S. Africa Rebels, White Liberals Vow New System

A group of prominent white South Africans joined the outlawed African National Congress in a declaration Sunday, pledging to campaign to end apartheid and establish a democratic political system in their country.

South Africa’s whites, as well as blacks, “have an obligation to act for the achievement of this objective,” the two groups said, although “different strategies” will be used in what they declared “a common struggle” against continued minority white rule in Pretoria.

The joint statement concluded four days of landmark talks between senior ANC officials and more than 50 white South African politicians, businessmen, academics, clerics, writers, journalists and students.

Support of Whites Sought

Entitled the Dakar Declaration, the statement is intended to be the starting point of a major effort to broaden the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa into a united front that will draw increasing support from the country’s white minority as well as from blacks.

“It is necessary for everyone to act to bring about this kind of democratic, non-racial South Africa,” said Thabo Mbeki, the ANC’s information director and the leader of its delegation. “This is a commitment to act . . . and our white compatriots have shown that they are willing to take the risks that go with opposing a regime such as that in South Africa.”

What the ANC hopes for, he and other officials said, is an alliance of interests with many more whites--even those who do not support its belief in armed insurrection and may not fully share its political vision--working to end the apartheid system of racial separation and minority white rule.

“Liberation will free the oppressor as well as the oppressed,” Lindiwe Mabuza, an ANC delegate to the talks, said Sunday as the group toured Goree Island after concluding their talks.

Goree Island, just outside Dakar, served for two centuries as a departure port for the shipment of hundreds of thousands of Africans to the Americas as slaves. Their visit to a “slave house”--in which many of the Africans were kept for months before sailing--visibly moved both white and black participants in the conference.

The white participants in the conference were drawn mostly from South Africa’s Afrikaner community, the descendants of Dutch, French and German settlers who have dominated the Pretoria government for four decades, and the talks were described as probably the frankest political exchange yet between black and white South Africans.

Had Kept Their Distance

While most of the whites were liberals within the South African political context, few until this meeting were willing to associate with black militants denounced as “radicals” and “terrorists” by the government; many declared their resolve Sunday, however, to return home to promote fast, fundamental change and broader support for the goals of the ANC.

“Afrikaners, particularly younger Afrikaners, are not prepared to accept the inevitability of violence and unresolved conflict, or the kind of (reform measures) the government is offering,” said Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, the conference chairman and co-director of the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for South Africa, which organized the landmark talks.

But the white participants have been threatened with vague government reprisals and possible violence from the extreme right on their return to South Africa for what critics have called treason and “political terrorism.”

Slaying in Swaziland

The concern was heightened by news that a member of the ANC national executive committee, Cassius Make, a senior military commander, was shot to death Wednesday near Mbabane, the capital of Swaziland.

According to ANC officials, Make was traveling in a taxi with another ANC member and a woman from Mozambique when he was gunned down by three armed men, reportedly blacks, who had blocked the road. The other man was wounded, but the woman and the taxi driver were not hurt.

Make’s death is the most recent of a series of killings, attacks and kidnapings carried out against ANC personnel in Swaziland, mostly near its border with South Africa. The ANC has blamed Pretoria for the actions; the South African authorities have generally refused to comment.

In their joint statement, the ANC and the white delegation called for a negotiated resolution of the South African crisis but said that the Pretoria government’s approach to such talks--particularly its insistence on an ANC renunciation of violence as a precondition--is “the principal obstacle to progress.”

Must Free Prisoners

The white participants agreed with the rebels that “the unconditional release of all political leaders in prison or detention and the unbanning of (ANC and other opposition) organizations are fundamental prerequisites for such negotiations.”

The whites had pressed the ANC hard to justify its armed insurgency, undertaken in 1961 after the organization was banned by the government the previous year, and the delegation “accepted the historical reality of the armed struggle although not all could support it,” according to the statement.

But conference participants “recognized that the source of violence in South Africa derives from the fact that the use of force is fundamental to the existence and practice of racial domination,” the declaration said.

Whites had also “developed an understanding of the conditions that have generated a widespread revolt by the black people, as well as the importance of the ANC as a factor in resolving the conflict.”