The Washington Post, by Jimmie Lee Hoagland

JOHANNESBURG—"The most important event of the 20th century for Africa will be the revolution that did not happen."

Unhappily paraphrasing Chesterton on 19th century England, a liberal white South African educator recently gave that analysis of his country’s fate.

Firmly entrenched here at the southern corner of the African continent, white power has halted the winds of change that were supposed to sweep four million whites back into the sea.

Instead, the white men and women who form Africa’s strongest and most domineering tribe have prospered, and have developed new ways to squeeze even harder the 16 million nonwhites they rule.

They have tightened their harsh system of segregation without triggering the violent explosion that many predicted would raze Africa’s richest and most developed country.

This has frozen much of the rest of the continent in time and psychology, as it fitfully and insecurely waits for change, for an ending to what U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers recently called "the unfinished business of the emergence of Africa."

Rogers’ statement contains important historical, moral and political assumptions that are angrily disputed by South Africa’s white leaders.

They deny that African nationalism is an irresistible historical force with an overriding moral claim. They also deny that America’s interests are served by supporting Black Nationalism in Africa. They point to the protection they give the billion dollars worth of American investment in South Africa.

Drawing the color line more sharply than anyone has since the time of slavery, Africa’s Teutonic tribe has provoked a flood of emotional rhetoric from critics and supporters that tends to obscure more than to illuminate such questions as:

• What forces are working for change, and what forces hold it back?

• Are South African whites the unyielding remnants of exploitation and colonialism (as they are often painted), or are they radicals, seeking new, progressive solutions for a racial problem that plagues the whole world and threatens to destroy them (as they claim)?

• Why do the country’s blacks acquiesce as walls of silence and frustration are built higher around them?

Farmers in Power

The search for answers in this nation, rich in scenic beauty, resources and cultures, inevitably begins with the people who have forged white power into the most enduring political force in Africa over the past two decades—the Afrikaners.

Any change short of the dreaded explosion that could spark a much wider race war must come from within the ranks of Afrikanerdom, most South Africans say.

In his 22-year rule, the Afrikaner has come off his farm to preside over the world's second most phenomenal economic growth (Japan’s is first) and to construct political and security apparatus that rival Stalin’s Soviet Union in single-mindedness and ruthlessness toward dissidents.

The Afrikaner is South Africa’s legislator, farmer, policeman, censor, soldier and preacher. More and more, he is also the country’s banker, mine official, intellectual and shopkeeper.

Intensely loyal to his own, vindictive toward others, he clings fiercely to religious principles that have changed little during the three centuries of his isolation in this land. He usually regards change with suspicion, if not hostility.

But speculation that change is overtaking him has never been more acute in South Africa than at this moment. Events that are ripples elsewhere can take on the proportions of tidal waves in this society.

A month ago, his political machine, the National Party, suffered eight parliamentary defeats in national elections. Minor in number, they are also the first for the party since it came to power.

Take these events of last month which involved Afrikaners:

Businessmen openly disputed the government on how widespread, and how harsh, segregation has to be. A cabinet minister was forced to resign because of a suspicious bank loan he received. A high-ranking policeman was prosecuted for breaking the Immorality Act (banning white-black sexual intercourse) he is supposed to enforce. Other policemen were investigated for taking bribes.

Superficial things? Yes. But it does seem evident that Afrikanerdom is inching toward a crossroads which no one has yet clearly sighted but which will involve an interplay of economic, political and religious forces that alarm Afrikaner leaders.

Detribalized Whites

Two important historical currents are producing these forces, and provide essential keys to understanding contemporary South Africa.

First, the Afrikaners, once a sternly puritanical, agrarian and classless society, are in transition toward a more rootless, money-oriented and urbanized community.

In effect, they face the schizophrenic detribalization that is occurring in other African countries.

Here, the process could be even more traumatic, because of the Afrikaner’s systematic use of government as a tribal instrument, and as a foundation for an ideology to channel the extremes of his loves and hates.

Second, having achieved one of the most remarkable ascents to power of any minority in history, he still carries with him the scars of desperate poverty and weakness that he has conquered. He also carries the fear that the now powerless black man who outnumbers him can do the same, and will wield power as harshly as he has done.

The second force seems to be locked In a deadly struggle with the first. As a result, change in South Africa is slow—agonizingly slow for the millions who suffer because of the system.

The uncertain outcome of the struggle also means that change in the Afrikaner world will not necessarily mean a better deal for nonwhites.

Descendants of Teutonic settlers who began the first true colonization of Africa 318 years ago, the Afrikaners make up 60 percent of the white population. Until 1848, they were popularly known as the Boers, or farmers, and had to take a distant second place to their more sophisticated, richer and better-educated white English-speaking countrymen.

Their farms devastated by English armies during the Boer War, the Afrikaners were forced into the English cities and mining camps during the first two decades of this century, and were treated like unskilled immigrants in their own country.

They watched as English capitalists gave jobs they sought to black men who spoke better English or worked for lower wages than the Afrikaner. To the Afrikaner, however, the Africans were descendants of people they had either had as slaves or defeated in a long series of wars over cattle and land.

"The Afrikaner never forgave either the English or the Africans," says an English speaker. Economist J. L. Sadie, himself an Afrikaner, puts it this way: They were "people who felt themselves kicked around, trampled upon and humiliated."

The Profit Motive

Banding together around their Calvinistic church, which taught them they were a chosen people, and around their common language and poverty, the Afrikaners methodically set out to regain South Africa.

"These wore people who came of sound basic stock, from the Continent, and there was no reason why they should not be as economically important as anybody else," said Tom Muller, now one of South Africa’s most important mining directors and a key figure in the financial bodies Afrikaners formed to promote their community.

"The English-speaking South African controlled the wealth, and the Afrikaner wanted to wipe out that disparity. His ambition to do so has been the biggest driving factor in his rise," said Muller in words that one might expect to hear today from a black South African talking about the white man.

In short, the Afrikaner had discovered the profit motive later than most other white people.

In the solitude of his farms, "the Afrikaner missed the lessons of the 19th century about liberalism and equality," according to Prof. Julius Lewin. "He emerged into the 20th century as a modern man, and wears that label because he knows how to make money."

Today, the economic gap has dwindled to insignificance, and modern Afrikaner businessmen are discarding the sentimental appeal of Afrikanerdom. They rely on better business techniques to bring them a larger share of a standard of living that has doubled within the last 20 years.

"You cannot classify business as Afrikaner and English any more. We’ve moved beyond that," Jan Marais, head of South Africa’s growing Trust Bank, said in a recent interview in Cape Town. "Both groups no longer look inward."

The Trust Bank is an offshoot of the Afrikaner financial combine, but the hard driving, efficiency-conscious Marais has turned it into South Africa's first one-stop service bank and given it modern methods and a heavy public relations approach admired by American bankers.

Marais is considered a model of the new Afrikaner entrepreneur, seeking to broaden the horizons of the Afrikaner community and the country. He proudly points out that there are no segregated waiting lines in his Cape Town banks, and, while agreeing with the general aims of his government’s strong segregation policies, he presses for more skilled jobs for nonwhites.

His ideas resemble those of Anton Ruppert, who has built his Rothman’s of Pall Mall cigarette company into an empire stretching across 16 countries and 250 factories.

Ruppert’s desire to expand into the African markets to the north has been one of the main forces behind the government's stated "outward policy" of seeking more economic ties to the rest of the continent.

The Enlightenment

The softer approach to race by businessmen like Marais and Ruppert, and a few leading Afrikaner editors and academicians, has been dubbed the verligte (enlightened) policy. It is pointed to by those who argue that new business interests are reforming Afrikanerdom.

Others, however, think that the economic pull can be a double-edged knife.

"You cannot run the country from boardrooms in Cape Town," said a young Afrikaner editor who supports the verligtes but who doubts their strength. "You have to run it from Pretoria," the administrative capital.

"Politics or the church, or both, have been the home of the bright young Afrikaners," he continued pessimistically. "Now they go into business, and all they influence are dividends for shareholders. The government meantime is composed of party hacks who make the decisions that count."

Piet Cillie, the editor of the Afrikaans newspaper Die Burger and considered to be one of the architects of the verligte policy, recently conceded that "any power the verligtes have is highly ephemeral."

"The party machinery could turn on us and crush us at any moment. The important thing about the (April) elections was that the conservative establishment protected us" from the ultra-rightist Afrikaner group that wanted to jettison the verligtes and go back into Afrikaner isolationism.

Others say even more strongly that the new, embourgeoised and less dogmatic Afrikaner society has made minor inroads into the real seats of South African white power—the National Party and the secret society that influences it, the Brotherhood.

Because of their numbers, the farmers in the interior and the white working class in the cities still are the backbone of the party. The party can and does satisfy both with its apartheid policy of keeping blacks out of jobs reserved for white men, and thus keeping a pool of cheap black labor available for the farms.

The flavor of a recent National Party campaign meeting gives some indications that the homespun, traditional values of Afrikanerdom still exert a strong pull.

Schoolgirls wearing the hoop skirts of pioneer women who went on the Boer treks line Prime Minister John Vorster’s path as he enters the hall. Overhead flutter orange pennants bearing the names of past Afrikaner prime ministers, and on the walls are the curved powderhorns the trekkers depended on for ammunition.

On stage, Vorster’s minister for information, Connie Mulder, who resembles a young, handsome Minnesota butter and egg salesman, is leading the crowd in singing hymns and Afrikaans folk songs that tell of their battles with the British and Africans.

The meeting begins with a lengthy prayer. The nationalist politicians on stage do not close their eyes in tribute to God, but clench them tightly shut, contorting their features.

Beside them stand their wives. Like the men, they arc middle-aged but, unlike many of the men, whose features have gone soft and puffy, they seem to have retained the pinched leanness one expects of frontier folk.

Ben Schoeman, a sleepy-eyed but vitriolic tribal elder, speaks before Vorster. He is minister for transport, and second only to the prime minister in prestige. Schoeman, who is talking about "the long-haired scum" that want to tear down South Africa, has been in the cabinet since 1948. It is something akin to having James Byrnes making policy for the United States today.

In the audience, people stir restlessly, waiting for Vorster. They are, of course, all white, and most of them are there as a family. About one -third of the capacity crowd is well below the 18-year-old voting age. The children are enthusiastic.

Vorster begins quietly, clasping his hands piously in front of his rotund body. Even in delivering some of the jokes that have brought him criticism from the humorless ultrarightists, he looks stern.

In the campaign, he has appealed to English-speaking voters, and now he tries to erase any worries this may cause the Afrikaners. He says they will never give up their Afrikaner culture and language to the English. Anyone who asks him to give up his traditions, he says fiercely, "can go to a place that is not so cool."

