Optimism In South Africa

Press, Issue 32333, 26 June 1970, Page 13

Optimism In South Africa

(By DAN VAN DER VAT, of “The Times,” through N.Z.P.A.) CAPE TOWN, June 25.

Rumours that the new British Prime Minister (Mr Heath) will quickly resume the sale of strategic arms to South Africa are being welcomed in Cape Town with profound relief; they are seen as evidence of the imminent restoration of the special relationship between the two countries.

The great tide of optimism flowing in South Africa since the British General Election shows just how much South Africa still depends on her connections with Britain, nine years after she left the Commonwealth and became a republic. This dependence, which has been played down with increasing desperation over the last six years—and even more so when it seemed that Labour might win again—has come into the open; and the Prime Minister (Mr Vorster) has gone to the unusual length of publicly expressing his personal satisfaction about the defeat of Mr Wilson. The fields in which the special relationships between Britain and South Africa is most visible are trade and defence.

Britain, which buys nearly one-third of South Africa’s exports, is at once her chief supplier and customer. This was true before the Labour Party gained power in 1964, and it remained so throughout Mr Wilson’s leadership.

The deterioration in relations, caused mainly by the Labour Government’s arms embargo, had an effect on this trading relationship which could be described, at worst, as marginal. South Africa has only a formal defence understanding with Britain—the Simonstown Agreement, which was instituted in 1955 and gave the Royal Navy access to the port of Simonstown in peace and war, in exchange for the delivery to the South Africans of ships and aircraft to defend the Cape sea route. Mr Wilson’s Government imposed a total arms embargo as soon as it assumed office in 1964, and the South Africans decried this action as a breach of the Simonstown Agreement—a protest which Labour rejected as unfounded.

The British embargo was in line with a United Nations resolution demanding a world-wide arms embargo against South Africa because of her apartheid policy. This dispute lay at the heart of the deterioration in relations, but the Labour Government also made repeated denunciations of apartheid.

Mr Wilson’s expression of sympathy with non-violent demonstrators planning to oppose the South African cricket tour, and the cancellation of the tour at the Labour Government’s request because of the fear of violence and the aggravation of race relations in Britain, completed the South Africans’ disenchantment.

The real effect achieved by the arms embargo and growing sports isolation is best illustrated by Mr Vorster’s unprecedented tour of Western

Europe, which began after Mr Wilson had called an election on the basis of a powerful swing in Labour’s favour, and was, at least in part, a demonstration that South Africa was capable of finding friends other than Britain.

The unexpected Tory election victory may even have made Mr Vorster wonder whether his journey, the first by a South African Prime Minister to Europe since 1961, was really necessary. The special relationship is felt much more keenly by South Africans than by Britons, just as the British spend much more time talking about the British-American special relationship than do the Americans: and it goes much deeper than trade and defence, culture and migration For the South Africans it

is also a psychological need, both for the English-speakers, who have British roots, and the Afrikaners, whose powerful historical reasons for hating Britain have flowered into an unparalleled obsession with all things British. . Afrikaans and English newspapers in South Africa, and the Government-con-trolled radio devote enormous attention to news about Britain and to abuse of Britain under Labour, vitriolic personal attacks on Mr Wilson, and uninformed sneers about the permissive society, have filled the letter columns for six years. The coolness of Labour Britain towards South Africa hurt badly, and created profound uncertainty about the future among the white minority in South Africa. Now there is euphoria over the volte face in Whitehall, and those few South African voices counselling caution because of Britain’s ties with the black Commonwealth, as well as Conservative disapproval of apartheid, are going unheeded.