Anti-White Racism Blinds U.S. to Change in South Africa

It is becoming increasingly difficult for Americans to judge the situation in South Africa accurately because growing U.S. racism toward the white Afrikaners is bedeviling any reasonable assessment. In the process the only group that has committed itself in writing to a new democratic dispensation--President Pieter W. Botha’s National Party--is being beaten over the head with sanctions, divestiture and threats of international isolation.

During a scandal that rocked South Africa’s government seven years ago, Botha attempted unsuccessfully to imprison me on false charges to save his political skin and some of his cabinet ministers’ careers. So I find it ironic that now I am defending a president whom I detest. However, having just spent two months in South Africa (during which I infuriated my nonthinking Afrikaner friends by publicly making a case for the release of Nelson Mandela), I am convinced that U.S. reporting on the situation there is atrocious, and obscures the fact that there is a peaceful way out of the political morass--for blacks and whites.

Americans seem unable to grasp the complexity of race relations in South Africa: 11 major languages, 4 races, 12 major religions, vast disparities in income and education--the world in microcosm. The National Party has won every election among whites since 1948 on the pledge of separation of political powers and segregation. As late as the 1970s Botha still described the policy of political integration as “unintelligent and dangerous.” In contrast, he announced in January that the government now rejects the concept of apartheid, and pledged that there will be political power-sharing under a new democratic structure to be devised by all races.

This pledge followed earlier reforms that enabled Indians and Coloreds to participate in parliamentary debates in the House of Assembly that for decades had been the exclusive preserve of whites. In a law passed last month Botha restored the South African citizenship rights of blacks who had been declared citizens of the so-called independent homelands. The government also approved the new multiracial executive authority for the province of Natal, which had been administered for decades by a white-only authority.

Any reasonable person who was familiar with South African politics before 1984 should recognize that in three years Botha has gutted the very foundation of National Party policy. Can those who talk glibly about turning power over to the African National Congress say when the ANC ever committed itself to such democracy, to any kind of democracy? In writing? When has Bishop Desmond M. Tutu committed himself to such a democratic program, when he is not busy being a prophet of doom and violence?

Despite all this, Americans have been told that blacks in South Africa would welcome the Soviets in preference to the present government. But South African law in no way prohibits blacks from leaving the country--in contrast to East Germany, which “sells” its citizens who want to leave to West Germany for cash.

American banks say that they pulled out of South Africa on moral and economic grounds. Yet the same banks recently lent $500 million to East Germany, which already owes the West roughly $10 billion. Where is the economic sense in this, the morality? The banks say that such aid to the Soviets and international trade promote detente and that detente is good for peace. Yet trade and investment are not good for peace in South Africa?

South Africa is being roasted because only whites have the vote. That is factually incorrect. Coloreds and Indians also vote for the same parliamentary authority. But why is there no protest or divestiture from Liberia, where President Samuel Doe stole the election last year? Why tell people falsely that South Africa is the only state in the world to bar non-whites by constitutional decree from citizenship, land ownership and the vote?

In Liberia the constitution stipulates that these rights belong only to “Negroes or people of Negroid descent.” Americans are not told that 85% of all black voters on the African continent have been effectively disfranchised because of military coups, as in Nigeria; the suspension of the constitution, as in Lesotho; one-party governments, as in Tanzania, or self-appointed presidents-for-life, as in Malawi. There are African states where there have been no elections in 20 years.

Consider: Black activists have successfully launched boycotts against South African products in various U.S. cities such as Atlanta, but have made no issue about Soviet goods produced by a vast system of slave-labor camps.

The House subcommittee on Africa has taken the lead in the campaign to ruin South Africa’s economy and to force “change.” From 1970 to 1980 the committee held no fewer than 70 public hearings, all of them dealing with only three white-controlled countries--Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa. There were no hearings on any black African states during the same 10 years. Yet during that same period roughly 10 million peasants in Tanzania were forcibly removed from their land; millions were killed in political unrest and genocide campaigns in Burundi, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Uganda and elsewhere in black-ruled Africa.

There were no hearings on these gruesome, Nazi-style mass killings, no efforts to produce “change.” The House subcommittee on Africa has made it clear that blacks have human rights in South Africa because they are governed by whites, but blacks elsewhere are not entitled to human rights because these rights are being abused by blacks. This grotesque racialist approach makes a rational assessment of developments in South Africa extremely difficult.

Still the fact remains that Botha’s government is the only group publicly committed to power-sharing. For the first time since 1948 thousands of whites are beating each other at political meetings because the government’s reform movement is considered too far-reaching and too rapid.

In two years Botha has discarded more discriminatory legislation than his predecessors did in the past 76 years of South Africa’s existence. Newspapers that have bitterly opposed the government for decades, such as the Johannesburg Sunday Times, now admit that Botha has embarked on a “radical restructuring” of society.

Only a mind warped by anti-white racism will reason that there has not been a fundamental change in direction. A 1986 survey by a Gallup organization in South Africa for the Johannesburg newspaper Rapport found that 67% of whites now favor power-sharing. Another 1986 survey, by the Human Sciences Research Council, showed that a clear majority of all races--blacks, Indians, Coloreds and whites--support power-sharing.

It took America 300 years to achieve its degree of integration in a nation that even now is only 12% black. How long would it have taken if the United States were 87% black?

If one can understand why there are separate Greek and Turkish states on tiny Cypress, or why the homogeneous Scandinavians separated into different states after trying for 80 years to share rulers, then it should be understandable why there is no quick fix, no magic wand, for easily uniting powerful black nations and other groups in South Africa. Botha’s daunting task is being made even more difficult by the ANC, which wants to take over power by violence. Egging on black radicals and the ANC perpetuates the violence, making progress toward Botha’s democratic constitution impossible. Picking on Afrikaners, but not on the black African states, will eventually force white South Africa to cut itself off completely, throw out every foreign journalist and govern like North Korea and other nations whose abuses no one ever writes about because it is impossible to get in to document them.

Unless the United States intervenes in South Africa in a positive rather than a punitive context, the only group committed to democratic reform will be destroyed, or the country will end up like Lebanon, or worse.