The Defiant White Tribe

"Hoor, hoor [Hear, hear]!" shouted the square-jawed Afrikaner farmers and their dutiful wives, as one speaker after another referred to the guest of honor as "a gladiator," "a saint" and "a savior." Dour and unsmiling, he sat stolidly, barely nodding his acknowledgment of the eulogies. When at last he took the platform, surrounded by the orange, white and blue posters of the National Party, which has ruled South Africa for 29 years, Balthazar Johannes Vorster, 61, could almost have been stepping to a throne.

After the wild applause there was sudden silence: a pause of anticipation, and die volk were not disappointed. Within a minute the Prime Minister had gained the first murmurs of acclaim; within five minutes he had brought the crowd to its feet. When he wanted to drive home a point, it was not a jab but a double uppercut as he thrust both fists in the air. And when he wanted the world to listen--as he did last week--John Vorster switched from Afrikaans to deliberate and slightly accented English.

"There are those in the world outside," he thundered in this speech to his constituents in the Transvaal town of Heidelberg, "who believe they can bring South Africa to its knees [long pause] with a mandatory arms boycott [pause]. I tell them [long pause]they have another guess coming." The audience went wild. A National Party worker, standing 6 ft. 6 in. in his bush boots, pounded the shoulder of the spectator next to him. "Man," he shouted, "this is the man! This is the Churchill of the platteland!"

The audience was composed almost exclusively of members of the worried, defiant, 2.6 million-strong "white tribe" of Africa, whose Dutch forefathers first landed in Cape Town in 1652. More than any other man since their legendary 19th century Boer chieftain, "Oom Paul" Kruger, Vorster is their accepted leader. Said a party worker at last week's rally: "The people of this constituency have followed Mr. Vorster's career and been loyal to him in his worst and his best times. This time it has never been better."

Never better for Vorster's Nationalists, that is; the political arm of the Afrikaners held 123 of the 171 seats in the previous Parliament, and it stands to gain as many as 15 more in the national election on Nov. 30. The opposition parties that traditionally held the loyalty of South Africa's English-speaking whites are in disarray. As has happened so often in their tortured history, the Afrikaners once again are responding to threats from without and within by going into the laager (literally, camp)--an expression from the days of the voortrekkers, South Africa's Boer pioneers, who would drive their ox wagons into a circle to fight off Zulu or Xhosa attackers. Vorster's campaign slogan is the same today as it was in the last election, in 1974: "He made South Africa safe. Keep it that way." That rallying cry, which is also the central theme of Afrikaner history, is one of self-preservation, and it has always worked.

But how long will it continue to work? Never before has South Africa, the last firm bastion of white rule on a predominantly black continent, been so threatened. Nearby Angola and Mozambique, once Portuguese colonial buffer states, have become independent, leftist, black-ruled nations committed to helping the struggle against white rule in South Africa. One way or another, Ian Smith's Rhodesia, where blacks outnumber whites 22 to 1, is destined for majority rule. So is Namibia (South West Africa), the huge, mineral-rich territory that South Africa has governed (originally under a 1920 League of Nations mandate), although an independence formula is still to be agreed upon by the territory's various political groups, including the militant South West Africa People's Organization.

The main problem is South Africa itself--and the future of the Afrikaner. Since Vorster's National Party gained power in the 1948 elections, it has been committed to the oppressive policy known as apartheid (separateness). In theory, apartheid means that South Africa's 4.3 million whites, 18.6 million blacks, 2.5 million mixed-blood "coloreds" and 750,000 Asians will proceed along separate lines of development under the government's benign guidance. In practice, apartheid has meant the disfranchisement of a huge majority, which is subjected to one of the most repressive and discriminatory systems of racial laws in the world.

