Specter at the Celebration

By Russ Hoyle

Whites mark an anniversary, but blacks look angrily ahead

It was conceived as the most elaborate flag-waving event in years, a monthlong Republic Festival to celebrate South Africa's 20th anniversary as an independent republic. From the Cape shoreline to the Transvaal highlands, South Africans launched a series of sporting events and pageants. "All racial groups can be fired anew with determination and genuine patriotism," intoned State President Marais Viljoen.

From the outset, however, the celebrations ran afoul of the country's bitter, racially divided heritage. At Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand, black and white students boycotted classes to protest the festival and set off three days of demonstrations, flag burnings and brawls. On the outskirts of the city, police fired tear gas and waded into crowds of demonstrators with dogs and sjamboks, quirts traditionally used by Afrikaner farmers and originally made of rhino hide. Soon more than 50 organizations with a total membership in the millions were formally boycotting the festivities. Declared an ad hoc committee formed to protest the celebrations: "The Republic Festival is window dressing to fool the world that all is fine in sunny South Africa." Snapped Black Leader Gatsha Buthelezi: "We cannot celebrate our own oppression."

Just before the nation's schoolchildren were let out for a five-day holiday to join in the festivities, the resentment turned into outright violence. Sections of railroad were blown up by terrorist bombs outside Johannesburg and Durban. In East London, black nationalist guerrillas lobbed a hand grenade into a police station and raked the building with automatic-rifle fire. Two days later, other saboteurs set off an explosive device at a South African Defense Force recruiting center in Durban.

The disturbances and sabotage dramatized the mounting tension and deepening sense of foreboding that have come to pervade South Africa. Despite some recent loosening of the white supremacist apartheid laws, blacks, who form 71.5% of the population of 27.7 million, are insisting with increasing militance that the time has come for them to share political power with the white, Afrikaner-dominated government. The successful black liberation movements of nearby Angola, Zimbabwe and Mozambique have given their cause new urgency and credibility. After years of international isolation, a growing number of the white minority is realizing that the tenacious dream of maintaining apartheid forever is illusory. By the year 2000, whites will constitute only 13.7% of the population and just 7% of the work force.

The fiercely proud, tribally insular Afrikaner elite faces an increasingly irreconcilable dilemma: how to avoid massive civil unrest and bloodshed without relinquishing at least some power to the overwhelmingly nonwhite majority. The 2 1/2-year-old government of Prime Minister P.W. Botha, 65, has tried to make a beginning by limiting discriminatory practices like segregation at public facilities, lifting bans against mixed sports and recognizing some black trade unions. But even these tentative reforms have angered many whites and set off a spasm of soul searching over the future course of the country that provides so much chromium, manganese, platinum and vanadium, which are so valuable to the West. Says Journalist Tertius Myburgh: "It is no longer a question of whether Afrikanerdom will split politically. It has already split."

South Africa's recent national elections, in which nonwhites were not allowed to vote, reflected unprecedented division within Botha's ruling National Party over the pace and scope of future "accommodations." Though the party, which has been in power since 1948, maintained its iron grasp on the government by winning 131 of 165 parliamentary seats, it is now supported by only 57% of South Africa's 2.1 million eligible white voters, including most of the Afrikaner majority-within-a-minority.

The opposition Progressive Federal Party, a bastion of South Africa's English-speaking white minority, attracted enough support at the polls from liberal Afrikaners to increase its parliamentary strength by nine, to 26. On the right, the ultraconservative Herstigte Nasionale Party (H.N.P.) drew 191,249 votes, compared with only 34,159 in the 1977 election. Reason: growing numbers of the Afrikaner working class fear that Botha's reform measures will prepare the way for black majority rule. Declares H.N.P. Leader Jaap Marais: "Botha is stimulating racial frictions by creating expectations. It implants the idea that the existing order is not legitimate." He adds, "We have a kaffirboetie government," using Afrikaans slang for "nigger lover." Says Gert Combrick, a white mine worker: "Today they are ventilation officers and electricians. In a few years I'll have a black manager, and I won't work for him."

Nonetheless, Botha vows to "continue the direction we have taken" in easing the laws that govern the so-called petty apartheid. But he has no intention of changing the far more important underlying structure of apartheid that denies blacks the right to vote in national elections, requires segregated primary and secondary schools, forbids blacks to own land in major cities and forces 52% of the black population to live in ten impoverished rural reserves, or "homelands." All together the homelands constitute 13% of South

Africa's land area. Though administered by autonomous governments, most depend for subsistence on primitive agriculture and handouts from Pretoria. Even within Nationalist circles, the homelands concept is criticized as unworkable. But during the past 20 years, some 3 million blacks have been stripped of their South African citizenship, uprooted by the government and trucked off to these remote and hardscrabble locations.

Black leaders angrily dismiss the Nationalist reforms as so much window dressing as long as the homelands exist.

