A lynching mood

Richard West

Johannesburg On hearing that the United Nations had put an arms embargo on South Africa, I could not help wishing that somebody could impose an arms embargo on Northern Johannesburg which seems to get more gun-crazy every month. A few hours after looking into my usual hotel, a man in the street outside was shot in the buttock, apparently by a stray bullet, and even the news of the UN embargo took second place in the Rand Daily Mail to the tale of a twogun killer who shot dead a Johannesburg businessman and seriously wounded two men in the plush northern suburbs.

The UN embargo is only the latest and not the most serious move in what white South Africans see as a plan by the rest of the world to wipe out their nation. This threat is the main, indeed almost exclusive, theme of the campaign leading up to the general election on 30 November. Although the outcome is likely to be a runaway victory for the National Party, this campaign is far from apethetic, and star speakers get audiences of hundreds, even thousands. The Afrikaners have always, in time of danger, insisted on public debate about their destiny. The Voortrekkers did so, seated among the ox-wagons, and often if they could not agree which trail to follow or how to repel the Zulus, would split up and head in different directions. Debate raged, too, in the tiny parliaments of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, before the Boers decided to fight the British Empire in 1899.

The current best-seller in Johannesburg is R. W. Johnson's How Long will South Africa Survive? which is what one might call a good question. This excellent book has had an unfortunate history. In England, Where it was meant to be published in June, the publishers tried so hard to keep it up to date that review copies were sent out almost on publication day, as a result of which it got only a very few notices, including one by Bill Deedes in the Spectator. This was sad, because Johnson's book is not only a masterpiece of political analysis but utterly free of the sanctimonious humbug that clogs most writing on Southern Africa. This now seems to have dawned on South Africa's censors who have at last let through the book in spite of its frightening title, and in Spite of the rude things Johnson has to say of certain South African politicians and one Policeman.

For although he does not moralise, Johnson does explain that South Africa's survival depends to a great extent on the support or at least the docility of the nonwhite population, which will disappear if white politicians force the teaching of Afrikaans in Soweto schools, and if white policemen torture and even murder polit ical detainees. These parts of Johnson's book support the argument of the white lib erals here, as expressed in the Progressive Reform Party, the main, if feeble challenger to the government in the general election.

The recent death in detention of Steve Biko, followed by the suppression of the principal black newspaper, only confirm in liberal minds the awful warnings contained in the Johnson book.

Other parts of the book will delight the ruling National Party, for Johnson has shown with a wealth of detail the hideous calamity brought on this part of the world by meddling foreign powers and in particular the United States. The villain of Johnson's book is Dr Kissinger, who is accused of egging South Africa to attack Angola, later letting her down, and of fixing a bogus settlement in Rhodesia (as he had done in Vietnam) in order to swing a US election.

The Carter government, which has compounded ignorance of South Africa with pious rhetoric, is still-less loved here. Even white liberals feel there is something absurd in the condemnation of South Africa by countries that practise mass murder of racial and political opponents, and have never had a free press to stifle. The National Party politicians have worked themselves into a very enjoyable frenzy of righteous wrath against the United States, the loudest of all being Foreign Minister Pik Botha who, only a few months ago, was portrayed as a liberal. Even the old CIA has reappeared as a bogeyman. The progovernment Citizen has accused it of financing black subversives, while an extreme National politiciarf, recalling Kennedy's death, has now blamed the CIA for the murder of Dr Verwoerd, South Africa's previous prime minister.

More liberal South Africans fear that denunciations from UN and foreign governments can only whip up election support for the National Party. Indeed current polls suggest that in Johannesburg, once the citadel of liberal, English feeling, the National Party may command almost half the votes, while 30 per cent even of English-speakers will vote for them. Even in those plush northern suburbs, so recently terrorised by a two-gun killer, the PFP will have to fight hard to maintain the support of the well-to-do Anglo-Jewish community.

A few middle-class Afrikaners vote for the PFP and even stand as candidates but they do not feel much at home there, and when I went to a PFP fete 1 noticed that none of the second hand books for sale was in Afrikaans, although dozens were in French or German. At the other end of the social scale, the National Party now hopes to get the support of the English-speaking working class, whose fathers and grandfathers used to vote for the Labour Party. This change from Labour to the Apartheid Party has an inherent logic for it was English trade unionists who went on strike for and obtained the system of job reservation which, crudely expressed, means keeping the blacks out of the money. Readers will note that the Modern English trade unions have introduced the apartheid system so that, unofficially, blacks and Asians are kept out of the well-paying jobs in the mines, the docks and British Leyland.

In spite of job reservation, the mass of the white working-class are low paid, live in tiny bungalows and probably do not own a car. The white Afrikaners and English in turn feel threatened by even poorer white immigrant groups. In districts like Brixton you see signs scrawled on the walls saying 'No trading licences to non-Afrikaans speakers' — meaning Portuguese immigrants.

Poor white Johannesburg, like the neighbouring black town of Soweto, is ter rorised by violence and what might be called tribal war. A Roman Catholic priest, Father Clayton Jackson, used to run a Saturday night dance in his parish hall in Turfontein but, he told me: 'We had to stop them after the third shooting. Oh yes, lots of the young men brought in guns. It wasn't just the shooting but the fights. A chap takes a beer bottle and breaks it on the jamb of the door, and then uses it as a dagger to gouge another chap's face. We've had 200 people in here fighting in this quite small room, and the police wouldn't come. If they did arrive, they'd wait outside until they got reinforcements. We very often got conflicts between the Lebanese and the Portuguese. The teenagers of those groups don't seem to get on very well'.

From the time of the Gold Rush, the Afrikaners hated Johannesburg whose wealth attracted hundreds of thousands of alien English, Jews and Blacks. The federal capital of Pretoria has always considered its larger neighbour suspiciously liberal which was why the administration of Soweto was taken out of the hands of Johannesburg and put into those of the West Rand Bantu Administration Board — with the disastrous results that began last June. Even in details of town planning, the province government frequently overrules Johannesburg in order to put up such garish nonsenses as the Post Office Tower, which Johannesburg Fire Brigade has condemned as a fire trap.

If the National Party wins even Johannesburg in the coming election, things will look bad for liberal South Africa. 'They want to use the election result as an excuse to crush the opposition and what remains of the free press', said a gloomy friend. Cer tainly the British trade unionists, who introduced the job reservation, hated the liberal Johannesburg newspapers, as they showed by burning down the premises of the Star. The Afrikaners, the mainspring of the National Party, have in the past been tolerant of their white opponents, but now they are in ugly mood, almost a lynching mood.

That last phrase was not lightly chosen. At an election meeting last week in Pretoria, a senior National Party MP, Frikkie Le Roux, stated: 'I would have killed Steve Biko' and later explained to a reporter: 'In South Africa, when a man disturbs law and order the way Steve Biko did, he should be killed — as far as I am concerned anyway. . .

I have no regrets that Biko is dead . I would have killed him. That's what I told the meeting'. The policemen who did actually kill Biko and are not to be charged with his death, will no doubt welcome this encouragement from the party to kill anyone else who in their opinion, but not that of a court, disturbs law and order.