One unanswered question is how long the regulatory machinery of government, which many white South Africans fear is turning their country into a police state, can control unrest. In June 1976, student-inspired riots broke out in the sprawling black suburb of Soweto, outside Johannesburg; urban black unrest has continued sporadically across the country ever since, taking more than 600 lives. Two months ago, a young black leader, Stephen Biko, 30, died mysteriously in prison. An inquest is still pending, but there is widespread suspicion that prison beating contributed to his death. The Biko case produced further disorder, and on Oct. 19 the government responded by arresting or "banning"--a unique form of near-solitary confinement which can include house arrest--some 60 individuals, 18 organizations and two newspapers. Last week, during a house-to-house sweep through a township near Pretoria, police arrested 626 blacks on a variety of charges.

The Oct. 19 crackdown was South Africa's most severe act of repression in many years, and it produced a worldwide outcry. After debating more sweeping measures, which were vetoed by the U.S. and its Western allies, the U.N. Security Council voted to impose a mandatory arms embargo on South Africa. For the immediate future, that embargo will have only a limited effect, since South Africa is virtually self-sufficient in arms production--but it was a clear signal that the U.N., and particularly the West, is determined to take a firmer line with South Africa from now on.

If international pressure was intended to moderate the policies of the National Party and weaken its hold on South Africa, it has seemingly had the opposite effect. One South African poll suggests that the Nationalists will nearly double the vote they normally get from English-speaking whites. Even opposition leaders have joined with the government in speaking out against foreign influence on the country's domestic affairs. Colin Eglin, leader of the Progressive Federal Party, sounded almost as angry as Vorster when he denounced President Carter's firm policy toward South Africa as "appalling."

Thus foreign pressure is not in contention in the election campaign. What is at stake, ultimately, is whether the government will be able to carry on with the Afrikaners' grand scheme of apartheid--also known as "separate development" and more recently as "plural democracy." The purpose of apartheid is the preservation of the language, culture and political power of the Afrikaners--the unique white tribe on a continent of black tribes. Unlike the white settlers of Rhodesia or the French pieds-noirs of Algeria, the Afrikaners have no ties to a European motherland. After more than three centuries in South Africa, they have as much right to claim it as their true home as Canadians have to claim Ontario. That fact was recognized by black African leaders at the Lusaka conference of 1969, which acknowledged that the 4.3 million South African whites (equivalent to the population of Finland) were not colonialists.

In their mores and lifestyle, the Afrikaners--particularly in the countryside--are as authentically tribal in outlook as Zulus living in a homeland kraal. Afrikaner society is a rigid one, held together by language (Dutch-based), faith (a fundamentalist form of Calvinism) and a sense of special mission created by their hard history. Even in the large cities, Afrikaners tend to mix uneasily with English-speaking whites. In the country, they are a law and a people unto themselves. The family structure is strong and disciplined; Afrikaner youth are far less likely than their Anglo counterparts to smoke or drink. Sunday is the Lord's day; sports, cinema and TV are forsworn for lengthy sermons of a dominee at the local church. The Afrikaner can, and usually does, treat his black workers with kindness. Yet there is never a sense that the black is, or even could be, his equal; in the common view, the black is a child of God who needs to be guided to civilization by the one who knows the way--the Afrikaner.

Vorster is a product of this society as well as its chief. One of 14 children, he was born in Jamestown, in the northeastern part of the Cape province. His father was a sheep farmer. Vorster attended the University of Stellenbosch, a bastion of Afrikaner nationalism, on a scholarship. He studied psychology and law and joined the junior wing of the National Party. In the early years of World War II he helped found the Flaming Ox-Wagon, a militantly anti-British, pro-German nationalist movement. Vorster was arrested by the pro-British government in 1942 and spent 14 months in an internment camp.

After the war Vorster practiced law, dabbled in politics and in 1953 was elected to parliament from the Nigel constituency in the Transvaal, which he has represented ever since. He was named Minister of Justice in Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd's Cabinet in 1961 and succeeded his old Stellenbosch teacher as Prime Minister when Verwoerd was assassinated by a demented clerk five years later. Hard-working and singleminded, he personifies the stubborn resolution of the white tribe today.

