SOUTH AFRICA'S WHITE REVOLT

A. R. Kenny finds the great threat

comes not from black miners but from right-wing white workers

Eastern Transvaal THE South African revolution is coming but everybody is looking the wrong way. The black miners' strike once again turned the heads of South Africa-watchers in the wrong direction. Our little Eastern Trans- vaal fastness made the main international news with a violent incident at the coal mine that supplies our power station. There was no such interest in the far more ominous event in May of this year, the white election. This election revealed with chilling clarity the most dangerous fact of South African politics: politically white South Africa is divided not by language, not as between town and country, not by region — but by class. All white opposition to apartheid comes from the rich middle class; the white working class is rock solid in favour of it. Throughout the country there is now a great tidal movement of white workers towards the extreme pro- apartheid parties, a movement compared with which the antics of the ANC are a sideshow and which more than anything else menaces the future of South Africa.

The easiest way to see this is to superim- pose a map of the white political consti- tuencies upon an economic/geological map of South Africa. You will see immediately that support for the liberal Progressive Reform Party (PFP) is reduced to a few rich middle-class constituencies in the big cities, the swimming-pool constituencies. You will see that support for the Conserva- tive Party (the CP, the extreme pro- Apartheid party that attacks P.W. Botha's National Party Government as being too liberal) follows the coal seams. Where there is coal there are mines and heavy industry and a white industrial proletariat which now votes CP. The map will show you, too, that the most enthusiastic sup- port for hard-line apartheid comes not from the farmlands but the industrialised areas.

Throughout the economy the divide is the same. The boardrooms and reception areas are open to all races; the factory floors have 'White Men' and `Non-White Men' lavatories. The senior managers might vote PFP; the welders and fitters used to vote for the Nationalist Govern- ment and are now voting CP. White university students are trickling into the multi-racial United Democratic Front (UDF); white workers are pouring into the fascist AWB (Afrikaner Weerstands- beweging — Afrikaner Resistance Move- ment). No `neo' is required in front of `fascist'. The AWB is a straightforward fascist party: nationalist, racist, socialist and big on the historical destiny of the yolk. It is also, I believe, the fastest growing political party in Africa.

The Conservative Party and the AWB form an alliance which in May successfully dislodged the PFP as the official Opposi- tion and which won just under 30 per cent of the white vote compared with the PFP's 14 per cent. The AWB, which coyly describes itself as a 'cultural organisation', does not stand in elections but works for the candidates of the CP. Many of its members wear a uniform and many more are armed; they vary from fascist bully- boys to mild and avuncular working men of the kind I met as shop stewards and foremen when I worked in Lancashire. The CP is led by the prim Dr Andries Treur- nicht, an ex-clergyman: it provides respec- tability, reassurances and bogus scholarly justifications for apartheid. The AWB is lead by the fire-breathing Eugene Terre'- Blanche, an ex-policeman with a voice like a bugle, regarded as the finest mob orator in South Africa: it provides muscle, excite- ment and organisation.

The class divide over race in South Africa is far wider than any class divide in Britain. All South Africans know this. During my Cape Town childhood, I soon became aware that there were two kinds of white people. There were 'Us', who spoke properly, held our knives correctly, went to university and were nice to the blacks; and there were 'Them', who spoke in uncouth accents, held their knives and forks like pens, went to trade schools and were nasty to the blacks. In adolescence, when canvassing for the liberal Progressive Party (the forerunner of the PFP), I knew that the bigger the house, the more friend- ly the reception. If there were a Mercedes in the drive and a swimming pool in the garden, an anti-apartheid vote was a near certainty. On the other hand, if the house had a tin roof, no garden and a broken car on the pavement, then I knew I risked physical assault if I knocked on the door and announced I was canvassing for the anti-apartheid party.

This is a world-wide phenomenon. There is nothing at all unusual about the racial attitudes of white working men in South Africa. I worked for some years at a factory in the north of England and I am now working at a power station in the Eastern Transvaal, and in their attitudes towards race, and indeed everything else, I find the white worker from Lancashire and the white worker from the Transvaal to be as like as two peas in a pod. Nor is it a modern phenomenon. One of the first actions of Wat Tyler's men when they stormed London in 1381 was to kill the foreign artisans.

Some of the reasons for this are clear. The jobs of white workers are more threatened by the blacks than the jobs of white professionals. But there are other deeper, irrational reasons, which no doubt sociologists could explain if they could bring themselves to investigate the prob- lem — or even admit its existence. And of course it is not that the working class is inherently more racist than the middle class but that its racism takes a different and more forthright form. In Britain race is a minor problem which has been 'solved' by a series of immigration laws which have effectively prevented her tiny black population (less than 5 per cent of the total) from increasing further. In South Afirca, where race is the dominant prob- lem and where no such neat 'solution' exists, the question of the white class divide over race is urgent and full of peril.

By far the most serious insurrection that the South African state has ever faced happened in 1922 when the country was faced with an armed rebellion of white mineworkers. The workers rose up in arms when the mine owners on the Rand de- cided to allow black miners into jobs until then reserved for whites. The Smuts gov- ernment backed the mine owners and had to use troops and artillery to put down the workers' rebellion, with a large loss of life. It was a bitter and bloody struggle which makes the British general strike in 1926 seem tame and insignificant by comparison and which completely eclipses any black uprising in this century. Some of the white workers were communists and their in- teresting rallying cry was 'Workers of the World, Unite and Fight for a White South Africa!' Some died on the gallows singing the Red Flag — working-class martyrs dedicated to apartheid.

