The New York Review Abroad

by Robert B. Silvers

  White people have turned away from concern to a matter-of-fact preoccupation with self-protection. A Johannesburg parents’ committee has a meeting to discuss whether or not teachers at a suburban school should be armed, as they might once have planned a school fête. I bump into a friend who tells me, as if he were mentioning arrangements for a cattle show, that he and fellow farmers from a district on the outskirts of Johannesburg are gathering next day to set up an early warning system among themselves—one of them uses a two-way radio for cattle control, the gadget may come in handy.

  Now it is not only the pistol-club matrons of Pretoria who regard guns as necessary domestic appliances. At the house of a liberal white couple an ancient rifle was produced the other evening, the gentle wife in dismay and confusion at having got her husband to buy it. Gunsmiths have long waiting lists for revolvers; 50 percent of small arms come illegally from Iron Curtain countries who call for a total arms embargo against South Africa at the UN.

  Certainly, in that house a gun was an astonishing sight. Pamphlets appear with threats to whites and their children; although the black movements repudiate such threats, this woman feels she cannot allow her anti-apartheid convictions to license failure to protect her children from physical harm. She needn’t have felt so ashamed. We are all afraid. How will the rest of us end up? Hers is the conflict of whites who hate apartheid and have worked in “constitutional” ways to get rid of it. The quotes are there because there’s not much law-abiding virtue in sticking to a constitution like the South African one, in which only the rights of a white minority are guaranteed. Gandhi had our country in mind when he wrote, “The convenience of the powers that be is the law in the final analysis.”

  My friend Professor John Dugard, Dean of the Faculty of Law at the Witwatersrand University, says that if whites do not show solidarity with blacks against apartheid, their choice is to “join the white laager or emigrate.” Few, belonging to a country that is neither in the Commonwealth nor the Common Market, have the chance to emigrate. Of the laager—armed encampment—my friend David Goldblatt, the photographer, says to me: “How can we live in the position where, because we are white, there’s no place for us but thrust among whites whose racism we have rejected with disgust all our lives?”

  There is not much sign that whites who want to commit themselves to solidarity with blacks will be received by the young anonymous blacks who daily prove the hand that holds the stone is the whip hand. They refuse to meet members of the Progressive-Reform Party, who, while assuming any new society will be a capitalist one, go farther than any other white constitutional group in genuine willingness to share power with blacks. They will not even talk to white persons (there are still no white parties that recognize the basic principle of Western democracy although they would all call themselves upholders of the Western democratic system) who accept one man one vote and the rule by a black majority government as the aim of any solidarity, and understand, as John Dugard puts it, that “the free enterprise system is not the only system” to be discussed.

  The black moderate Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, whose position as a Bantustan leader fiercely attacking the government that appointed him has made him exactly the figure—legal but courageous—to whom whites have talked and through whom they hope to reach blacks, lately is reported to have made a remark about “white ultra-liberals who behave as though they are making friends with the crocodile so they will be the last to be eaten.” He also said, “Nobody will begrudge the Afrikaner his heritage if it is no threat to the heritage and freedom of other people.” It seems old white adversaries might be accepted but white liberals will never be forgiven their inability to come to power and free blacks.

  Nevertheless, I don’t think the whites he referred to would be those with the outstanding fighting record of Helen Suzman, let alone radical activists like Beyers Naude of the Christian Institute, and others, of the earlier generation of Bram Fischer, who have endured imprisonment and exile alongside blacks in the struggle.

  If fear has taken over from concern among whites, it has rushed in to fill a vacuum. In nearly six months, nothing has been done to meet the desperate need of blacks that seems finally to have overcome every threat of punishment and repression: the need, once and for all and no less, to take their lives out of the hands of whites. The first week of the riots, Gatsha Buthelezi called for a national convention and the release of black leaders in prison to attend it. As the weeks go by in the smell of burning, the call for a national convention has been taken up by other Bantustan leaders, black urban spokesmen, the press, the white political opposition. After five months, the prime minister, Mr. Vorster, answered: “There will be no national convention so far as this government is concerned.” Most of the time he leaves comment to his minister of justice, police, and prisons, Mr. Jimmy Kruger. The only attempt to deal with a national crisis is punitive. It is Mr. Kruger’s affair. He continues to project an equation that is no more than a turn of phrase: “South Africa will fight violence with violence.”

  Three hundred and sixty people have died, of whom two were white. The police, who carry guns and still do not wear riot-protective clothing but army camouflage dress and floppy little-boy hats that could be penetrated by a slingshot, have not lost a single man.

  Neither the prime minister nor his minister in charge of black lives, M.C. Botha (Bantu Administration, Development and Education), has yet talked to urban black leaders more representative than members of the collapsed Urban Bantu Councils. (They do not have normal municipal powers.) On their own doleful admittance, these are dubbed “Useless Boys’ Clubs” by the youths who run the black townships now.

  Of the black leaders whom the vast majority of urban blacks would give a mandate to speak for them, Nelson Mandela and his lieutenants Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki, of the banned African National Congress, are still imprisoned for life on Robben Island. Robert Sobukwe of the Pan-Africanist Congress is banished to and silenced in a country town.

