13

I was groping toward some understanding of South African politics and society. While touring the country and first teaching in Cape Town, I had come up with several tentative answers to the great and obvious question that presented itself when we arrived in the country—about what prevented black South Africans from simply rising up against their outnumbered white overlords. The first was the manifest docility of most blacks. This perception had been shaken by the unexpected response at Grassy Park High to the big news from Zimbabwe, and was further shaken by almost everything I managed to read about the history of black resistance in South Africa. Much of the relevant writing had been banned, but the long, bloody story of strikes, marches, boycotts, revolts, and massacres could be found even in mainstream academic histories. Clearly, not all blacks had been taking their subjection passively. Still, I could not avoid the impression that many black South Africans were shackled by a slavelike mentality, in which self-confidence, self-respect, and conscious, constructive resentment of their oppression were conspicuously lacking.

A second inescapable observation and provisional answer seemed

to be black disunity. From a distance, it might be easy to think of South Africa's 25 million blacks as a whole and wonder why they did not act in concert. Inside the country, it was not so easy. People lived in widely scattered communities, separated by great barriers of ignorance, poverty, language, and culture. There was no national black political organization; there were no national black political leaders (other than those in jail or in exile). There was a great range of black political attitudes. The power of black numbers, as perceived from overseas, was largely an illusion.

The most ambitious attempts to organize the country's blacks for mass political action had each been crushed in its turn: the Industrial and Commercial Union in the 1920s; the African National Congress (ANC), founded in 1912, and a potent force in the 1950s, but outlawed in 1960; the breakaway Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), also outlawed in 1960; and the Black Consciousness movement, banned in 1977. The sort of wholesale revolt that I first imagined might work in South Africa had actually been attempted by an underground movement known as Poqo (the armed wing of the PAC) in the early 1960s. Poqo had frightened whites, but inspired few blacks with its violent, ill-organized program, and it had been easily smashed by the government in 1963. The ANC's first attempts at guerrilla warfare after it was driven underground were also smashed around the same time, when a number of its top leaders, including Nelson Mandela, were captured and received life sentences. An essentially spontaneous national uprising had occurred in 1976, when Soweto high school students protesting educational conditions were attacked by police and the township exploded. The violence eventually spread to black townships all over the country, continuing for over a year and claiming at least six hundred lives. "Soweto," as the revolt was known, had been by far the most serious and prolonged confrontation between blacks and the authorities in modern times. But it, too, had been handled with relative ease by the police, who lost not a single man. (The army was never even called out.) On the black side, there had been no coherent leadership, no coherent overall strategy.

Of the various ideologies advanced by the succession of black resistance movements, the Black Consciousness philosophy struck me as the one most likely to galvanize the greatest number of people into decisive political action. Its main texts were all banned, but it was still possible to gather the general theme: aggressive black pride, black self-reliance, and psychological preparation for majority rule. In

many ways, Black Consciousness had remained a "pre-political" movement, its growth increasingly hampered throughout the 1970s by police harassment, culminating in the 1977 death in detention of Steve Biko, its preeminent leader and theorist, and the subsequent banning of all Black Consciousness organizations and publications. The movement had spread its message widely only among students, and it seemed to have spent more energy rejecting the help of white liberals than it had spent actually fighting the government, but its defiant creed had clearly inspired many participants in the 1976 uprising. Nondogmatic but uncompromising, Black Consciousness had drawn on a wide variety of sources for its ideas, from traditional African nationalism to Marxism to the Black Power movement in the United States.

It was partly the firm line taken against white liberals that appealed to me about Black Consciousness, I think, because the more I read in recent South African history the clearer it seemed that the would-be white allies of black resistance had usually served only to temper black resentment, divert black initiative, and otherwise slow the pace of black emancipation. As Steve Biko wrote, "The biggest mistake the black world ever made was to assume that whoever opposed apartheid was an ally."

My growing disenchantment with white liberalism extended to the white opposition press which had so impressed me in Johannesburg and included both of the English-language daily newspapers in Cape Town, the Cape Times and the Argus . These papers' critical coverage of the government's behavior remained ferocious, and their editors' conception of the ruling National Party was, in my view, accurate. A typical Cape Times cartoon showed a big, brontosaural skeleton, labeled "Nat-Osaurus" and wearing the battered top hat which always adorned caricatures of National Party politicians, with a scientist explaining to a group of museumgoers: "Some time in the late twentieth century it became bogged down in an ideological quagmire and trapped by a political eruption." But just as the major Afrikaans-language papers were all openly linked with the National Party and uniformly supportive of government policy, the opposition papers were all closely identified, I soon realized, with the Progressive Federal Party, the largest white opposition party. Both the papers and the party were controlled by the same South African English business interests. Along with making a profit, getting the Nats' goat was the opposition papers' raison d'être .

