Anti-apartheid – is it succeeding?

Press, 21 July 1984, Page 19

Anti-apartheid - is it succeeding?

By

ALLISTER SPARKS

of the “Observer”

It is 25 years since the AntiApartheid Movement was formed in response to an appeal by Albert Luthuli, then leader of the African National Congress, for an international boycott of South Africa.

Looking back, what has been achieved? There is no doubt that the movement has succeeded in isolating South Africa as no country has ever been isolated before. Prime Minister P. W. Botha’s recent swing through Europe notwithstanding the nation he represents is an international pariah without parallel. Yet the basic structures of apartheid are still intact. Blacks still have no vote. They are still arrested at the rate of 720 a day under the Pass Laws. They are still being dumped by the thousand in the tribal “homelands.”

When Luthuli issued that appeal in 1959, there was a sense that change was imminent. Especially after the Sharpeville massacre the following year and the massive international reaction that shook the South African economy to its foundations, there was a feeling that apartheid’s days were numbered. One more push, or boycott campaign, and it would collapse.

To that extent the campaign has failed. After a quarter of a century of effort, the day of black liberation is still not in sight. Yet South Africa is not the same either. Some things have changed, and the changes can be attributed at least in part to external pressures.

Sport is the outstanding example. All sports, even rugby with its almost totemistic importance to the ruling Afrikaner community, have made efforts at integration in response to the boycott campaigns against them over the last six or seven years.

The process has ground to a halt now because those who made these efforts got no reward for them. They continue to be boycotted as before, so that there is no incentive for them to change further. This suggests the need for an effective sanctions campaign to include a delicate balance of carrots as well as sticks. Namibia is another. There can be no doubt that without sustained international pressure there would be no talk of independence for the territory. Left to itself, South Africa would have annexed it by now, and partitioned it into 11 little tribal “homelands.” There can be no doubt, too, that the threat of sanctions, boycotts and disinvestments played a role in Pretoria’s decision to give trade union rights to blacks — the one reform that I would call fundamental.

Because of their new collective bargaining powers, and also because of the Sullivan and E.E.C. codes of employment which were a direct result of disinvestment threats, blacks are better paid and many are doing more skilled and advanced jobs today. They are also more socially integrated, in hotels, restaurants and other public amenities. Although much of this is tokenism, it has its small effect on the racial attitudes of the whites, which are softening palpably. Some boycotts have had a negative effect and actually strengthened white South Africa by making it more self-sufficient. The arms boycott is one. It stimulated the founding of a domestic industry which has made South Africa into the world’s tenth biggest arms manufacturer.

The oil boycott, likewise, provided the stimulus for a synthetic fuel industry and a search for offshore fields that will soon be giving South Africa 60 per cent of its petroleum needs, albeit at huge cost.

Perhaps, though, the most important change is the least tangible. The basic structure of apartheid may still be in place, but as an ideology it has collapsed. It is now seen to be impractical and the steady pressure has slowly built up a moral unease about it. Nobody outside the new breakaway parties of the far Right subscribes to apartheid in its original form any longer. Even the word has become tainted. Everyone in Government acknowledges the need for “change.” There is a good deal of cant in this, of course. Even as they talk of “change” the verglites of the National Party still cleave to the principle of Afrikaner “leadership.” There is no thought of giving blacks a foothold in the central Government.

But the important thing is that apartheid — a doctrine that once bound the Afrikaners together with the force of a religious faith — is discredited. It binds them no longer, so that they are split. It no longer sustains them with intellectual and moral confidence, so that they are confused. As a ruling oligarchy they have been weakened. But if that is all that can be said after 25 years of international pressure, can one continue to look to the boycott movement as a major agency of black liberation? Bishop Desmond Tutu, the foremost spokesman for blacks in South Africa, has no doubts. “Intensified Western pressure is the

single most important thing that can be done,” he says emphatically. Bishop Tutu sees it as the only thing that can halt a steady slide into civil war. The Anti-Apartheid Movement must arouse opinion in the countries of the West to the point where it becomes too politically expensive for their Governments to go on “buttressing apartheid” and they start stepping up the pressure on South Africa. Bishop Tutu believes economic pressure is the most important because “when people’s pockets are touched they talk." But any boycott is grist to the mill. It is the aggregate of pressure that matters. It must reach the point where the men in Pretoria count the cost too high and agree to sit down to talk with the real leaders of the black community. Can the boycott movement ever achieve this? “If it can’t then we are for the birds,” says the bishop.

Hermann Giliomee, a young Afrikaner widely regarded as South Africa’s most perceptive political scientist, is sceptical. He doubts that the boycott movement is capable of presenting enough of a challenge to the ruling oligarchy to produce the “crisis of hegemony” necessary for there to be the collapse of will that Bishop Tutu hopes for.

And to the extent that the boycott movement holds out a false hope to blacks that it can do this, Giliomee wonders whether it is not in fact preventing them from becoming more active in their own cause as they wait for outside agencies to liberate them. “If I were to Write a book about the black struggle in South Africa I think I would call it ‘waiting for liberation’,” he remarks wryly. Mr Giliomee thinks the boycott movement might achieve more if it set more limited, and thus more attainable, objectives, selecting areas where change would release new forces inside South Africa. Education is one. Pressure aimed at forcing an end to segregated and inferior education for blacks would help a new leadership generation to emerge, especially at the middle level where black leadership is conspicuously thin. This is a key reason why black movements are so organisationally weak and ineffective at the moment.

Likewise, there could be pressure to end influx control and allow free labour mobility. This would bring economic benefits to the black masses most urgently in need of it, help mobilise them, and also counter the Government’s new strategy of trying to divide the black population into mutually antagonistic “insider” and “outsider” classes. (Copyright — London Observer Service.)