Later, he glares through his bifocals at an antagonistic questioner who wants to know why Vorster has ordered investigations into the affairs of the ultrarightists. Vorster says the inquiries should not bother his opponents.

"You ever heard of a man who tells the truth being embarrassed?" Vorster asks. In a few words, he has encapsulated much of the Afrikaner’s character, and much of the reason for the gulf between the Afrikaner and the rest of the world.

"To the Afrikaner, the state is the creation of Providence, ordained and blessed by the Supreme Being to run the country" says N. J. J. Oliveer, an Afrikaner professor at Stellenbosch University, which is Vorster’s alma mater.

"The Anglo-Saxon mind fears that if you give a man power, he will be tempted to abuse it. There must be checks. The English world asks, ‘Why trust anybody with power?' The Afrikaner asks, ‘Why do you distrust the man?’ With his rural background, where he knew and trusted all his neighbors, and with his belief that only good men obtain power, he assumes that there will be no abuse."

And so the Afrikaner parliament has given the Afrikaner police force power to arrest anyone, anytime, without giving any reason, and to hold the detainee as long as he likes.

The power is most often used against black men.

The government also can ban anyone from his work, from living in his own house, from talking to other people, from anything but breathing, as one critic has said, "and they are working on that."

"The Afrikaner, in good faith, has substituted his conscience for the rule of law," said Oliveer, whose dissent to some of the government’s policies has made him unpopular with the Nationalists.

"And since he knows that the white man in parliament will treat the black man fairly, then why does the black man need to be in parliament?" Oliveer concluded.

Many Afrikaners I met on a six-week trip across South Africa do seem genuinely puzzled that the outside world criticizes them for having drawn up the grand design of apartheid, which intends to resettle perhaps 10 million Africans from where they now live with out letting the Africans have any say.

It is not surprising that National Party politicians retain a rural, devout outlook. Most of the members of parliament either grew up or still live on farms, and almost all of them are regular church-going members of the Dutch Reform Church, which forbids going to movies or playing golf on Sunday, and frowns on racially mixed worship services.

The church supplied the Afrikaners with their first Nationalist prime minister when D. F. Malan left the pulpit to lead the party to eventual victory in 1948.

The church’s influence is also felt through the powerful Masonic-like organization called the Brotherhood (Broederbond in Afrikaans), to which 7,000 to 8,000 of the most important Afrikaners belong.

The Rev. C. F. Beyers Naude, a former Dutch Reformed minister who had to resign his post when he began working with groups opposing apartheid, estimates that there are at least 500 Dutch Reformed ministers in the Brotherhood.

Because of its oath of secrecy, the only sources that will talk about the Brotherhood are dissidents, and it’s not clear just how much influence the organization does exert over the government.

It seems to have structures paralleling both the government and party, and to tie together the many Afrikaner religious, cultural and economic groups in a strong monolith. It also seems to be dominated by more conservative Afrikaners, and dedicated to the status quo.

But younger Afrikaners think its influence is slowly withering, as is that of the church—at least in the cities. The increasing conflict between secular and religious demands in the urban setting is creating much of the confusion that outsiders often mistake for change.

Even Vorster’s easier political style contributes to a disorientation. He plays golf, which upsets the tribal elders. Moreover, he lunches with black diplomats, which confuses young Afrikaners who know they are forbidden by law to have such contacts with black men. And he tells them not to use familiar derogatory racial terms such as "kaffir."

The Need to Conform

But if there is confusion, it still seems to stop short of doubt. In the harsh world in which he has been formed, the Afrikaner has not had much opportunity for what he sees as the luxury of self-doubt.

The pressures on him to conform have been, and continue to be, severe.

Afrikaner society completely excludes anyone who does not subscribe to its beliefs. To ostracize in Afrikaans means literally to cast out into the wilderness, where the dissident will not weaken the frontier fort, and where he will perish.

When Mr. Naude began to disagree with apartheid, not only did he have to give up his job, but Afrikaners also cut off all social contact with him. "They view me as a heretic," he said sadly.

D. W. J. Van Heerden, a prominent member of the antiapartheid Progressive Party and an Afrikaner, got the same treatment. "Disagreeing with apartheid is worse than murder to some Afrikaners," he noted.

This organized casting out is one of the most tribalistic features of Afrikaner society. There are many others which bear resemblance to attitudes and practices of groups like the Zulus or Kikuyu.

There is, for instance, ancestor worship. (During a recent half-hour conversation, a high-ranking government official invoked the name of Hendrik Verwoerd, Vorster’s predecessor, no less than eight times.) "Ours" and "we" run through all conversations.

There is also the feeling of superiority over all other groups, a feeling that is based not on color alone. When asked why the large majority of South Africa’s colored (mulatto) population has Afrikaner ancestors, the Afrikaner will often reply: "Why, no sensible Zulu woman is going to bed with a bloody Englishman, is she?"

To call the Afrikaners a tribe is, in some ways, to make a judgment that helps them in their historical argument. Their case, as one civil servant puts it, is, "We are a permanent feature of the African scene. We have nothing in common with the European colonialists who left the Continent in the last decade."

On the other hand, to deny that they are something of an African tribe is to refuse to face the really serious problem they face in this sun-filled, opulent land.

They have crisscrossed the plains for several centuries, and like all other tribes, have fought their neighbors for cattle and land. There is no other country they can go to where the majority of them could have anything approaching the standard of living they have achieved here.

Their leaders are convinced that they will, eventually, have to give up their hard-gained cattle and land, and their gold mines and skyscrapers, if they make any concessions to the 16 million nonwhites who outnumber them.

By any standards, the concessions they have made so far have been precious few, and mostly for the sake of their own economy. It is not in the Afrikaner’s nature, nor, he is convinced, in his interest, to make concessions.

"Look around the monuments and you will see the Afrikaner’s past, and his future," said a young white English speaker as he took a visitor around the massive Voortrekker Monument that stands on a hill outside Pretoria.

The monument, a mausoleum-like structure, is adorned by friezes depicting the Boer trekkers battling and defeating the Zulus at Blood River in 1836. Outside, standing guard with muskets, are 10-foot-tall statues. In the center of Pretoria, stone riflemen encircle a monument to Paul Kruger.

There hardly seems to be an Afrikaner monument without guns.

"His history is violence, and strength, and they are the only things he respects," said the English speaker, who by his own admission is highly critical of Afrikaners.

"The Africans understand him (the Afrikaner) better than other white men do. They know that anything they get from the Afrikaner will have to be paid for in blood—mostly theirs—but also his.

"I don’t know when it will come. Probably not any time soon, probably not in this century. But I’m not going to be around to see it. I’m getting out."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

CAPE TOWN—Lord Charles Somerset gazes down suspiciously at outsiders as they are conducted to the guest register near the club’s entrance. The aristocrat’s somber portrait stands out in the studied bareness of a world where English gentlemen gather without ladies.

The club (one is not told its name, and it seems impudent to ask) is one of the shrinking cultural enclaves the British Empire maintains in South Africa. Cheese follows dessert. Punch lies on the reading room table.

At the luncheon table, the conversation turns to the relations between Somerset’s heirs and their more numerous more powerful Afrikaans-speaking white countrymen. It is not a subject that brings joy to these precincts.

"A lot of us retreated into clubs like this in the past nine years, trying to pretend that things were the same," says a wealthy English-speaking businessman.

New Identity

"But, of course, things have changed. People keep talking about us finding a new identity as South Africans. There’s something to it, but the really basic thing that is happening is that we are losing our identity just like we lost the country."

Nearly a decade after the Afrikaners forced them to cut the political umbilical cord linking them to the British empire, South Africa’s English-speaking are beginning to show signs of despondency and doubt about their role in the country.

Their political effectiveness has been reduced to zero. Their economic dominance is declining rapidly as the Afrikaners consolidate their rise to wealth and the brightest of their sons and daughters are choosing, or being forced, to live abroad.

In fact, the English speakers are being written off as a meaningful force for change by just about every other group in this divided nation, at a time when change of some sort may be within grasp.

"All we have to do to the English is call them," a powerful member of the Afrikaners political machine, the National Party, said recently, making a beckoning motion with his hand, "and they come running."

Clout Them

"And when they get close enough," he continued with a smile and making his hand into a fist, "we clout them on the chops. And they take it, because Corporal Van der Merwe is the only thing that protects them from the black man."

Van der Merwe is the equivalent of Smith or Jones among Afrikaners, the teutonic white group that makes up 60 percent of the four million whites and most of the country’s of South Africa police force.

Like the Nationalist politician, many here attribute the ability of these four million to keep 16 million nonwhites under their heel—politically and socially—to the Afrikaners strength, and tenacity.

Some students of South African affairs demur saying that the predicament of South Africa today is as much failure by the English speakers as a success by the Afrikaners.

The Afrikaners originally settled South Africa, beginning in 1652. The British, led by Lord Somerset, arrived 150 years later to set up a self governing colony within the empire.

Complete Control

It took them another 100 years, a large army and the costly Boer War to gain what they thought was complete control of South Africa.

English speaking whites of British origin did fasten a stranglehold on the country's rich gold and diamond mines, and devoted themselves to commerce and trade while the Afrikaners spent their time on politics.

The Afrikaners came to power with the 1948 election victory of the National Party, rooted the English speakers out of important posts, and in 1961, realized their dream of pulling South Africa out of the British Commonwealth.

Since then, they have ignored more than opposed their English-speaking countrymen. Most of the government's energy has been exerted to uphold its harsh segregationist policies, and to break African nationalist demands for rights.

"The English speakers have failed because they failed to understand the white nationalism of the Afrikaner, of the black nationalism of the African," says Prof. Julius Lewin, himself a South African English speaker, now living in London.

"They were embarrassed by nationalism, because it is so emotional and un-English. They devoted themselves to the business of business, while the Afrikaner was taking over the country."

Hold Few Seats

The political organization most English speakers back, the United Party, holds less than a quarter of the seats in parliament.

Moreover, the party’s policies have become a fuzzy shadow of the National Party’s program for keeping white domination, enforced perhaps less harshly.

Afrikaners delight in, and firmly believe, this analysis of the English speaker: "They talk Progressive Party [a small, relatively liberal group that favors some rights for Africans], vote United Party, and thank God every night for the National Party."

Perhaps it is more significant that many nonwhites repeat the same story.

This is especially true among the coloreds (mulattoes) and Indians, who have had more contact with the English than have Africans. Blacks tend to blame most of their present misery on "the Dutchman," or Afrikaner.