It is one of the great ironies of South Africa that the Afrikaner, now seen as a pitiless persecutor of a black majority, has a history of struggle against oppression. During the 17th and 18th centuries, while the Cape colony was under the control of the Dutch East India Company, the earlier settlers, who by now included German immigrants and French Huguenots seeking religious freedom, were the first to suffer. They were denied land rights and subjected to fines for such offenses as allowing their cattle to stray.

The British, who seized the colony in 1795, were equally harsh overlords who regarded the Afrikaners as obstinate and inferior. Afrikaners were excluded from jury service because of their language, forced to accept English-speaking ministers in their churches and tormented by courts that encouraged black servants to give evidence against their masters.

In the mid-1830s thousands of settlers fled British rule by migrating into the interior in ox-drawn wagons. There were bitter fights between the voortrekkers and black tribes migrating from the north in search of fresh grazing land. The discovery of gold in the Transvaal in 1886 led to an invasion of white English-speaking settlers--and eventually to Afrikaner defeat in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902.

Isolated in the heartland of the Dark Continent, the Afrikaners were relatively untouched by the liberalizing forces that swept Europe and America in the 19th century. Nor were their ranks infused with the new blood of Dutch immigrants from what had long ceased to be a homeland across the seas. After the Boer War, the Afrikaners were second-class citizens in what they regarded as their only country. Their solution was to take refuge in and inspiration from their churches and societies--notably the mysterious Broederbond--which knit the community together, and to wait for a time when political power could be theirs.

That day came in 1948 when, in an upset victory, their National Party, led by Daniel Malan, defeated the United Party founded by Jan Smuts. Although the basis of national separation of the races in South Africa dates back to 1909, when the British withdrew the rights of non-whites to sit in parliament, the new government moved inexorably to spread and enforce apartheid.

Since 1948 the Afrikaner government has pushed legislation through parliament classifying the population by race, banning marriage and I sex across the color line and imposing "pass" laws that rigidly control the movement of blacks. In all, some 300 pieces of separatist legislation form the edifice of apartheid today. Local prejudices simply reinforce the letter and spirit of the laws. A minority might endure such a system without protest, but South Africa's black majority did not. In 1960 came the bloody Sharpeville riot, in which 69 were killed as police fired on a black crowd demonstrating peaceably against the pass laws. It was a shock from which South Africans--black and white--never quite recovered.

Perhaps the most degrading aspect of the system is the web of social segregation laws and customs known as petty apartheid. In this respect--unlike many others--the segregation is similar to that which existed in the U.S. South until the '60s. Petty apartheid includes everything from segregated buses to beaches and lunch counters. The government has promised to reduce the irritations of petty apartheid, and has made some progress. WHITES ONLY signs have disappeared from elevators and park benches in most cities; restaurants and hotels that are granted "international" status can now admit local blacks.

The system is shot through with absurdities. Chinese are classified as a colored subgroup; the Japanese in South Africa, who are mostly foreign businessmen, are regarded as "honorary whites"--thereby illustrating the comment of Frantz Fanon, the black radical writer, that "you are rich because you are white, but you are also white because you are rich." A black beauty queen who won a holiday at a Cape hotel was refused accommodation because the hotel did not have international status. In a reshuffle of Durban's elaborately segregated beaches, Indians took over one formerly white beach but discovered they could not use the restaurant there; its designation had not been changed.

Further liberalization of the segregation laws is promised, although the concessions, as always, will come too late to satisfy rising black aspirations. Last month urban blacks were authorized to hold 42 more kinds of jobs than before--including those of auctioneer, druggist, chiropractor and boardinghouse keeper. Officially, pay scales for black and white workers are the same; in practice, blacks earn far less than whites who hold the same jobs. A fortnight ago the government announced its intention to modify slightly the hated pass laws; henceforth blacks will be allowed to carry "travel documents" rather than the present identity books.

