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GLASS HOUSES IN SOUTH AFRICA
The expressions of pious outrage which greeted the admission by the South African government that it passed money to In- katha clearly demonstrate that, even now, few people grasp what is at stake in South Africa. The task is not to create a sea- green incorruptible polity but to seek a post-apartheid settlement which will pre- vent economic catastrophe under condi- tions of reasonable political freedom. There is little room for error as far as the economy is concerned: in 25 years' time there will be 50 million blacks in South Africa, and misconceived economic experi- mentation will result very swiftly in the kind of pictures which presently assail us from too large a part of Africa.
The Nationalist Party has played dirty, but there is not a single aspect of its behaviour in this matter at which the ANC is entitled to point the finger.
That the Inkatha movement is often brutally violent is undoubtedly true, but the ANC has itself resorted on many occasions to horrific violence to impose its will. Nelson Mandela himself has admitted that the ANC, where it has obtained local power, has tortured dissidents; there are well-attested accounts of ANC prison camps in Angola and Tanzania. If Inkatha has often attacked the ANC without reason, only someone who was maliciously naive would imagine that it has never happened the other way round. But Inkatha is a tribal organisation, catering only to the Zulus, and therefore the South African government, in support- ing it financially, has resorted — so it is maintained — to the old and vicious tactic of divide and rule. There is a measure of truth in this; but the extent to which the ANC itself, especially in its leadership, is an alliance between hard-line communists and Xhosa aristocrats is insufficiently appreci- ated by those who, for the last three or four decades, have blindly denied the import- ance of the tribal factor in African politics. It is inconceivable that a subvention alone could produce the obvious hostility be- tween Inkatha and the ANC.
But it is when the question of the subvention itself is considered that the apotheosis of absurdity is reached. The ANC is an organisation which has for
decades received not hundreds of thousands but tens of millions of dollars from external sources, practically all of them morally disreputable. If necessity is pleaded, Inkatha may plead it as well as the ANC; if it is the moral quality of the donors that distinguishes the ANC from Inkatha, the distinction is a vanishingly fine one. The Scandinavian governments, hopelessly out of their depth in Africa, supported Nyerere's removal at gunpoint of millions of Tanzanian peasants from their ancestral lands, an eviction every bit as violent and cruel as that of South African blacks from their locations. The Scandinavian seal of approval in Africa is therefore scant recommendation.
All this pales into moral insignificance
however, compared with the acceptance over decades of huge subsidies from the Soviet Union, at a time when that country was under the sway of the most complete tyranny known to history, compared with which apartheid was but a bonne bouche. Even now, the ANC has not shaken off its adherence to the benighted ideals of the Stalinists: only last week, Joe Slovo, a man of great influence within the ANC, up- braided Gorbachev for throwing out the baby with the bathwater, there being no other candidate for the role of baby than the monopoly of the Communist Party.
None of this, however, disqualifies the ANC from playing a part in post-apartheid South Africa. It derives its right not from its moral qualities, but simply because it represents, however disastrously, the aspirations of a considerable part of the population. Likewise with Inkatha: it has more than a million members, and there- fore cannot be excluded from any settle- ment, however much money it has taken from the government.
The reason the Nationalist Party's sub- vention to Inkatha has been seized upon with such joyous indignation is that it gives renewed hope to those who want to see a totalitarian utopia in South Africa, The mechanism for the imposition of such a utopia stands ready and waiting: the ANC's thoroughly odious Cultural Desk, for example, is already pronouncing on such questions as whether it is politically acceptable for Afrikaans-speaking South Africans to write in their own language. By trying to cast doubt on the eligibility of either Inkatha or the government to negotiate about anything, the ANC and its supporters are implying that it alone has the moral right to form a future govern- ment: an eventuality which may confident- ly be expected to issue in disaster.
The fact that the Nationalist Party has thought it necessary at all to support a black political movement illustrates how completely apartheid has been superseded in South Africa. Would Malan, Strydom or Verwoerd have subsidised Buthulezi in the hope of forming an electoral alliance with him? The best — perhaps only — hope for South Africa is that some such alliance should be formed.
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