The New York Review Abroad (15 page)

Black intellectuals who might stand in for these have been detained one by one, even while whites of unlikely political shades continue to affirm a fervent desire to talk to blacks, just
talk
to them—as if 300 years of oppression were a family misunderstanding that could be explained away, and as if everyone did not know, in the small dark room where he meets himself, exactly what is wrong with South African “race relations.”

The government leaders refuse to meet the Black People’s Convention, perhaps in the belief that by not recognizing Black Consciousness organizations the power of blacks to disrupt their own despised conditions of life and (at the very least) the economy that sustains the white one will cease to exist. Fanonist theory of the black man as an image projected upon him by the white man takes a new twist; the white man goes to the door of his shop in central Johannesburg one September morning this year and fails to recognize the black man marching down the street shouting, in his own image, “This is our country.”

The government won’t speak to the Black Parents’ Association, formed originally to finance the burial of Soweto children in June. In this ghastly bond, the association moved on under the leadership of Nelson Mandela’s wife and Dr. Manas Buthelezi, an important Black Consciousness leader about to be consecrated Lutheran Bishop of Johannesburg. It became a united front combining youthful black consciousness inspiration with the convictions of older people who followed the African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress.

Finally, the government does not consider speaking to the militant students themselves who are still effectively in leadership, sometimes preventing their parents from going to work (two successful strikes in Johannesburg). Daily and determinedly, they pour into the gutters the shebeen liquor they consider their elders have long allowed themselves to be unmanned by.

Meanwhile, since June 926 black schoolchildren have received punishments ranging from fines or suspended sentences to jail (five years for a seventeen-year-old boy) and caning (five cuts with a light cane for an eleven-year-old who gave the black power salute, shouted at the police, and stoned a bus). They are some of the 4,200 people charged with offenses arising out of the riots, including incitement, arson, public violence, and sabotage. Many students are also among the 697 people, including Mrs. Winnie Mandela, detained in jail for “security reasons”; the other week one hanged himself by his shirt in the Johannesburg prison, an old fort two kilometers from the white suburban house where I write this.
²
Several students, not twenty years old, have just begun that reliable apprenticeship for African presidents, exile and education in Britain. When, in September, Mr. Vorster met blacks with whom he
will
talk—his appointed Bantustan leaders—he would not discuss urban unrest or agree to a national conference of blacks and whites to decide what ought to be done about it.

There is a one-man commission of inquiry into the riots, sitting now. Mr. Justice Cillie, the white judge who constitutes it, complains that few people actually present at these events have volunteered evidence. In fact, the schoolchildren and students themselves boycott it, and for the rest, South Africans’ faith in the efficacy of commissions to lead to positive action has long gone into the trash basket along with the recommendations the government steadily rejects. The Cillie
Commission keeps extending the period in which it will sit, as the riots continue to be part of the present and not a matter of calm recollection. January 27 next year is the latest limit announced. Historical analogies are easily ominous. But a commission of inquiry was Czar Nicholas II’s way of dealing with the implications of the “unrest” of Bloody Sunday, the beginning of the 1905 revolution.

A chain-store owner whose business has been disrupted by strikes and the gutting of a store has burst out of the conventions of his annual report to shareholders to say, “Decades of selfishness and smugness by South African whites is the principal reason for widespread unrest among blacks.”

Yet most changes suggested by whites do not approach a call for a national convention, with its implication of a new constitution and the end of white supremacy. Black certainty that
nothing
will bring equality without power is dismantled by whites into component injustices they can admit and could redress without touching the power structure. The Federated Chamber of Industries calls for job “reservations” discriminating against blacks in industry to be ended, and has the support of the most powerful trade union group and the opposition parties. The National Development and Management Foundation goes farther and calls for the ending of business and residential apartheid as well. Afrikaner big business, government supporters all, in their
Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut
ask for blacks to be given “greater” rights in their own urban areas and training to increase their skills.

Although the Progressive-Reform Party has demanded a national convention and the release of all people from detention, it was still necessary, before its 1976 congress agreed to change its education policy to enforced desegregation, for Helen Suzman to remind rank-and-file members that the separate-but-equal dictum for education had been “thrown out by the United States twenty years ago.”

With unprecedentedly strong criticism of the government coming from its own newspapers and prominent Afrikaners as well as the opposition, it is baffling to read that at the same time 60 percent of whites—an increase of 5 percent over the majority gained by the government in the 1974 election—support Mr. Vorster’s National Party. The reliability of this particular poll is in some doubt; but perhaps the contradiction is not so unlikely after all. It is possible to see a dire necessity for change and fear it so greatly that one runs to give oneself to the father figure who will forbid one to act.

