U.S. Quietly Aids S. African Black Activists

The United States, so often seen as the upholder of the status quo and the partner of some of the world’s most conservative governments, is quietly becoming a major force for political, economic and social change in South Africa, working with black activists to establish majority rule here.

While the Reagan Administration continues to defend its policy of “constructive engagement” with Pretoria’s white-led minority government, millions of dollars authorized by Congress are going to scores of opposition groups to help finance their fight against apartheid. Among these projects:

--The United States is now educating hundreds of blacks, at both South African and American universities, in the belief that they will become South Africa’s leaders within the next decade.

--It is helping to pay the legal fees of political activists, some charged with treason and subversion, and is underwriting a program to assist children and others who have been detained without charge. It has also paid some of the costs of legal actions that have challenged the five-month-old national state of emergency and sometimes succeeded in overturning the government’s severe emergency regulations.

--American labor unions, using federal grants, are training scores of black union organizers and shop stewards, both here and in the United States. They have provided funds to help start new unions in South Africa that already are developing the political and economic muscle of black workers.

--The U.S. Agency for International Development is sponsoring training programs in business management for black entrepreneurs, hoping not only to broaden black participation in South Africa’s white-controlled economy but also to develop a strong black middle class.

--And, in its boldest moves yet, the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria is allocating $2.3 million to black groups to help them organize their communities, train grass-roots leaders and develop neighborhood self-help programs, actions that recall similar efforts during the American civil rights and anti-poverty campaigns of the 1960s.

Altogether, the United States is spending about $26 million this year on its various projects for black South Africans, making the effort the biggest foreign involvement in South Africa and one of the largest such American programs worldwide to promote political change in a country.

$40 Million More

The U.S. effort, which has already grown dramatically over the last three years, could increase sharply again next year--by $40 million. This is the amount that Congress authorized for expansion of American aid programs here when it passed the legislation imposing economic sanctions on South Africa last month.

The aid has received so little publicity, however, that the United States has not reaped the political benefits of a better image among South Africa’s black majority, which still regards the Reagan Administration as an ally of the white-led government.

Because of the deepening U.S. involvement in the country’s politics that has resulted from the aid and Pretoria’s increasing sensitivity to it, U.S. officials are reluctant to discuss the effort, except in broad terms. Instead, they point to the congressional legislation that gives them their mandate.

“U.S. policy toward the victims of apartheid,” says the law enacted last month over President Reagan’s veto, “is to use economic, political, diplomatic and other effective means to achieve the removal of the root cause of their victimization. . . .

“In anticipation of the removal of the system of apartheid and as a further means of challenging that system, it is the policy of the United States to assist these victims as individuals and through organizations to overcome the handicaps imposed on them by apartheid and to help prepare them for their rightful roles as full participants in the political, social, economic and intellectual life of their country in a post-apartheid South Africa.”

Educating Black Leaders

A quarter of the money now goes through international organizations, such as the Red Cross and the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, or to traditional assistance programs, such as famine and disaster relief. However, the twin focus of the expanded U.S. effort is educating a generation of new black leaders for the country and encouraging groups working for a faster but peaceful end to apartheid.

The focus of the U.S. aid program when it began six years ago--and still its largest element--is university education. The U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Information Service spent about $13.5 million on this during the last fiscal year, according to U.S. Embassy figures. About $2 million more was allocated for scholarships for refugees and political exiles from South Africa and the neighboring territory of Namibia, which South Africa administers.

When the United States began the assistance program, according to an official involved, it wanted to make “a meaningful intervention, one that would lead to change in the system and prepare people to lead this country in the future.”

The logical choice, said the official, who asked not to be quoted by name, was an educational assistance program that would “prepare leaders for the transition to majority rule in, say, 10 years.”

400 Students Helped

With funds from the Agency for International Development and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, about 400 promising black students have been sent to more than 80 American universities to study education, science and business administration. About 100 have now returned, most of them after graduating in the top quarter of their classes. About 80 to 100 students a year are expected to go to the United States.

A year ago, U.S. assistance was expanded to provide scholarships for 78 blacks enrolling at South African universities; this year, there will be 240 scholarships.

The U.S. Information Service also awards grants to black students for a wide variety of graduate programs, legal studies and journalism courses at American universities.

“Our aim is to prepare people for leadership not just of their communities but of this country, people who until now have been excluded from political power and who in the past by design have received inferior educations,” a U.S. official here said.

Three years ago, the United States moved beyond educational assistance to establish a $500,000 “human rights fund” that has provided limited grants to scores of organizations around the country.

Aid for Women, Handicapped

The funded projects have ranged from construction of a clinic at a village fighting forced resettlement to underwriting a national women’s conference, from establishing community-run day-care centers to financing a program to train blacks who are physically handicapped.

Summing up the program, a U.S. official involved in awarding the grants said the goal is “to encourage groups here working for peaceful change, toward a more democratic and non-racial society in South Africa, where suffrage is not based on race. Often, the impact is just local, but cumulatively we think it will have a tremendous effect over several years.”

The U.S. Embassy in Pretoria and the U.S. consulates general in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban this year awarded 160 grants, averaging about $6,000 each, from the human rights fund. U.S. officials are not directly involved in running these projects, or any others under the aid program, but work through local groups, checking on the results and the way the money is spent.

“This has been a way on one level to show American concern to a lot of blacks around the country,” another U.S. official commented.

