U.S., S. Africa Hold Talks on Violence : Black Boycott of Merchants Spreads Rapidly

Black consumer boycotts are spreading rapidly as South Africa’s black majority tries to use its buying power for the first time in many years to force the white government to undertake greater political, economic and social reforms.

A black boycott of Port Elizabeth’s white merchants, now in its fourth week, is being copied in more than 20 other cities and towns in eastern Cape province despite government efforts to crush it by arresting its organizers and threatening to put black shopkeepers out of business.

The National Union of Mineworkers, which claims the allegiance of nearly half of the country’s 550,000 black miners, began a boycott Wednesday of white-owned stores near mines across the country to protest the 19-day-old state of emergency and the sweeping powers it gives the police and army.

White Shops Targeted

In Cape Town, a boycott of white shops is being organized to force businessmen to support black political demands more actively. Similar preparations are under way in Pretoria and several smaller cities in Transvaal province, and anti-apartheid organizations in Johannesburg are discussing the possibility of starting a nationwide movement to get the state of emergency lifted.

A well-organized national boycott could bring the government “to its knees without a single stone being picked up,” the Rev. Allen Boesak, a leader of the United Democratic Front coalition of anti-apartheid groups, said in Cape Town the other day. “The one thing (whites) fear more than anything else is when we say we will withdraw our buying power.”

Black buying power has increased substantially in recent years, and black consumers now account for more than half the retail sales in South Africa. The anti-apartheid movement has also grown--there are 650 grass-roots organizations in the United Democratic Front alone--and it appears to be developing the organization and discipline needed to make consumer boycotts effective. Taken together, these could mean a return to the consumer boycotts blacks used in the 1950s but abandoned as ineffective.

“Economic paralysis could come very quickly if we used consumer boycotts on a national scale,” Mkhuseli Jack, the organizer of the Port Elizabeth boycott, said before he was detained by the security police early this month. “The government would be confronted with a crisis that could not be resolved without addressing the country’s fundamental problems. Coordination would be a problem, but the impact would be tremendous.”

The impact here is already evident--and growing. White merchants report losing virtually all their black customers; stores downtown and near the city’s black ghetto townships are empty; sales have dropped 30% to 90%; small shops are closing daily and bankruptcies are multiplying.

“Port Elizabeth’s economy is already quite seriously depressed, and this is shaking us very badly,” Tony Gilson, executive director of the Port Elizabeth Chamber of Commerce, said. “Merchants are beginning to close up, some of them completely bankrupt, in alarming numbers, and this will soon have a ripple wave effect right across the whole economy far beyond just the retail sector. If the boycott lasts another month, as planned, many here will be desperate.”

The boycott’s effectiveness has brought a warning from the journal Finance Week to skeptical South African businessmen who dismiss black consumer boycotts as inconsequential and short-lived on the basis of their failure over the past 25 years.

“The threat of a national black consumer boycott is no longer a paranoid retailer’s bad dream,” the magazine commented. “It could turn into a real nightmare.”

The Port Elizabeth boycott is scheduled to run until Sept. 15 but could be continued if the state of emergency remains in force. To the original demands of its organizers--withdrawal of troops from the black townships, freedom to hold political meetings, abolition of the present local black governments, an end of alleged right-wing abductions of black activists and the establishment of student councils at schools--have been added calls for an end to the state of emergency and release of those detained under it.

Similar agendas have been drawn up in other eastern Cape cities, including major centers such as East London and Uitenhage, and many smaller towns, such as Graaff-Reinet, Cradock, Fort Beaufort and Grahamstown, where the conflict is often even more intense than it is here.

“An effective consumer boycott can strangle a town like this to death,” a bank manager in Somerset East, 100 miles north of here, said, asking not to be quoted by name. “If the boycotts spread, the government will face a real crisis because the National Party draws much of its support from all these little dorps (towns), and it cannot allow them to be killed off that way.”

Business is already pressing the government to end the state of emergency as quickly as possible, to free those detained without charge under the emergency regulations, to step up the pace of reform and to bring an end to South Africa’s system of racial separation.

“Businessmen, as a group, are sympathetic to the grievances of the black community, but most of the specific demands put forward by the boycott organizers are things that are beyond our power,” Gilson said. “All we can do is press the government for reforms.”

Boycott organizers do not accept this argument, contending that white businessmen are part of the political power structure in South Africa and have influence with the government. When President Pieter W. Botha declared the state of emergency on July 20 and security police began detaining most black leaders and forcing others into hiding, the Port Elizabeth Chamber of Commerce was in the midst of sensitive negotiations with black community leaders here, looking for a compromise that would end the boycott and effectively ally white businessmen with the anti-apartheid movement.

“Although the state of emergency was probably inevitable, there is no doubt that its declaration and certain actions thereafter jeopardized the delicate negotiations we had started,” Gilson said. “We are continuing our policy of identifying black grievances and conveying them to the proper authorities, but for a dialogue we need people to talk with.”

With the arrest of Jack, head of the eight-man Port Elizabeth boycott committee, who had maintained telephone contact with Gilson from his various hiding places after the state of emergency was declared, the last contacts between the black community and the businessmen have been broken.

“However much we want to, we can’t negotiate an end to this boycott now,” Gilson said.

The police, using their sweeping emergency powers, are now concentrating a major portion of their effort on breaking the black consumer boycotts in the eastern Cape, but so far without apparent effect.

Those suspected of organizing boycotts are being detained, according to reliable sources in the black community here, and youths sent out to white shopping areas to “remind” black consumers of the boycott are being arrested on charges of intimidation.

Black businessmen who have stockpiled food and other goods and reduced their prices are being detained or threatened with closure under the emergency regulations, these sources say, and pressure is reportedly being put on their wholesalers and bankers to limit supplies and reduce lines of credit. In Port Elizabeth and other towns, bogus leaflets have been distributed in the names of the local boycott committees calling off the action.

“The pressure on us is intense and getting worse every day,” one of the boycott organizers in Graaff-Reinet said by telephone. “But the police action is only increasing people’s resolve. To break this boycott, they are either going to have to jail the whole town or starve us to death.”