The centerpiece of the apartheid system is the elaborate plan to establish nine "independent" black homelands within South Africa. Eventually, all South African blacks will be given citizenship in one of these homelands, even though about half of the black population live permanently in "white" South Africa. Of these, hundreds of thousands were born in the urban townships and have rarely if ever visited, or wanted to visit, their theoretical homelands. The urban black population in South Africa is estimated at 9 million.

But no matter. The first homeland to be granted its "independence," Transkei, celebrated its first anniversary last month. Although invitations to the ceremonies were sent to most Western capitals, Pretoria was the only one to accept. Transkei's Prime Minister, Chief Kaiser Matanzima, took the occasion to attack "the rejection of our legitimacy" by the outside world. In December a second homeland, Bophuthatswana, will officially become independent, and three more are likely to follow within the next two years. The only one definitely holding out against such independence is KwaZulu, whose leader, Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, dismisses the whole idea as a sham.

In theory, an argument could perhaps be made for a homelands policy--but not as the South African government has designed it. If every black in South Africa were to move to his ancestral homeland, 70% of the population would be packed into 13% of the land, much of it arid and unprofitable. Only one homeland, Basotho-QwaQwa, is composed of a single piece of land. The others are broken into two or more parts, surrounded by white South Africa. KwaZulu was in 29 pieces five years ago, but eventually will be consolidated into six. Homeland leaders are demanding more land, if only to link their fragmented areas together.

The real purpose behind the homeland policy is transparent: to assure continued Afrikaner dominance. Blacks will remain in white South Africa because they must have jobs--and because they are desperately needed by industry as a source of labor. Without them, the country's economy would collapse overnight. But politically their presence is an embarrassment to the government because they outnumber the whites by so wide a margin. Now, when an urban black's theoretical homeland becomes independent, he automatically becomes a citizen of that homeland--and is even dropped from the South African census figures. In reality, of course, his life is utterly unchanged.

That leaves the coloreds and the Asians to be shoehorned into the Afrikaner political system. A primary reason for Vorster's calling the election is to gain a popular consensus for a proposed new constitution, one that would abolish the present parliamentary system, based on the Westminster model. Instead, each racial group in the country except blacks--whites, coloreds and Asians--would have a separate communal "parliament." These bodies would in turn nominate representatives to a Council of Cabinets, which would choose an all-powerful President (presumably Vorster). The council would have eleven members--six whites, three coloreds and two Asians.

Thus Afrikaner control is maintained. The blacks are written out of the political system; the coloreds and Asians are given a symbolic role but no real power. And the English-speaking whites are simply outnumbered by the Afrikaners by a ratio of 60 to 40 on a white franchise that, needless to say, is based on the principle of one man, one vote.

Despite the hostility directed at the country from abroad--and the anger burning from within--white South Africa remains curiously peaceful. The street tensions and stonings within its removed black townships--even the ongoing massive school boycott by 200,000 students in Soweto--fail to transmit more than a ripple to what Novelist Nadine Gordimer (A World of Strangers) calls the "dreadful calm" of white society. So distant do such events seem, in fact, that most whites only learn of them from their newspapers. Of Johannesburg's white population of 600,000, precious few have ever set foot in Soweto, although it is a scant eight miles away. And to the farmers who live in the flat reaches of the Orange Free State and the lush valleys of the Cape wine country, Soweto rioting seems almost as remote as U.N. oratory.

Yet there is indisputably a malaise in South Africa today that touches even to the heart of Afrikanerdom. For the first time within recent memory, more whites are leaving the country than are entering it (a net loss of 1,329 this year, v. a net gain of 25,190 in 1976). The economy is in deep recession, the worst in 40 years. The result is a mood of doubt and defiance that is as severe as any in South Africa's history. At the seemingly endless stream of seminars on the national destiny, the questions are inevitably asked: What will South Africa be like in a year? In two? In five? And there is an all too familiar answer: Worse.

