The fourth Boer war

SOUTH AFRICA ELSPETII HUXLEY

South Africa is like a pantomime donkey whose front legs, the government's policy, plod in one direction while its hindlegs, economic realities, trot in the other. Sooner or later there must be either a split or an accommodation.

Few countries in the world can be doing better economically. Industry expands, trade is buoyant, employment healthy, finances strong, productivity rising. Cities grow like termitaries; Pretoria, for instance, not so long ago a haunt of civil servants and part-time par- liamentarians, now has nearly half a million citizens, more than half of them white, and many industries, including the giant iron and steel corporation Iscor, whose new head- quarters overtop the grandiose monument to the Voortrekkers who started it all, unwittingly enough, some 130 years ago.

The Voortrekkers go trekking on minus reldschoen and wagons but in spirit still folk of veld and laager who find themselves in com- mand of a high-powered modern economy built up mainly by Jews and their British- origin ex-enemies. Against these they have won the Third Boer War, but now they have another on their hands and once again, as they see it, for survival: a war against being swamped by black Africans. The only strategy they can see in this struggle is to keep the spectre of integration out of the laager.

A modern economy demands the integration of the labour force regardless of colour. To start with you can make a simple division between skilled and unskilled jobs and allo- cate the former to whites and the latter to blacks and coloureds, but as industry becomes more sophisticated it becomes increasingly difficult to draw the line. Moreover, as industry expands there are just not enough whites to fill the skilled and semi-skilled categories as well as to man an inflated civil service. So more and more blacks are crossing the line, and becoming much better off in the process. 'Job reservation has broken down,' indus- trialists will tell you. The fast-growing cities are becoming mixing, if not melting, pots of the races, defying laws of increasing severity passed by a government increasingly alarmed by this pressure to integrate. Thus the hind- legs of the donkey heave against forelegs resolutely pointed towards the haven of com- plete apartheid, where all will be safe because no one race will be afraid of another, and the spectre of integration will at last be laid.

So apartheid, raised on a simple base of race preservation, has been elevated into a complex system which will deny no black man oppor- tunity to rise to the highest position his talents fit him for, whether prime minister or pro- fessor, a surgeon as skilled as Dr Barnard, a magnate as great as Sir Harry Oppenheimer, a winner of Olympic gold medals. There is no theoretical reason why a hospital in the Transkei should not become as fine as Groote Schuur, a university in Zululand as great as the Witwatersrand, or a business as thriving as the OK Bazaars. But all this must take place in the Homelands, as Bantustans are now generally called.

Once the structure is complete, black and white will meet as equals at the top. Dr Vorster's government has shown itself to be in earnest about this by according diplomatic status to representatives of black states, who have been wined and dined at the best white hotels. When all has been accomplished, what exponents of the theory call 'petty apartheid' will (again in theory) wither away. Petty apar- theid means all those wounding indignities that non-believers find so abrasive: 'Whites Only' signs on park benches, post office doors, buses and lavatories; no blacks (other than diplo- mats) admitted to hotels; residential segrega- tion; and so on. Apartheid believers sweep these aside as temporary, but necessary, measures.

If to most outsiders all this seems like cloud-cuckoo-land, most Afrikaners honestly and sincerely believe in these doctrines, which are, after all, no dottier than those held by many others at different times, including the present, such as those of Fundamentalists and Seventh Day Adventists, or believers in the Protocols of Zion or flying saucers. A truly formidable amount of energy and money is being poured into an attempt to make the theory work.

' All this is resulting in a general post on a colossal scale. About a million 'foreign natives' are to be moved right out of the country to leave the field clear for native natives. 'Influx control' is now applied in all the major cities. This does not mean stopping the • influx of Bantu so much as reversing it—sending people home. All over the republic men and women are being pulled up like weeds and replanted, or told to replant themselves, in Homelands with which many of them lost contact a generation ago, amid strangers and minus jobs. Whole provinces may be so treated. In the Western Cape a target has been set to reduce the Bantu population by 5 per cent a year, so that in twenty years' time there will be vir- tually no Bantu living there. This is to leave the field clear for the coloured community, who lack even a theoretical Homeland, and yet are to be separated from the whites and gathered into a political pen on their own. People are being tidied up to fit a theory regardless of their own inclinations and often at the price of broken homes and dispersed families.

Even apartheid theorists do not think they can repatriate to Homelands the entire Bantu population of the cities, and recognise that someone must keep the wheels turning. So any Bantu may remain if he can prove either that he or she was born in the city, has worked there for ten consecutive years for one em- ployer, or has been continuously employed there for fifteen years. If he cannot prove any of thesq things, out he goes. Proof is difficult, sometimes impossible, to obtain in a country without compulsory registration of births, and a year or two away will break the continuity. Even if a man qualifies, he may not bring in a wife and family from outside, so either he must marry a local girl or live as a bachelor for the rest of his life. The authorities apply these laws with particular stringency to women because women mean homes and spell per- manency. So Bantu in increasing numbers live as bachelors, perhaps ten or a dozen to a room, visiting their wives only on holidays, unless they are lucky and are close enough to a Homeland to get there for weekends.

The object is to make all Bantu labour, or as much of it as possible, transient labour. Yet all the time the cities go on needing labour and the people go on climbing up the economic ladder farther and farther away from Home- land, chief and tribal ways. The government's intention to develop the Homelands is largely thwarted by the government's own ban on allowing white capital to do so. There is not enough other capital, and most of the border industries remain on paper, the real ones stay- ing obstinately in the towns.