This lack of "objectivity" did not bother me, once I understood its particular bias. What did bother me was the bias itself. The opposition press subscribed to the PFP's platform, which boiled down to a call for "power sharing." This call was entirely ignored by the government, but it was actually less sweeping than it sounded. The envisioned power sharing was limited; it was decidedly not one-person one-vote. As a January 1980 editorial put it, "No sensible person these days is dogmatic about constitutional forms or puts forward extreme solutions such as separate development or universal franchise in a unitary, Westminster-style constitution." (The "sensible person" in question here was clearly white, since even opinion polls carried out by government commissions showed that an overwhelming majority of black South Africans favored exactly that "extreme solution": one-person one-vote in a unitary state.)

The editors of the opposition press avoided this definitive, "constitutional" question when they could. They preferred to concentrate in their editorials on the government's responsibility for the countless "unsavoury incidents" caused by apartheid—deploring the eviction of a "colored" athlete from a "white" steak house, or the enforcement of beach apartheid. They were not above squeezing political capital out of these stories—sending, for instance, a Cape Times reporter to the beach with three PFP politicians to record their high-minded horror at police harassment of black beachgoers. The real concern of the white opposition over such incidents was pragmatic, however. The constant insults and humiliations being dealt out to blacks could all too easily become, as one of the beachgoing politicians put it, "the cause of violence to come in this country." More substantive oppression was viewed from the same perspective. The essence of the white opposition's view of the need for amelioration of black misery seemed to me contained in the well-worn observation, made in a Cape Times editorial about hunger on the Cape Flats: "If they do not eat, we do not sleep."

South Africa's "international image" seemed to be of special concern to the English-language papers. Each instance of the continued virulence of apartheid, they complained, only "confirms this country's critics in their belief that South Africans are a weird breed of raceobsessed bigots." (Again, it was only white South Africans whose reputation was thus imperiled; but this confusion, of South Africa in toto with its white minority, was extremely common among whites, even among liberals.) They would often fret in print about South Africa's image as a "police state," and point out that it looked very

bad to people overseas for the government to be continually "banning" persons,^[*] jailing its opponents, withdrawing passports, outlawing political parties, and so on.

None of this is to say that the protests of the opposition press against such practices were not sincere, and even sometimes useful to their victims. Neither is it to say that the opposition press did not itself suffer any government strictures. There were over one hundred laws containing press curbs on the books in 1980, proscribing coverage of everything from national defense to prison conditions, energy policy to police operations. There were also some extremely broadly worded laws in among the stacks of "security legislation," laws that, for example, defined "terrorism" as anything that served "to embarrass the administration of the affairs of the State." Such laws naturally resulted in a high degree of "self-censorship" among journalists; but there was also direct censorship. In 1980, the Rand Daily Mail of Johannesburg began to indicate just how restricted was its reporting by inserting a picture of a pair of scissors alongside portions of stories which had been censored. I thought Louis Le Grange, the Minister of Police and Prisons, captured the government's attitude toward the press perfectly when he said, "The State and the press must have a pleasant relationship, but, when it is necessary, we talk to them with a sword in our hand in great friendship."

On some key issues, the position of the white opposition was even in agreement with the preponderance of black opinion (insofar as that could be canvassed). The PFP and its newspapers advocated, for instance, the repeal of several of the legislative mainstays of apartheid, including the Group Areas Act.

Still, the white opposition's endless talk of "change" and "intergroup reconciliation" came to seem hollow to me, and I began to mistrust its newspapers. My problem, I realized, was that I was beginning to view the white opposition, and by extension its mouthpieces,

* "Banning orders," which usually run for five years, are served on opponents of the government without warning or explanation. Banned persons are usually placed under some form of house arrest. They may not write for publication, be quoted in print, have their photograph published, meet with another banned person, or even be in the same room with more than one other person. They are usually forbidden to enter any educational institution, library, printing establishment, factory, or hospital. Sometimes they are banished to remote parts of the country. Banned persons are effectively erased from society, and are often served with new banning orders when their original orders expire. Between 1950 and 1974, the South African Institute of Race Relations estimates that 1,240 persons were banned. In May 1980, there were 146 banned men and women.

from the perspective of those South Africans with whom I was spending most of my time—from, that is, the Cape Flats. And my awareness of their irreducible "whiteness" was becoming obtrusive as a result. I still read the daily papers, but more and more I read them with an eye for their unwitting irony, for their self-serving piety and their peculiar self-absorption. Seen from that angle, they could be terribly obtuse. There was a Cape Times editorial reviewing the findings of an official inquiry into the 1976 uprising, an editorial that ended: "The lesson to be absorbed, then, is that a gap in understanding between black and white existed in Soweto and elsewhere around the country before the upheaval. We may draw our own conclusion that this gap is still in existence." I remember laughing over this "conclusion" with a colleague in the staff room at Grassy Park High. Said my companion: "That means the nanny just won't open up to madam the way she used to!"

