by Guy Arnold
This was the age of the Bureau of State Security (BOSS), the secretive instrument of repression that had been established in 1969. It was a paradox of the Afrikaners that though they used the laws ruthlessly to control those in the state that they regarded as potential or actual enemies of their supremacy they were also sticklers for the law so that deviations from the law could and would be challenged. Mr Justice Potgieter had completed a report on BOSS in August 1970 but it was only tabled in the House of Assembly 18 months later, in February 1972. It recommended that BOSS should become a department under the control of the Prime Minister. Full details of BOSS’ functions had not been disclosed but these covered state, police, security and military intelligence matters and BOSS was answerable only to the Prime Minister and its head, Gen. Hendrik van den Bergh, and did not fall under Parliament, Treasury or the Public Service Commission. The Potgieter Commission’s report also recommended that BOSS be given Parliamentary authorization to tap telephones and intercept mail. BOSS was shrouded in extreme secrecy and was seen as one more instrument of Afrikaner state control.
A government inquiry early in 1972 focused upon ‘Four Left Groups’. A commentator wrote of the inquiry: ‘Though by Western standards the Institute of Race Relations, and the other three organizations, the National Union of South African Students, the University Christian Movement and the Christian Institute, are eminently respectable, perhaps Vorster is right to fear them. For they are among the last groups of people who still preach and often practise multiracialism in South Africa. In particular, the work of the Institute of Race Relations is galling to the Nationalists. The Institute has been fighting the low wages paid to Black workers by attempting to stir up the consciences of South African and American industrialists…’4 The investigation caused a political furore and was described by another commentator as ‘both a smear and a blatant piece of political gimmickry’. The government was clearly directing attention away from its economic difficulties and its inability to deal with them.3
It had become an accepted part of the South African lifestyle at this time that there were always ongoing trials for treason, defying banning orders or other dissident activities against the state and a disproportionate amount of time in the South African courts was devoted to so-called treason trials at various levels. Winnie Mandela, the wife of the imprisoned ANC leader, Nelson Mandela, was sentenced early in 1973 to six months in prison for failing to comply with banning orders against her; on appeal she won her case. The Dean of Johannesburg, the Very Rev. Gonville ffrench-Beytagh, also had his appeal allowed against a five-year sentence under the Terrorism Act and left the country for England. In Pietermaritzburg, after a long trial, 13 accused were found guilty of treason. Louwrens Muller, the Minister of Police, announced that only 13 out of 205 police convicted in 1972 on charges of culpable homicide, intent to do grievous bodily harm, and assault were dismissed from the force.5 Censorship was another weapon of a government that tended to see enemies intent on undermining its authority on all sides. It was reported in 1974, for example, that of 1,283 films submitted to the Publications Control Board, 507 were subjected to exhibition to persons of a particular race or class only, 395 had to be cut before screening, and 129 were prohibited outright while 885 publications and 34 ‘other objects’ were banned. These latter included ‘T’ shirts with the motif ‘Black is beautiful’.
One of the constant fears that drove the ruling Afrikaners was the fact of their dwindling population in relation to all the other races in South Africa. Thus, between 1961 and 1970 the total white population of South Africa increased by 662,836. Natural increase accounted for 395,634. The remaining 263,756 were immigrants but only 0.4 per cent of the immigrant children subsequently went to Afrikaans schools.
The small Progressive Party, whose lone MP, Helen Suzman, had become famous for her role as a white conscience, did at least portray an alternative, more humane white approach to the race divide that made South Africa such an uncomfortable and brutal place for its non-white majority. In October 1971 Colin Eglin, the Progressive Party leader (not in Parliament), and Helen Suzman went on a tour in independent Africa. At a luncheon in Ghana one of the guests asked Mrs Suzman: ‘Don’t you realize that in making a trip of this sort, putting across a view that South Africa is not quite a totalitarian state – that even though you are an opponent of the regime, you are allowed to go outside and say what you like – don’t you see that you might well be an unwitting agent of the regime?’ Mrs Suzman denied this. She was then tackled on the issue of press freedom. A newspaper in Tanzania coupled Mrs Suzman with Harry Oppenheimer as opposed to apartheid but enjoying the approval and material support of the ‘capitalist West’. The editorial continued: ‘Now it is a social truism that it is he who holds economic power that rules. Political leaders in the bourgeois world are often little more than loyal envoys of financial moguls. In South Africa, then it is Helen Suzman and her kind, and not John Vorster, who really rule. The Pretoria regime would collapse overnight without the support of big business.’ The Progressive leaders had a two-hour meeting with President Nyerere. He told them he was completely committed to the Lusaka Manifesto, and that while this provided for dialogue on condition that there was a change of direction in South Africa over apartheid policy, as there had been no such change of direction Tanzania remained utterly opposed to dialogue.6
Prior to a general election (for whites) on 24 April 1974, the National Party hurried a number of bills through Parliament with the aim of reassuring the all-white electorate that even after 26 years of unbroken rule, the NP remained in control. Security was becoming of increasing concern to the electorate as South Africa’s white community gradually came to realize that African guerrillas were having an increasing impact in Angola, Mozambique and Rhodesia. They had taken for granted that without help from Moscow and Beijing (according to the anti-Communist propaganda to which they had long been subjected) Africans were incapable of organizing effective resistance and, therefore, that once inside the borders of a white-ruled country their supply lines would be severed and their forces rapidly rounded up. It was becoming clear that this was not the case. Vorster and the National Party won the election, taking 122 of 169 seats (they had held 118 of 166 seats in the previous Parliament); the United Party dropped from 47 to 41 seats. The Progressive Party, which had been represented by Helen Suzman alone since 1961, won 10 seats and Colin Eglin now became its leader in the House.
