South African paradoxes

Richard West

The 'Anti-Racism Year' of 1984 will almost certainly concentrate on hostili- ty to South Africa. Already Ken Liv- ingstone, the head of the Greater London Council, has drawn up a black list of actors and actresses who have performed in South Africa and now will be banned from premises of the GLC. Oddly enough, this annoyed the actors' union Equity, although they were responsible a few years ago for one of the most ridiculous protests against apartheid. They tried to ban a Xhosa song and dance troupe on the grounds that the work could have gone to local black per- formers, presumably of West Indian origin. Can one imagine it argued that a Welsh choir might comprise Italians and Poles, because they are all whites? The amazing Anthony Wedgwood Senn writes with ap- proval in the Guardian of picketers outside

the South African Embassy forming themselves into a 'Pavement University', which hands out degrees on the spot to those with correct opinions. And the new Bishop of London has called South Africa's system un-Christian.

What makes South Africa unpopular is that, by the misfortune of history and geography, it includes within its frontiers almost every kind of racial disharmony known to the world. There are, for a start, two different nations of Europeans, the English and Dutch, sworn enemies in the 17th century and, two centuries later, over the Boer War. Hostility between the English-speakers and Afrikaners still per- sists, though it is largely ignored by the,out- side world.

As I tried to suggest in my last two articles on this subject, people who talk

about 'racism' often confuse two separate attitudes. There is hostility to an entrepreneurial class such as the Jews or, in parts of Asia and Africa, towards Chinese and Indians. There is also the racial superiority felt or claimed by Europeans to people of darker colour, and in particular by the people of former slave-owning coun- tries towards the descendants of those slaves. That is the 'racism' that still persists, more strongly than ever, in the United States, and now is growing in Britain. South Africa suffers from all kinds of 'racism', though less badly, in some respects, than do Britain and the United States.

There is now less anti-semitic feeling in South Africa than there was a hundred or fifty years ago. The high involvement of Jews in the gold and diamond mines pro- voked much hostility from English and Afrikaners alike. Johannesburg was nicknamed 'Jewburg', the Oppenheimers 'Hoggenheimers'. Thousands more Jews came as refugees from the pogroms of eastern Europe and Hitler's Reich.

Although some of the early Afrikaners, like Paul Kruger, preferred the Jews to the gen- tile English, some of the National Party is still anti-semitic. So was much of the trade union and socialist movement. A Jewish South African friend recounts how he was taunted and beaten up as a child by Afrikaner boys. That was during the second world war when many Afrikaners rooted for Hitler. Today, although most South

African Jews probably vote for an opposi- tion party, and are critical of apartheid,

they fear the result of 'one man, one vote" This is inspired partly by self-interest, part- ly by fellow-feeling with Israel which also suffers the odium of its neighbours and the world at large.

The Afrikaner politican J.B. Vorster, who started off virtually as a Nazi, was later to visit Israel as the South Africa's prime minister. I noticed that when the South African army made a punitive raid on ter- rorists in Lesotho, this action was criticised

by some of the Afrikaner press but approv- ed by the newspapers owned by the Op- penheimer group. The analogy had been made, rightly or wrongly, between South Africa and israel; Lesotho and Lebanon.

The Asians in South Africa have fared less well than the Jews but better than their compatriots in other parts of the continent.

They do not enjoy the vote at the moment and probably would get no power under the government's new constitutional plan. They are subject to the absurd and cruel apartheid town planning that forces than to remove from districts such as the old Johannesburg market to drab suburban ghettoes. The Indians and the less numerous Chinese dislike the South

African government but they have not suf- fered the persecution, expropriation and ex-

pulsion endured, by Asians in Uganda and to a lesser extent in Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia.