"The English speaker hasn’t had the nerve, nor the foresight, to develop his prejudice into an ideology," says Fatima Meer, a sociologist who is a member of Durban’s Indian community. "That has become the trump card of the Afrikaner."

In ‘Tough Spot’

"The Afrikaner ideology makes it possible for him to say, 'I’m discriminating and it’s all right because it is in God’s name.' The English speaker says, I'm discriminating and it’s bad, but I’m in a tough spot, what else can I do?'"

Mrs. Meer pointed out that the United Party introduced the first legislation in 1946 forcing Indians into segregated living areas. The Nationalists took over the idea for their Group Areas Act, which is widely despised by the nonwhites who are forced into racial ghettoes by it.

A colored leader in Cape Town put it this way: "We used to think the English speakers were more fair minded. Now we see that they are not a damn bit better. The hell with the whole bunch of white men."

At the same time, it is generally recognized that the limited opposition raised in South Africa to apartheid has, for the most part, been raised by English speakers.

"We may not be a real political threat to the Afrikaner," says Progressive Party leader, Colin Eglin, "but we can still be the activator of the South African conscience. There must be somebody to stand up and say, this is wrong."

Disturbing Change

The increasing loss of this tempering influence is, to many liberals, the most disturbing change that is taking place in South Africa today. It is a change that could raise the chances for a violent confrontation between Afrikaner, and African, nationalism.

The English speakers have been unable to develop anything to interpose between the two. While South Africans like to talk today of the two white groups coming together, a six week visit to the country makes it clear that most of the concessions toward "a broad South African nationalism" are being made by the English—speakers, not the Afrikaners.

Afrikaner economist J. I. Sadie says: "From being an appendage of the British nation, they have changed into South Africans ... This has greatly accelerated during the past few years in which [most of] the English speaking section formed the impression that Britain was selling the white man in Africa down the river." Guy Butler, poet and author, has written that English speakers "feel a lack of purpose, of direction; they want to feel they belong and they are afraid of belonging."

Leaving Country

"Yes, I’m leaving the country," says Ken Costa, president of the students’ representative council at the English-language University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. "They wear you down, they reduce you to making snide gestures, and there is no point in staying."

For some young English speakers, the sense of powerlessness that afflicts their community is terrifying.

"I talk to Afrikaners and they say they want to get rid of all the black men, however they have to do it," says Lee Haiden, a senior coed at the same university, "and I talk to the few Africans I know as friends, and they say they’ve given up, all they want to do is cut the white man’s head off and throw it back into the ocean. God, do I feel trapped."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

"The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." — W. E. B. Du Bois, 1900.

STELLENBOSCH, South Africa—The coed smoothed her skirt, which hovered a modest inch above the knee, and smiled confidently when asked if there was student unrest here.

"No. We know that we cannot afford to be irresponsible. If we want to continue to survive, we must have discipline and authority."

In many ways, the youth of South Africa is moving into tomorrow occupying the positions their parents have staked out for today. Peaceful change may be as elusive for the next generation as it has proven for the one now in power.

And. as one of the keenest students of South African affairs. Prof. Julius Lewin has noted, "There is no revolution around the corner.

"In South Africa today, most people do still behave as if they felt that, with all its weaknesses, the country were a going concern. Only a small minority think otherwise, and even their actions commonly belie their fears."

In short, it appears that for the immediate future, white South Africans will continue to prove that an unjust society can be a workable one. But there is also the long-term chance that this white minority is constructing a grim, self-fulfilling prophecy of a bloody and chaotic black takeover that will devastate this rich country.

Still Time

Neither prospect is as immutable as outsiders often proclaim. Revolt is usually unforeseen. More importantly, there is still time to turn the central proposition around—to make the workable society a just one. But there may not be the creative leadership, and national will, required to bring this about.

White South Africans are among the most judged people in the world. They invite judgment by their hostile insistence to outsiders that they have the answer to the racial problem, and that nobody else—especially America—does.

But the judgments, whether from friend or enemy of apartheid, are too often colored by the outsiders' own reason and problems, and too often show too little understanding of the complex South African situation.

Defining the problem is the first, and perhaps crucial consideration.

White Domination

The actions, if not always the words, of the autocratic white rulers make it clear that they consider the problem to be preserving white domination and protecting the interests of the 4 million-member white minority group that has its roots here and has done much to develop the country. They are willing to use efficient, ruthless and degrading methods to accomplish this.

For many others, it boils down to turning the country over to the 16 million Africans and other non-whites. As a black majority on a black continent, they must dominate the whites, this view holds, by violence if necessary.

Between the two extremes lies the largely neglected, and much more difficult, question of offering an equitable sharing of economic, political and social rights to whites and blacks without doing serious damage to either group.

Perhaps, as the white leaders intimate, it is not possible because of the vast disparities between the two groups. Perhaps, as blacks often contend, it would perpetuate much of the injustice that now exists.

But the distressing thing about South Africa today is that too few people scorn willing even to address this center position realistically and grapple with the hard choices it presents.

Justification of Apartheid

The white regime justifies its apartheid solution of taking 87 percent of the land and shutting out Africans not only as necessary for white survival, but also as just and in the interest of the powerless Africans, who have nothing to say about the arrangement. This contention is fantasy, as white author Alan Paton has labeled it.

If South Africa’s leaders persist in using this fiction to ignore their country’s staggering problems, they can hardly expect the rest of the world to look realistically at their largely Justifiable claims that there is much in white South African society worth preserving.

By continuing to ignore or to distort cases like that of independent Kenya, where the rights of whites have been scrupulously protected, and by pretending that the Congo of 1970 is the same as it was in 1960, the white leaders of South Africa and their foreign allies will block one of the most powerful forces' for peaceful change in South Africa.

Du Bois’ Prediction

This is not to say that black Africa to the north is, or will shortly be, free from upset and chaos. And it is not to minimize the major problems and potential disruption that will arise from trying; to bring a largely uneducated black mass into sophisticated economic and political systems.

It is to say that South African whites cannot have it both ways. They cannot boast of the more than 2,000 college-educated Africans in the country, and then say that Africans are not qualified to be a part of the nation’s mainstream. They cannot continue to ignore the fact that W. E. B. Du Bois’ prediction has, for better or worse, largely come true, and refuse to accept the dangerous implications of their actions.

"Tyrannies based on race" may or may not be more evil than other tyrannies, former British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart once observed, but "at the present time in the history of the world, they are infinitely more dangerous."

Many white South Africans will undoubtedly find such conclusions coming from an outsider presumptuous. Many of us probably would, if we were in their place.

Generalizations are always unsatisfactory, and dangerous. But they do seem to be a little more justified here in the land of racial stereotyping and neat compartmentalization than perhaps in other places.

The people are a strange mixture of paternal generosity and empathy, smugness and insecurity. This beautiful land is Eden after the fall, but before the expulsion.

The overwhelming impression left on this visitor is melancholy, despite the exuberance of the people. There is in both black and white a Faulknerian sense of despair at being saddled with this crushing burden in an otherwise Elysian setting.

For all they have done to him personally, and more importantly to his ideas, the white rulers have been unable to erase these words written by the country's greatest author, Alan Paton, and spoken by a black character to a white in his play "Sponono":

"You are, whether you like it or not, your brother’s keeper ... We are bound together, for better or for worse."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

JOHANNESBURG—It is 7 a.m. and the city has belonged exclusively to the whites for nine hours.

Dawn slides softly up the ridges that break around Johannesburg and probes the quiet canyons between the deserted skyscrapers. A breeze stirs puffs of dust from the giant yellow heaps of dirt brought to the surface 50 years ago, dumped and left as men dug deeper for more gold.

The hum begins a few minutes after 7 o’clock, far away, hut moving toward town. It grows, and suddenly becomes a roar of hurtling steel and iron as the trains from Soweto arrive, and Johannesburg goes back to the uneasy black-white division of the day.

A swirling mass of black men and women explodes out of its separate trains, up its separate stairways and out of its separate station. In a few hours, 200,000 persons will have arrived on the red, 11-car trains.

The streets that the white government bars them from after 10 p m. are suddenly filled with the rush of feet and a buzzing of tongues. The clicking sounds of the Xhosa tribal language flows into guttural noises of Afrikaans, the white man’s language.

But there are no whites here, except for the few policemen moving through the station to check passbooks all blacks are required to carry.

"It would be a trauma for while South Africans," says an African journalist with a sardonic smile as he surveys the scene from a nearby railway bridge. "They do everything they can to make us invisible, to set us out of sight and out of mind. This marching river of people would frighten most whites silly."

South Africa’s 13.6 million blacks are among the most scrutinized, yet least known, peoples of this continent.

The United Nations spends much of its time fretting about them. Some American Congressmen have taken up their cause, and the rest of the world wonders how much longer before they overthrow their white masters.

But inside the country, the prospect of an immediate black revolution seems to grow dimmer all the time.

"We have law and order here" says a white professor. "Our Africans live in peace. The only trouble is that it is the peace of a cemetery."

There is no voice that can claim to speak for what Helen Suzman, a member of Parliament, calls "the great silenced majority." All who tried have finished up "in jail, in exile, or in deep lonely despair," in the words of another white liberal.

Leaderless Mass

This has left the mass of South Africa’s blacks seemingly leaderless, frightened and highly frustrated. Moreover, they are vulnerable to numerous pressures, a factor that those who expect an uprising sometimes overlook.

"Ten years ago, we were united, and thought we were going to change the country," says one. "Now we are afraid even to talk to each other. Those who talk are taken away in the middle of the night, and we don’t see them again."

The white government cleverly exploits the considerable weaknesses of the divided and often isolated Africans by waving both an extremely heavy stick and an elusive carrot.

Drawn by the lure of money making opportunities in the "white" cities and mines, a third of the country’s black population has moved into residential compounds built and tightly controlled by the whites, and riddled with well paid police spies.

Another third—mostly women, children and old men—have been left behind on remote, inaccessible tribal reservations where they are watched over by chiefs appointed and paid by the white government, which is doing its best to keep tribalism alive in South Africa.

And a third live and work on white farms, often cut off and surrounded by a semi-feudal existence. They are perhaps most invisible of all.

With a prison system that keeps him supplied with cheap black labor, a farmer in the interior might have 15 workers, pay each $6 a month and, if he desires, refuse to let their children go to school.

Education for Hoodlums

"Education would just make hoodlums out of them," explained one such farmer recently to a visiting journalist.

Underlying these divisions is an even more fundamental one—the tribe. There are eight major tribal groupings in South Africa, including warrior tribes like Zulus and Xhosas, who have fought each other, and among themselves, more than against the white man.

