Partition

Needless to say, if binationalism is ideologically unacceptable to a good many influential South Africans, partition of the country into more than one state is anathema. The sources of this reaction are several: the common antipathy of politicians to the prospect of losing territory in which power can be exercised; the conception of partition as another form of divide and rule, comparable to cutting the Black homelands out of South Africa and declaring their inhabitants to be noncitizens; and suspicion that a partition plan will give the predominantly White successor state the major share of good land and natural endowment, particularly mineral resources and rainfall—a suspicion solidly grounded in experience with the boundaries of the crowded, resource-poor homelands.

The comparative experience with partition in the post—World War II period has generally been unhappy, not in the sense that the alternatives to partition were necessarily superior but in the sense that partition was costly in lives and in protracted, post-partition conflict. The examples of India-Pakistan, Israel and the rest of Palestine, Cyprus after 1974, and Ireland after 1968 (although it was partitioned almost a half-century earlier) are all pertinent here.^[14] Partition may, in the end, be unavoidable, but for a great many reasons it is generally not the policy of choice.^[15]

[14] For brief discussions of these cases and comparisons to South Africa, see Newell M. Stultz, "On Partition," Social Dynamics 5, no. 1 (June 1979): 1–13.

[15] For a fuller assessment of the consequences of partition for ethnic conflict, see Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 588–92.

Still, South Africa is a society so divided that fallback positions can hardly be excluded a priori. Possible partition plans have been assessed in South Africa for a very long time.^[16] Among the various plans, the most carefully considered, from the standpoint of history, economic integration, demography, and—especially—fairness in the allocation of resources, is the one described (but not advocated) by Gavin Maasdorp.^[17] Maasdorp's plan is particularly generous, in terms of resources, to the part of the bisected state that would have an African majority. But to examine briefly even this careful design is to see the ethnic problems that would be left afterward.

The successor state with the larger White percentage—"Capeland"—would be centered on the Western Cape, extending eastward to, roughly, the Fish River (east of Port Elizabeth), and would also include two districts in the southwestern area of the Orange Free State. On the basis of the 1970 census, Africans would constitute only 23.6 percent of the population. The remainder of South Africa—"Capricornia"—would have a strong African majority. Nearly all Indians would be in Capricornia, and nearly all Coloureds would be in Capeland. More Whites would be in Capricornia than in Capeland, but since Capeland would have less than 20 percent of the total South African population, Whites would form a larger share of the Capeland population.^[18]

Despite the effort to disentangle populations, Whites would still form a minority of only 27 percent in Capeland (and of 15 percent in Capricornia). Coloureds would make up nearly half the Capeland population, and Africans would be (even as of 1970) almost as numerous as Whites there. Neither state would be free of the same sort of conflict that now troubles South Africa.

No doubt it is true that there was once a possibility of solidifying the links between Whites and Coloureds in the Cape, but those links have been weakened and, in a good many cases, broken since the apartheid policy of the National Party disfranchised and forcibly displaced many Coloureds from their residences in the 1950s. Segments of the Coloured community remain quite conservative. As I noted in Chapter 2, in a 1985 survey in Natal, 31 percent of Coloureds chose President P. W.

[16] For an excellent survey, see Eugene Lourens and Hennie Kotzé, "South Africa's Non-unitary Political Alternatives," in A. Venter, ed., South African Government and Politics (Johannesburg: Southern, 1989), pp. 294–331.

[17] Gavin Maasdorp, "Forms of Partition," in Robert I. Rotberg and John Barratt, eds., Conflict and Compromise in South Africa (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1980), pp. 107–46.

[18] See ibid., p. 130.

Botha as their preferred South African leader, nearly three times the number that chose Nelson Mandela.^[19] But a great many Coloureds have identified with the struggle of Africans against the White regime. In Capeland, there is little doubt that, in place of intergroup harmony, there would be considerable political conflict between Coloureds and Whites. Moreover, the end of influx control and pass laws in the mid-1980s has produced enormous growth in the African population around Cape Town, so that it is no longer a foregone conclusion that Whites would even constitute the second largest population group in Capeland. Capeland would be an especially severely divided, triethnic society.

About 80 percent of the population in Capricornia would be African. The White minority there would presumably have relatively little political power. Capricornia would, after all, be designed to be the African-dominated successor state of South Africa. If Whites had grievances, the presumption would be that they might move to the "non-African" successor state, Capeland, where, as we have just seen, their position might also be precarious. And to the extent that White power was diminished in Capricornia, conflicts among Black groups could be expected to emerge there, uninhibited by the comfort they would otherwise have given to powerful Whites. In fact, in Capricornia, as in Capeland, a few large groups would compete for power. Ironically, this would alter one of undivided South Africa's only favorable conflict conditions—the existence of a multiplicity of ethnic groups, no one of which could, under democratic conditions, easily capture power by itself.^[20]

It seems obvious that partition along these lines would not solve the problems of intergroup conflict—though it would rearrange the conflict somewhat—or the problems of Whites, or the problems of anyone else. Any partition that stood a chance of solving such problems would require a massive population transfer, principally of Whites to the Cape, which might not be able to support them.^[21] Even if a transfer could be arranged, its impact would be to turn the Coloureds, almost a majority under Maasdorp's plan, into a minority under the domination of Whites, who have not exactly been solicitous of their interests in the past. Partition cannot be ruled out, but it is not a promising idea.

[19] Fatima Meer and Alan Reynolds, "Sample Survey of Perceptions of the Durban Unrest—August 1985," in Fatima Meer, ed., Resistance in the Townships (Durban: Madiba, 1989), p. 262.

[20] For the conflict advantages of many dispersed groups, as opposed to a few centralized ones, see Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict , pp. 36–41.

[21] Between 1947 and 1950, some 12 million to 15 million people crossed the borders between India and Pakistan in a population transfer that cost perhaps a million lives.