Such are the fissures in South African life that I was coming around to seeing the value of what had seemed beyond comprehension on my first day in the country: separate newspapers for blacks and whites. The only black paper in Cape Town was a weekly, the Cape Herald, which was widely read on the Cape Flats. If black people wanted to see a daily paper, though, their only options were the white papers—which were "white" not only in the relatively subtle political-editorial sense I have been describing, but in every department, in every detail. I've mentioned some glancing instances of this, but I first ran into it squarely when I heard that the Cape Times had published a list of all the high school graduates in the Cape the previous year, and I looked it up to see what the results had been at Grassy Park High and neighboring schools. I found the Senior Certificate Pass List—but Grassy Park was not among the dozens of schools listed. I was baffled until, in the Cape Times of three days later, I ran across the Coloured Senior Certificate Pass List. In the world of the white papers, there were high school graduates, and there were Coloured high school graduates.

The argument for separate newspapers for blacks was partly practical. What use were the entertainment pages of the Cape Times when the cinemas listed were all whites-only? What use were the ads for housing, when the flats and houses were all, or nearly all, in the white areas? Here was an ad for dancing lessons—it was against the law for blacks and whites to dance together, so the lessons were presumably being offered to whites only, although the ad never said so. Blacks and whites did live in such rigorously separate worlds—did it not make

sense that, would it not be easier all around if, they should have separate daily journals?

There was a psychological argument for black papers, too. Seen from the perspective of the Cape Flats, the outstanding quality of the white papers was that of exclusion . They were produced by the white minority for the white minority. Black life was at best a shadow in the background of the "real life" being led in the white areas. The Cape Flats was covered like a police beat. Every Monday, there was a body count—so many assaults, so many rapes, so many murders—and that was the week's news from the nether regions. Blacks remained spectators, strangers in their own land.

Black papers tended to adopt editorial positions that were far more hostile to the government than those of the white opposition press—such that, in 1977, the government simply banned the nation's largest black paper, The World, and jailed its editor. Any black paper that was not openly defying the government would have been in an impossible position in the black community. This I eventually understood—some time after I began to see the extremely limited relevance of even the white opposition press to the lives of black South Africans.

But before I grew too sensitive to the hypocrisy of it all, I found the back and forth of white politics which dominated the white papers fascinating. The PFP could be terribly eloquent in its denunciations of the government. It had, after all, little else to do except polish its technique. The Nationalists, meanwhile, regularly skewered the PFP on the contradictions of its position as well-heeled protester. For the most part, the government employed a surprisingly cool, social-scientific rhetoric on even the most inflammatory issues of race and subjugation. Its spokesmen were constantly reaching out fraternally to "other groups." "The more we are prepared to sweat together in peace, the less likely we are to bleed in war," as the Minister of Cooperation and Development (formerly "Bantu Affairs") put it. Gone was the rhetoric of naked white supremacy; the government now worked hard to convey a neutral, managerial attitude toward the problems of the country. The PFP made the most of the ruling party's occasional slips, such as when the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications informed Parliament that blacks had "slower thought processes" than whites did. The opposition press had a field day with this remark—although the minister said he saw no reason to retract it. But this was all a far cry from the days when a Nationalist MP had felt free to say in public that he wished more blacks had died at Sharpeville—"Sharpeville" being a famous massacre in 1960, when

police opened fire on a peaceful demonstration, killing sixty-nine blacks and wounding hundreds, most of them shot in the back while attempting to flee.

The torch of unadulterated white supremacism had not been extinguished in South African political debate; it had just been passed to the various white parties to the right of the government, notably in 1980 the Herstigte Nasionale Party. These parties were the refuge of whites who, alarmed by the government's recent reformist gestures, had begun defecting from the National Party. The HNP advocated the restoration of job reservation; it rejected the principle of equal pay for equal work. At its convention in 1980, the party called for all-out war against Angola, which was providing bases for black South African guerrillas. It was essential to show blacks "who is boss in this white man's country," the party leaders declared. In a way, I found I actually preferred the outrageous policy statements of the HNP to the more measured positions taken by the Nationalists and the PFP. At least the leaders of the HNP stated in public exactly what they stood for. The problem was that many members of the National Party apparently saw things the same way—the far right was growing stronger with every by-election.

