South Africa's curse
Richard West A n evening newspaper last week carried the front page headline: 'South Africa. KR UER SAYS WE HOLD IT'. That was :!ames Kruger, the Minister of Police, speakfig of riots in African townships like Soweto, but it might have been 'Oom' Paul Kruger,
ithree Years Boer War leader who was for
constantly in the English headInes, his name generally coupled with epithets of which 'sly' and 'dour' were the !east abusive. 'Cruel in the shadow, crafty 'n the sun' (as Kipling called him), the earlier Kruger did not manage to hold the British and died in exile in Switzerland in 1904. His cause has not yet been lost, however, so that another Krugernow defends the Afrikaners against a greater danger. The present crisis in southern Africa must seen in terms of Afrikaner versus English ts well as of white versus black. We in viain tend to dislike the Afrikaners. The c'ers, seventy-five years ago, were caricatured in the right-wing press as thickIlLecked, pig-eyed, hirsute ruffians on ponyuliack who would not stand up to be shot by Majesty's troops, just as today in the set.'wirt8 press they are caricatured as hir-te• Pig-eyed and thick-necked ruffians who not stand up to be stoned in Soweto. Yet we the British, and not the Afrikaners, are largely responsible for the mess in s,°11thern Africa. When the Boers started vtheir trek in 1837 they went in search of irgin land and settled great tracts of what ss now the Transvaal and the Orange Free i,tate, where the Africans had not yet penet'Lated. Scarcely had the Boers established c"eir two farming republics when the disrcIyery of gold and diamonds brought a cush of English miners, then capitalists and anTh followers. The creepy, 8188ly megaloaniac Cecil Rhodes first seized the terri c, frY to the north, then tried to destroy the s ransvaal Republic by launching the James(3.n Raid. A few years later Rhodes and Is henchmen goaded the Boers into war. cIke James Kruger, most of the white 4'neers in Soweto are no doubt Afrikaners. out townships like Soweto—with their vertY, crime, bad housing, pass laws and tiler forms of oppression—have grown up 111°I, t at the wish of Afrikaners, but because cY serve British and other foreign capital, d, Particular the mining houses. Riots and v'llsturbances are no new thing in the Trans41a.al. In 1922 the army shelled the white col,ners, who in turn massacred their black ik,"Irades, using the slogan 'workers of the °rld unite for a white South Africa'. tr9ur own economy and all classes in ti 'tain gain enormously from the conanndued Power of capitalism in South Africa, ' from the racial system on which it is
based. A few years ago, the liberal Guardian newspaper ran worthy articles on the exploitation of black African labour by British firms, yet at the same time the Guardian pension fund switched its investment from wobbly London securities to South African mining shares. The pretend socialists of the British Labour Party back the jods and wages of British workers out of South African profits. As Anthony Crosland said, when he was President of the Board of Trade: 'South Africa is now one of our largest markets after the US. Our investment in South Africa has been estimated to be of the order of £1,000 million. Industries here are for their part rightly determined that political difference should not affect their determination to cultivate the opportunities the South African market should continue to offer.'
The 'left-wing' Mr Benn signed a contract for Britain to be supplied with uranium from the illegally held South African mine at Rossing in South-West Africa. He said by way of explanation: 'We never adopted the policy of trade embargo, as you know, and I encouraged industrial and technical links with every country I could.' Thus British workers enjoy employment and privilege at the expense of the proletariat in southern Africa.
It is instructive to note that the 'left-wing' Labour MPs who are most vociferous against the Vorster regime are also the sworn foes of Lonrho, a company active in Africa, which they denounce (in Mr Heath's phrase') as the 'unacceptable face of capitalism. In fact Lonrho is very unpopular with the South African mining houses, while its chairman, Mr 'Tiny' Rowland, is friendly with African leaders such as Kenneth Kaunda. The boardroom quarrels in Lonrho revolved on whether to trade with black African countries, as Mr Rowland wished, or with South Africa, as his opponents wished. This does not mean that Mr Rowland is a philanthropist ; but he prefers to deal with countries where blacks, if exploited at all, are exploited by fellow blacks.
Lonrho has taken on as a director Joshua Nkomo, one of the black Rhodesian leaders who, so the company hopes, will soon be in power. Another indication that white rule in Rhodesia is finished was given this week in the hostile speeches of South African ministers. In particular they are dismayed by Rhodesia's 'hot pursuit' into Mozambique, since South Africa needs to establish relations with all neighbouring black countries, however left their regimes. The South Africans are all for black neighbour states—indeed the more the better. They are giving independence to SouthWest Africa, which did not really belong to them anyway, and seem determined to subdivide its population of less than a million into still tinier tribal units. In October they intend to grant independence to the Transkei, the Bantustan or tribal trust land of the Xhosas, followed eventually by a separate Zulu state. South Africa justifies the creation of such clan states by the existence of three independent countries— Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana—that were once British protectorates.
Unfortunately for the Vorster government, this fragmentation is most unpopular with the very Africans whom it is intended to help. As far as can be ascertained (since foreign journalists are discouraged) neither the Zulus nor Xhosas believe that nominal independence can bring the ieal article. The shortage and poverty of the agricultural land would mean that the economy would continue to depend' on the emigration of workers to white-ruled South Africa.
The South African government has to face the disagreeable fact that the 'native problem' cannot be tucked away in little agrarian settlements, whether called Bantustans or independent, UN-recognised states. The economy and the future of southern Africa depend on Johannesburg and the other centres of mining and industry. The Zulu and Xhosa leaders demand a united, multi-racial South Africa. This might be possible if South Africa, like Kenya or Zambia, had only a small transient population of white people. But in South Africa there is a white population of four million, half of whom have been there since before the blacks.
What are the Boers to do? They could re-harness the ox-teams, re-outspan the wagons and start a trek in reverse from the now despoiled virgin lands of the Vaal and Orange rivers, back to the Cape from which they had fled, there to create an all-white community devoted to wine and oranges. They could, but I think that they will not. The Boers have come to depend on the mineral and industrial wealth brought originally by the ualanders, the outsiders. As Paul Kruger foresaw, the Boers have become corrupted by gold—'every ounce of which will have to be weighed against rivers of tears'. Like the Gods in Wagner's Rheingold, the Boers have to face the curse of the Ring.
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