  Black intellectuals who might stand in for these have been detained one by one, even while whites of unlikely political shades continue to affirm a fervent desire to talk to blacks, just talk to them—as if 300 years of oppression were a family misunderstanding that could be explained away, and as if everyone did not know, in the small dark room where he meets himself, exactly what is wrong with South African “race relations.”

  The government leaders refuse to meet the Black People’s Convention, perhaps in the belief that by not recognizing Black Consciousness organizations the power of blacks to disrupt their own despised conditions of life and (at the very least) the economy that sustains the white one will cease to exist. Fanonist theory of the black man as an image projected upon him by the white man takes a new twist; the white man goes to the door of his shop in central Johannesburg one September morning this year and fails to recognize the black man marching down the street shouting, in his own image, “This is our country.”

  The government won’t speak to the Black Parents’ Association, formed originally to finance the burial of Soweto children in June. In this ghastly bond, the association moved on under the leadership of Nelson Mandela’s wife and Dr. Manas Buthelezi, an important Black Consciousness leader about to be consecrated Lutheran Bishop of Johannesburg. It became a united front combining youthful black consciousness inspiration with the convictions of older people who followed the African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress.

  Finally, the government does not consider speaking to the militant students themselves who are still effectively in leadership, sometimes preventing their parents from going to work (two successful strikes in Johannesburg). Daily and determinedly, they pour into the gutters the shebeen liquor they consider their elders have long allowed themselves to be unmanned by.

  Meanwhile, since June 926 black schoolchildren have received punishments ranging from fines or suspended sentences to jail (five years for a seventeen-year-old boy) and caning (five cuts with a light cane for an elev
en-year-old who gave the black power salute, shouted at the police, and stoned a bus). They are some of the 4,200 people charged with offenses arising out of the riots, including incitement, arson, public violence, and sabotage. Many students are also among the 697 people, including Mrs. Winnie Mandela, detained in jail for “security reasons”; the other week one hanged himself by his shirt in the Johannesburg prison, an old fort two kilometers from the white suburban house where I write this.2 Several students, not twenty years old, have just begun that reliable apprenticeship for African presidents, exile and education in Britain. When, in September, Mr. Vorster met blacks with whom he will talk—his appointed Bantustan leaders—he would not discuss urban unrest or agree to a national conference of blacks and whites to decide what ought to be done about it.

  There is a one-man commission of inquiry into the riots, sitting now. Mr. Justice Cillie, the white judge who constitutes it, complains that few people actually present at these events have volunteered evidence. In fact, the schoolchildren and students themselves boycott it, and for the rest, South Africans’ faith in the efficacy of commissions to lead to positive action has long gone into the trash basket along with the recommendations the government steadily rejects. The Cillie Commission keeps extending the period in which it will sit, as the riots continue to be part of the present and not a matter of calm recollection. January 27 next year is the latest limit announced. Historical analogies are easily ominous. But a commission of inquiry was Czar Nicholas II’s way of dealing with the implications of the “unrest” of Bloody Sunday, the beginning of the 1905 revolution.

  A chain-store owner whose business has been disrupted by strikes and the gutting of a store has burst out of the conventions of his annual report to shareholders to say, “Decades of selfishness and smugness by South African whites is the principal reason for widespread unrest among blacks.”

  Yet most changes suggested by whites do not approach a call for a national convention, with its implication of a new constitution and the end of white supremacy. Black certainty that nothing will bring equality without power is dismantled by whites into component injustices they can admit and could redress without touching the power structure. The Federated Chamber of Industries calls for job “reservations” discriminating against blacks in industry to be ended, and has the support of the most powerful trade union group and the opposition parties. The National Development and Management Foundation goes farther and calls for the ending of business and residential apartheid as well. Afrikaner big business, government supporters all, in their Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut ask for blacks to be given “greater” rights in their own urban areas and training to increase their skills.

  Although the Progressive-Reform Party has demanded a national convention and the release of all people from detention, it was still necessary, before its 1976 congress agreed to change its education policy to enforced desegregation, for Helen Suzman to remind rank-and-file members that the separate-but-equal dictum for education had been “thrown out by the United States twenty years ago.”

  With unprecedentedly strong criticism of the government coming from its own newspapers and prominent Afrikaners as well as the opposition, it is baffling to read that at the same time 60 percent of whites—an increase of 5 percent over the majority gained by the government in the 1974 election—support Mr. Vorster’s National Party. The reliability of this particular poll is in some doubt; but perhaps the contradiction is not so unlikely after all. It is possible to see a dire necessity for change and fear it so greatly that one runs to give oneself to the father figure who will forbid one to act.

  For months the white political opposition parties—Progressive-Reform, United Party, and Democratic Party—have been trying to agree to some sort of realignment. If a liberal front comes about, it will trample the old sand castle fort of the United Party, the conservative official parliamentary opposition, already eroded by the departure of most of its politically vigorous members to the Progressive-Reform Party.

