A party pulled two ways

Geoffrey Wheatcroft Johannesburg Never say never and never say dull. These are the first maxims to be inculcated at the obscure schools of journalism where many of us will no doubt spend our declining years. In London, Labour-watchers are still saying that Mr Benn cannot defeat Mr Healey in the autumn. These are the same commentators who said that the Labour leadership would never lose its critical votes at Blackpool and Wembley: it can't happen. In the same way, commentators here have long said that Afrikaner unity — the essential political fact of South Africa for a generation — would never crack.

This prognostication was compounded in the coverage of last week's general election by a tendency to call the election boring which, apart from anything else, is no way to engage the reader's attention. If you had only covered the ill-attended meetings of the ruling National Party, you might indeed have supposed that that was what the election was, dirty but dull. Those poor attendances were in fact a portent. In the event, the election was anything but dull. It may yet prove to be the most interesting and important since the Nats came to power in 1948.

Those 33 years have been a strange historical episode. The NP became — still is — much more than a political party. It is the public expression of Afrikanerdom, one of several expressions of the nasie, the nation. A whole people had taken its revenge, revenge for defeat in the Boer War and for the way in which the English subsequently ran the country. Those unhealed wounds still cause pain. On Monday night the Afrikaans television showed a moving documentary play about the life and death of Jopie Fourie. He was a former Boer commander, commissioned in the South African Army after Union, who took part in the Rebellion caper of 1914. (The rebels did not want South Africa to enter the Great War on the allied side. The immediate cause of their revolt was the order to invade Germany South West Africa, or Namibia. Maybe the rebels were right: it is proving an awkward conquest to be rid of.) In his condemned cell Fourie was seen talking of Dr Jameson, who was captured and condemned after his Raid but reprieved by Kruger, served a few months in an English prison and was later knighted. Before going to face the firing squad with a patriotic song on his lips, Fourie bitterly compared his fate with Jameson's, as well he might. Like so many things in South African history, Fourie's execution is a living memory.

Intelligent critics of the Boer War had foreseen this ultimate revenge. Olive Schreiner told British soldiers: 'there are no laurels for you here', and added that 'the hour of external success may be the hour of irrevocable failure', which was as it proved.

Although the blacks have been the most obvious victims of the system which the Nats have run since 1948, and although it would be absurd to claim that the Afrikaners are not racialist, racialism has in a sense not been the main driving force behind nationalism: that force was the pursuit of power. Once the NP — the Afrikaner nation — had gained power, the supreme aim was to retain it at all costs. Many of the deeds of nationalism can be seen in this light. In the 1950s the Cape Coloureds were ruthlessly disenfranchised, not so much, or not only, because of their colour, but because they were an identifiable block who voted solidly against the NP. One suspects that the Nats would have disenfranchised English-speaking whites if they had thought that they could get away with it.

The tenure of power meant that a high premium was placed on loyalty and unity — loyalty to the nasie in all its expressions, church, schools and universities, the bureaucracy as it. was rapidly Afrikanerised, tfie Broederbond, the party.Politically. it meant that once the whole Afrikaner yolk had been gathered within the NP fold they must stay there. This they did, with the occasional spasm of protest voting at the 1970 election. Since the Nats attracted also a sizeable part of the English-speaking vote, their position as a permanent ruling party seemed guaranteed. Until now. What has happened is more than a protest vote.

As against the Nationalist tradition of loyalty and unity, there has been for more than 6 decade an increasing strain on the party as it pulled two ways at once. Pressures within and without the country tell Mr P. W. Botha, as they told his predecessor Mr Vorster, that the Verwoerdian dream of separate development and untrammelled white supremacy cannot work in its own terms and that a large adaptation must be made. Mr Botha has been hesitantly feeling his way towards change.

This, however, is what many white working-class voters cannot swallow. They cannot accept that there must be some dilution of their privileges, nor that the pure tradition of apartheid — other than which no one under middle age has ever known — must be abandoned. Hence the advance at the election of the Herstigte Nasionale Party, The HNP's policies are simple: 'Sweeping the terrorists from Southern Africa' if neighbouring states will not control them; 'a real fatherland for the whites'; a South Africa in which the whites' amenities 'will be given back and in which the labour market of the whites will be taken back by the whites': a South Africa which will be 'a beacon of light and faith for the white Christian civilisation'.

