A State of Mind That Invites the Gunman : Systems Abound to Teach S. African Whites to Look Down on Blacks

The murder of seven innocent black South Africans in the capital of Pretoria has led to a war of words among white politicians about the root causes of this horrifying incident.

White nationalists have blamed one another for creating the political climate in which Barend Hendrik Strydom, a 23-year-old ultra-rightist ex-policeman (and son of an ultra-rightist ex-policeman), could allegedly arm himself, don camouflage garb and hunt blacks in the center of Pretoria. Apart from the seven killed, 16 were injured.

The buck has been passing furiously. The ultra-right blames the Pieter W. Botha government’s modest “reform” of apartheid that, it says, threatens the ruling Afrikaner’s sense of security and causes frustration. The government blames right-wingers for creating a climate of racial excess. Using powers previously reserved for action against the left, the government has moved to restrict the activities of some, but not all, ultra-rightists.

The argument misses the basic point: Both the ruling National Party and the rightist splinter parties that see the government as being “too liberal” are to blame for creating a climate of violence.

In a sense all white South Africans must share blame, including the comfortable English-speaking commercial and professional classes that eloquently criticize Afrikaner nationalist excess but that have often looked the other way when blacks have been removed, banned, detained, whipped and bludgeoned into submission.

The incident is not being passed off as the random actions of a lone lunatic. It has a distinctly political background.

Immediate blame for the state of mind that can produce an event like this rests at the door of those who devised and executed racist laws. This has its roots largely in the old South African Republic, established by Boers who migrated north to the Transvaal to get away from English colonialism in the Cape and whose constitution in 1858 expressly declared that “the people desire to permit no equality between colored people and the white inhabitants, either in Church or State.”

The process was fueled down the years by systematic apartheid, particularly since the present government came to power in 1948. Countless blacks were jailed under the now-abolished pass laws, which required them to carry documents to be in urban areas; millions of people of color were moved from their homes under statutes that decide where the races may reside; blacks could not get jobs reserved as “white.”

There were numerous unfeeling comments and actions by those in power. For instance, it was once suggested from on high that blacks should be educated for manual work and not for higher pursuits. A minister of justice, since dead, delivered himself of the chilling remark that the death in police custody in 1977 of black-consciousness champion Steve Biko “leaves me cold.” An Indian (ethnic Asian) golfer had to receive his trophy in the rain outside a clubhouse reserved for whites. The list goes on and on.

The process was bolstered every time a snub was administered to people of color under myriad laws designed primarily to protect whites--every time blacks lost dignity, home, job or money because they were black. These were the building blocks for the climate of violence. They dehumanized both black and white.

Sadly, further street killings could occur--unless there is a fundamental change in attitude. Racial prejudice prospers in South Africa, and little or nothing is done to tame it. The jailers of Biko got off scot-free; some were promoted. His doctors were called, mildly, to account only after sustained pressure from appalled members of the profession. Eugene Terre Blanche, the right-wing leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, to this day preaches his racism unchecked--and says the government would not dare to ban his movement. Many young whites learn, consciously or unconsciously, at their mother’s knee or in school to look down on their black fellow countrymen. And white men spend long periods in compulsory military service, where the enemy is axiomatically black.

The government has realized that it cannot rule without a broader base than a fragmenting Afrikanerdom, and is thus seeking to reform its policies to draw some black, and English-speaking, support. Yet reform does not go as far as giving evicted people their homes back, or paying them compensation, or even apologizing.

The government has retreated somewhat from the excesses of racial domination but, under right-wing attack, keeps in place the pillars of apartheid--separate living areas, separate state schooling, separate land allocation and separate political rights.

Perhaps the most chilling moment of the Pretoria mayhem came from a press report quoting a black bus driver saying that he had seen a white in camouflage uniform, gun drawn, chasing a black garbage collector. A white pedestrian, assuming that this was the usual thing--black thief, white pursuer--did the usual thing and apprehended the fleeing man and deliveredhim to the killer. It is the “usual thing” in South Africa that is on trial as much as is Strydom, the accused gunman.

In 1961, when Tanganyika (now Tanzania) was on the eve of independence, I interviewed a youngish Julius Nyerere in the State House in Dar es Salaam. He was a perfect host, even considering that I was a white South African. He chatted in relaxed mood about his country and mine. Yet his eyes turned suddenly steely when he talked about white racism. As long as whites saw blacks as hewers of wood and drawers of water, he said, there would be no peace in South Africa. Pretoria’s street carnage, I believe, bears him out.