Tony Benn: heir to Cecil Rhodes

Richard West

Windhoek Windhoek, the capital of South West Africa, lies hundreds of miles from the fighting on the Angolan border, so that most of the troops one sees in the cafés and bars are on leave—in spite of their dark brown uniforms and their carbines. A high proportion are bearded, like the Boers of eighty years ago. They look fit and I saw that the officers go out on the spree with the other ranks, singing and toasting each other in beer, with a certain amount of horseplay. These troops are the only reminder that former German South West Africa, now ruled in effect by the South African government, is one of those territories in the continent where whites and black are in military conflict. While South Africa is attempting to set up an independent, multi-racial but antisocialist state, a para-military black Marxist movement called SWAPO, backed by the states to the north and by the United Nations, intends to create a new state, Namibia, named after the Namib desert which takes up most of the land.

Paradoxically Windhoek is far more peaceful than Johannesburg, from which I have come. Here you can walk the streets at night without any fear of mugging; the people who bought pistols last year are now trying to sell them back again; the blacks and coloureds are non-hostile and even sometimes friendly. Most apartheid laws were removed last year as part of South Africa's plan for a constitutional settlement, and the races now mix with a certain caution. Some swimming pools have been closed because the whites would not agree to admit blacks; in some bars, black customers will be snubbed or ostracised; but on the other hand a Windhoek man was recently fined £50 for calling a black a `kaffir' during a quarrel.

When! was here seven years ago, the hotel staff made it clear that if I would like a coloured girl, this could be arranged with discretion. Now, with the lifting of the Immorality Act, there are scenes that would horrify the fathers of apartheid. In my small German hotel, it is rare to sit at the café without three or four dark girls squeezing up beside you. After a while, so an expert explained to me, you tell them your car number and later find the required girl curled up on the back seat. The Germans, who form the majority of the whites in Windhoek itself, are not much shocked by such carryings on but some Afrikaners protest. When Windhoek Theatre threw open its doors to all races, an unknown hand scrawled on an entrance pillar: 'Today here, tomorrow on your daughters,' which made it especially rich that the first show put on to mixed

audiences was Othello, in Afrikaans. At one performance attended by 300schoolchildren, giggling broke out and Othello stalked off the stage, leaving Desdemona waiting to be murdered. 'One possible theory in connection with the uncalled for laughter,' wrote the Windhoek Advertiser, 'could very well have been Othello's costume which consisted of brief shorts in black leather embellished with several jackal-tails.'

The white `South-Westers' as they call themselves are in most ways easier-going than the South Africans. There is a frontier atmosphere in which strangers will start to tell you their aspirations and sorrows. A young Afrikaner man described to me how he had left the family farm because his brother belonged to the right-wing Verkrampte wing of the National Party, while he belonged to the Verligtes, and they had not spoken for two years. An elderly German told me of how that morning he met a woman he knew as a girl in 1935. '1 asked her if she remembered how we had kissed. I told her that if she had married me then she might be a millionairess now instead of a shop assistant. She cried. And ach, how she's changed. But I don't suppose I look too good either since I had ten teeth pulled this morning.'

Until about five years ago, South West Africa was largely ignored by the rest of the world although the United Nations agitated to obtain the authority over this former German colony that it inherited from the defunct League of Nations. The South African government chose to ignore foreign protests against its rule in the South West. Then two events forced a change of policy. First the Ovambo tribe, who form about half the territory's population of 750,000, began to protest against the low wages and unjust contracts which they had long been obliged to accept on leaving their homeland in the north. Then two years latet a revolution in Portugal led to the end of Portuguese rule in Angola, South West Africa's neighbouring territory, in which there are many Ovambos. In the Angolan civil war, which is by no means finished, South African troops have been engaged in sporadic fighting on both sides of the frontier. Meanwhile the South African premier, John Vorster, as part of his plan to confront political change in the region, decided to withdraw from the administration of South West Africa and let the tet ritory form its own government, believing that a mild black regime now was preferable to the possibility of a left-wing regime in a few years' time. If Vorster had offered South West Africa independence ten years earlier, it might have been easy to form such a tame

state, run by the Ovambo tribe, but in offering independence only under duress and without the support of many Ovambos, South Africa has been finding it difficult to create a viable government that will be recognised by the United Nations.

The constitutional talks are held lfl Windhoek's Turn halle, the gym built by the Germans before the First World War. All the tribes or groupings are represented—the Ovambos, the whites (the second largest by population), the Damaras, the Hereros, the Bastards, the Hottentots and the Bushmen. These last, represented by one small, sad delegate, are the only people indigenous to the territory but have been virtually wiped out by the Hottentots, Bantus and whites who began their invasions some three hundred years ago. The Turnhalle talks have been beset by territorial jealousies between small but mutually hostile groups of black, brown and white farmers, all of whom are conscious that the most powerful group, the 'Ovambos, are scarcely represented at all. The Turnhalle-Ovambo delegation, led bY a clergyman, have been denounced bY SWAPO as the stooges of imperialism.