Many of the original Hottentot and Bushmen inhabitants were killed off when they were caught between the expanding Zulu empire, moving down from the north, and white settlers coming from southern shores.

Because of their argument that their 300-year-history in South Africa makes them a permanent part of the African scene with a claim to 87 per cent of the land, the country’s 4 million whites have quit calling their black counterparts "Africans."

They have adopted "Bantu," an African word that in most tribal languages simply means "people." "You are a Bantu, too," an African chauffeur will tell a white foreigner, with seeming good nature.

Much later, after he has come to know the foreigner, the chauffeur’s pretense of good humor disappears when the word comes up again.

Silly Word

"The word sounds silly to us. But it is like everything else. The white man says we should be called Bantu, and so we arc called Bantu. I have a name, too, but he doesn’t learn it.

"The white man decides everything for us—that we should live in Soweto, that no matter how many people there are in the family we should have a four-room house, that we are too ignorant to have politics."

The African did not recognize the word "paternalism," but he seemed to know the symptoms well. He grasps the other side of the coin, too.

He is a hard working, middle-class man who has never been in trouble with the law. Most of his money goes toward school fees of his four children, and he occasionally treats himself to a boxing match.

Yet he knows that on any day the government bureaucracy that regulates every phase of his life could order him to leave his home, his job, his family, and go to a distant village where there is no work, or hope, for him. He lives in constant fear this will happen. But, like Joseph K in Kafka’s "The Trial" he is unsure just what action will provoke the unseen bureaucracy.

Until World War II, direct contact between blacks and whites was limited to the sharply defined master-servant relationship found on farms where Africans worked, and in mining enclaves where they did menial jobs for pay low by white standards, but a small fortune to tribal men.

The war brought industrial boom to South Africa, and Africans began to find jobs in cities. From 244,000 in 1939, the African population of Johannesburg climbed to 400.000 in 1946.

Moreover, where the population had once been almost entirely single males who would work in the city for a few years, in 1946 nearly half was women and children. A permanent black urban population was being born.

The Africans built shantytowns, sprawling and squalid, with colorful names like Sophiatown, Maroko and Pimville. Books such as Alan Paton’s "Cry the Beloved Country" and Anthony Sampson’s "Drum" have been written around the strange mixture of despair and joy that pervaded these townships.

White South Africa never recovered from the shock of seeing 11 shantytowns go up almost overnight. "The rule of law was openly flouted," asserts a recent government publication explaining why they have been mostly destroyed. "Disease was rife, and sanitary and other services were non-existent."

Antiseptic Township

A nicely antiseptic compound, called Soweto, was erected 15 miles southwest of Johannesburg, and Africans who work in the city must return there at night and on weekends.

"Soweto had nothing to do with urban renewal as Americans know it," insisted one white government employer. "First, we had to provide some quick and cheap housing. Later, it he-came a method of control."

In the wake of the wartime shock, the white government has spent the last 25 years building and perfecting a giant bureaucracy and security apparatus to do the following.

• Keep Africans from coming into urban areas.

• Remove as many as possible of those already in urban areas, and send them back to the rural tribal lands where they, or their parents, originally came from. This especially applies to "non-productive Bantus" who can no longer work in the white economy, according to a recent government circular that says "the aged, unfit, widows, women with dependent children" are primary targets.

• Keep complete control over those allowed to live near white cities "temporarily, for as long as they offer their labor there."

The first two aims have been largely thwarted by the white economy’s expanding needs for labor. Despite Herculean efforts by the government, 80.000 more Africans pour into white areas every year.

But the third goal has been accomplished with awesome mechanical exactitude.

The African’s Burden

"They tie you down to one house, one job, one employer. If you lose any of those, you go to jail, or back to the reserves, where you starve to death," says an African lawyer.

An African has to prove he was born in Johannesburg, or has worked for the same employer for a decade, to get permission to live here. He has to have a lodger's permit to show he has a house. He has to carry at all times tax receipts, including a poll tax that voiceless Africans have to pay, but which whites do not have to pay.

These all form part of the "passbook"—the central device of governmental control of blacks "temporarily" introduced 100 years ago.

A white lawyer, Joel Carlson. recently called the pass laws "the greatest single cause of disruption of race relations in our society, creating more hatred and fear, sowing more suspicion and causing more insecurity" than any other factor.

Every African over 16 has to carry a passbook, which contains his photograph, tribe, an identity number, a monthly signature from his employer to show he Is employed. and tax stamps.

"If you’re unlucky, you’re opening the bloody book all day long," said G. T., an African laborer. "Then other times you can go weeks without police checking it. The police wait for us near the stations, and if you’re slow in Retting out the book, they say you are cheeky and arrest you anyway."

G. T., who asked not to be identified by name because he fears reprisal, carries his passbook in a frayed leather case. The case also carried a photograph of his wife, who has lived in Soweto as a fugitive for nearly a year since she was ordered to leave within 72 hours.

Two years ago. G .T. fell in love with a girl visiting in Soweto from her village, 40 miles away. They live with his parents; but after a child was born last year, he applied for a house in Soweto.

The authorities ruled that his wife had no right to be in the urban area, and "endorsed her out"—that is, ordered her to return to the village, where there is no work for G .T. He and the child, since they both were born in Johannesburg, are allowed to stay.

"I thought you got married so you can die together," 29-year-old G. T. said quizzically. "But we got married, and they say we can’t stay together."

City Marriage

C. M. is a widow—one of the unproductive Bantus. When her husband died, she was told she would have to go back to a rural area she left when she was four years old. She quickly remarried, primarily, she says, so she would not be endorsed out. But the government claims her new husband was not born in Johannesburg, (his passbook indicates he was) and they both have been told to leave.

"We are not wanted here," the new husband says angrily. "It is because we have black skin."

These two cases are only the lip of an iceberg. Police arrest an average of 2,500 black South Africans every day for pass law infractions.

In a year, a number creator than the entire population of the District of Columbia goes to jail in South Africa.

Their cases are handled in the crowded, dirty Bantu Commissioners Courts, where white magistrates devote an average of two minutes to a case before sentencing the guilty to as much as six months.

Most prisoners are given the choice of serving their time working for white farmers, but many who do and are rearrested take prison the next go-round. "They thrash you in prison, but on the farms, they may shoot you," says one African who has been through the process.

Three weeks ago. a white farmer named Johannes Pretorius was convicted of assaulting an African woman prisoner with a hosepipe. The woman died as a result of the beating.

Pretorius—who paid a $500 fine and was set free—was quoted by the local press as saying that he would never again use prison labor. "I wouldn't have had this trouble," he said.

It is generally accepted that at least 250,000 persons arc in white areas illegally—that is, without passes. They form a floating population, on the run from police, who cannot obtain legitimacy.

Soweto residents assert that these people form the nucleus of the violent criminals who terrorize the township at night. Police rarely check passes within Soweto itself.

The pass laws served as focal point for the most serious attempt Africans have made to protest against the severe segregationist system. Beginning in 1948, and culminating in a massive nationwide protest in 1960, the African National Congress political party organized demonstrations against the laws.

But the 1960 protest included a demonstration at a small township called Sharpeville. White police opened fire on a black crowd, and killed 69 Africans. A five-month state of emergency was declared, the Congress party was banned and the government began a ruthless campaign to stamp out any vestige of black political leadership.

It seems to have succeeded. Any surviving political leadership has been driven so far underground it makes no ripples on the surface, leaving behind a largely unpolitical mass scrambling to keep its privileged economic position by going along with the system.

"The average man in Soweto is more worried about next month’s payments on his radio set than about something called 'freedom,’" says a white liberal with good contacts in the black community. He ruefully concedes that a fairly average factory worker living in Soweto making $600 a year is one of the richest black men on this continent, in cash terms.

Home Sweet Home

By material standards, they live fairly well in the 50,000 neat brick houses that stretch toward the horizon in monotonous row after monotonous row in Soweto. But no matter how rich they are, they cannot buy the land on which their houses stand, and they know they can lose the house at a while administrator’s whim.

The Johannesburg City Council is so proud of Soweto that it runs regular guided tours through it. The guides forget to mention often that the majority or houses do not have electricity, or that the roofs do not fit.

In all, more than 600,000 people live in Soweto—not an African word, but an alphabetical coupling of letters from the official English name of the area—South Western Townships.

There are some sporting stadiums, more than 100 schools (most of which operate double sessions and some of which have teacher pupil ratios of 100 to 1) and there is even a large building called "Uncle Tom’s Meeting Hall" (named, the white guides who take visitors around say, after a former white superintendent who was affectionately known by his black charges as Uncle Tom.) But since public assemblies are for all practical purposes, banned, it is usually empty.

The closest thing Soweto residents have to a legitimate political forum is the Urban Bantu Council, a group of elected African advisers to the white government who seem to be considered by many Africans as stooges.

In what may have been are effort to shake that label, the council asked the government a few weeks ago to lift some restrictions that make the council "important and ineffective."

The request was turned down by Piet Koornhof, deputy minister of Bantu Administration, whose reply said he wished "that the Bantu would be happy and contented" and that Koornhof and his department "are doing everything in their power to solve any problems that come to their notice."

Communication Cut

While South Africans say that the myriad of restrictions apartheid has placed on contact across the color line has left them with almost no idea of what is going on inside the black community.

A white psychologist who works extensively with Africans reports that he sees signs of rising frustration, but is unprepared to make any guesses about what it will lead to. He thinks much of the violence that plagues Soweto is "displaced aggression against the white system."

The pressures in Soweto are among the most intense in the world, he thinks. "People are coming out of the tribal life and trying to cope with the already high pressures of a transition to urban living," he says. "The government’s policy of making them live in tribal groups inside Soweto, and continually saying that they are only here temporarily and will have to go back into the tribal system, has a frightening effect on these people, as docs the breaking up of families."

His conversations with patients indicates that, from the black man’s point of view, there is still a good chance for a peaceful transition to a multi-racial society. "I'm surprised at how low anti-white feeling on racial grounds seems to be. Many Africans still say, 'I be angry for you if you do something to me, but I not be angry for you if you do nothing.'"

"But the chances seem to be going down all the time. The government is taking an all or nothing bet that will give them one of the world’s richest countries, or a devastated and blood-soaked nation."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

DOORNFONTEIN—Willie, the while miner, signaled with his hand and the black miner started the drill. The African’s body shook violently as the sharp, short bursts caromed around the four-foot high pit that had been blasted here 3,500 feet beneath the earth’s surface.

Willie makes about 300 rand ($420) a month. The black miner, who is known to the company not by name but by an identity number, makes 20 rand ($28) a month. They do about the same work, the while mining supervisor conceded. "Why the difference in pay?" asked Lee Hayden, one of the half dozen visitors the supervisor was guiding around the gold mine.

