ANOTHER VOICE
Time for Bophuthatswana to join the Commonwealth
AUBERON WAU GH
The great American thinker, Bruce Springsteen, has given it as his opinion that it is in reality still part of South Africa; as such it should be shunned and vilified even though, if it is indeed part of South Africa, it is a part where the oppressive laws of apartheid do not apply, where everyone has an equal vote, where the races live together in harmony and comparative prosperity, which passes and administers its own laws, raises its own taxes and is entirely governed by blacks, with a sprink- ling of whites here and there.
However, the rest of the world has decided to follow Bruce Springsteen's lead. Not a single country has been prepared to recognise the new Republic of Bophuthats- wana. Bruce's former guitarist, Little Steve, has even composed a song which sums up the views of the Springsteen school:
Bophuthatswana is far away, But we know it's in South Africa no matter what they say.
Even so, I thought it extraordinarily civil of the President, His Excellency Kgosi Lucas etc, to receive me in private audi- ence on the morning after my arrival. Although I had accepted the offer of a trip on a whim some weeks before, and had spent 13 hours in an aeroplane to get there, I was by no means sure where I was or what I was doing.
The Kgosi kindly put me in the picture. Bophuthatswana (with the exception of a curious enclave of Batswana people many hundreds of miles to the south, in the Orange Free State) was formerly the southern half of Bechuanaland, now Bots- wana. In the parcelling out of land which preceded and followed the Boer War, it was taken away from Bechuanaland, de- spite passionate protests, and pushed into South Africa, where it remained when northern Bechuanaland was given inde- pendence by Britain in 1966. When South Africa allowed its Batswana people to set up their own independent state in 1977, Botswana was among the first to refuse to recognise its existence. When I asked the President why it was that his brothers to the north should behave so scurvily, he said he supposed the reason was twofold: that with fewer than a million inhabitants Botswana felt threatened by a much larger and richer African country to the south; and that since recognition as an indepen- dent African state would involve receiving aid, Botswana did not want to share whatever was going.
A more respectable reason for refusing to recognise the country's claims to nation- hood might lie with the 1.4 million or so de jure citizens who live and work in the Republic of South Africa. Because they have a vote in their distant homelands, the South Africans feel justified in not giving them a vote in the Republic of South Africa, thereby helping to bolster the racist regime. Anyone wishing not to recognise Bophuthatswana has a perfect excuse, in any case, by pointing to its curious com- position, of seven enclaves surrounded by open borders with South Africa, its only effective border being with Botswana.
But this second objection is surely spe- cious. There is no reason why a country should not be separated by much greater distances than these — as East and West Pakistan used to be — if that is what its citizens want; open borders are an excel- lent and progressive idea if they can be made to work — it is only the old Adam in us, and in our political leaders, which prevents their introduction to the EEC. The answer to the first point is surely that the Nationalist government in Pretoria would feel justified in denying Batswana people — and any other blacks — the vote in any case. Nobody else is in the least bit impressed by the arguments about blacks being able to vote in their own homelands.
The real question is whether or not these self-governing black homelands are a good thing in themselves. I cannot speak for other ones — Transkei and Kwa Zulu because I have not visited them and hear that they are pretty grim: poor, over- populated and with no prospect of self- sufficiency. But Bophuthatswana is quite rich, producing a third of the world's platinum, with a flourishing tourist indus- try in Sun City and self-sufficient in food, at any rate until the great drought set in three years ago. What it has achieved is to set up a non-racial state, run by blacks to their own and everyone else's satisfaction, with a hardworking and highly motivated workforce. Above all, it is an object lesson for Boer visitors that the black and white races can live, work and play harmo- niously together. Real opposition, it seems to me, is based on the attitude that because the South African regime is evil anything that comes out of South Africa must be evil — whether tinned oranges, footballers, or independent black homelands. Is this, perhaps, a little babyish? In order to show our abhorrence of apartheid we persecute its victims. By a similar sort of osmosis, we are happy to be told that Sun City is a sort of Las Vegas, part gambling, part brothel, where the Boers creep in for the purpose of getting their legs over a black bit.
I was quite keen to investigate this claim, and must duly record that it is not even a half-truth but a total lie. Although I have no doubt that with a little effort and more time something might have been achieved among the English dancing girls, waitresses and croupiers, I am convinced that there is no organised prostitution in the place. The fact of gambling and two topless shows are enough to excite the South Africans. One of these shows struck me as quite brilliant, and I was really proud of the English dancing girls, whose precision and drill were better than anything to be seen in Havana, let alone England. The truth is that Sun City is a luxurious and very well run modern holiday resort — also extremely cheap since the Rand has fallen from 50p to 26p. By comparison, Black- pool is a sink of iniquity. The President, an Angophile who comes to watch Wimbledon every year, is on record as describing his strange scattered country as the illegitimate child of West- minister. 'But in Africa, we do not spurn our illegitimate children,' he says sadly. If the Commonwealth really believed in the multi-racial ideals it espouses, it would invite Bophuthatswana to join — both as a slap in the face to the racist regime in Pretoria, which is excluded, and as a beacon of hope that something construc- tive might emerge from that beautiful but hideously tormented corner of the world. The alternative — of a destitute country taken over by a minority within a minority of frenzied, Marxist Zulus, given up to civil war, starvation and mass murder — is not particularly enticing.
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