The Nationalist Party that came to pow- er in 1948 carried the mantle of these martyrs. It had two main causes: Afrikaner nationalism and support for the poor whites, the working-class whites. (It hap- pens that the majority of white workers are Afrikaners.) It swiftly set about building the formal structures of apartheid, which to a large extent exist to protect white workers against black competition. The Nationalist government played the part of an all-powerful white trade union, with the curious result that today the white trade unions proper are themselves very weak (except on the mines), much weaker in- deed then the black unions.

Over the last decade or so the National- ist Party has lost its raw working-class appeal and has become gentrified, prosper- ous and reform-minded. Many of the men at our power station regard P. W. Botha as a `kaffirboetie' (`nigger-lover') and in- creasingly the NP are regarded as a bunch of rich careerists who, at the behest of the international community, are preparing to sell out the white working man to the blacks.

My employer, Escom (Electricity Supply Commission), is now an 'equal opportuni- ties employer' and has rejected job re- servation for whites. I attended a meeting of our shift when the production manager explained the 'New Escom' to the oper- ators, black and white. He explained that all promotion would be strictly on merit, that colour discrimination was a thing of the past and that racial terms such as taas' and 'boy' were now forbidden. All admir- able stuff, of course, but it came as a decree from on high rather than a proposal for negotiation. I watched the white work- ers as he spoke. Fearing the loss of their jobs if they dissented, they listened in silence, their faces like stone. That week there would be another hundred new recruits for the AWB. In the May election the lads voted overwhelmingly for the CP.

hite workers, feeling betrayed by W the NP, which has looked after them since 1948, and without effective unions of their own, are now turning to the CP and the AWB, mainly because there is nowhere else for them to turn. Liberal opinion, at home and abroad, shuns them completely. The ghastly snobs who read the Guardian in England or the Weekly Mail in SA try to ignore the white workers of South Africa altogether. South African liberals and socialists, who find blacks exotic and piti- able, find the white workers merely vulgar and ignorant. Various pilgrimages of fore- ign anti-apartheiders, such as the fatuous Eminent Persons Group, who claim to consult 'all shades of opinion in South Africa' (by which they really mean a bishop, a businessman and Winnie Mande- la), never consult representatives of the white working class — in many ways the most important 'shade of opinion' in South Africa. The worst snobs in this regard are the Marxists, for whom the white worker is a forbidden non-subject. It sometimes seems that the only thing which unites Marxists the world over is a deep loathing for the working classes.

However, the Nationalist government might well have managed to push through racial reforms and keep its working-class support but for one crucial new circum- stance: sanctions. Sanctions have been brilliantly successful in strengthening the fascist parties and in damaging prospects for ending apartheid. When the NP began its programme of reform, it promised that white living standards would not suffer. In fact the reforms were immediately fol- lowed by sanctions (a line of causation that the fascist parties have gleefully pointed out) and living standards among the poorer whites have fallen. According to the latest official statistics I have seen (September 1985), the average white South African wage is £473 a month (£5,680 a year). However, this average is heavily skewed by a few very rich whites — nearly all liberals — and most white workers earn less than this, many much less. In real terms they are becoming poorer. And as they become poorer and feel themselves more threatened by a hostile outside world, the white workers are turning for protection and understanding to the AWB.

South Africa faces two, and only two, possible outcomes for as far into the future as it is possible to see: democracy or white tyranny. There is in South Africa some- thing that has never existed in any other part of Africa: a white nation — rather than a handful of white expatriates. This nation is massively too strong to be over- thrown by black revolution. Democracy can only be established with the consent of the white working class, without whom industry could not operate and whose sons and brothers fill the lower ranks of the police and armed forces.

This consent is obtainable. In all my conversations with the workers and oper- ators up here I find them reasonable men even if their racial perceptions are different from my own. Their relations with the black workers are usually easy and cheerful — in sharp contrast to the excruciatingly awkward relations between liberal white academics and black students at the Uni- versity of Cape Town, where I studied. Like working men everywhere they are immune from folie de grandeur and they do not dream about a Great White Empire in Africa. It's the little things that matter to them. They would be quite happy to consider power-sharing but not social in- tegration. For them the important thing is to keep their whites-only schools and pubs and lavatories. If an arrangement could be made to allow white workers to live and learn and drink and defecate among their ain folk, and to give them assurances about a decent wage (say half the wage of a British worker), then they would not ob- ject to having black men, even a majority of them, in the highest offices of govern- ment. But this requires new ideas and new attitudes.

This is all a practical argument rather than a moral one. Black workers are more worthy of our sympathy because they are worse off than the white workers. But white workers are more worthy of our attention because they, unlike the blacks, have the potential for mustering irresist- ible industrial, political and physical force. (When the black workers at the mine which supplies coal to our power station were nearly all on strike, our coal flow from the mine continued unaffected. If there were a strike of black workers at our power station, we would not lose a MW- hour. A white strike at either plant would shut it down instantly and completely.) When I climb onto the roof of our power station I can see at least four others in the distance. Over the horizon lie the other stations of the Transvaal and the huge oil-from-coal plants. This area, which pro- vides over 80 per cent of South Africa's electricity and all of her oil from coal, now lies under the political control of the CP and the AWB, and the control is spreading into the rest of South African industry. In the pits and factories and turbine halls about me I seem to see the spectre of 1922. The shadow of the AWB now falls over the whole of northern South Africa from the Kalahari to the Swaziland border and it is lengthening southwards. Unless the debate about South Africa changes, there are dark days ahead.