by David Lamb
The centerpiece of apartheid is the Land Resettlement Act of 1936, which, paradoxically, was the result of international pressure on South Africa, exerted by the League of Nations in an attempt to improve the blacks’ lot. The plan called for resettling of the blacks, who comprise 67 percent of the population, into ten separate Bantustarts, or “homelands,” that represent 13.7 percent of the country’s total area—and hold almost none of its natural wealth. Only four of the homelands are composed of a single piece of land—the others are broken into two or more parts surrounded by South Africa—and most are not even identified by any sign at their borders to inform a traveler that he is leaving South Africa and allegedly entering a new country. By 1982 four homelands, each representing a particular tribe, had been declared independent states by Pretoria.* Each has a president, a parliament and some political autonomy. But their “independence” is only a sham, an event staged by Pretoria, and no government in the world other than South Africa’s extends them diplomatic recognition.
South Africa claims that the Bantustans are designed to give all peoples equal opportunities, but the obvious purpose is simply to segregate the four main racial groups—white, colored, Asian and Bantu—into separate national communities, thus maintaining the whiteness of the Afrikaners without disturbing their access to cheap labor. The scheme is like a giant United States’ school busing project in reverse. (No rural land is set aside for the coloreds and Asians; instead they are allocated residential areas in the urban centers.) The only ones who benefit are the whites.†
What apartheid does, then, is to sever the links of contact and communication that people have in a normal society. The whites meet only black garbage collectors and janitors, not their counterparts who are teachers, doctors and social workers. The blacks deal mostly with white Afrikaans-speaking policemen and civil servants. By day the black works in the shadow of the white preserve, in the clean, sparkling cities and the expansive suburbs. By night he returns to his smoky slum where, by law, he must remain until dawn. The discontent builds, and the envy and resentment take firm hold.
To be sure, there are some moderates in the white community who see what the inevitable result of apartheid has to be. But they can be found mainly among the people of English stock, who make up 40 percent of the white population. The Afrikaner remains intransigent. Contrary to what he believes, though, his intransigence is endangering the whites’ long-range interests in South Africa. It will create the very conditions that the Soviet Union can best exploit—racial unrest and political instability. It will make Communism a far more real threat to South Africa than it is to the rest of the continent. For no matter how alien the tenets of Communism may be to Africa, there comes a point, when the unhappiness of the general population runs deep enough, that the propaganda of the left sounds like a hopeful panacea.
President Jimmy Carter recognized this and put some distance between his Administration and the Pretoria government. Not so with President Ronald Reagan. He moved quickly to repair the damaged relationship, asking: “Can we abandon this country that has stood by us in every war we’ve ever fought?” It is true that South Africa did fight with the Allies in the two world wars, took part in the Berlin Airlift, participated in the postwar United Nations’ force in Korea and maintains a foreign policy that is staunchly anti-Communist. But Reagan’s statement seriously distorted the historical record.
The South Africans who twice stood by the Allies at the start of global hostilities were largely the English-speaking white minority. The Afrikaners argued against declaring war on Germany in 1914. They held demonstrations throughout South Africa to protest the United Party’s decision to enter the war, and in 1939 the Nationalist leader, J. B. M. Hertzog, defended Hitler in the South African parliament and contended that Germany had annexed Czechoslovakia in self-defense. South Africa joined the Allies only after a close parliamentary vote, 80–67.
The end of World War II saw the political emergence of the Afrikaner and the introduction of apartheid. The international community gradually cut South Africa adrift. In 1974 the United Nations revoked its General Assembly seat. In 1977 an embargo on the shipment of weapons to South Africa, which the UN had made “voluntary” fourteen years earlier, became mandatory. South African sports teams were barred from the Olympics and most international competition. South African airplanes were banned from landing at almost every airport in Africa, and South African resident diplomats were welcome nowhere on the continent except in Malawi. Telephone operators in most black-run countries won’t even connect a caller to a South African number. By 1982 South Africa had only one unquestioning friend left, Israel, another outcast of the world community. There are 120,000 Jews in South Africa, but the relationship seemed to be based more than anything on the premise that my enemy’s enemy must be my friend.