“But we have also used it as a way to help black groups develop their own leadership and strengthen their organizations. . . . Not much money has gone to white-led groups, though they may represent the traditional liberal opposition to apartheid. Developing as many authentic black leaders as we can is as important for us as doing good.”

Legal Networks Formed

The human rights fund, which totaled $1.6 million last year, has also helped to pay for the establishment and expansion, with participation by American foundations and companies, of a network of legal resources and advice centers around the country that not only help individual blacks caught up in discriminatory laws but also are increasingly fighting apartheid as a system.

Ambassador Herman W. Nickel, announcing a typical $97,000 grant to a group of civil rights lawyers shortly before his departure from South Africa last month, said the United States hopes that the money “will enable more persons to seek and, we hope, obtain legal relief as an alternative to frustration and violence.”

“The rule of law is the basis of Western democratic societies,” Nickel added. “No form of assistance to South Africa could be more in keeping with American values and traditions.”

Injecting such “American values” into South African politics is an increasingly important factor in the U.S. program.

‘Schools for Democracy’

In helping black labor unions, Washington’s interest is not only in enabling blacks to deal with management in the workplace but also in developing a stronger political voice; the new unions are seen, moreover, as “a school for democracy,” teaching blacks how to organize, to conduct meetings, to hold elections and to negotiate.

Looking toward the future, the Reagan Administration also wants a strong, independent labor movement in South Africa to counterbalance a possible socialist government there, according to labor specialists familiar with the program. The training courses, for example, are oriented toward teaching union leaders that they can achieve more through collective bargaining, as American and West European unions have, than by depending on government action, as in Eastern Europe.

In helping to teach blacks the skills that they need to run small businesses, the U.S. aim is not only to enlarge their share of the economy but also to develop an alternative to the Marxism and African socialism advocated by most black political activists.

Another aim is to build up a black middle class committed to free enterprise. The U.S. partner in the project is the National African Federation of Chambers of Commerce, an umbrella organization for black businessmen.

Vocational Training

The new “community outreach” project, now spending $2.3 million and likely to cost at least $10 million over the next five years, pays for leadership training for a wide variety of community groups and helps to expand their operations with such projects as vocational training for unemployed youths.

But it also appears aimed at developing diverse, community-based organizations that, while strongly opposed to apartheid, are not part of a political monolith that some U.S. officials here and in Washington worry will emerge from the struggle against South Africa’s system of minority white rule.

“After liberation, we want to see a politically pluralist society in South Africa,” said a U.S. official visiting from Washington. “Frankly, we don’t want apartheid replaced with some system modeled on East Germany or Bulgaria. . . . Naturally, we try to help those whose interests coincide with ours.”

As a result, much of the U.S. money is going to “black consciousness” groups, many of them small, rather than the larger organizations that look for political leadership to the exiled African National Congress and the United Democratic Front inside the country.

Ironically, this means that some of the groups most critical of the United States and most vocal in their commitment to socialism have spinoffs whose activities are heavily subsidized by Washington. A former president of the radical black consciousness group, Azanian People’s Organization, for example, is the key figure in an unpublicized, $1.1-million leadership development program.

Critics From Right, Left

With such clear political goals, the aid program is becoming controversial here. The criticism comes from both the government and parties to the right of it and from some black groups on the left.

When asked about their attitude toward the U.S. aid program, the Foreign Ministry and the government Bureau of Information declined to comment.

However, state-run Radio South Africa, in a commentary reflecting government views, described the program’s human rights projects as “heavily politicized,” complained that “radical unions” were getting most of the labor union money and declared that “where external funding is used to politicize education, this can only bedevil, rather than assist, in the promotion of human rights.”

The Conservative Party took the criticism further this month, describing the U.S. program as “blatant political interference and obviously aimed at the destruction of the existing political structures in this country.”

Financing black labor unions, the party added, is the same as funding a political movement, and the U.S. Information Service activities, largely intended to promote “the American way of life” and explain U.S. policies, are “sowing dissent.”

U.S. Influence Debated

The South African government’s concern has been heightened by two studies by Johannesburg’s Rand Afrikaans University, one specifically of the U.S. aid program and the other of all foreign assistance to black unions here. The studies argue that Washington is trying to shape both the solution to the country’s problems and the character of post-apartheid South Africa.

“This is an immense program,” says Prof. Carl Noffke, director of the university’s American Studies Institute, who calculates that the total expenditure could total $100 million or even $150 million annually in few years. He continued:

“Its intent is clearly to shape black politics for the present, to press black majority rule upon us and then to ensure a government friendly to the United States afterward. . . . Naturally, there are questions about whether any of this will be to our benefit or whether much of it should not be stopped.”

On the left, there are also deep suspicions about ultimate U.S. aims. Some see Washington as trying to manipulate the anti-apartheid movement and to shape its ideological outlook so that South Africa under majority rule would remain friendly to the United States. Others believe that accepting the U.S. money will split the movement and delay “liberation.”

Progressives Hesitant

Many progressive groups and labor unions, particularly those that support the African National Congress and the United Democratic Front, have been reluctant to accept U.S. financing for these reasons, although only a few proposed grants have actually been rejected outright.

“This bothers us because we are truly not trying to play favorites,” a U.S. official in the program said. “Our basic approach is to consider requests from groups that come to us or we hear about. We are not so Machiavellian as to try and play one group off against another, and we do not want to be wed to any particular black political persuasion.

“We hope that word will get around in time that . . . what we are interested in, accelerating the process of peaceful political change, is what they want, too.”