  The numerical strength of such a front cannot be measured until it is known whether a major part of the United Party, which still polled 31.49 percent in the 1974 elections, will enter it alongside the Progressive-Reform Party, in the last few years grown from a pressure group to a real presence in parliament, with twelve seats and 6.25 percent of the vote. (The crankish Democratic Party has a minute following.) Only when the extent of United Party commitment is revealed will it be possible to estimate roughly what percentage of the 40 percent who voted against the government in the last election are liberals. There are rumors that some disaffected verlaigte (“enlightened”) National Party MPs may defect to the front too.

  The declared aim of the front is to protect the rights of whites while giving Blacks, Coloreds, and Indians a direct say in government—which careful phrasing suggests its policy will be to the right of the present Progressive-Reform Party. The spectral raison d’être of such a realignment is surely not the chance of ousting Vorster’s government but of getting ready a white “negotiating party” to treat with blacks on a shared power basis when he finds he can no longer govern. The viewpoint of enlightened white politics now includes urgently the wide angle of acceptability to blacks, although they have no vote to be wooed. When Mr. Vorster can no longer govern, it is not likely any other white government will be able to.

  No one knows whether the Bantustan leaders are, in their different circumstances, preparing themselves for a particular role on that day. They meet at a Holiday Inn at Johannesburg’s airport, exactly like Holiday Inns all over the world, down to its orgy-sized beds and cozy smell of French fried potatoes piped along with muzak, but deriving its peculiar status as neutral country outside apartheid from the time when it was the first hotel here to be declared “international”: not segregated—for foreign blacks, anyway.

  From there the Bantustan leaders demand “full human rights for blacks and not concessions.” With the exception of the Transkei and Bophutha Tswana—the former having celebrated the homeland brand of independence on October 26, the latter soon to do so—they reject ethnic partitions of South Africa. Which means they walk out on the many-mansions theory of apartheid, abandoning the white government which set them up inside; and they identify themselves as part of the liberation movement for an undivided South Africa. They present themselves to the black population in general as black leaders, not tribal leaders. Is this a bid for power? If Nelson Mandela were to come back from the prison island, would they step aside for him? Has the most imposing of them, Gatsha Buthelezi, a following cutting across his Zulu tribal lines?

  Whites believe so. He attracts large audiences when he speaks in cosmopolitan black townships. Many blacks say no; and the African National Congress in exile continues to deride the Bantustan leaders as collaborators, making no exceptions. Other blacks imply that the best of the Bantustan men are keeping warm the seats of leaders in prison. Among politically articulate blacks, this year’s is their (Southern hemisphere) hot summer of brotherhood. Tsietsi Mashinini, the student leader who fled the police to exile in Britain, suggests that the tremendous force his movement shows itself to represent is loyal to Mandela. It does not seem to matter to blacks whether it is a Gatsha Buthelezi or anyone else who is the one to say to whites, as he has, “The future is a Black future and we Blacks want our future now.”

  From the Market Theatre, newly opened in what was the Covent Garden of Johannesburg, comes a strange echo—Cucurucu, Kokol, Polpoch, and Rossignol, asylum clowns in Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, singing: “Give us our rights … and we don’t care how—We want—our re-vo-lu-tion—NOW.” The author granted performances on condition everyone could see the work and has donated his royalties to a Soweto riot victims fund. His play has never been performed before in a city atmosphere such as ours, it has never been heard as we hear it.

  During the “quiet” years of successful police repression, before the young emptied the Dutch courage of shebeens down the drain and sent through people’s v
eins the firewater of a new spirit, there have been political trials in progress continually in South Africa. Not only those of blacks who have left the country for military training and re-entered illegally, but also those reflecting aspects of the struggle against apartheid carried on by an intellectual elite.

  While the riots have been taking place, two young white university lecturers in Cape Town have given the black power clench and, avowing “no regrets,” have accepted long sentences under the Terrorism and Internal Security acts; their uncompromising personal suffering serves as proof of solidarity with blacks that must be granted even by those whites who abhor the white far left. In Johannesburg I have been to hear the trial of four white university students and a lecturer accused of trying “to change South Africa” by organizing black workers, who have no recognized trade unions. The five were charged under the Suppression of Communism Act, and the state’s principal evidence consisted of papers read at a seminar.

  The backs of these young men in blue jean outfits suggested a pop group; but when they turned in the witness stand it was not to greet fans but to smile at the wife of one of them, whose hands, while she followed the proceedings, were working at a complicated length of knitting—the danger of active dissent does make risk of imprisonment part of the daily life of courageous people. Yet I felt events had overtaken them. The segregated public gallery was almost empty of white and black spectators. The struggle was a few miles away in the streets of Soweto.

  But it is another trial, which has gone on almost two years, that seems to have the opposite relation to present events. Four years ago, the nine black members of the South African Students’ Organization accused under the Terrorism Act seemed to the ordinary public, black and white, to represent a radical fringe movement on the far side of the generation gap. The state’s evidence against them was literary and clumsily esoteric—it consisted of black plays in the idiom of New York black theater of seven years ago, mimeographed Black Consciousness doggerel that couldn’t compete with comic books, poetry readings that surely could appeal only to the educated young.