What exactly were these alleged reforms that the government was introducing that were alienating so many apartheid-loving whites? I had a hell of a time trying to answer this question during my first months in South Africa. Certainly, it was all still a matter of far more talk than action. Prime Minister P. W. Botha had told the country's whites the year before that they would have to "adapt or die." This was the kind of statement that appalled the verkrampte , or unenlightened, wing of his own party. At the same time, the government remained committed to the basic apartheid program, including the ultimate "denationalization" of most of the country's blacks. A seemingly endless series of consultative bodies were forever being appointed in the government's effort to formulate some broadly acceptable plan for the country's future. But these councils and commissions, most of them launched with a great deal of fanfare, all seemed then to drift slowly out of view, their charter incomplete or overly restrictive, their purpose forgotten, their recommendations ignored. In time, I learned to look upon this level of official activity with some of the skepticism that most black South Africans did.

The bottom line was not hard to discern. The white minority imposed its will on the black majority by force. The South African police and military were massive, highly motivated, and extremely

well-armed organizations. Blacks were unarmed and unorganized. The eyes and ears of the Security Police^[*] were everywhere, and there were few constraints upon the state when it moved against its opponents. This was perhaps the simplest and most complete answer to the question about the failure to date of blacks to throw off the yoke: the whites, though few, were just too strong. The African National Congress, operating from exile, fielded a small guerrilla force, known as Umkhonto We Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), estimated to contain between two thousand and seven thousand fighters, most of them based in training camps in rural Angola. Returning clandestinely to South Africa in tiny bands, ANC guerrillas attacked power stations, railway lines, government offices, township police stations, and other economic and symbolic targets on a regular basis—averaging six or seven incidents a month in 1979. The ranks of the ANC had been bolstered by the exodus of thousands of young blacks from South Africa after the 1976 uprising. Still, the military threat it presented to the government was negligible.

But the press coverage of these "terrorist" attacks, and of the numerous "terrorist" trials being held (usually in camera ) continually around the country, did serve to highlight the true location of the battle lines in the ongoing South African crisis. For when it came to the prospect of violent black resistance, the sentiments of whites, proand anti-apartheid, converged, and the white opposition took a position indistinguishable from that of the government. The sentiments of blacks on the same issue were rarely revealed in the press, but when they were, the effect was stunning. In January 1980, for instance, four young men from Soweto seized a bank in a white suburb of Pretoria, took twenty-five hostages, made demands including the release of Nelson Mandela, and were killed in a police assault. Four days later in Soweto, twenty thousand people gathered to give one of them a hero's funeral.

Other issues that provoked a similar convergence in white opposition and government positions were South Africa's banishment from the international sporting community, and the disinvestment movement in the Western democracies. The whole spectrum of white politicians opposed this sort of "foreign meddling." Again, it was difficult to know exactly what most black South Africans thought about these

* Often known as the Special Branch, or the Security Branch, this plainclothes wing of the South African Police deals exclusively with "political" crime. Its exact size is a state secret, but its power and influence have grown immensely in recent years.

issues—in the case of disinvestment, it was a treasonable offense to advocate it. But there were many signs that blacks appreciated any form of international pressure that made whites squirm.

I've said that the overwhelming power of sheer black numbers in South Africa was largely an illusion, which dissolved upon closer inspection. Nonetheless, there were statistics, particularly population projections, which unavoidably revived the idea that simple arithmetic doomed white rule. Blacks were multiplying at a far faster rate than whites. Within twenty years, it was estimated, there would be over 40 million black South Africans, with only 5 million whites. Blacks were also moving to the cities. The fraction of the black population living in urban areas, which in 1946 stood at less than 30 percent, representing 2.5 million people, was in 1980 over 40 percent, or 10 million people, and was expected to reach 75 percent, or 28 million people, in the next twenty years. Blacks, finally, were going to school. While there were fewer than four black high school students for each white high school student in 1980, it was estimated that within three decades that ratio would exceed nineteen to one .

The government was furiously trying to juggle these numbers by declaring bantustans "independent." Thus, 2.4 million blacks assigned to the Transkei had vanished overnight on October 16, 1976, and another million or so disappeared the next year as a scatter of impoverished settlements called Bophuthatswana became a "black national state." Yet such manipulations seemed to me to do little to change the real balance of forces—whatever that actually was—in South Africa.