"What we are witnessing is a whole people, white South Africans, moving to accept what is a fraud, a lie--that this country is white and that the blacks belong to their own little independent states," fumes Dr. Nthato Motlana, a controversial leader in the all-black township of Soweto, outside Johannesburg, where 176 died in the fierce race riots of 1976. Chief Buthelezi of the KwaZulu homeland is even blunter: "This confederal formula is a formula for death and destruction."

Despite these growing frustrations, the black movement is handicapped by one grave flaw: a lack of leadership. Since Black Activist Steve Biko was found dead in a government detention center in 1977, no leader has emerged with enough appeal to bind together South Africa's blacks, let alone unite them with the "coloreds" of mixed blood, who represent 9.4% of the population. Some potential leaders are hindered by pervasive tribal animosities or ideological differences.

Zulu Chief Buthelezi, whose broad-based Inkatha (Ring) movement gives him some claim to a national leadership role, is broadly criticized by young militant blacks for his commitment to working peacefully within the system. Bishop Desmond Tutu, the outspoken secretary-general of the South African Council of Churches, whose passport was recently revoked by the Botha government, has no political base.

The most charismatic of the potential black leaders is Nelson Mandela, 63, head of the outlawed African National Congress (A.N.C.). Since 1964 he has been imprisoned on windswept Robben Island for antigovernment activities.

But since 1976, when black unrest stirred in South Africa, the A.N.C. has been increasingly active. Mozambique-based A.N.C. guerrillas have stepped up their raids on South African targets. Last year an A.N.C. guerrilla assault on South Africa's strategic SASOL coal-to-oil conversion plants caused $7.2 million in damage.

In the Pretoria suburb of Silverton, three black guerrillas held up a bank and tried to negotiate their freedom by taking hostages. Two white women were killed.

A.N.C. guerrillas were also behind the well-planned Republic Festival raids. The latest round of sabotage may mark a new phase in the political uses of violence in South Africa, and it will almost surely provoke repressive measures from Pretoria.

Against this background, South Africa's booming economy, controlled by whites, has become a powerful impetus for racial reform. As the economy creates some 300,000 new jobs annually, most of which will be filled by blacks, many companies are developing color blindness. In fact, some sectors of the business community are far ahead of the government in advocating major reforms. Says Industrialist Harry Oppenheimer: "If you think of private enterprise as building a better, more prosperous and a fairer country, then the most important part of all is that black people should have major opportunities in private enterprise."

There are also signs that the black worker is beginning to lose his traditional docility. Only 2% of black employees now belong to unions, but the figure is expected to grow swiftly and substantially.

Since 1976 some 25 unions have been ap proved by the government, and many others are unofficially recognized by employers. Disruptive labor disputes now occur at a rate of two or three times a week. In the final days of the anniversary celebration, black unions demonstrated their strength by calling simultaneous walkouts at the Ford and General Motors assembly plants in Port Elizabeth. The cost in lost production: $2 million.

Despite mounting domestic unrest, however, South Africa is still far more stable than pre-Zimbabwe Rhodesia, where blacks succeeded in establishing a government in 1980. The country is also far better equipped to withstand international pressure intended to force it to change.

South Africa's military is indisputably the most powerful in the region. Commando units regularly conduct illegal raids with impunity across the borders of neighboring countries in search-and-destroy missions against A.N.C. guerrillas or forces of Namibia's South West

Africa People's Organization (SWAPO).

Faced with an arms embargo imposed by the United Nations in 1977, South Africa developed its own weapons industry.

Faced with an OPEC oil embargo in 1973, the country found enough willing sellers who were not members of the cartel to keep going nicely, while developing its coal and nuclear power. Within two years, thanks to conservation measures and its growing program to convert coal to oil, South Africa will meet 60% of its needs for oil and gasoline. Nor are international economic sanctions likely to give pause to the rulers in Pretoria. One ironic reason: although neighboring black nations would want to go along with a boycott, they could not for long because they depend so heavily on South African trade.

The threat to stability is internal, not external. Any number of events--the emergence of another Biko, an unforeseen economic downturn that would send black workers into the streets, harassment of a symbolic figure like Bishop Tutu -- could spark further civil disorder.

We have squandered our time," says Industrialist Oppenheimer, one of his country's leading liberals.

"There was a time when we could have done these things quite slowly. But to avoid a revolution in South Africa, we've got to take substantive steps not only toward social justice but toward the sharing of power within a period of five years."

With their intensified militancy, growing numbers and new power, the blacks of South Africa are not likely to be bought off indefinitely by promises or good intentions. After he took office in 1978, Prime Minister Botha declared that South Africa must "adapt or die." His advice still holds good.

-- By Russ Hoyle.

Reported by Marsh Clark and Peter Hawthorne/Johannesburg

With reporting by Marsh Clark, Peter Hawthorne/Johannesburg

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