New Prospects Grow in Southern Africa as Warfare Yields to Serious Negotiation : Peacemaking: A sense of hope, but no basic decisions yet or even a necessary common language for agreement.

A few years ago, the troubled southern Africa region seemed destined to become just another polarized Third World backwater, from which the dynamic parts of the world would simply disengage. But that scenario is not inevitable.

Last week’s meeting between imprisoned African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela and South Africa President Frederik W. de Klerk in Cape Town symbolizes the reality that human events are shaped by individuals as well as by ideas and historical forces. All three factors will play a role in making South Africa’s future. The South African drama, moreover, is not unfolding in a vacuum. It is an integral part of the broader southern African context as well of the global dynamics of our age.

The watershed Namibia-Angola settlement of December, 1988, could open the door to a brighter future for 150 million people. Political reason prevailed over reflexive behavior, permitting leaders to design a negotiated settlement in which everyone wins. Today, South African soldiers have come home from the wars in Namibia and Angola and the Cubans are leaving Angola on schedule. African National Congress guerrillas are also leaving Angola, the last of South Africa’s neighbors to host them.

Namibians have just participated in one of the most democratic experiences in African history. The South-West Africa People’s Organization, SWAPO, which won a bare majority in the November elections, has joined its rivals in drafting a constitution based explicitly on a set of principles negotiated in 1982 that enshrine the concepts of Western liberalism. Conceivably, an independent Namibia could even join company with Botswana--up to now the only bastion of Western liberalism within thousands of miles. Angola and Mozambique, in their separate ways, are exploring ways to end their hideous domestic strife and find the road to reconciliation.

The doctrines of violence that have tormented this region for years--armed struggle, destabilization, official hit squads and “necklacing”--have all been discredited. If South Africans can find a common language and apply the lessons of Namibia-Angola at home, southern Africa might escape a grisly fate.

But there is nothing easy or automatic about this scenario. We in the Western world talk loosely about the “end of history” and celebrate the victory of Western liberalism in the centuries-old battle of ideas over how to organize society. These, however, are abstract propositions for the majority of people around the world who still live under authoritarian systems.

In most of the Third World, including Africa, the battle of the “isms” continues. Marxism is a continuing plague that amounts in practice to ministerial ownership of the means of production. Leninism is far more prevalent than liberalism because Leninism answers the question of how to seize and monopolize power in transitional societies where governments are politically accountable only to themselves.

Of all the isms, nationalism--not liberalism--is what serves as the dominant political idea outside the Western World. It comes in many flavors: irredentism, separatism, chauvinism, fundamentalism, racism and, in many post-colonial societies, a nationalist litany of anti-Western slogans that remind citizens of the one thing they can agree on: their departed imperial enemy.

Southern Africans still take nationalism seriously as the basis for organizing politics. It remains the primary source of legitimacy for the governing elites of the Frontline States; for SWAPO, in Namibia; for the ANC, the Pan-Africanist Congress and their internal allies within South Africa, and for De Klerk’s governing National Party. Throughout the region, nationalists have won the battle for independence from foreign control. But, internally, the conflict of competing nationalisms is harder to resolve.

Apartheid is best understood as the vision of the victorious and exclusive Afrikaner nationalism that swept into power in 1948. Afrikaner empowerment was the goal; it would be achieved by institutionalizing white control and channeling the black majority into separate, tribally defined homelands. This, in other words, was to be an African version of the Soviet political and constitutional structure, complete with geographically delineated “national” republics, nominal “sovereignty” and the reality of imperial control from the center.

The remarkable transformations in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have a direct bearing on the clash of isms in Southern Africa. Afrikaners have perceived Marxist ideology and Soviet Third World military adventurism as the enemy. (They have been silent about Soviet nationalities policy.) Much of the black opposition has held the opposite view, seeing an ally in their enemy’s enemy. The death of Marxism, “new thinking” in foreign policy, perestroika and the unleashing of nationalist ferment in the East have suddenly neutralized these perceptions. South Africans need a new political compass: It is not clear whether the government or its opposition is more disoriented.