The saddest racial group in South Africa are the Coloureds, descendants of sexual

Union between the original Dutch settlers and girl slaves from the islands of what is now Indonesia. Like the African slaves who were shipped to the Americas, these Col- oureds lost their names, language, family Sense and religion, and therefore a sense of identity. Most of them adopted the language and Calvinist faith of the Afrikaners; it was therefore especially bitter for them to lose their few remaining Political rights, and often their homes, under the laws of apartheid. The plight of the Coloureds today is comparable to that of the freed slaves in the southern states of America who found themselves victims of Insult, Jim Crow and segregation; except that in South Africa these things have been legalised.

The position of the South African Jews, Asians and Coloureds can sensibly be compared to similar groups in other parts of the world. But the relationship of the black with other South African peoples is something peculiar. The whites who went to South Africa were not imperialists like those who went to west and east Africa at the end of the 19th century. They went as settlers, like the Pilgrim Fathers, or like later emigrants to Australia. But South Africa is in no way comparable with the United States and Australia, where the few aboriginals were driven away and almost Wiped out. Australia, being an island, was able to enforce its ban on non-white im- migrants, the 'white Australia policy', as it was called. The United States until recently did the same. The white settlers in South Africa, on the other hand, had found themselves on a continent with a vast in- digenous population. While the settlers stayed in the Cape, where the few aboriginals were Bushmen and Hottentots, there was no clash of interests; but when the Boers started their trek east and north, followed later by English farmers and Miners, there began a series of cattle and and wars with Xhosas, Sothos, Zulus and the rest. During that time there was also a mass movement of black people southwards.

The South blacks, as distinct from Col- oureds, were never a slave population. A small proportion were farm or house slaves until this was banned by the British Parlia- ment; but there was no transportation of slaves or plantation slavery. When sugar Planting began in Natal, the owners brought indentured labourers from India. The blacks did not like this work nor, at first, mining. In the first decade of this cen- tury, Chinese indentured workers came to the gold mines. Even today, the mining companies like to recruit African labour from outside the Republic. It is often said that South Africa pro- spered only because of the cheap black labour. It is true that some of the gold Mines, because of their low-grade ore, Might not have been profitable without lOvv-paid miners. But most of South Africa's wealth from corn, sugar, fruit, Wine, coal, uranium, diamonds, platinum

and manufacture might just as well have been produced by whites. In Australia whites do all the mining; they even cut cane on the Queensland sugar plantations, and very efficiently too. It is also said that white South Africans could not live without black servants. The Australians have survived perfectly well without servants. Far from depending upon the blacks, most white South Africans frequently wish that they had their beautiful country to themselves.

Critics of South Africa compare it, un- favourably, with the United States where people of diverse nations have blended in a 'melting pot'; or at any rate that was the theory. The South Africans have never aspired to be a multi-racial democracy. Even the two white nations live in separate districts and sometimes speak only their own language. However strange it may sound to us, white South Africans do tend to think of the blacks as immigrants from their tribal homelands; as being foreigners in the white-built cities. Hence the uncon- vincing attempts by pro-government anthropologists and historians to prove that the whites preceded the blacks to most parts of South Africa. Hence the attempts by black nationalist politicians to play down the tribal differences of the Africans and to show them as one black nation.

Theorists talk of African or just black 'consciousness'. The idea had appealed to some South African blacks like Steve Biko. It appealed still more to negroes in the United States and the West Indies, who yearn to find some identity in the land of their forebears. Thus some of them go back to Africa only to find themselves strangers with no ties of language, culture or even appearance. Some cut their faces with tribal marks, though not knowing to what tribe their ancestors may have belonged.

The real crime done to Africa was not imperialism or 'racism' or even modern apartheid but the transportation of men and women to slavery, where they were rob- bed of their names, family, religion and sense of identity. The blacks in South Africa still enjoy these, the essential human rights, which are often denied in other countries today. The treatment of blacks in South Africa is brutal, unkind and unfair but I cannot think of it as an evil like the former slavery in the Americas, or the pre- sent slavery in the camps of the Soviet Union. The undoubted racial neurosis of many South Africans has less to do with the blacks than with guilt about their bastardis- ed half-cousins, the Coloureds.