Apple to Halt Sales in South Africa : Reason Is Political, Not Economic, Computer Firm Says

Apple Computer Inc. is suspending sales to South Africa because of the nation’s apartheid policy and political pressure on it in the United States, the company’s South African distributor said Sunday.

Apple’s European regional office last week informed the distributor, Base 2 Ltd., that effective Oct. 31 it will no longer sell its personal computers or other equipment here but that it will continue to supply spare parts, according to John Floisand, managing director of Base 2.

Apple has no direct investment in South Africa, Floisand said, and his firm has handled all its business for the last six years.

Although a dozen American companies--Chase Manhattan Bank and Pan American World Airways prominent among them--have recently pulled out of South Africa or reduced their presence here, Apple is the first to say that it is doing so for political rather than economic reasons.

“Apple was quite plain that its reasons were political,” Floisand said. “Apple felt that, in view of the current feeling in the United States and recent events here, it did not want to be in South Africa, and so they are pulling out.”

Sales of Apple computers, like those of other personal computers, have declined in the last year due to South Africa’s steep recession, but Floisand said that Apple had an increasing share of the highly competitive market.

Other major American computer companies, including IBM, Control Data and Burroughs, which have large operations here, have recently declared their intention to remain in South Africa while working actively for political, economic and social reforms.

In another development Sunday, Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, the leader of the Zulu people, South Africa’s largest black tribe, reemphasized for a U.S. television audience his longstanding opposition to economic sanctions against this country.

Interviewed from London on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Buthelezi said that despite assertions to the contrary from militants, South African blacks in general do not support sanctions because they would wreak the greatest damage on black workers.

“I challenge anyone to go to a meeting--say in Soweto or in any other township--and talk that language, that people should lose jobs and that their dire straits, in which they find themselves, should get worse,” he said. “. . .In general, black people do not support sanctions.”

His comments, responding to questions about U.S. economic sanctions awaiting final approval in Congress, appeared to bolster Reagan Administration arguments that reducing American economic activity would only reduce leverage with the Pretoria government while costing blacks some of the country’s best-paying job opportunities.

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“I think the South African regime needs to have a country that is as powerful as the United States breathing literally down its neck,” said Buthelezi, who leads a potent political bloc within his country. “. . . And I think that if you are going to remove the only leverage which you have in the United States of having your corporations operating in South Africa, then you will remove the only leverage which you can apply as far as economic justice for my people is concerned.”

Saying that he is “against my people being used as cannon fodder just to have drama,” the chief criticized as ill-timed a threatened strike called for later this month by the black miners’ union.”

Times staff writer Bob Secter in Washington contributed to this story.