Nevertheless the South African government and the white South-Westers are confident that the territory will be a viable independent state. And the man who has made South West Africa a viable, white-rue state is Anthony Wedgwood Benn, Who started the breath-taking uranium boom: It was in 1969 that the British mining company Rio Tinto-Zinc, which already exploited uranium in Canada and Australia, applied for permission to work the apparently vast deposits at Rossing, some thirty miles from the coast of South Wet Africa. In order to raise the capital for this venture, RTZ asked the British government for permission to supply the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority with uranium from this new mine, instead of (or as well as) the previous sources in Canada and Australia. The responsible minister, Tony Ben°, signed his approval. Later, he gave several different reasons why he had given s° huge a contract for uranium to a territorY held against the authority of the United Nations by a country ruled on the apartheid system. He said first that RTZ had concealed the source of uranium, which RTZ deny; second that he believed in trade as a way of promoting international understanding ; and finally that he had made a mistake. rt has been quite a hefty mistakeAlthough outsiders are not allowed la. to Rossing and all information about the mine is barred by South Africa's Atomic EnergY, Act, I did learn in the neighbouring town of Swakopmund that this is already the largest mine in the world ; that production will scoot be increased by underground mining; that a least two even larger uranium mines are to be opened nearby; and that RTZ has staked. out claims all over South West Africa. All this means that South West Africa has_ become the world's largest producer of uranium during a time when the price of the metal has risen from $6 to $35 a pound and

seems certain to go on rising because of its value as a source of fuel. As far as one can make out, uranium may soon surpass gold and diamonds as a source of South African wealth.

Besides making South Africa immensely rich, the RTZ mine has had other results Which might surprise Benn and his admirers. To provide the water for the mine, RTZ have had to pipe from an underground lake near Walvis Bay, causing conservationists to fear that South West Africa's water reserves may disappear in a few years. Already there are plans to pipe water south from the Kunene River, using a system of canals that would virtually wipe out one of the three finest game reserves in Africa. There are other 'environmental' risks from the production of uranium, admitted recently by Dennis Etheridge, chairman of A.nglo-American's gold and uranium division in an interview with the Johannesburg Sunday Times (30 January): 'Their [the ecologists') main complaint is that waste from uranium production is radioactive and therefore dangerous to health and the land. Although Mr Etheridge sees opposition by the ecologists hampering production ill countries such as Australia, he does not envisage this situation in South Africa.'

Since the Missing mine is kept in secrecy, n°hodY knows whether the labour force there has suffered in health. Nor do we know whether RTZ pays its black employees the S. ame wage rates it claims for its employees the Republic of South Africa. Evidently trie Ovambos employed there cannot be altogether satisfied as they went on a long strike last year. Nevertheless there is no shortage of applicants for employment at the Rossing Uranium Ltd Recruiting Office, in ,,SwakoPmund—sandwiched between the o_alon Cherie Ladies Hairdressers and the De.sert Inn Restaurant, 'speciality Western Fried Chicken.' . The mine has also had the effect of hugely Irtcreasing the number of whites in the coastal part of South West Africa. This thin stretch of bleak coast, strewn with wrecked shiPs, was virtually uninhabited until the discovery of its diamond wealth. The largest town

, Walvis Bay, is an enclave of the

tePtiblic, and the second town, Swakopin,uncl, was until recently a seaside resort with only about 3,000 whites. in the last few Years that figure has more than doubled; a whOle new suburb has been built ; hundreds of People are meanwhile housed in caravans; and RTZ, in its effort to keep its employees Cheerful, has offered to put up £2 million to

have TV brought down to the South West coast.

At the present price of uranium RTZ earl afford such ventures, but in 1969 it tw,ould not have been possible to finance ne mine had it not been for the guaranteed

• contract from Tony Benn.

When [was last in Swakopmund, in 1971, i_oe and Germans dreaded the advent of the mine its employees, who, as they rightly predicted, would come mostly from Britain. NOW they are glad of the mine, partly

because of the great prosperity it has brought but still more because it has bumped up the white population. It has reinforced the feeling of whites on the coast that whatever happens up on the plateau—invasion by the Ovambos, Cubans or North Koreans—they will be impregnable, protected on one side by the daunting Namib desert and on the other by a perpetually storm-racked sea. The South African army, which is said to be trained by the Israelis in desert warfare, would have no difficulty in beating off all invaders. In Swakopmund, Germans, Afrikaners and English all seem to believe that if no solution is reached at the Turnhalle talks, the coastal strip can turn itself into a kind of Kuwait or Abu Dhabi, financed by diamonds and uranium. All they need is people, who are provided by the RTZ mine.

A fitter from Sunderland, who claims to earn £300 a week at Rossing, explained to me why he had left England four years ago: 'I was buying a house on a mortgage and buying a car on HP. Then came the miners' strike. I was put out of work and lost the deposit on my car. I've nothing against unions but what they are doing in England is something else. I didn't want to go to Australia because they've got union troubles too. I've only once been back to England, when Sunderland played in the Cup Final. I flew back for three days but I hated London. It was full of blacks. I think there's going to be a bloodbath in South Africa and when it comes I'll send my wife and children home. But I'll stay and fight.'

In a book I wrote about RTZ, River of Tears, published in 1972, 1 suggested that the Rossing mine might provide South Aft ica with the means of making nuclear weapons. This year there have been reports in American newspapers that South Africa could make and may already have made nuclear weapons. Whether these are made from uranium actually mined in her territory does not matter: the wealth of !tossing, added to wealth of other minerals, has made it easy to buy all the materials and the skills for any means of defence.

The whites won power and prosperity in South Africa out of the wealth beneath its soil. It is probable that as long as the minerals are available to be mined, the whites will try to stay on. This might not be possible in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, surrounded on all sides by unfriendly blacks, but SWAPO, the Cubans and the United Nations would have a hard job capturing Swakopmund and its neighbouring mines. Historians may come to see that Tony Benn has done more than any man since Rhodes for the sake of white supremacy in South Africa.