"‘Because Willie’s skin is white," the guide replied matter-of-factly. "It is the most valuable commodity you can have in South Africa. It is more valuable than this yellow stuff we blast out of the earth."

This reasoning does not, of course, follow standard laws of economics, like supply and demand. The white men who own the mine would love to get rid of Willie, and give the black miner a little—but not too much—of Willie’s inflated salary.

They cannot. The law will not let them. A professor at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, where Miss Hayden is a student, explained it this way later:

"The mine owners don't need Willie. They don’t need the white miners at all. But the government does."

Men like Willie have shaped much of South Africa's history during this century. They have forced the government to solve "the poor white problem" perhaps more successfully than any other industrialized country has by bending those laws of economics to meet the laws of politics.

In the process, they have laid one of the cornerstones of apartheid—the color bar, which prohibits employers from giving "traditionally white" and skilled jobs to Africans.

This has produced the bizarre spectacle of South African big business, restrained by law from cutting costs, lashing out occasionally at the government for being too conservative on race, and too liberal in its readiness to intervene in the country’s "free enterprise" system.

Rumblings from big business that have convinced many South Africa watchers that economic forces will eventually erode apartheid and that they offer the only chance for peaceful change.

They cite an ever-increasing dependency by the expanding economy on black labor and predict that this can be translated into gradual and political advances for the 16 million non-whites who are now powerless.

Many who make that argument are outside South Africa, especially the American businessmen who have invested $1 billion in South Africa.

But from the inside, the situation looks quite different. There are few concrete signs that the economic advances non-whites have made in recent years add up to anything more than material gains—and even those are not as much as is often claimed.

Publicly, leaders of the ruling National Party have increasingly made it clear that they will, if necessary, sacrifice economic progress to keep complete control over the Africans.

Privately, they say exactly the same thing, "it would be nice to believe that economic forces will predominate," says one National Party leader who is slightly disillusioned with the course apartheid is taking at the moment. "But they won’t. The whites will say 'They (the Africans) must go. We want them out.' And they will go."

History would seem to back his argument that the politicized economy of South Africa adapts well to apartheid and the few handicaps it offers.

"More economic progress means the government can buy more guns, bigger tanks and pay its spies among the Africans a lot better," says one economist who opposes apartheid. "Over the past decade, as the Africans’ economic position has improved, the few rights they had have disappeared."

While it is brutally repressive toward Africans, South Africa's governmental machinery has an extraordinary sensitivity to the demands of the white working class. It is a white proletarian's dream.

A few months ago. for example, the South African parliament went to the trouble of passing a law that in effect docs nothing more than protect one white laboratory assistant in the town of Port Elizabeth from ever being replaced by an African.

This trend began in 1922. Faced with a depression and a fixed price for gold, mine owners began to replace white miners with cheaper black labor.

White workers (influenced, ironically, by Communist organizers) went on strike, attacked the Africans and tried to shut the mines. The government called out troops, and 250 persons were killed.

Two years later, that government was voted out of office and a coalition regime took over. The coalition, forerunner of the present National Party, had campaigned on one issue. Voters had to choose whether "South Africa should be one huge black compound for the benefit of the capitalists, or a prosperous white man's country."

The voters gave their answer, and two years later the color bar was firmly installed in mines and industry. It still functions—although prosperity has reshaped it.

Since 1947, the South African gross national product has increased 150 percent in real terms, and the standard of living has doubled as the result of a remarkable industrial surge that seems to be peaking now.

The spiral upward has dragged the color bar along with it. As more and more skilled jobs have developed, an intense labor shortage has pulled more and more Africans into the economy.

The government has had to resort to granting wholesale exemptions from race restrictions to employers who cannot find while workers. Firms that cannot get the exemption, or do not want to bother with the unwieldy government bureaucracy, find ways around it.

They hire African clerks and call them messengers. They fragment jobs held by whites, write new descriptions and hire three Africans for less than a white.

But the government refuses to jettison the color bar, which, for one thing, insures that whites will never work for Africans. The regime is willing to put up with mountains of paperwork for that "protection."

"This crazy country has half its population employed issuing permits to the other half so they can go to work," complains Parliament member Helen Suzman.

Few would dispute that Africans have made important gains in recent years. Government figures tend to be over-optimistic because one of the regime’s principal claims is that "our Africans" are more prosperous than any in independent black countries.

It does seem likely, however, that the per capita income of the African population is about $120 a year, high by this continent’s standards. Black workers in industry do much better, probably averaging close to $500 a year, or more, per worker.

This is not, however, the whole story, a recent official survey shows that in the segregated township of Soweto, outside Johannesburg, where many of those industrial workers live, more than 60 percent of the families had incomes below the estimated minimum living costs for that area, also high by African standards.

Thus far, increased prosperity has not brought any social gains. "They could make an African general manager of this company, and he would still have to live in Soweto," said one disgruntled white executive.

"It doesn't change a damn thing."

Moreover, whites are taking an ever-increasing share of the prosperity. The government’s Department of Statistics says white wages in industry and mining rose $18 a man last year, while African wages rose only S1.40.

The average white worker’s earnings were ten times as great as the African’s. Whites control more than 80 percent of the nation’s personal cash income, while non-whites have more than 80 percent of the population.

As the case of Willie and his black companion demonstrated, the gap is perhaps greatest in mining, where white workers make 20 times as much as black ones—and where the color bar has remained most firmly entrenched.

Mining is the last stronghold of the poor white, and he docs not want to give up any jobs. When mine owners tried recently to get the strong Mineworkers Union to let black men do the menial job of picking up rock samples, the union balked. Whites said "samplers" were white jobs in 1911, and should remain white jobs.

This attitude has raised mining costs, and put mine owners at the forefront of those calling for changes in the color bar.

"Apartheid can give white capitalists and black workers a common cause sometimes," Francis Wilson, economist at the University of Cape Town, says with a hint of a chuckle.

"All the mines arc asking for is the same kind of flexibility that industry has. If they get it, the change will be heralded by many as the end of apartheid. It won’t be, of course. It will just be another shifting of the color bar."

Wilson notes that while many businessmen and mine owners "make a fuss about how unjust it is for a black man not to be able to work because of race restrictions, hardly any ever say anything about the justice of making Africans live in Soweto, or not letting them have unions, or about voting."

African trade unions are not legal, and the government negotiates for African workers if they ask it to.

Surprisingly, some white trade unions have' now begun to attack the color bar as well. J. A. Grobbelaar, head of the moderate Trade Union Council of South Africa, thinks the barrier harms the entire labor movement by artificially inflating wages that encourage employers to replace men with machines and to fragment jobs.

"The whites are in danger of pricing themselves out of the market," says Grobbelaar. "It is not only immoral, but completely unrealistic." Grobbelaar is one who subscribes to the theory that Africans will take a more and more important role in the economy, and will be so essential to it they will be able to extract concessions from the white rulers.

He noted there are already 4 million non-whites in the 5.5 million strong workforce in the so-called white economy. At its present 5.8 percent a year growth rate, the economy will he short 500,000 skilled workers in ten years.

“The whites will choose growth. I don't think they will ever choose to be segregated and poor. They will choose to be integrated and rich. They’re on the bloody merry go round, and can’t get off now, man."

But the leaders of the Nationalist Party, which represents the ruling Afrikaners, have already begun to say the country needs to slow its growth anyway, to fight inflation.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

JOHANNESBURG—How docs it feel to be a television tycoon in the only industrialized country in the world without television?

‘"Great," saws bushily bearded Keith Watson as he stands beneath the huge "Budget TV" sign that crowns his shop in downtown Johannesburg. "I’m getting in on the ground floor and going up with the market."

The confident Watson is one of many who are betting their bankrolls that South Africa will soon accept television. For a decade, the tube has been banned here because of its potential impact on the morals and politics of this white supremacist country.

The government, which is awaiting a report from an official 12-man commission on television, is expected to give a reluctant go-ahead to TV within the next few months.

Financing a television system has never been a real problem for Africa’s richest country, where the ruling four million whites enjoy a standard of living second perhaps only to the United States. Manufacturers are gearing up to produce sets here, and retailers like Watson are jockeying for position.

Public demand has grown steadily, as poorer black countries to the north have installed their own systems and been able to enjoy or hiss Lucy, Maxwell Smart, the Forsythe Saga, and other American and English retreads.

But for a government suspicious of outside influences that could intensify the deep divisions of South African society, television has been viewed as a dangerous luxury. The problems the commission is wrestling with include:

• Religion. Leaders of the powerful and quasi-puritanical Dutch Reformed Church fear the "corrupting” influence of television and other artifacts of the "permissive society."

As a concession to the church, the government, which is composed almost entirely of Dutch Reform members, may keep television off the air on Sundays, just as films and all other entertainment are banned on the Sabbath.

• Language. The Afrikaners, who make up 60 percent of the white population and completely control the government, worry that television will dilute their closely-knit culture, which they see as providing the strength that enables the white minority to dominate 16 million nonwhites.

Descendants of Dutch, German and French Huguenot settlers who came to South Africa 300 years ago, the Afrikaners insist that half the programs will be in their language, Afrikaans, or there will be no television at all, although most Afrikaners speak English. Duplicate productions and dubbing American and English programs will add greatly to the cost of television here.

• Race relations and politics. Although these factors are not mentioned in the commission's extensive terms of reference, they are perhaps the crucial ones for South Africa’s white leaders.

"It will give the African ideas," says one white laborer. "He will see how the white man lives, and he will want that. It is dangerous."

Not all the concern comes from the right, however. Citing the heavy doses of propaganda the government-controlled radio network already dishes out, a white liberal said recently:

"It is going to be much worse with television. People just won’t hear the sneer in the announcer’s voice as he says ‘liberal’ or 'African.' They’ll see his expression, too."

The government does seem to be realizing that a state-controlled television system may be more of an advantage than it had thought.

"Television would be a tremendous media to drive home to our people what we are accomplishing for South Africa," said one of the more conservative members of the cabinet in a recent interview. He insisted on not being named.

"Right now, only a few people know how well separate development is working. It is not a story that can be told, even by our (the government’s) press. But pictures could do it," he added.

In any event, television would be subjected to the same rigorous censorship now applied to films, books and magazines.

Even with immediate approval, it will take about two years for a television system to be operational here.

But Keith Watson, and other businessmen aren’t waiting. Watson already has plans to convert the basement of his store, which now stocks hi-fi equipment and other appliances, into a viewing lounge for customers.