South Africa has not only survived in the face of global condemnation, it has prospered. A century ago it exported little more than some wine from Cape province. Today it mines nearly three quarters of the West’s gold, manufactures everything from refrigerators to automobiles, exports vast quantities of food, textiles and machinery, and is the tenth largest weapons producer in the world. Some of those armaments are both indigenous and innovative, notably the Ratel, a high-speed armored personnel carrier that has a range of 900 miles and is built for rugged conditions. The weapons and munitions are assembled by black laborers and are a major factor in the continuation of white rule.
Two aspects of South Africa seem abundantly clear: the country must make a dramatic change to transform itself into an integrated multiracial society; and if that change is initiated by violence, perhaps in the form of Africa’s first race war, the effects on the continent and the world would be cataclysmic. What can the United States do to effect a peaceful change? One popular line of reasoning says that the 350 U.S. companies in South Africa should close down and the United States should divest itself of all investments there and should terminate its trade with the Pretoria government, which runs in excess of $5 billion a year.
The gesture would, I believe, be futile. First, embargoes and sanctions have never been effective because, whether the culprit is Communist Cuba or capitalistic Rhodesia, someone is always willing to break them. Second, if the South African economy deteriorates and jobs are lost, the first to suffer will be the blacks, not the whites. Third, if Washington ordered U.S. companies to pull their money out of South Africa, the Pretoria government would undoubtedly freeze the funds, and another country such as France or Japan would step in to pick up the United States’ share of the trade market. Fourth, if the United States cut its commercial ties, it loses whatever leverage it has to pressure South Africa to make changes. Fifth, any action taken by the West is meaningless as long as black Africa demands that others do what it is unable or unwilling to do itself.
That leaves Washington with only one sensible policy to follow, other than the use of diplomatic pressure: make sure that American companies in South Africa provide equal pay for equal work to all races, formulate training programs to elevate blacks into positions of authority, end all segregation in their plants. The results will not topple the pillars of Afrikanerdom, but they will make them quiver, for anything that gives the South African black a fair share of wages and increased authority gives the South African white reason to worry that what he has created cannot last forever.
In the end, the apartheid that gave the Afrikaner his strength may be the very system that will destroy him. He has relentlessly denied the blacks opportunity, and now the white population is no longer large enough to supply all the skills and services an industrialized country of 28.5 milion people needs. He has built a powerful military and developed nuclear capabilities to protect this system. But the threat is at home, not abroad, so what are his choices? To rain bombs on his own country in a frenzy of self-destruction? He has enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the world while holding 85 percent of the people in a form of serfdom. The prison on Robben Isl
and is already full. What does the Afrikaner do with the young, educated, unemployed blacks who surely will not be as tolerant as their parents were?
I can think of no single event that would bring more benefit to all of Africa than the peaceful advent of an integrated multiracial society in South Africa. And indeed, by the spring of 1984, there were encouraging stirrings underway, with South Africa and Mozambique signing a nonagression pact and South Africa and Angola holding secret negotiations to find a formula for peace. If South Africa could trade freely with the rest of the continent, its political and economic influence would be gigantic. It would dominate Africa as no single country dominates Europe or South America. It could take the leadership role in the Organization of African Unity (of which it is not even a member now). Its technicians and experts could travel without restriction and help other governments develop their countries the way the Afrikaner has developed his own. They could make the ports and railroads and telephones of Africa work again. The resultant economic stimulation to the continent would be nothing short of revolutionary. The Russians would have to pack their bags and go home, for without poverty, instability and discontent they have little hope of gaining the foothold they seek in southern Africa.
And what of the comfortable life style the white man in South Africa cherishes so dearly? It probably would not change much if the transition occurred before, as Alan Paton wrote, the blacks “are turned to hating.” The Afrikaner would still control the commercial and professional world. He would still belong to the same country club (with, to be sure, a few black members). He would still live in a comfortable suburban home and have a domestic staff. He would learn, as others in Kenya and Zimbabwe already have, that there is no reason why blacks and whites cannot work together to build a nation and a continent, especially when both races are African.
