‘Cry the Beloved Country II’ : With Normalcy Elusive, South Africa Might Try Rationality

South Africa is the kind of country where one is filled with hope on a Monday, only to be catapulted into utter despair on a Tuesday. This observation by Alan Paton, author of “Cry the Beloved Country,” once again came through after the encouraging results of Wednesday’s election were followed by unconfirmed reports of more than 25 people being shot dead by the police the same day.

In a sense, two elections have just occurred in South Africa: the one within the parliamentary system, which still excludes the black majority, and the second being the expression of the Mass Democratic Movement. This is the current umbrella body of all extra-parliamentary organizations, ranging from churches to trade unions to civic bodies.

The official election produced no result except to entrench the stalemate between the government and its main adversary, the outlawed African National Congress, whose internal allies here keep popping up under different names.

The expressed intention of the ANC and the Mass Democratic Movement is to dispel any illusion that normalcy has returned to South Africa now that the apparently urbane Frederik W. de Klerk has stepped into the shoes of the bellicose P. W. Botha. In this they succeeded.

In Cape Town, the police riot squad showed itself unable to handle what were essentially peaceful demonstrations in the mode of the American civil-rights movement under the leadership of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who is greatly revered among the colored, or mixed-raced, community of the city. The violence and the deaths have rocketed proper control over the police to the top of De Klerk’s agenda. Police reform will become the litmus test of his reformist will.

De Klerk confronts this and other challenges as leader of a party that was badly mauled in the election by both the left and the right. The party has lost 25 seats, and the overall impact of the result is an unprecedented opportunity in white politics.

Despite De Klerk’s fairly comfortable overall majority, the politics of the ruling white group is clearly entering a process of realignment that may inexorably shift the National Party away from apartheid.

The government’s effort to re-enter the financial markets of the West is forcing it to make the kind of adaptations that will inevitably bolster support for the right wing in the Afrikaner community, which dominates white politics.

The more pragmatic English-speaking whites, comprising nearly 40% of the electorate, have shown themselves unwilling this time to be coerced into support for the National Party through security scares and xenophobic appeals: Glasnost and perestroika are partly responsible for the defection of English-speaking voters from the ruling party.

Surveys found that white youth show a greater willingness, compared to the older generation, to support the Democratic Party, which propagates an anti-apartheid policy of non-racial individualism. At Stellenbosch, the trend-setting Afrikaner university, support for the Democratic Party has risen from 5% to 25% over the past decade. Of English-speaking students throughout the country, 80% are to the left of the National Party.

But perhaps the greatest pressure upon De Klerk is the growing resentment of the white electorate at large toward the National Party, which has dominated white politics for 40 years and which in recent years has allowed graft and pork-barrel politics to get hopelessly out of control.

In a way, the National Party finds itself in a position similar to that of Israel’s Labor Party before its rude awakening of 1977 (after the shift to the Likud Party); another striking analogy is the decline of the Unionist Party in Northern Ireland.

This election has produced a result that places the National Party in a similar position as previous dominant parties just before major realignments during South Africa’s political history. Its percentage of the vote has dropped to below 50% and the two opposition parties looks much more rigorous and committed.

The ruling party can regenerate itself by absorbing one of the two. Such a realignment with the right-wing Conservative Party would finally seal South Africa’s international fate. The only other choice is the leftist Democratic Party.

In his first statement on the election, De Klerk was quick to point out that more than 70% of the white electorate “voted for reform” (meaning both the National Party and the Democratic Party).

Any of his predecessors would rather have their right hand wither than group the National Party with a party of the left. But De Klerk is enough of a realist to know that in the situation in which South Africa finds itself, he has little choice.

It is perhaps too early to cite the prophecy of Israel’s Abba Eban that men and nations turn to rationality after they have exhausted all alternatives. But after this election, there are some stirrings of hope.