SOUTH AFRICA
White hopes
ANTHONY DELIUS
The South African elections gave the Prime Minister, Mr Vorster, rather more than he wanted, and surplus is often more difficult to handle than shortage. What essentially he, and those around him, asked of the country's two million white voters was greater freedom to interpret the policy of race separation or apartheid, and more room to manoeuvre round the bitter race and sectional prejudices on which it was based. The electorate replied by annihilating the only group dedicated to holding him back, and slightly increasing the representation of those who most want South Africa to edge a bit further into the twentieth century.
Probably the great mass of voters wanted South Africa to stay the way it is, dominated by the three-and-a-half million whites, segregated, and prosperous. The United party, supported by the bulk of the English- speaking minority, wants this. Its increase in seats from thirty-nine to forty-eight—for the first time since 1948 it has not actually lost seats to the ruling Nationalists—is hardly likely to turn its cautious and battle-weary leader, Sir de Villiers Graaff, into an outspoken liberal. He is more likely to grow slightly more vague in policy, now that he believes he is getting the formula right for stopping the hitherto steady growth in Nationalist power.
But the fact is that both Mr Vorster and Sir de Villiers Graaff know that South Africa has to change. The problem is to make that change as imperceptible as possible to the whites, and yet offer to the critical outside world some indication that change is taking place. The Nationalists think this can be done by pushing on with apartheid, and yet getting a number of African states to accept that this policy is in the best interests of the Africans in South Africa. The United party thinks the best way is to reduce the ideological excesses of apartheid and to restore African representation, at first by whites, in parliament.
But underlying these surface manoeuvres the need to change is becoming more and more inescapable. Economically the South African whites are stretched to their numerical limit. Immigration cannot be . massive enough to alter this situation much, and might worsen it. The central economy, that of the so-called 'white areas', depends on about one and a half million white workers and four and a half million black ones. The industrial colour bar, or `job reservation', seeks to keep all the better-paid and more skilled jobs in the hands of the whites. But there just aren't enough whites to go round any longer, and already many third-rate whites are doing jobs that can be better done by more capable blacks. Throughout the country the job reservation rules are being broken, bent or simply set aside with government connivance.
If South Africa is going to maintain her prosperity, she has to make more efficient use of her non-white labour. She is now among the first fifteen trading nations of the world, a fact which not only makes her somewhat more sensitive to international relations, but also more concerned about the competitiveness of her goods abroad. This requires a more rational labour system. And, in any case, if the internal market of South Africa is to be increased, the only real way of doing this is to increase the wages and consumer demand of the bulk of the popula- tion, which is African. For the whites this growth of African prosperity can be made more palatable, even attractive, by the slogan, 'the richer they grow, the better we do.'
The Nationalists are aware both of the domestic political uses of African prosperity (If they don't eat, we daren't sleep'), and of its international advantages (Nowhere else in the rest of Africa do black workers earn anywhere near as much'). They plan to• develop a whole 'co-prosperity sphere' from the Congo to the Cape, in which the ad- vantages of economic cooperation with South Africa are shown. And they believe they will achieve this against a background of the rest of Africa in increasing chaos.
The full pressure for African political and social rights both from Africans in the coun- try and in the independent states can, the Nationalists believe, be blunted by Ban- tustans—that is the policy of turning the old tribal reserves into self-governing 'homelands'. The government even hopes that the increasing drift of Africans into the 'white areas' can be reduced by decen- tralising industry, setting up factories on the borders of the Bantustans. But during the next five years the government is going to find itself facing a growing demand for 'independence' from the Bantustans. Mr Vorster was served notice of this during the elections by the chief minister of the only Bantustan so far in operation, Chief Kaiser Matanzima of the Transkei. And Mr Vorster accepts that independence is, at least, a possibility.
To the United party this means of escap- ing or evading the African demand for a greater share in the political processes is dangerously eccentric. They believe that this will mean breaking South frica up, and making the white areas dependent on labour from independent Bantustans which might come increasingly under leftist or communist influences. The up alternative is to create a growing African middle class in the central
areas whose interest in maintaining the country's prosperity will be identical with that of the whites. The Nationalists' reply would lead to a mounting African demand for majority representation in the central parliament, and then ultimately to African rule.
Perhaps the clearest indication given by the elections is that the main group of whites, the Afrikaners, are adjusting to being an urban rather than a rural population. They have an increasing share in the pro- sperity of the thriving cities, and their in- terest is more in economic well-being than political gain. The mystique of preserving the Afrikaner identity and the whiteness of their skins is still important to Africarfers, but it is no longer as overwhelming as it was. Nor is the threat of the English section seen to be anything like it once seemed to be. Of course, if South Africa should have an economic setback, and there were a scramble for jobs and business, the call to close the Afrikaner ranks against English and African competition could become meaningful again. But for the moment the prospect for economic progress looks even better for the Afrikaners than it does for other sectors of the population. That is why the right-wing rebels under Dr Hertzog seemed to be merely beating the air and could only scrape together the pitiful total of 50,000 votes, seventy-three lost deposits, and no seats.
Finally it must be said that this was the first South African election in half a century in which there was a drift from the right rather than towards it. The increase of votes for the liberal Progressives provides yet another indicator of a general shift towards moderation. It is also a warning to the United party that its rightward trend and low profile' tactics are making its more intelligent followers uneasy. But this will not necessarily lessen the UP'S hope that affairs may be moving to a point when South Africa may be governed by a coalition of the more 'enlightened' section of the Nationalists and themselves. The recent split in the Na- tionalist party may even have heightened this hope in the minds of the uP strategists.
Previous page