The development of the homelands (formerly called Bantustans) took up a good deal of Vorster’s attention during the decade. In 1971, in particular, he was anxious to present a good image of South Africa abroad and divert attention from the adverse ruling of the International Court of Justice over Namibia and he embarked upon a tour of the homelands. However, he could not conceal during this tour the basic inequalities of the allocation of land between the races, and the consequent inequalities of economic opportunity. Neither was he able to reply satisfactorily to the challenge to apartheid presented by the existence of South Africa’s two million Coloured people. On this occasion he visited Tswanaland, North Sotho, Machangana and Venda. There was much debate about the homelands during that year with Vorster trying to define just what the homeland policy should be. This debate was carried to London in October when three homeland leaders – Paramount Chief Kaiser Matanzima of Transkei, Chief Lucas Mangope of Tswanaland and Chief Gatsha Buthelezi of Zululand – visited England. While Matanzima and Mangope had accepted the principle of separate development, Buthelezi declared himself a non-racialist, challenged the whole dogma of separate development and refused to seek independence for Zululand. Buthelezi, who was the government-appointed head of the Zulu Territorial Authority, was rapidly building a reputation for outspokenness. He told the Sunday Times that he questioned the sincerity of the government when it said it wanted self-determination for Zulus.7 The following year, on a visit to Malawi in July, Buthelezi told an audience at Mzimba in Northern Malawi that he doubted there would ever be indepen
dent so-called Bantu homelands. He said the South African government hardly ever consulted Africans and therefore their policies were imposed by sheer force.8 Chief Matanzima of Transkei, on his return from the United States, said he had come back ‘more determined than ever to work towards a consolidation of African-occupied southern Africa’. On the government side the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development, M. C. Botha, said that no more land would be allocated to the African homelands than that stipulated under the Act of 1936, and that if African leaders continued to demand more they would only have themselves to blame for delays in their progress to independence. In January 1973, Chief Buthelezi told the Zulu Parliament that he would cease negotiating with the government on its proposals to consolidate the Zulu homeland into six widely separated blocks of territory. Buthelezi, who had decided to ‘work’ the homelands system, continued to refuse to accept ‘independence’ and through the 1970s, a period of major oppression in South Africa, he made a substantial impact arguing over policy with the Pretoria government. Homeland leaders spoke out frequently during 1973 about the difficulties facing their people and the growing anger amongst the young over their poverty, lack of opportunity and subjection to white interests. Chief Kaiser Matanzima called for non-whites to have a meaningful share of political power and warned that African youth was moving towards black power. Co-existence would only be possible, he argued, under a system of one-man, one vote with representation for all races in Parliament. Matanzima’s arguments were echoed by the leaders of Bophutatswana and Lebowa. The Minister of Bantu Administration criticized such statements by homeland leaders as irresponsible and creating the impression of threats, although in a more emollient afterthought he said such sharp and provocative utterances should be treated with self-control and sympathy.
THE ECONOMY: SET IN A MOULD
In 1971 Harry Oppenheimer, the chairman of Anglo-American, blamed the country’s growing economic problems on apartheid. He claimed that economic advancement for Africans would also result in much more rapid advancement for whites. Writing in the 1970 Anglo-American review, he said: ‘Rapid progress with what we call African advancement would do more than raise material standards for all sections of the population. It would help powerfully to harmonize the natural and reasonable aspirations of the majority of the people with the structure of the economy and the stability of the State. It would do more than any dialogue with other African States, important and valuable though such a dialogue would be, to defeat the sterile policy of isolating South Africa by the right wing element in South Africa and by the left wing element abroad.’ Stanley Uys, commenting on Oppenheimer’s statement, said that in asking for better wages for Africans, Mr Oppenheimer did not say whether he included those working in gold mines. Their average pay was 69 cents a shift (40p). White miners were paid 19 times as much. South Africa was a major exporter of a wide range of minerals. The most important foreign exchange earners were gold, diamonds, platinum, copper, uranium, asbestos, manganese, vanadium, iron, antimony, nickel, coal and chrome. These and other minerals already provided about two-thirds of South Africa’s merchandise exports. Dr A. A. Maltitz, President of the Chamber of Mines of South Africa, discussed the problem of the greater use in industry of non-whites. This course, he argued, ‘is unfortunately fraught with political difficulties, but I am convinced that an improved use of labour can be attained within the framework of government policy and on a generally acceptable basis’. He argued that white men could assume more supervisory jobs and non-whites could move up into certain tasks previously carried out by whites. The industry had offered to guarantee that no white employees would be retrenched as a result of such changes. The white worker could remain in highly paid employment and his status would be enhanced.9 Despite such ‘debates’ neither Oppenheimer nor any other ‘progressive’ white was actually prepared to challenge the political system and increase wages for their black workers.