The English-speaking business community, although it controls an estimated 80% of the country's private sector, complains that its leverage with the government is weaker than ever. "We are subject to an Afrikaans-speaking tribal government," says Harry Oppenheimer, chairman of the Anglo American Corp. of South Africa Ltd., a mining empire. "We have some influence only if they want to remain on good terms with the rest of the world and want foreign investment to flow in." American investment in South Africa amounts to about $1.5 billion. U.S. companies are bound by American law to avoid discrimination--but cannot always do so if they hope to stay in business in South Africa. Last week, under an emergency measure, the government assumed the power, if necessary, to order foreign-owned plants to produce strategic materials that might become unavailable later from overseas suppliers.

Particularly in the cities, whites seem edgy and ill-tempered. To a group of neighbors who were gossiping about the rise in thefts and the burglarizing of homes, a white housewife in an affluent suburb of Johannesburg complained: "They [the blacks] are gathering all the time in small groups around the neighborhood. A few years ago, the police would have stopped them or picked them up. Now they're just everywhere. I never even walk any more." Many feel plagued by uncertainty. "People just don't make plans," says Nadine Gordimer. "They can't make up their minds, whether it's over buying a house or starting a multiracial theater company or sending children away to school."

In the poor white neighborhoods near Johannesburg, where the red brick row houses resemble those of Soweto, people are equally apprehensive. Says Mrs. Hestor Nortje, a widow: "We can live with the blacks, but can they live with us? There is so much suspicion, you don't know whether a man is going to kill you or not. If you live in the same area, the blacks will take the attitude they are better than the whites and take over."

As for blacks, their traditional concern has been with poverty and injustice, not revolution. They are anxious about wages, about their children's schooling, about losing their jobs and thus their legal right to remain in the urban townships. Their leaders, for the most part today, are in prison, in detention or in hiding. They have few spokesmen. Despite the current wave of arrests and bannings, tangible evidence of the power of the state, riots and strikes will probably go on. South Africa's best-known writer, Alan Paton (Cry, the Beloved Country), has described the black-white confrontation as "a nightmare of noncompromising power creating a noncompromising opposition." In Soweto, a former engineering student says defiantly, "They create the fury, then they suppress it. They feel they have controlled the situation by detaining our leaders, but we feel it is a declaration of war."

There is some evidence that one goal of the present crackdown on dissent is to reassure the right-wing verkrampte (narrow-minded) members of Vorster's National Party. To foreigners, the gruff Prime Minister may seem to be nothing more than a formidable reactionary. "He travels in an ox wagon always one length behind the train of history," a ranking British official observed last year. But Vorster is a pragmatist by comparison with many of his Afrikaner colleagues in government and a very shrewd politician as well. Thus, the new constitution could be interpreted as a concession to white moderates, including the verligte (enlightened) wing of the National Party, in that it gives coloreds and Asians a modest role in government. Conceivably, this gesture toward multiracialism in South Africa could be a first step toward allowing some black participation later.

Vorster need not be too worried about he U.N.'s mandatory arms embargo. Eventually, the embargo could hurt South Africa by depriving it of sophisticated new weaponry and technology. But as of today, South Africa's 41,000-man army is one of the best trained and best equipped on the continent; 130,000 reserves can be mobilized against invasion--or insurrection--within 48 hours. The only real gaps in the country's arms production at present are helicopter technology and warships. Last week France announced that it was canceling delivery of two submarines and two missile-launching corvettes, even though the ships had been ordered before the ban. The Israelis also said they would abide by the embargo, but some diplomats wondered whether the Israelis might be willing to circumvent it. Israel has been deeply involved in a number of military projects with the South Africans.