"Television is just going to explode here," says Watson, an Englishman who helped introduce television retailing in Kenya in the mid 1960s. "I made a lot of money there in two years, and I’m going to do the same thing here."

He thinks the first sets to go on the market will be 17-to 19-inch, black and white models that will sell for $200 to $250. He has tried to interest American firms in manufacturing sets here, or shipping them in.

"But they just fall down laughing when I talk about an order of 500 sets. Sure, that’s a small market by American standards, but it’s going to be a lucrative one."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

PRETORIA—There are two apartheids. One is oppressively real and mundane. The other is intellectual, a vague theory undertaken in the name of freedom.

The first kind of apartheid confronts the arriving traveler at South Africa’s main airport, named for war hero Jan Smuts.

No matter how well the traveler feels prepared by the countless books, films and articles that have dissected this country and its distinctive practices, there is a sharp jolt as he steps out of the impersonally efficient customs hall and into the cavern-like, noise-filled waiting room.

The jumbo jets will soon be landing here, but for a moment the visitor is wrenched back two decades, perhaps into the rural Southern United States.

Discrimination is not whispered or done subtly in this country. "Blanke"—white in Afrikaans, the language of 60 per cent of the whites—shout the big signs over the restaurants, restrooms and even the observation platform. "Nie Blanke" read those on the fewer, smaller and dirtier counterparts for nonwhites.

Written across the nation’s park benches, elevators, liquor stores, unwritten but still present on many church entrances, these signs are for much of the outside world "apartheid."

But officially, they aren‘t. "Apartheid" is the name given to a lofty social and strategic plan to create a "white fortress" spanning 87 percent of the country.

Africans will be encouraged, or coerced, into "finding their own freedoms" in eight separate homelands where they can theoretically run their own affairs without interference from the white man—and, more importantly, without interfering in white South Africa.

Much of the outside world dismisses the theory of apartheid as unworkable, or undesirable because the leaders of four million whites have made all the decisions affecting 16 million non-whites.

But this grand design has now acquired its own momentum. It has become a powerful dynamic for change in the situation it is supposed to resolve.

Political lives have been staked on it, millions of dollars spent in its name, people crushed to further its goals. Its implementation has even provoked the first significant split in the ranks of the National Party since the Nationalists gained control of the country in 1948 and introduced the word "apartheid” to the rest of the world.

The Afrikaans word is usually translated to mean "separateness," or "apartness."

But because the world has fastened a bitter stigma on the visible, everyday segregation of the races, the government has almost entirely dropped apartheid, opting instead to call their blueprint of separate nations "separate development." Segregation in facilities is labeled “petty,” or little apartheid here.

But these practices do not loom small in the minds of whites, or blacks, in South Africa.

"For most of the whites, keeping Africans off park benches and out of coffee shops is apartheid," said one outspoken white government employee recently.

"They don’t have the foggiest notion what the big ideological plan is all about. But as long as they read in the paper that the government has passed a new law, and something is being done to the African, they think, 'Apartheid is being implemented'."

These comments seemed to take on some validity in the recent national election, when government officials practically fell over each other in rushing to tell white voters that they were "proud to announce" that thousands of Africans would lose white-collar jobs (none has, nor are they likely to) and pledge to build expensive pedestrian bridges so Africans could get to work without walking through "white" streets.

Besides whatever political purposes petty apartheid serves, it is also a powerful force for maintaining the master-servant relationship that has traditionally existed between whites and blacks here.

The desire to completely separate the races in South Africa can be traced back to the Dutch sea captain Jan van Riebeeck and his small party of farmers who landed at the Cape of Good Hope in 1752.

Van Riebeeck’s answer was to erect a bitter almond hedge around his settlement to keep Africans out, and to keep his own men from pilfering goods and taking them out to trade to the Africans. Understanding neither the whites who were to become the Boers, nor the Africans who were called Hottentots, van Riebeeck failed.

Three centuries later, van Riebeeck’s descendants do not seem to be doing much better with the giant metaphorical hedge they are trying to erect around their cities.

Despite the hostility apartheid has created for them, and the holes it shows. South Africa’s white leaders insist it will work. It has to, they add, because they are convinced that their survival depends on it.

Critics suggest that big apartheid, launched with much fanfare seven years ago, is getting nowhere. For one thing, the desolate homelands—which still exist almost entirely on paper—cannot even support the 4.5 million people who live there now, much less absorb more.

The division of the land not only reserves 87 percent of it for the whites, but gives them all the cities, most of the good farms, and almost all the country’s tremendous wealth.

Despite a vast bureaucracy designed to keep Africans out of the white areas, 80,000 new black workers pour into the expanding white economy every year.

Informed economists say that even if the government can complete its ambitious development programs for the homelands, the annual flow of new black workers 10 years from now will still be 50,000.

"The government is giving us freedom," said one African who, like most of his colleagues, seemed unimpressed by apartheid's promises. "We have the freedom to stay in the white areas and eat, or go back to the homelands, and starve."

Politically, the government's reluctance to release key powers to the Transkei, the only homeland that has a functioning self-governing legislature, has raised doubts about the white regime's intentions to live up to its pledges of eventual sovereignty for the homelands.

The growing perception of these weaknesses in the development of apartheid has provoked the widely publicized, but often misinterpreted, Verligte-Verkrampfte split within the National party and within Afrikanerdom in general.

Verligte is an Afrikaans word meaning "enlightened." Because they are ranged against the ultra-rightist Verkrampftes ("enclosed"), the Verligtes have often been portrayed to the outside world as a liberal force. They view themselves in that light.

But whether one considers them liberal on race depends a large extent on whether one considers apartheid to be the answer for South Africa’s tricky racial situation. For the Verligtes say that apartheid is a good idea, and its only problem is that the government won’t get on with it.

Young Afrikaners "have come to separate development out of the highest ideals. Now they want those ideals implemented," Leon Coetzee, an Afrikaner philosophy teacher, wrote nearly two years ago in the South African magazine Newscheck.

Newscheck, modeled after Time magazine, is one of the leading organs of the Verligtes. Its editor is Otto Krause, an exuberant young Afrikaner who acquired a taste for rep ties during a year at Yale.

Krause calls the Verligte approach to apartheid "a radical solution, so liberal that it may be beyond the grasp of European-oriented minds with their outmoded guilt concepts and fetishes for traditional answers which fail anyway."

He argues that providing different homelands for entirely separate nationalities that have conflicting interests will head off the kind of nationalistic wars Europe has experienced in the past two centuries.

He compares the present social disruption—which he admits is being inflicted almost entirely on blacks—with Stalin’s collectivization of the peasants in the Soviet Union, and says the results apartheid will bring will justify its methods.

Another leading Verligte intellectual, Piet Cillie, editor of the National Party-controlled Die Burger newspaper, also accused outsiders of trying to fit South Africa’s many different people into one mold and demanding that they stay inside that structure.

"If I could believe in the one-nation concept, l could go around with a clear conscience like the liberals who live in rich villas in rich suburbs do," said Cillie.

"But it won't work here. Apartheid is just a way to get the white man to behave decently. One can only be liberal from a position of strength, and we can only feel strong on the basis of separate freedoms and separate beliefs exercised in separate areas."

The Afrikaner Nationalists insist that separate development will work because it's building vertical, not horizontal apartheid. 

On the surface, at least, their theories resemble some of the arguments advanced by black power advocates in the United States.

Vertical apartheid means that the Africans can develop their own cultures and nationalism in their own areas, and attain the highest economic level possible in their own communities.

Horizontal segregation would result in whites always dominating the top positions in a theoretically integrated society, creating resentment that would eventually tear the entire structure apart. 

Some of the country’s best economists contend that apartheid will just convert the majority of the black population into a vast pool of migratory labor.

The pattern is clearly established in the country’s mines, where nearly 400,000 men work for six to 18 months at a stretch, living without families in crowded dormitories.

The apartheid machinery has already streamlined the four million black workforce in white industrial areas by pushing as many of the elderly, children and nonworking women as possible back in the homelands.

Unlike the India-Pakistan division, apartheid docs not call for complete partition. There will always be a large but unspecified number of Africans (probably a minimum of six million) who will remain in white South Africa, as long as the whites need their labor.

Others will live in pocket homelands near white industrial areas, crossing imaginary borders each day to work in the plants, and then returning to the "homelands" to exercise their political and social rights.

As Editor Cillie indicated, one of the favorite Verligte arguments is that as big apartheid makes progress, the whites will feel more secure and let up on petty apartheid.

But the seven years since the Transkei was set on the road to independence, which is promised at some vague point this side of eternity, have produced an intensification of discrimination against blacks.

Thousands of laws and regulations, ranging from the puzzling to the insulting to the ludicrous, govern human relations in South Africa.

A white can invite a black into his house but he must not offer him a drink of whiskey. The African has to bring is own—and in most towns, leave at the stroke of 10 p.m.

In Durban recently, a teenage Chinese girl was barred from completing a tennis tournament she had entered, because a white complained.

If the girl had been of Japanese origin, however, she could have played tennis with as many whites as she liked. Japanese are "honorary" whites, according to the government, which is trying to boost its trade with Japan.

Prime Minister John Vorster was asked about this dichotomy at a public meeting in April. Vorster patiently explained that Japanese are in South Africa on a non-permanent basis, usually on business trips, and therefore are not fortunate enough to have the government set aside separate group areas and facilities for them. Thus, they had to share white facilities. 

But the descendants of Chinese, who have been in the country for generations, "have areas of their own," Vorster noted, "and there are a large number of Chinese."

The question of numbers, in fact, seems to underlie both brands of apartheid, big and little. This may account for outsiders’ confusion about apartheid. Surprisingly, some of South Africa’s most important people seem to share some of the confusion.

Jan Marais is the energetic, widely traveled president of the important Trust Bank Organization in Cape Town. He wears Dior silk ties and smokes only the most expensive and longest cigars available.

During a recent interview, he was asked about the implications of apartheid and its philosophy. He replied with an anecdote:

"I was visited by an important American some time ago, a man who was an adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, and he couldn't understand apartheid. So I took him to my beach, which is quiet and well kept, and then we went over to a non-white beach. And after he saw those crowds of people washing their faces with watermelon, he understood at once. Apartheid helps me keep my beach uncrowded."

Mrs. J. M. De Wet, wife of the president of Fort Hare University which is located in the small, remote town of Alice, recently told a visitor that the need for apartheid was underscored for her on a visit to Cape Town, in which she saw crowds of nonwhites getting on their buses. "If they got on our buses, we would be crushed. We would never find a seat."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

STELLENBOSCH—David Curry thumbed rapidly through his bulging notebook and read out the names of his customers.