Although the differential in pay for white and black miners in 1971 was huge, white trade unions complained that the government was failing to apply its job reservation principles to the full. The Director of the South African Institute of Race Relations, Fred van Wyk, said that two of the country’s biggest employers of labour, South African Railways and the Post Office, had accepted the fact that, if the demand for services during the next few years was to be met, more non-whites would have to be used in skilled and semi-skilled occupations. The Rand Daily Mail blamed ‘industrial apartheid’ for the fact that white people were losing their jobs and that the real rise in white wages over the past 10 years had been only 2.34 per cent according to a University of South Africa survey. ‘Artificial labour restrictions and excessive expenditure on ideological projects have pushed up the rate of inflation which has eroded the ordinary man’s buying power. Thus is white South Africa cutting off its nose to spite the black worker’s face.’ Such critiques of the industrial system became ever more frequent as a steadily increasing number of people realized that apartheid and full economic growth were incompatible.
In January 1973 the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce fixed a poverty line for an African family of five at R8.15 a week. The Chairman of its Non-European Affairs Committee said that African heads of families should be paid R100 a month.10 In Natal at that time the poverty line was calculated to be about R83 a month. In 1970 the Natal University School Research Department reckoned that only 15 per cent of African families in Durban were not living in poverty and that since then a sharp rise in the cost of living had occurred. At the beginning of 1973, over the New Year, a 600-mile pilgrimage from Grahamstown to Cape Town focused attention on the migratory labour system. Those who supported the pilgrimage pointed out that men were forced to leave their wives and children in their homelands and live in ‘single’ hostels in order to get work, causing much unhappiness and deprivation. If women wished to go to work they often had to leave their children with grandparents. The march was supported by a number of leading churchmen. Early in 1974, in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War when black African states, overwhelmingly, had supported the Arab-OPEC stand, South Africa contemplated petrol rationing. Its supplies – together with those of Portugal, Rhodesia and Israel – were embargoed. Speed limits and other measures to cut consumption were enforced. At that time South Africa obtained 40 per cent of its oil from Iran and produced a further 10 per cent in its SASOL plants. The economy was 20 per cent dependent upon oil and 80 per cent dependent upon coal and other fuel sources.
The Anglo-American Corporation (AAC) deserves study. It was at the heart of the South African economy and Harry Oppenheimer, the ruler of this vast industrial empire, claimed to be progressive. He talked of the need to train and include Africans, he supported the Progressive Party financially, and often attacked government policies, though never too severely. And throughout these years he and his vast empire benefited enormously from the apartheid system that so conveniently allowed him to keep black mineworkers’ wages at a minimum while conditions for the workers in his mines were often atrocious. In the 1970s the US$15 billion AAC empire dominated the South African economy. AAC controlled 1,000 companies in South Africa alone and its operations could be divided under two main headings: mining, industrial and other operating companies; and finance and investment companies. Its holdings included three of the top four mining houses, six of the top 10 finance houses, the largest investment trust, the second-largest property company, the second-largest merchant bank, the largest transport company and the fastest-growing car company. Minerals, however, represented the core business. In the 1970s Anglo produced 40 per cent of South Africa’s gold (which was equivalent to 30 per cent of the non-Communist world’s production), 40 per cent of the world’s industrial diamonds and over 30 per cent of its gem diamonds. Member companies accounted for 40 per cent of world vanadium production, 15 per cent of coal and 4 per cent of uranium. It was also a substantial producer of copper, platinum and manganese. In 1979 the group’s total assets were estimated at more than
US$3 billion and the assets of the parent company alone at US$1.7 billion while net income stood at US$700 million and over US$350 million for the parent company. Profits on investments were above 20 per cent. There were three major (non-subsidiary) associates: De Beers Consolidated Mines, Charter Consolidated, and Minerals and Resources Corporation (MINORCO). De Beers, the largest diamond-mining company in the world, achieved net profits of US$900 million in 1978. Charter Consolidated was responsible for mining finance and owned assets worth US$500 million; it owned 6 per cent of Anglo while Anglo owned over a third of Charter Consolidated. MINORCO was primarily a mining investment company and owned assets worth US$300 million; it was 40 per cent owned by Anglo.11