On a map, Zimbabwe looks like a big rock balancing on the toe of South Africa. The illusion is a symbolic one, because in 1980 Zimbabwe began an experiment in black-white peacemaking that, in its infancy at least, showed promise of offering the South Africans an enlightened alternative to apartheid.
But comparing South Africa with Zimbabwe—formerly the outlaw state of Rhodesia—has some limitations, for the whites in the two countries are of different character. The Afrikaner tends to be humorless, stern and pious. He would not, I suspect, look mis-dressed in a Nazi storm-trooper uniform. The white Zimbabweans, on the other hand, have the earthy manner and breezy informality of Australians. They have a pioneer spirit and a colonial temperament. Laughter comes easily to them, and they rather enjoy a Saturday night “punch-up” at the local pub. They wear shorts with knee socks in the countryside, and their faces are as lined and browned as the basin of a dry riverbed. Unlike the Afrikaner, they never severed their sentimental or family ties to Europe. They had a place to go—if they wanted one—when their white homeland collapsed and, slipped across the border to Botswana one night, making his way outnumbered by blacks 28–1, they had the sense to realize that their only hope for survival lay in integration.
I first arrived in Rhodesia (as it was then called) on Pioneers Day in 1978, a national holiday that celebrated the hoisting of the Union Jack over Salisbury eighty-eight years earlier. At that time the flag was raised by 180 pioneers who had traveled in ox carts from South Africa, moving through country unknown except to a handful of traders and missionaries. Most were “British” South Africans, not “Dutch” South Africans, and they came, like frontiersmen settling the Old West, in search of land and a better life. Their trek, led by Frederick Selous and organized by Cecil Rhodes, a Briton who had made a fortune in South African gold and diamonds, was made under the auspices of the British South Africa Company.
Now the whites, including six surviving daughters of the founding pioneers, gathered in Cecil Square on that September morning in 1978. The women wore broad-brimmed hats, spring dresses and white gloves. In the parks of Salisbury there was a profusion of purple jacaranda in bloom, and the broad boulevards—designed by Rhodes to be wide enough for an eight-team ox wagon to make a U-turn—ran along rows of low white shops with overhanging steel awnings that shaded the spotlessly clean sidewalks. Whereas Johannesburg is a real city, Salisbury (now called Harare in honor of a Shona Chief) is really a large country town. It feels very British, reminding me of what York would look like if it were stuck in the middle of the Montana plains. The soft spring sun beat down on the whites in Cecil Square and on a small group of blacks, watching impassively from across the street. There was a roll of drums and a bugle call as the great-grandson of a founding pioneer raised the Union Jack—a ceremony that would be repeated in 1979 but never again. White heads bowed. The words were brave, even defiant, but everyone knew the end was near. The whites had overcome great odds and built an amazing country. Now the lessons of Africa had caught up with them, and Rhodesia, racked by a liberation war that would claim 27,000 lives between 1972 and 1979, was in the throes of transition.
“Our hearts are heavy,” said the Reverend C. W. A. Blakeley, “for there is sadness and pain and fear and war in our land, and a terrible desire for destruction has been thrust upon us. God, give us all the courage to be part of the solution to our problems and not part of the problem itself.”
Prime Minister Ian Smith—accused by the liberal whites of attempting to maintain white supremacy and by the conservatives of trying to turn Rhodesia over to “Marxist thugs”—moved among the descendants of the pioneers. “How nice to have you here, to see you looking so well,” he said, and ninety-eight-year-old Maria Mooman smiled back and patted his hand. Then Smith, a farmer-turned-politician, walked to his limousine, one hand clutching his hat, the other on the shoulder of his wife, Janet, and sped away without looking back.