"Vorster. Burton. De Klerk. Fiandorp. Le Roux. See all good English and Afrikaner names, nothing else."

Curry is a successful young insurance salesman here in this sleepy university village fitted into the rolling vineyards around Cape Town. A few miles away, the brightest children of the white Afrikaners who run South Africa were walking to classes on their leafy, quiet campus.

"See that road out there?" Curry asked as he glanced absentmindedly out the window of his distinctly middle class living room, which was filled with pastels of Christ and other religious symbols. "It’s been unpaved for 60 years. If I were white, it would be paved."

Not Quite White

David Curry, and all his customers with the good white names, are not white. Not quite. A tall man with a lumpy figure, Curry has a slight brownish tinge to his complexion that outweighs his white name, his white religion, his white middle class habits.

It determines where he lives, where he works, where he will he buried. It, as much as he, decides whom he marries, what cabs he rides in, what toilets he uses.

Curry is one of the two million people officially branded by the white South African elite as the product of apartheid's greatest sin—sex across the color line.

According to the theory of apartheid (which says that whites and blacks are so different that they should not and cannot mix peacefully) these two million should not exist at all. But they do, and they form the most perplexing racial problem in a country filled to the brim with racial problems.

God's Stepchildren

In the Afrikaner language, the brand on them reads "kleuring," the English call them "coloreds." Sometimes, in their growing anguish and despair, they call themselves "God’s stepchildren."

They are, in fact, the white man’s children, but he is trying to disown them as speedily as he can. Ask a colored when his "race” began, and he replies with some bitterness:

"Nine months after the first Dutch settler put ashore and saw an African woman."

According to long time residents of this area, where the majority of the coloreds live, the voice telling the story would have contained a hint of pride or perhaps amusement a decade ago. Bitterness is a recent development.

Frustration has replaced their once legendary lassitude as the coloreds have been relentlessly counted out of the while world by apartheid, and forced into an uneasy psychological alliance with the country’s 13 million Africans, the primary target of segregation here.

New Restrictions

A whole array of new social restrictions are being imposed upon the coloreds just as they are making rapid strides up the economic ladder, and are beginning to develop a representative political organization.

The convergence of these, some observers here think, could push the coloreds into the thin end of a big nonwhite wedge intent on breaking apartheid. Even the government has indicated recently that it fears this is happening.

"The African became attuned a long time ago to the insult of segregation," says D. W. J. M. Van Heerden, a white man who was a legislative representative for coloreds.

"But the coloreds are the most exposed people in South Africa. Each time he cannot go to the beach, or ride on a bus, or is told he has to move, the insult is still fresh. It still stings.

"The coloreds realize their effort to move 'white' has failed. In time, they have to move toward the blacks. This bloody government is just increasing the odds against itself."

Even more than any physical threat they may ever represent (and at the moment, such a threat is nil) it is the philosophical damage the coloreds do apartheid that confounds the white supremacist National Party government.

South Africa’s 4 million whites justify their plan to take 87 percent of the country's land, and give 13 percent to 13 million Africans, by saying that the African tribes should live in their traditional homelands, where they can practice their traditional cultures and have their own political and social rights.

For the majority of the coloreds, their only culture is the white man’s (the majority speak Afrikaans). Their traditional homeland is on the white farms and in the white cities where they have been bred and raised, here around Cape Town, the loveliest spot in South Africa and one of the loveliest in the world.

Even the problem of defining the coloreds as a race has been troublesome for the government?

What is a colored?

He is a person who is not white, and who is not African.

Avoids Problem

It may sound to an outsider like a grim version of a knock knock joke, but Ibis is precisely the local formula the government has fastened upon to define coloreds.

Like much of the official jargon the South African government uses in discussing its segregation policies, the answer avoids a lot of the real problem which is the fact that coloreds are both white and black.

There is a broad spectrum of coloreds, ranging from swarthy, illiterate farm hands who are just short of being classified as Africans, to doctors and college professors who are virtually indistinguishable from whites in color, speech, manner—in everything but the identity card they must carry which says they are colored.

This span is one of the major problems the whites face in any effort to assimilate the coloreds. "It's all right for the city people to have tea with colored school teachers, but they ought to try it with some of my workers," sneers an Afrikaner farmer.

Last year, the government acknowledged some of this diversity by subdividing the colored group into seven categories. They range from Malays, the thousands of descendants of imported Malay slaves who have retained a tightly knit community, to Chinese, Indian, and something called "other colored."

But whatever they are called, they are all classified as non-whiles under South African law, which means that they face most (but not all) on the restrictions placed on Africans.

The coloreds at the whiter end of the scale, who have seen a color line that they could easily drift across, suddenly tightened, deny vigorously that there is a colored race. They badly want to assimilate into white society.

Playing Ball

"The tragedy is that the coloreds wanted to play ball with the whites. But they’ve got nothing for their good behavior," says Van Heerden.

Until recently, the Cape Town province has had comparatively tolerant race relations. With relatively few Africans around Cape Town (perhaps 100,000) coloreds rode on the same buses, lived in their own district in the middle of town and could aspire to go to white universities.

But the government's general tightening of the apartheid screws has begun to pinch the coloreds in the past three years.

A score of lovely beaches around Cape Town are now restricted to whites, while the more numerous coloreds have been given two inaccessible strands. More jobs have been reserved for whites. Coloreds are now barred from white universities.

Most importantly, the government has begun to move coloreds out of their center city "District Six" homes which will become white, and is resettling them on the windswept, barren Cape Flats, 20 miles away.

This, more than anything else, has produced the smoldering resentment that coloreds are beginning to bear their former idol, the white man.

The restrictions are even more paradoxical to many coloreds because they come as coloreds have begun to make spectacular economic advances out of general and wretched poverty.

"Before, they were a Cannery Row kind of people, always sitting around on doorsteps with bottles of wine in their hands," says Harvey Tyson, assistant editor of The Cape Argus newspaper. "Now they have taken off economically. It’s amazing."

Even in a hard drinking country like South Africa, coloreds have always has a phenomenal rate of alcoholism. Figures suggest that in the past, Africans have had a rate of four confirmed alcoholics per thousand, whites five per thousand and coloreds 35 per thousand.

Demanding More

Such problems remain. But more and more colored parents are demanding, better education for their children, and more and more of them are moving into semi-skilled jobs vacated by whites, as labor-scarce white employers wink at the job reservations.

And, to the government’s dismay they have taken up the white regime’s promises of a political role in South Africa, and organized the only potentially effective nonwhite opposition to apartheid that exists here.

M. D. Arendse, a fiftyish, squat man who runs a variety of ill-defined business enterprises, had been one of the main forces in the party. But he now has become one of the first casualties of the new rumblings of brown power.

Youth in a Hurry

Sitting in his cluttered office, located above a radio repair shop on one of Cape Town’s less distinguished streets, Arendse recently explained why the party ousted him as leader a few months ago:

"These young people, they say 'M. D. Arendse is a good chap, he knows his onions. But he is too slow.' This younger element wants things done. They don’t want to negotiate slowly for what’s due them now."

David Curry, the Stellenbosch insurance salesman, is one of the "younger elements." At 39, he is now deputy leader of the party.

Curry, a seemingly prudent man who is well aware of how far the government will let nonwhites go in making public statements before tossing them in jail, emphasizes to visitors that he and other Labor Party leaders are not militant, or radical, as the terms are understood elsewhere.

"Please remember that we are against violence in any form, that we believe any change must come legally and peacefully."

But his style is more direct, and aggressive than Arendse, who came under heavy criticism in the party for agreeing to meet with Prime Minister Vorster after he had effectively overturned the Labor Party’s victory in colored elections last year.

"Our weapon against apartheid is first the economy," says Curry. "We will push people up, organize our labor and buying power, and then be in a position to make our political demands."

Colored Council

Until last year, coloreds elected four white men to represent them in the National Assembly. The government eliminated this, and set up an elected Colored Persons Representative Council that has only advisory powers on colored affairs.

The Labor Party campaigning against apartheid and backing equal rights for all South Africans, won 26 of 40 elected seats. Four parties that supported the government won a total of 14 seats.

Vorster 's government then erased that working majority by appointing 20 colored apartheid supporters to the council.

One of the 20 was Tom Swartz, one of Vorster’s most vocal supporters. Defeated in his own constituency by a five-to-one margin, head of a Federal Party that could win only 11 seats, Swartz became the head of the council, or, as he likes to put it, "the colored prime minister."

Even Swartz does not try to square Vorster’s promises of rights for coloreds in their own area with the disregard for the voting totals.

"You say that it is undemocratic? I concede that it is undemocratic," Swartz said recently in his modern, well-furnished office in the colored wing of a government building. "But I didn't do it. Any questions about it will have to be directed to Mr. Vorster."

The Government’s Man

"Surely no one expects the government to put its enemies in power,” he continued. "They had to turn to reasonable men, and that is why we were appointed."

But even as the government's man, Swartz does not wax too enthusiastic about apartheid. He admits that right now, most coloreds oppose it.

"But this is the policy of South Africa and we have to live with it. For me, the positive aspects outweigh the negative ones right now.

There are more hurts for us than goods, but in the long run, my people will develop more rapidly than they would have under so-called integration, which never did anything for us."

Swartz is a 65-year-old retired linotypist who has done well in the real estate field since the government began uprooting the colored community and resettling it out of town.

His opponents charge that government loans to coloreds are often awarded on the basis of supporting Swartz, and maintain that whites helped finance his campaign.

"The white farmers told their colored laborers that they could look for another job if they didn’t vote for Swartz and the laborers said 'yes baas,'" said M. D. Arendse, noting that almost all of Swartz’s support came from rural areas. The Labor Party also charges that Swartz tried to frighten coloreds into voting for him by telling them they will be swamped by Africans if apartheid is overlifted. Swartz was vague on this point when asked about it.

Coloreds do have an ambivalent attitude toward the black mass that stands below them on the social, economic and political scale. Many have reluctantly concluded that their only hope lies in identifying with the blacks, but are not terribly happy about it.

"Here around Cape Town, African is largely a word. We don't see that many of them," says a colored educator, "and the ones we do see are garbage men or farm laborers. It is a little difficult to identify your aspirations with that."

But, he continued, "We soon will have little choice left, unless, as more and more are doing, we choose to leave the country and go live in Canada or Australia. The whites here could probably still buy us off, with a better deal. But they don’t seem interested." Of about 30 leaders interviewed, the majority felt that if the Africans staged a violent uprising that appeared to have any chance of success, most coloreds would join them.

Arendse was one who disagreed. "They would stay neutral. Coloreds will think a long time again before fighting for the white man. We did it in the last war, and what the hell did we get? Apartheid, and lower pensions," he said, referring to a recent case in which the government cut a wounded' veteran’s meager pension in half because he was reclassified from white to colored.

