Apartheid’s Death: Reports Are Greatly Exaggerated

In Pretoria, the official line is that apartheid is dead.

On the streets, the goverment is as busy as ever in its crackdown on people protesting apartheid.

Today, several million whites may vote in the national elections. None of the more than 25 million blacks even has the right to vote. Under the Group Areas Act, black people are still required to live in so-called “townships,” remarkable for their squalor and dreariness and for the ease with which they can be sealed off militarily.

People who demonstrate against these segregated and inferior conditions are gassed and arrested. Black and white leaders who oppose the system and seem to be effective are either detained or restricted under so-called emergency regulations, which the entirely white courts have declined to review.

If it weren’t for international sanctions, the government wouldn’t even offer the pretense of change. Leaky and ineffective as they are, sanctions aggravate the economic decline of the country, under way since the beginning of the decade. Blacks know that external sanctions are now their best hope, because internally opposition is neutralized by an efficient security apparatus while externally the military arm of the African National Congress, always overestimated, has been deflected.

The extra-parliamentary opposition, as it is called, presses allies abroad to maintain and increase sanctions. The white government is also obsessed with sanctions. It seeks to have them lifted by creating the illusion of change.

The dynamics of the Pretoria government militate against real change. A characteristic of autocratic states is that officials seek to conserve the party, the system, their constituencies and their careers, even though the economy and the social infrastructure may be slowly disintegrating. Where even the enfranchised cannot dismiss rulers who have failed to perform well, there’s no incentive to undertake initiatives that might fail.

True, initiatives might reverse the decline, but they will hurt some constituents. More to the point, they can fail, which would spell the end of a career. Staying on course has no risk. Things will decline further, but imperceptibly to those who count. Meanwhile, one’s career can flourish.

This is how it works in South Africa. Like bureaucrats in the Brezhnev era, Pretoria’s officials make the smallest concessions, just enough to get by. Words are changed. Apartheid is dead. (But it’s not.) Many people are executed. (That continues.) The government is ready to negotiate. (But not with the enemy.) The voice is now Jacob’s, the hands are still Esau’s.

They may be unaware of it, but white racists are also victims of their system. They were taught to hate in school, in their families and, until four years ago, by the church. All their information is controlled. Everything they hear and see validates the hatred. In an odd way, the men and women who have taken a stand, even if they’re detained or restricted, are freer.

In my talks with black people in the townships, I was struck by their understanding of the situation and their extraordinary tranquility. It comes, I suppose, from a sense of the human dignity of all, from courage and from the deep conviction that history will vindicate them.

The saddest people in South Africa are the “in-betweeners,” mostly whites, in business, the universities and even government, who have some moral consciousness and recognize the evil of the system but who accommodate it and are rewarded with wealth, comfort and respect.

The in-betweeners are skilled at the double-entry bookkeeping of all moralizers and rationalizers. They may pay their domestic servants a wee bit more, protect a friend who has trekked to Dakar or Lusaka to meet with the ANC, bemoan the government privately and tell themselves they’re working from within to change the system while they tolerate and benefit from it. They always tell you apartheid is dead and things are getting better. They are the damned of South Africa.

So the king is dead. Long live the king. The ruling National Party, the government that proclaimed the death of apartheid, is campaigning on a platform of “group rights.” That means that different groups should have their own facilities and the option of living separately, with no group controlling any other. In other words, forget “one man one vote” and majority rule. In other words, apartheid.

Even that change of vocabulary could cost the ruling party the election, for the right-wing Conservative Party claims to reject any accommodation.

The election may be about as real as the death of apartheid. Many outsiders, myself included, have thought of South Africa as an imperial democracy, like Israel or England in the days of its empire.

In imperial democracies, vigorous power-sharing takes place within the ruling group. All of those outside that group are powerless. South Africa has elections, campaigns and a scattering of parties, but emergency regulations, a self-sterilized judiciary, effective censorship and a powerful and widespread secret apparatus all conspire to control nonwhites and whites.

The most astonishing thing about this police state is the effect of censorship. Television, the major source of information for the man in the street, is controlled by the government; so is radio. The press is censored, as are other publications and movies. People who are “banned” may not even be mentioned publicly.

Unless a white South African travels abroad or cultivates a taste for the foreign press or the British Broadcasting Corp.’s World Service, his values and images of the world will be the handiwork of the political elite: a rosy world where apartheid is dead and South Africa flourishes.

The government in Pretoria may capture the minds of its people. It must not capture ours. Apartheid is not dead.