But there is clearly something new in the air in South Africa and a sense of hope in people’s faces. Explanations vary: the universal sense of relief that Pieter W. Botha (“the old crocodile”) is gone; De Klerk’s reform moves and a refreshing rhetoric reminding his constituents that South Africa is not the private property of the Afrikaners; black opposition, confidence in its growing organizational clout; De Klerk’s decision to give black leaders some space in which to operate. But have any basic decisions been taken by Pretoia and those with whom it must deal?

Not yet, in the sense of defining bold new bottom lines for a grand compromise. That would be premature. The government and its opponents still cling officially to mutually exclusive code words--”group rights” and the “transfer of power.” Neither formula is a serious response to the challenges facing the country; both will be scrapped when things ripen. Suspicion and fear bedevil the crucial tasks of defining an agenda and developing a new common language with shared negotiating principles. Yet various parties have already begun the process of pre-negotiation; this is the meaning of Wednesday’s encounter between Mandela and De Klerk. We do not know what they said to each other, or when--next month, next year--Mandela will be free, but we do know that his freedom and negotiations on a post-apartheid South Africa are intimately linked.

South African politics have become an almost continuous consultative process as this divided society discovers the art of communication. From prison, Mandela is at the center of a network of fax machines and face-to-face consultation that includes the government and every significant component of the organized opposition, from labor unions and churches to homeland leaders and the major figures in the various organizations--ANC, United Democratic Front, Mass Democratic Movement, Black Consciousness. Outside the country, South Africans of all stripes have become frequent flyers in order to meet each other at conferences in Dakar, Paris, London, Bermuda, Lusaka and Harare. No one quite knows what this process will produce, and no one is in control of it.

The first instinct of political leaders anywhere is to organize and control the agenda, starting within one’s own camp. It is no easy matter for Pretoria’s opponents, still operating under a state of emergency, to get their act together on the hard compromises that lie ahead. It is simpler to have yet another protest rally, or to reject the latest official press statement. De Klerk also has problems. He inherited closets full of skeletons and scandals while seeking to re-establish cabinet government and internal accountability. He is torn between three important goals: keeping the initiative; avoiding premature discussion of the toughest issues, and getting a serious process of talks launched.

South Africa can no longer be organized and controlled by politicians: It is becoming, inexorably, a more integrated, multiracial society. Racial laws are increasingly ignored and unenforced. Economics and demography are changing the ground rules. Blacks cannot empower themselves in the white-dominated economy if it is destroyed by political stalemate and the loss of access to foreign capital. By the same token, as conservative white opposition leaders have discovered in Boksburg, enforcing apartheid means bankrupting white business. Blacks account for 70% of Johannesburg’s commercial turnover, 40% of South Africa’s middle managers and university students, nearly 60% of new housing starts.

Seen against this backdrop, South Africans simply cannot afford apartheid. Its domestic price tag includes not only defense and police expenditures but the “hidden” costs of skilled emigration, subsidizing strategic industries and oil reserves, empty white classrooms and hospital beds and the costs of maintaining 14 parliamentary bodies and 151 government departments. Nor can they afford socialism, whether of the Afrikaner nationalist variety or that of the black urban radicals who misperceive Pretoria’s statism as “capitalism.” The De Klerk team has committed itself to economic liberalism. There is talk of major budget cuts and reallocations, privatization and deregulation. These are important principles. Applied to the economy, they could save billions that will be needed to build a free South Africa; applied to the society, they could bring an end to the nationalist nightmare of apartheid.

In theory, the conditions now exist that could drive the states of southern Africa--and the leaders of South Africa--toward one another. For 30 years they have moved closer to the abyss that awaits them if they fail to shape a common destiny. They have also witnessed the success of the peacemakers in Namibia and Angola and the failures of Marxism and exclusive nationalism in the wider world. Neither official repression nor insurgent violence can create a better future.

There are also more tangible reasons for hope. South Africa, the dominant regional player, is well endowed with independent newspapers, dynamic churches, quality universities, entrepreneurial and engineering genius plus a rich array of labor unions, political movements and non-governmental institutions. There are courageous leaders in all walks of life, battling for their beliefs. The country needs to free its political leaders, black and white, from their physical and conceptual prisons. It needs more historians to rewrite a divisive past of domination and resistance. Its leaders need to accept full responsibility for their own future rather than seeking foreign allies and scapegoats.

We can help by sharing these hopes and supporting meaningful steps toward an equitable society. Above all, we should do no harm.