who retain claims to foreign residence have scrupu- lously ensured that their documentation is in order.

The motive for leaving varies. Hundreds of young men are fleeing to avoid compul- sory national service, an issue which has become all the more fraught since national servicemen have been deployed in the black townships. A friend of mine, who spent the last six months in and out of the townships investigating reports of brutality by the security forces, will be compelled to return this month on the back of an army Casspir. Quite apart from his own unease about the justness of what he has to do, he knows that if he ever returns to the townships as a reporter he will be a prime target for the 'necklace' treatment whereby a petrol-filled tyre is lowered over the victim's head.

But in most cases the reason for emigrat- ing is purely financial. With inflation nudg- ing 20 per cent, taxation forever rising, and a severely collapsed currency, South Africa is simply no longer the white man's land of milk and honey. As the recession has deepened, more and more middle and senior managers have been made redun- dant. Nor can the government take com- fort that it is merely off-loading a few bolshie lefties. There is currently a fashion- able bravado within left-wing (as opposed to 'liberal') circles about staying on to see Uhuru, and a corresponding contempt for those who are throwing in the towel now the good times have passed. The label `liberal' has in fact become a swearword in South Africa, and the best way to start a fight at a chic Cape Town cassoulet party is to accuse a fellow guest of 'liberalism'. The adjective, in its old complimentary sense, has been replaced by 'progressive', 'radic- al', or even 'thinking'. The progressive or thinking white South African sees current events not as the beginning of the end, but the beginning of the beginning.

Confusion within the South African broad Left is nowhere more in evidence than in the dismal state of the newspaper industry. During the Soweto uprising of 1976, so veteran journalists say, a reporter from the English-language press could bound into black townships with impunity. If the going got tough he needed only to produce his press card and shout 'I'm not Afrikaans' to be assured of safe passage. Nowadays, to be associated with certain newspapers is dangerous in itself.

A combination of economic recession, expansion of television and appalling man- agement has effectively emasculated the once justly admired South African press. The newspapers themselves are produced with the state of the art technology that Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell dream about — colour editorial and adver- tising put together on fully computerised typesetting systems. Indeed management has been quick to realise how few journal- ists are actually needed once all the tech- nology is installed, and have off-loaded 200 of them this year alone.

Three major English-language papers have shut down this year, including the flagship Rand Daily Mail. Ownership of the English press is split between two companies, the Argus Group and South African Associated Newspapers (SAAN), both of which are controlled by the Anglo- American Corporation. As if this own- ership were not concentrated enough, the Argus group is now effectively taking over the whole field as SAAN is in dire financial straits. Journalists' salaries are appalling, and as the talk is of further rationalisation or closures, many have taken the hint and left the profession or the country. Journal- ists have become South Africa's fastest- growing export industry, and morale among those who remain is rock-bottom.

But apart from such financial problems many newspapers have lost their editorial direction. In the old days it was simple they opposed old-style apartheid vigorous- ly and were wedded to the traditional English South African liberal opposition. But during the referendum campaign many of the papers ignored the advice of the Progressive Federal Party and — following the line of Anglo-American and much of big business — urged their readers to vote yes. The result was Mr Botha's new, racially structured, tricameral parliament, the very institution which three years later is viewed by much of the press as the root cause of the current chaos.

The newspaper management and most senior editorial staff believe in cautious step-by-step reform, while many of the junior journalists openly and actively sup- port the United Democratic Front. This has led to continuous friction within news- rooms as reporters battle to get their stories about police action past the com- pany men in charge of editorial policy. Virtually the entire political staff of Natal's biggest selling daily resigned recently be- cause their coverage of the launch of Cosatu, the new trade union umbrella front, was spiked and replaced with a venomous attack by Chief Buthelezi on the communist nature of the organisation.

This confusion is reflected in the whole spectrum of English-speaking South Afri- can life. The businessmen who backed the government when it changed its hardbitten image and became reformist are the ones now travelling up to Lusaka for talks with the African National Congress. The past 12 months have shown there is nothing like a spoonful of sanctions and a currency col- lapse to spur businessmen into entering the political arena. Only a year ago it would have been unthinkable for business leaders to talk openly to the ANC. Captains of industry who call for the total abolition of `I'm sick of hearing Vivaldi's Four Seasons!' apartheid and immediate negotiations with the ANC don't even make the front page these days.

But herein there lies a ticklish confusion. It is one thing to say apartheid must go everyone says so these days — but quite another to suggest one man one vote. I often try, without success, to pin down old-style liberals and zealously reformist businessmen about what they mean by reform and negotiation.

`So you want group areas, influx control, the Population Registration Act to go, do you?'

`Yes, absolutely, sooner the better.' `But what about the vote — that's what it's all about, isn't it?'

`Ah, let's just take it easy here.'

Despite repeated demands that the gov- ernment should negotiate, dismantle this law and that restriction, the franchise issue remains the great political unthinkable, not only to diehard Afrikaners, but to a very broad band of white opinion.

For several weeks now government sources have been studiously leaking the contents of the speech President Botha will deliver to American bankers and Western governments when he opens parliament at the end of the month. This time around, we are told, he will not waggle his finger as he did at the National Party Congress in Durban in August, but will announce more `far-reaching reforms'. After the last fias- co, when local newspapers took foreign minister Pik Botha's word that the new dawn was breaking, the press remains highly sceptical.

Smart money is on an announcement that influx control will be revamped, that abolition of the pass system is imminent and that there will be a reworking of the Group Areas Act. But most people agree that whatever he says will not go far enough to stop the violence. A government which is incapable of preventing its own security police from buffing Winnie Mande- la's grandchild over the head in the full glare of foreign television cameras is not fancied to produce the goods on weighty constitutional matters.

Most whites, and an overwhelming majority of Afrikaners, supported the gov- ernment when it declared the State of Emergency. Since then, with over 500 deaths since July, it is now belatedly dawning on them how serious the violence has become. The death rate has increased, and shows no indication of falling. In Cape Town this year most blacks, and many whites, observed a 'black Christmas' by exchanging only token presents and cutting back on the wining and dining. At subdued end-of-year parties the toast was to a peaceful, not a happy, New Year. Con- versation centred on the gloomy outlook for 1986, and how many friends would be celebrating the arrival of 1987 in distant climes. As one party guest said to me on New Year's Eve — she had recently triumphantly rediscovered her Irish ances- try — the difference between an emigrant and a refugee is only a matter of timing.