The HNP did not win any parliamentary seats but it received 13.1 per cent of the vote. Together the far right took 15 per cent. This means that a third of Afrikaner voters have defected right-wards. Some ingenious Nationalist journalists argue that this is a transient phenomenon and that Nat unity is really unimpaired. It is surely more accurate to follow the conclusion of the Afrikaans Sunday paper Rapport that Afrikaner unity 'in the political sense of the word' no longer exists; or simply to heed the wise words of Bishop Butler: 'Things and actors are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?'

It was a successful election for the Progressive Federal Party which won 18.2 per cent of the vote, picked up several seats and remains the official opposition. But it is what happened on the right of nationalism that matters. The NP is experiencing a major adjustment, and even if there is no split, as has been widely prophesied, the party can hardly be the same again. The tension within the NP produces odd results. The .party is now more fractious and querulous than ever. In any case, whatever the NP has managed to impose for so long, calm and unity are by no means outstanding Afrikaner characteristics, as a cursory study of South African history shows.

The campaign turned into a comedy of errors, with Mr Botha repeatedly losing his temper (he now accuses the police in his own constituency of working for the HNP), with the Minister of Agriculture, Mr du Plessis, attacking the HNP for 'promoting Communistic aims', with one member of the Cabinet saying that 'we must sell to the black man what we can and take from him what we need' and another that 'the white man has paid astonishingly little for the black man's development' — they could both have expressed themselves more felicitously — and, best of all, the Minister of Health, Mr Munnik, claiming that a pensioner (he meant a white pensioner) could eat on 20 rands (£11.70) a month. The Nat could take a charm course from the Tribune Group and lessons in PR from Mrs Thatcher's Government.

The pressure acting on the government, mentioned earlier, is not far to seek. Although no black man casts a vote in South Africa, the blacks are not insignificant onlookers. When the Nats came to power, they tried not only to reverse 6 current sweeping through the outside world but also another deep secular current within the country. The history of South Africa, of relations between the races, from even before the mining and industrial revolutions, has been in large part the story of white men inducing black men to work for them. This means that there was always a fundamental flaw in the grand scheme of apartheid.

As Verwoerd saw it, the blacks were to have their own homelands or Bantustans. When they left them it would be as temporary sojourners — the European phrase `guest-worker' would have been a tactful name — with no rights of residence or citizenship. This still operates for migrant black workers in the mines. They come from their villages, live in compounds and return home with their cash wages.

It was a scheme which never bore much relation to the reality of urban blacks. They now number some seven million, and will probably be 25 million by the end of the century. And although the government can deny them political rights, it is now impossible td deny them at least some industrial rights. Not long ago black trade unions were forbidden and black strikes were in theory impossible. Now that blacks are ever more unionised, this tendency is not universally welcomed. We read that in London, England, the Rowntree Social Service Trust has donated £70,000 to the Social Democrats. In East London, Cape Province, a subsidiary of Rowntree is among the companies which have refused recognition to black unions. Well, the SDP's money has to come from somewhere. At the same time, one of the railway unions has agreed to admit black members, albeit on limited terms. And in recognition of these developments, a new bill to 'normalise' industrial relations is being brought forward by the Manpower Minister.

More important than unionisation is plain black advance. The mine workers are fighting what they must know is a losing battle to keep blacks out of skilled jobs, but elsewhere the number of skilled black workers is increasing rapidly. By the end of this decade a majority of artisans will be black. It is not an exaggeration to call this the most important change in South Africa for decades.

Thankfully, not all talk is of politics and industry. The royal wedding has caused enormous interest and comment in the press. An Indian gentleman writes from Natal: 'I think Lady Diana Spencer is beyond all reproach. Talking of experience, other than sexual, I would consider her fairly experienced. She drives a car, runs a flat and belongs to the aristocracy.' Talking of experience, the Afrikaners are more than fairly experienced at running the country and, when necessary, of making pragmatic change. They will need to be.