But few coloreds seem to think it will come to that. They view their role in any coming struggle as the nagging reminder that apartheid is incompatible with the country’s desires and needs, and as an economic pressure group able to extract concessions.

John Vorster told his all white parliament last year that "our children after us will have to find a solution" to the colored problem, to the colored problem.

"Mr. Vorster may not think so, but my children, and millions of black children will also decide the future of this country," snapped one colored leader in recent private discussion.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

PRETORIA—Their names arc Stinkwater, Limehill, and "A Place For Weeping."

In the euphemistic jargon of South African bureaucrats, they are "closer settlement areas." People who live there call them "tent towns."

In fact, they are apartheid's artifacts, barren rural slums as bad as any on this continent. A Catholic priest who has spent a year investigating them, calls these settlements "dumping grounds for Africans un-needed by the white economy."

They result from the government's increased effort to squeeze black South Africans out of "white” areas and into the "homeland" tribal reservations that have been set aside for Africans.

The blacks are supposed to find their freedoms in these reservations. There is mounting evidence that many of them find nothing but wretched poverty, disease and isolation.

The importance of these resettlement camps extends far beyond the misery of many of their residents. While the white theorists and politicians continue to argue the why of apartheid, the blacks forced into Stinkwater and Limehill have already begun to experience the how.

Tens, if not hundreds of thousands have been uprooted from their homes in urban areas, or on "black spots," and told to go build themselves new homes in remote, desolate places. South Africa has created a refugee population of its own, largely for ideological reasons.

The settlement camps that have sprung up ns apartheid’s compartmentalizing of races and land gains speed are often little more than collections of tents, mud huts, and shacks made out of rusted corrugated tin or planks and cardboard.

An exact number of the settlements, which arc dotted around the tribal areas, is difficult to obtain. Government officials are reluctant to talk about these camps.

But they do say that the government has “helped" 80,000 Africans to move into the camps, and thousands more have found their own way.

These officials dispute assertions by government critics that perhaps 900,000 Africans have been driven from their homes by apartheid’s demands.

Those pouring into the camps include a steady stream of "nonproductive" Africans ordered out of urban areas by the government. The aged, ill, widows, and women with dependent children are officially classified as "nonproductive labor units."

The biggest proportion of Africans being resettled are people "cleared" from "black spots"—African farms, or villages, surrounded by white-owned land.

Black spots are a hangover from the 1913 and 1936 land apportionment laws which gave 87 percent of the land to whites. The laws carved the land into a checkerboard pattern, but today apartheid demands one continuous, consolidated white nation with black tribal reservations on its flanks.

This means the pockets of African land arc expropriated and the people living on them ordered into the homeland resettlement camps.

Large communities, numbering hundreds of families, have been packed into trucks and hauled away from areas they had occupied for decades, and deposited in the middle of an open field, given tents they did not know how to erect, and told to dig their own pit latrines.

This happened to 1200 people from the village of Moran in Natal province in 1968. Father Cosmas Desmond, a 34-year-old Franciscan priest who had done mission work at Moran, was there the day they were moved to the camp called Limehill.

The first arrivals sat in a bare field surrounded by their belongings, looking bewildered and utterly lost.

"That night there was a heavy rain and the tents they had been given were swamped," Father Desmond recalled.

The experience was the beginning of Father Desmond's yearlong study of resettlement townships throughout South Africa. Clergymen arc free to enter the black areas without having to obtain government permission.

He has just published his findings in a graphic and compelling book entitled "The Discarded People," which is strongly critical of the government.

Expecting his book to be banned. Father Desmond personally distributed the first thousand copies by driving 3,000 miles in four days.

Thus far, however, the government has ignored the book, which focuses on places like Stinkwater, where the Africans complain of a poor water supply.

The priest found about 250 families there. They had lived 10 miles from the large town of Pretoria before being shifted to Stink-water a year before.

They had no sanitation facilities in Stinkwater. The children attended school under a tree. Most importantly, the men who had been 10 miles from work were now 35 to 40 miles away. Many could not afford the daily bus fare, and had been forced to begin living in hostels in Pretoria during the week and seeing their families only on weekends.

Father Desmond reports that in most resettlement areas he visited, there are no opportunities for work and the workers are being turned into migrant laborers, rarely seeing their families.

In Weenan, which means "a place for weeping," he found 800 people living in makeshift shacks. An old man came up and asked him why the white man wanted to "kill" him and his children by sending them to "this place where we suffer."

Government supporters contend that this social disruption is an unfortunate but necessary consequence of a policy that will eventually help both black and white.

But thus far it appears that little is being done to provide even minimal facilities and, perhaps more important, economic opportunities for blacks in the "homelands."

Exceptions are apparent only in the more permanent townships that have been built on the border of some homeland areas.

White firms site their industries just inside the white area, and the black workers commute daily across an imaginary frontier to work. They return home at night and theoretically will enjoy rights there they can’t demand in the white areas.

But economists here say the border townships are still essentially a part of the white economy, and will do little to alleviate the extreme poverty of the rural homelands which are getting poorer, not richer as the government said they would.

Because of inefficient farming methods, soil erosion has always been a serious problem in the tribal reservations. In many areas-crop yields arc falling while population is rocketing upwards, both from natural increases and the influx of people expelled from black spots and the cities.

Moreover, white farmers have begun to use more machinery, and it is expected that several hundred thousand Africans now living on white farms will lose their jobs over the next decade. Since they are banned from the cities, they too will have to be accommodated in the reserves.

The convergence of those forces, and the failure of the government thus far to deal with them (although it has stepped up its soil-erosion control efforts) are causing some observers in South Africa to take a new look at the desolate homelands.

"People are always watching the urban townships for signs that Africans are becoming more frustrated, ready to explode, or whatever," says a white liberal. "But their situation isn’t nearly as desperate as those people living in the hopeless homelands.

"It is hard for us to imagine any trouble starting. But if it does, I think it will come off those naked, hard plains where the government insists these people must try to scratch out a living. Even peasants sometimes say, 'enough.'"

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

UMTATA—The enigmatic tribal chief who rules over ravine pocked plains stretching around this remote trading town relishes his role as the key figure in South Africa’s advertised answer to its explosive racial problems.

"Independence must come to us," Kaizer Matanzima said with emphasis during a recent interview. "I cannot tell you when, but we have our constitution, and we have the word of the government that this is to be our nation."

Matanzima is the chief executive of the Transkei, one or South Africa’s eight black nations-in-waiting. A towering man with ramrod posture and a cultivated air of regal aloofness, the chief has also made himself one of the most controversial figures in the controversy-shrouded land.

Because of his outspoken support for the while regime’s apartheid policies of separate development, Matanzima has been written off by many as a government stooge.

Rut recent events in the Transkei have caused other observers to reappraise his role. They think Matanzima maybe maneuvering to hoist the while leaders on their own petard of repeated pledges of independence and freedom for the two million Africans who live in the Transkei.

Thus far, Matanzima has been able to survive by trimming his political sails just enough to keep both sides guessing.

Matanzima has gained international importance because of l he theory of separate development, which is supposed to carve out eight new black "sovereign nations" for the millions of Africans unwanted and unneeded in the future while fortress of South Africa.

These homelands, which are called Bantustans, arc presently scattered across 230 separate pieces of land, which are small, and poor, with one exception. The Transkei is large and poor.

Centuries of gusting winds and heavy rains have washed deep gullies across the face of the 15.000 square miles of sparsely populated farmland here in the southeastern corner of South Africa.

Dust swirling about them, tall, lean Xhosa tribesmen ride into the quiet streets of Umtata, the "capital" of the Transkei, and hitch their horses to no parking signs. Around their shoulders, the men wear blankets decorated with symbols that bear a striking resemblance to the designs of the Navajo Indians of America’s southwest.

There are only about 14,000 white residents in this area, making the "creative self-withdrawal" the white government has promised relatively painless. The idea is that the whites will move out of this "black" area, and millions of blacks will move out of the "white" area.

The low number of whites, plus the fact that the Transkei is "vaguely viable," in the words of one white apartheid supporter, has made this area the proving ground of separate development.

Bargaining Power

Set up in 1964, the Transkei does have governmental machinery of its own in operation, and elections have been held here. The other seven Bantustans exist only on paper, most informed South Africans concede, although the government says otherwise.

The effect of this is to give Matanzima more bargaining power with the while rulers than any other black man in South Africa. This power is extremely limited, and amounts in fact to nothing more than the power to embarrass the whiles.

But it is one of the few pressure points that South Africa’s disenfranchised blacks have.

"What would happen if the Transkei demanded complete independence now?" mused one white South African recently. "The government would say no, of course. But then it would have to face some of the realities about race that separate development obscures."

Labeled recently by a South African magazine as "a nationalist in no hurry to win freedom," Matanzima is a paramount chief of the Xhosa tribe, as well as leader of the Transkei's ruling political party.

Black African political parties are banned elsewhere in South Africa.

The whites, who get 87 percent of the country under the present configuration of separate development, have delineated eight major tribes and allotted each a Bantustan. The Xhosas will theoretically develop their own social and political systems in the Transkei homeland, and will therefore have no right to complain about the system the whites have chosen.

Many observers scoff at the assertion that whiles will ever turn over important powers. They assert that separate development is a placebo for world opinion, designed to give the appearance of change without changing anything.

The white administration in Pretoria refuses, for example, to give even a hint of a timetable for the promised granting of independence and retains the key powers of government.

The while South African slate president is by law the Supreme Chief of all Africans, and can rule the Bantustans by decree.

"Even here, all the amenities are reserved primarily for the whites," complains Knowledge Guzana, an articulate Transkei lawyer who leads the political opposition to Matanzima. Guzana's party opposes separate development and the establishment of the Transkei.

The grandiose claims the white government makes about setting up the Bantustans so Africans can develop their own societies suffer badly from the discrimination practiced by whites in Umtata.

The mayor of Umtata, the capital of the future black republic, is white. Around the tiny city hall arc parking places, toilets, a post office and restaurants reserved for whites only.

Until recently, members of Transkei’s legislative assembly had no place to stay overnight, as Umtata’s hotels were for whites only. The government has now built a showpiece hotel and restaurant for blacks.

Shabby "Black Zone"

There is only one cinema in town. Blacks are theoretically permitted to sit in the balcony, but few bother to go.

As the government often points out, there are more African shop owners than ever before in Umtata. What it doesn’t point out is that their shops are confined to the shabby "black zone" of the town, while stores in the main street are owned and staffed by whites.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)