For months the white political opposition parties—Progressive-Reform, United Party, and Democratic Party—have been trying to agree to some sort of realignment. If a liberal front comes about, it will trample the old sand castle fort of the United Party, the conservative official parliamentary opposition, already eroded by the departure of most of its politically vigorous members to the Progressive-Reform Party.

The numerical strength of such a front cannot be measured until it is known whether a major part of the United Party, which still polled 31.49 percent in the 1974 elections, will enter it alongside the Progressive-Reform Party, in the last few years grown from a pressure group to a real presence in parliament, with twelve seats and 6.25 percent of the vote. (The crankish Democratic Party has a minute following.) Only when the extent of United Party commitment is revealed will it be possible to estimate roughly what percentage of the 40 percent who voted against the government in the last election are liberals. There are rumors that some disaffected
verlaigte
(“enlightened”) National Party MPs may defect to the front too.

The declared aim of the front is to protect the rights of whites while giving Blacks, Coloreds, and Indians a direct say in government—which careful phrasing suggests its policy will be to the right
of the present Progressive-Reform Party. The spectral raison d’être of such a realignment is surely not the chance of ousting Vorster’s government but of getting ready a white “negotiating party” to treat with blacks on a shared power basis when he finds he can no longer govern. The viewpoint of enlightened white politics now includes urgently the wide angle of acceptability to blacks, although they have no vote to be wooed. When Mr. Vorster can no longer govern, it is not likely any other white government will be able to.

No one knows whether the Bantustan leaders are, in their different circumstances, preparing themselves for a particular role on that day. They meet at a Holiday Inn at Johannesburg’s airport, exactly like Holiday Inns all over the world, down to its orgy-sized beds and cozy smell of French fried potatoes piped along with muzak, but deriving its peculiar status as neutral country outside apartheid from the time when it was the first hotel here to be declared “international”: not segregated—for foreign blacks, anyway.

From there the Bantustan leaders demand “full human rights for blacks and not concessions.” With the exception of the Transkei and Bophutha Tswana—the former having celebrated the homeland brand of independence on October 26, the latter soon to do so—they reject ethnic partitions of South Africa. Which means they walk out on the many-mansions theory of apartheid, abandoning the white government which set them up inside; and they identify themselves as part of the liberation movement for an undivided South Africa. They present themselves to the black population in general as
black
leaders, not tribal leaders. Is this a bid for power? If Nelson Mandela were to come back from the prison island, would they step aside for him? Has the most imposing of them, Gatsha Buthelezi, a following cutting across his Zulu tribal lines?

Whites believe so. He attracts large audiences when he speaks in cosmopolitan black townships. Many blacks say no; and the African
National Congress in exile continues to deride the Bantustan leaders as collaborators, making no exceptions. Other blacks imply that the best of the Bantustan men are keeping warm the seats of leaders in prison. Among politically articulate blacks, this year’s is their (Southern hemisphere) hot summer of brotherhood. Tsietsi Mashinini, the student leader who fled the police to exile in Britain, suggests that the tremendous force his movement shows itself to represent is loyal to Mandela. It does not seem to matter to blacks whether it is a Gatsha Buthelezi or anyone else who is the one to say to whites, as he has, “The future is a Black future and we Blacks want our future now.”

From the Market Theatre, newly opened in what was the Covent Garden of Johannesburg, comes a strange echo—Cucurucu, Kokol, Polpoch, and Rossignol, asylum clowns in Peter Weiss’s
Marat/Sade
, singing: “
Give us our rights
 … 
and we don’t care how—We want—our re-vo-lu-tion—NOW
.” The author granted performances on condition everyone could see the work and has donated his royalties to a Soweto riot victims fund. His play has never been performed before in a city atmosphere such as ours, it has never been heard as we hear it.

During the “quiet” years of successful police repression, before the young emptied the Dutch courage of shebeens down the drain and sent through people’s veins the firewater of a new spirit, there have been political trials in progress continually in South Africa. Not only those of blacks who have left the country for military training and re-entered illegally, but also those reflecting aspects of the struggle against apartheid carried on by an intellectual elite.

While the riots have been taking place, two young white university lecturers in Cape Town have given the black power clench and, avowing “no regrets,” have accepted long sentences under the Terrorism and Internal Security acts; their uncompromising personal suffering
serves as proof of solidarity with blacks that must be granted even by those whites who abhor the white far left. In Johannesburg I have been to hear the trial of four white university students and a lecturer accused of trying “to change South Africa” by organizing black workers, who have no recognized trade unions. The five were charged under the Suppression of Communism Act, and the state’s principal evidence consisted of papers read at a seminar.