South Africa’s future: still room for hope?

Press, 16 July 1979, Page 16

South Africa’s future: still room for hope?

By

PATRICK LAURENCE

Have South Africa’s race relations improved in 50 years? What are the prospects in the next 10? The South African Institute of Race Relations, an independent fact-finding body, failed to reach any clear answer during its fiftieth anniversary conference in Johannesburg early this month. Alan Paton, the author and former president of the now defunct Liberal Party, reflected the general ambivalence in his keynote speech entitled: “Towards Racial Justice — Will there be a change of heart?” In a reference to the death in detention of the black leader, Steve Biko, Paton asked: “Does anything change? Yes, you are safer in detention in 1979 than you would have been in 1977. That change was brought about by the revelation of torture and death. Can you call that a change of heart?”

He then described a more positive change since the founding of the institute in 1929. The decision by the new Minister of (racial) Cooperation, Dr Piet Koornhof, not to use bulldozers against the black squatter camp of Crossroads, near Cape Town.

Paton asked: “When, in the history of South Africa, has a Minister of State sat down and talked to squatters as though they were human beings?”

After relating how he had been jeered by young black demonstrators and young white policemen at the funeral of the pan-Africanist leader, Robert Sobukwe, he concluded: “I find myself

unable to declare emphatically that there are no grounds for hope . . . Sometimes the hope is strong, sometimes it is not.”

Another speaker, Professor Francis Wiison, of the University of Cape Town, offered a different perspective. South Africa had changed. But the movement was away from crass race domination to a more subtle and more durable form of white hegemony. Professor Wilson suggested that the ruling whites were edging towards a deal with what he called the "black urban insiders” at the expense of the “black rural outsiders.” The idea was that whites would gradually lift the restrictions on urban blacks living in the industrial core of South Africa in return for their assistance in keeping the “outsiders” under control.

Professor Wilson pointed to a recent Government decision to extend trade union rights to urban-based blacks while denying them to blacks in rural areas.

“Such a policy has many advantages to white South Africa. It makes possible a ‘new deal’ for those living in places like Soweto. The process of integrating some blacks into the core will take much of the sting out of international criticism, which is generally focused exclusively on the inequity of the use of colour as a bar,” he said.

Professor Jill Nattrass, of the University of Natal, produced figures which showed that the economic gap between urban and rural blacks is growing. According to her

in Johannesburg

data, the average yearly income per head for urban blacks is nearly four times that of rural blacks. She went on to show how influx control prevented escape from poor rural areas by blacks. The consequence was a rising number of “outsiders” and a relative decrease of “insiders,” particularly as tougher application of influx control in the cities seemed designed to drive out some insiders.

Against Professor Wilson’s view was the more hopeful scenario presented by a political scientist. Dr David Welsh. The gist of his address was that there were signs that both the ascendant whites and the subordinate blacks might settle for less, and agree to compromise. For whites to insist on the status quo would be to invite escalating guerrilla warfare and intensified revolutionary struggle. For blacks to demand simple black majority rule would be to provoke intransigent resistance from whites.

The middle way lay in the adoption of some mode of shared power in a “consociational” constitution aimed, like Nigeria’s new constitution, at “curbing simple majoritarianism.” Arguing that fear of white coercion was more powerful than hatred of white oppression, Dr Welsh said: "There can surely be little doubt that a substantial majority of blacks would prefer a negotiated accommodation to a protracted period of continuing urban violence and guerrilla war, in which the

blacks have no certainty of a decisive victory. A much more probable scenario would postulate the development of a ‘no-win’ or deadlocked situation.” But few of the delegates would have challenged the view expressed by one of the earlier institute presidents, Mr Alfred Hoernle, 38 years ago. In his presidential address of 1941, Mr Hoernle said: “I deny that there is, in our caste society, either the will or the vision for planning and effecting change . . . The changes which will come will be forced on us by world forces arid world events over which humanity has little conscious control.”

The question was whether South Africans, particularly the ruling whites, would adapt quickly enough to these forces — or whether they

would react too slowly and allow events to overtake them, 0.F.N.5., Copyright.