South Africa’s Black Leaders: A Matter of Shifting Alliances

The meeting last week between Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Oliver Tambo, exiled leader of South Africa’s largest black opposition movement, the African National Congress, broke important ground.

After more than six years of “constructive engagement” with South Africa’s white-minority government, the Reagan Administration finally talked directly--and openly--with a major representative of the other side.

It is not as if U.S. policy toward South Africa has fundamentally changed. On the contrary, current and former policy-makers are still complaining that economic sanctions against South Africa, approved by Congress over the President’s veto last year, were a mistake. And Shultz, intimidated by conservatives who faulted him for receiving a man they consider a “terrorist,” spent much of his time with Tambo complaining about communist influence in the ANC and deploring its turn toward violence in recent years.

Still, Tambo’s high-level audience signaled that the Administration at last recognizes the need to appear more evenhanded in South Africa--or at least preserve its options--and guaranteed Tambo greater credibility.

Pretoria will, of course, portray the Tambo-Shultz meeting as the final evidence that the United States cannot be trusted to help South Africa solve its severe problems. But in fact, this session with a top-ranking ANC official enhances U.S. prospects for a role in negotiating an end to apartheid before South Africa is engulfed in civil war. It gives the United States greater influence with a black majority that intends, one way or another, to play a role in its country’s future.

The next step is for Congress and the American public to develop a more subtle understanding of the various key players in mainstream black South African politics and their relationship to each other.

Tambo, for example, at 69 an elder statesman of anti-apartheid protest, has broad international respect, but is regarded by most South Africans as a stand-in for Nelson Mandela, the ANC leader in prison for nearly a quarter century.

Ironically, by keeping Mandela locked up, the white regime has enhanced his stature, preventing him from making the mistakes of any politician who must test his words and actions before the public.

While Mandela remains a largely unseen martyr, Tambo is subjected to minute scrutiny. Just as South African whites attack him for visiting the Soviet Union, Cuba and other communist countries, militant blacks will bitterly criticize him for selling out to the capitalist Establishment by going to America.

Founded as a multiracial organization in 1912, two years before the all-white National Party that now runs the country, the ANC has great standing in South Africa, despite the fact that it is banned and vilified inside South Africa and labeled pro-communist by conservative detractors outside. Yet some of the country’s most influential black leaders operate outside the ANC framework.

The Rev. Desmond Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and now Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, for example, has used his pulpit to fight apartheid. Tutu does not have an obvious political constituency within South Africa (his following could be larger overseas), but his moral endorsement may be necessary to sustain any compromise negotiated as a transition toward majority rule.

Tutu has frequently paid his political respects to the ANC and he has been particularly adept at stepping in between blacks and whites or black factions that are about to have violent confrontations; but he may nonetheless be resented by young militants for having gone so far without having fought in the trenches.

Another key figure with a base in the religious community is Allan Boesak, a so-called “Colored” of mixed race, who is president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. A leading force behind the formation of the United Democratic Front, a four-year-old multiracial political coalition of community-based groups, Boesak has helped to radicalize Coloreds who traditionally kept their distance from the various African ethnic groups. Increasingly, Coloreds now regard themselves as “blacks” with the same problems as other nonwhite groups; Boesak is partly responsible.

Because his first language is Afrikaans, the language of the ruling elite, Boesak is sometimes better able to get his message across to white audiences than other black opposition leaders. But some traditionalists now regard him as too radical.

The most formidable rival to ANC figures like Mandela and Tambo is Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, who is both hereditary chief of the Zulu people and an elected leader of the self-governing KwaZulu homeland, which has refused to accept South African-style “independence.”

Buthelezi has angered many elements in the black community with his persistent moderation-- opposition to economic sanctions and embrace of constructive engagement, for example--but his wide acceptance as leader of 6 million Zulus (South Africa’s largest ethnic group) means that he must play a role in any solution to the country’s crisis.

One worrisome factor is that cadres from Buthelezi’s political organization, Inkatha, have engaged in brutal fighting with members of the ANC, the UDF and other, more radical groups in South Africa’s black townships. But many observers remain convinced that, in a pinch, Buthelezi would cooperate with his rivals. (Mandela, for one, takes a conciliatory line toward Buthelezi in interviews.)

Another person who cannot be left out of the current political equation is Mandela’s wife, Winnie; she has developed a substantial following of her own, both at home and abroad. Widely known for resistence to government banning orders and other acts of bold defiance, she has repeatedly been given human-rights awards for her role in the South African struggle.

The relationship among black leaders is a matter of shifting alliances. Nearly everyone seems to distrust Buthelezi, yet recognizes that he may one day be needed. Tambo has had little to do with the others, because he lives in Lusaka, Zambia. Winnie Mandela and Boesak appear occasionally on the same platform, raising the prospect of future cooperation.

It is important for the United States and other nations with a stake in a peaceful solution to South Africa’s problems to continue their pressure for government negotiations with the true black leadership. All of these people may have a limited time before their own credibility in the black community fades and they are replaced by far more militant actors. Indeed, as the situation becomes more tense, the Azanian People’s Organization and other groups that reject cooperation with whites may come more to the fore.

With the exception of Boesak, who is 40, and Winnie Mandela, 52, all soon face the prospect of being regarded as senior citizens in a society where the average age is plunging (due to high black birthrates).

The Reagan Administration and other American political forces would also do well to recognize that none of these people are going to wring their hands over the ANC’s resort to violence or the existence of communists in its ranks. They have all suffered the official violence that is essential to apartheid, and unless they see more help coming from the West, they will undoubtedly turn to the East.