Rhodesia had done well under the early settler farmers; there was at the time only one country in sub-Sahara Africa more prosperous than Rhodesia—South Africa. In 1923, when the charter of the British South Africa Company was abrogated, the whites in Rhodesia were given the choice of being incorporated into the Union of South Africa or becoming a self-governing entity within the British Empire. They chose the latter. The whites never institutionalized racism the way the South Africans did, but the blacks in Rhodesia didn’t fare much better than their counterparts in the country next door. The best farmland was reserved for whites. All the top jobs and every seat in parliament were held by whites. The whites’ per capita income in 1975 was $7,800, the blacks’ was $716. The whites’ literacy rate was 100 percent, the blacks’ 30 percent.
“These Africans in Salisbury don’t have anything to do with the terrorists in the rest of the country,” a white housewife told me. “To my mind, they’re terribly lazy and inefficient—much too inefficient to be terrorists—and sometimes difficult to handle, but they’re good people. They’re part of our family, even when they’re working as servants. We tend to their aches and pains and we treat them like we do our own children.”
After World War II, thousands of immigrants from England moved to Rhodesia, attracted by one of the world’s most pleasant life styles, and in 1963 Rhodesia began negotiating with London for its independence. In 1964 the United Kingdom granted independence to Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi) but demanded that the whites in Southern Rhodesia first demonstrate their intention to move toward eventual majority rule. They refused, and on November 11, 1965, Ian Smith and his Rhodesian Front Party unilaterally declared independence. In March 1970 Smith proclaimed a State of Rhodesia.
The world responded by isolating Rhodesia with political and trade boycotts. But Rhodesia, with the help of South Africa and some Western oil companies willing to ignore sanctions, continued to prosper. Its 6,000 white farmers—who produced 80 percent of the country’s food—were as industrious and ingenious as any in America’s Corn Belt. They fed the California-sized country and had plenty of food left over to export. Agriculture became a $500 million industry as the farmers moved away from their one-crop economy (tobacco) and diversifi
ed. By the late 1970s Rhodesia ranked first in the world in per-hectare yield of groundnuts, second in maize and soybeans, and fourth in wheat. Denied legal trade with the developed world, Rhodesia started making its own wine (not bad) and whiskey (terrible, but the Rhodesians drank it with pride) and producing everything from air conditioners to radios. Despite the international sanctions, a young married couple setting up a home could meet 85 percent of its needs with Rhodesian-made products. (There was even a locally produced version of Monopoly, but since that name was patented, the Rhodesians called their game Around The Boardwalk.) The Rhodesian economy was further buoyed by important supplies of chrome, coal, copper and nickel.
Nevertheless, Rhodesia reverted to the status of a British colony in 1979 and became the independent, black-ruled nation of Zimbabwe in April 1980. What forced the whites to reluctantly surrender power was not sanctions but a guerrilla war that ended up costing the country thirty lives and $1.5 million—or 40 percent of the national budget—each day. The black nationalist forces of the Patriotic Front just wore the country down, economically and spiritually. One faction of the front was headquartered in Zambia, armed by the Soviet Union and led by Joshua Nkomo, a 300-pound former railway worker whose high living raised some eyebrows; the other was in Mozambique, equipped to a large extent by China and led by Robert Mugabe, a Marxist who once said, “Genuine independence can only come out of the barrel of a gun.”
Mugabe, a disciplined scholar and nonpracticing Catholic, spent ten years in detention or under restriction until 1974 in Rhodesia, and the whites’ greatest fear was that he would persecute his former tormentors, turn Zimbabwe into a Communist state aligned with Moscow and preside over the disintegration of another African economy. None of those things have happened, and Mugabe has shown far more respect for the due process of law than Ian Smith ever did. As the elected prime minister, Mugabe deftly juggled black hopes and white fears, and in the process proved himself to be perhaps the most capable leader in black Africa. His brand of Marxism thus far has been no more radical than social democracy in Europe and appears no more revolutionary than the demand that the exploitation of blacks must end. He has taken a page from Jomo Kenyatta’s scenario in Kenya and attempted to accommodate the whites, knowing that their presence is essential if Zimbabwe is to prosper. He has remained aloof from the Soviet Union, not even allowing Moscow to set up an embassy in Salisbury until more than a year after independence. In short, this former teacher whom the West called a Marxist terrorist is no more than a socialist and nationalist trying to serve the entire country on a basis of equality.