Third World countries, led by black African states, had wanted a total economic boycott. The U.S., Britain and France joined in the veto of such a proposal in the Security Council two weeks ago. But even an economic boycott would not have had much immediate effect. For example, South Africa reportedly has stockpiled a three-year supply of oil, it has the technology to produce more oil from its virtually unlimited cache of coal, and a friendly nation, Iran, is co-owner of South Africa's major refinery. An economic embargo would surely hurt some of South Africa's vulnerable trading partners, however, including Britain and a number of African states. South Africa now trades directly with twelve African nations and covertly with a dozen others.

Is there anything that can be done to influence South Africa? U.S. policy on southern Africa has changed sharply under the Carter Administration. Henry Kissinger almost completely ignored Africa for seven of his eight years in the Nixon-Ford Administrations. Then, after the Cuban military involvement in Angola, Kissinger went twice to Africa and seemed for a time to be on the verge of securing a settlement in Rhodesia. His strategy was to solicit Vorster's help on Rhodesia and Namibia and defer the question of South Africa's apartheid. Kissinger believed majority rule in Rhodesia and independence for Namibia were attainable through diplomatic pressure; he also believed Vorster would help him achieve it in order to take world pressure off South Africa.

The Carter Administration decided that the problems of Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa should be taken up simultaneously. In May, Vice President Walter Mondale met Vorster head-on in Vienna and told him that Washington was interested in "a progressive transformation of South African society." When the press asked him later what he meant by "full political participation by all South Africans," Mondale replied, inaccurately, that it was the same as one man, one vote. This was a misstep by Mondale that Washington has been gently attempting to correct ever since. Not even the U.S., with the rights of states built into its bicameral system, has a franchise based purely on one man, one vote. But the damage was done. Vorster the South African leader was enraged; Vorster the politician must have been delighted.

George Ball, who served as Under Secretary of State in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, takes the Carer Administration to task for scattering its shots in southern Africa. Given the complexity of the problem, Ball argued in a recent issue of the Atlantic, the U.S. should press toward fixed, attainable goals: an end to petty apartheid, equal pay for nonwhites, steps toward multiracialism. After that could come the granting of South African citizenship for those in the homelands and an expanding franchise for blacks within South Africa. Eventually, Ball suggested, as have others, there might be some form of partition--an extension, perhaps, of the homelands policy--with greatly enlarged black states retaining some sort of confederal relationship with Pretoria. Demanding that South Africa move immediately toward one man, one vote, Ball points out, is futile; in the present context, the South Africans could not be induced to accept it, fearing that they would be swamped by a tide of black nationalism.

Prospects are not bright for a rational, peaceful solution to the problem of South Africa. Black Africa is determined that majority rule must come to the country. Sooner or later, South Africa will face guerrilla pressure, although its armed forces could easily cope with the early stages of subversion. But an all-out military threat to South Africa could also bring a threat of Soviet involvement--and a dilemma for the West. Having found their voice at last, the unfranchised blacks of urban South Africa cannot be expected to turn silent again as long as they have legitimate grievances. And their demands are bound to increase. Political and economic concessions by a Nationalist government will probably be too little and too late to satisfy these rising ambitions.

There is a ferment within Afrikanerdom that involves even a painful demythologizing of the white man's history and divine mission. Nevertheless, belief in the sanctity and racial integrity of the tribe runs deep. "An Afrikaner will not be ruled by anyone but an Afrikaner," declares a liberal student at Stellenbosch. "To preserve our culture," suggests a prominent member of the Broederbond, "we would be willing to give up large chunks of the economic and political privileges that go with it."

Other Afrikaners talk about the sacrifices that lie ahead. Implicit in these phrases may be a startling notion: that the Afrikaners, short of the long-predicted Armageddon, might conceivably be prepared to hitch up their ox wagons once again and retreat backward toward the old Boer republics and the Cape, striking some sort of bargain in power sharing or land sharing with rivaling black nationalism. Any such solution would lie in the distant future. For the moment, there is only a sense throughout the beleaguered white tribe that the present system cannot hold, but that the prescriptions decreed by the outside world so far simply will not do.

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