It is a Gilbertian situation, and sad, not only for the uprooted people, but because the devotees of the theory do not mean to be unkind. On the contrary, their intention is to give the Bantu population genuine opportunity both for prosperity and self-respect. In their own Homelands they will be able to possess Their own homes, run their businesses, manage their affairs. Officials will point out that South Africa is far from being the only country where populations have been reshuffled, or where people leave their homes to find work. Millions of Europeans do this, not to mention Asians who have come to Britain and left their families behind.

Officials will also take you to Soweto to see what has been done for those who will remain and continue to work in the city. Johannesburg used to be ringed by shanty-towns whose filth and squalor horrified everyone. 'The people lived like pigs,' said a Bantu commissioner. 'They had no sanitation, no decency, they were robbed and exploited. It was disgusting. Now they don't live in palaces but they are decently housed.' This is true. The shanty-towns have vanished and in their place is this extra- ordinary complex of native townships with some 600,000 inhabitants, each in a hutch-like dwelling on its own plot of ground and each with running water, sewage, cooking facilities, reasonable rents and access to schools, clinics and transport, however crammed.

For miles and miles stretch these rows and rows of little dwellings laid out in grids, drab and featureless—the ant-state. There is no centre, no heart, no throb of human vitality. Soweto chills the heart but it is decent and hygienic and represents a colossal effort at a heavy cost. Now policy is to make of it a vast transit camp where no one owns his own house and whence people will retire to distant Homelands to make way for a new generation of commuters to Johannesburg. This is the aim. One of those responsible for carrying it out said, in baffled tones : 'It can't work.'

The Nationalist government has been in power for twenty years and seems set, on recent form, for at least another twenty, with opposition at a low ebb. There are times when the only bite seems to come from one woman, • the indomitable Helen Suzman, sole parlia- mentary representative of the Progressive party, that tiny but needling conscience of the nation. Now rifts are opening up within the monolithic ruling party between the • Yerk- rampte 'inward-looking' heirs of undiluted Afrikanerdom who want to stay in their laager and 'outward-looking' Verligtes pre- pared to change and modify and work towards closer relations between the republic and the outer word. Dr Vorster's decision to send multi-racial teams to the Olympic Games horri- fied the Verkramptes, who are probably superior in numbers but inferior in brains and have so far been outmanoeuvred in the seats of power. On the outcome of this Verkrampte- Verligte struggle, which is growing in intensity, the future of the republic probably depends.

The new Afrikaners who are coming into commerce, industry and finance are Verligte almost to a man. So is much of the Afrikaner press, most of the university teachers—the growth of Afrikaans-speaking universities in re- cent years has been remarkable—and leaders in all walks of life, with the exception of the Church. The Dutch Reformed Church remains pretty solidly Verkrampte, but even in this citadel cracks appear. One of the greatest men in South Africa today is a predikant whose father was a founder of the Broederbund, that secret society which has distilled, preserved and directed the spirit of militant Afrikanerdom. This is the Rev Beyers Naude, who has broken away from his Church to found the Christian Institute and preach that apartheid runs counter to the teachings of Christ. His own Church has disowned him and he has not been free from persecution, but be has not been silenced. He may be a portent or a false dawn.

There are only two ways to reverse apar- theid : to crush or to undermine. Some would like to go for the republic with fire and slaughter, destroy its cities and leave it a shambles to be put together by such Africans as survived. Also there are forces within that have despaired of peaceful methods and be- lieve that only violence can achieve the end.

The strength of the republic is now so formid- able that only a major war could overcome it from without, and its internal security arrange- ments appear to have become so efficient that an all-out revolution in the classic style would seem to be impossible to mount.

The only alternative, however slow and slender, seems to be to back those outward- looking forces that, in the long run, must bring South Africa into a closer relationship with the rest of the world and its policies, perhaps into a closer alignment. The length of this run may seem depressing, but several factors are speeding it up. One is the entry, already re- ferred to, of so many Afrikaners into business and industry which acquaints them at first hand with the facts of economic life and will set self-interest against ideology. Another may be the high cost of establishing Homelands that fulfil their aim, so long as white capital is excluded. Another is the rapid spread of uni- versity education. No campus is a monastery and ideas from other lands cannot be shut out. When an earthwork is impregnable, sappers must be called in. The sappers are ideas.

The policy of other nations, Britain included, seems to be to make the worst of both worlds. Withdrawing the hem of the garment from the sinner never did anyone any good. South Africa will not reverse apartheid because we stop selling arms. If their athletes are banned from the Olympics, the Nationalists will can- cel multi-racial concessions, seal up the tiny chinks in the apartheid doctrine and withdraw into the laager. The same with playwrights who refuse to let their works be performed in the republic, and actors who will not go there on tour. They only make the isolation more complete, ideas less fluid, the laager tighter. Cutting off South Africa from the rest of the world does not force repentance, it forces stubbornness. Verkramptes say 'I told you so,' Verligtes shrug their shoulders, the courageous band of Progs, Black Sash and others who do battle with the Nats are further isolated and. the caravan rolls on.

The way to modify apartheid is to keep open lines of communication, not to sever them; bring the republic into closer contact with the rest of the world; soften up, not vainly try to batter down; tempt people from the laager, not drive them back in. It is a pragmatic policy requiring patience, not a common quality these days, and some faith, even rarer. It will not bring about profound changes soon. Meanwhile there will continue to be suffering, as there always is when humans pursue a theory like hounds after a fox. But the republk despite its security police, is not dead-hearted,- it has not solidified; it is self-questioning, alive and arguing, trying to find a way through the wood.