The extraordinary growth of brown power in South Africa

Press, 26 September 1988, Page 20

The extraordinary growth of brown power in South Africa

The “Economist” charts the rise of “Boss” Hendrickse

MR ALLAN HENDRICKSE, the leader of South Africa’s Labour Party, has at various times been detained by security police, described as a “self-seeking collaborator" by black activists, and accused by the present Minister of Defence of playing into the hands of terrorists. Lately the Right-wing zealots of the Conservative Party have taken to calling him “Boss” Hendrickse. The Conservatives are angrily implying that the country’s president, Mr P. W. Botha, takes his orders from a “Coloured” (mixed-race) man. It is indeed the case that. Mr Hendrickse’s Labour Party controls the Coloured people’s chamber of South Africa’s bizarre Parliament. (The other chambers are for whites and Indians; there is none for blacks). Labour' can thus interfere with the timing, if not visibly the content, of Government legislation. Most non-whites scorn the tricameral Parliament. When Mr Hendrickse became one of its first Coloured members in 1984, it was widely supposed that he had given up the struggle against apartheid. Instead he has exploited his position to win real influence.

By backing the campaign against conscription to the armed forces, he has won the grudging respect of white liberals and denunciation by the Defence Minister, Mr Magnus Malan. Now his Labour Party has forced the ruling National Party withdraw five bills that had been unilaterally passed by Parliament’s white chamber. Three of the five bills would amend the Group Areas Act, the bastion of racial segregation in housing. Their effect, taken together, would be to permit racially open “free-settlement” areas, while stemming black infiltration into areas set aside for whites. The other two bills contained stricter measures against illegal squatting and the growth of slums. The National Party believes the bills will counter the Conservative Party’s claims that it is surrendering white areas to blacks. It still hopes to get them passed in time for the municipal elections on October 26. At the end of August, the Coloured chamber, dominated by Mr Hendrickse’s Labour Party, blocked the bills by refusing to

discuss them. When the National Party pushed the bills through by votes in the white chamber alone, the Labour Party countered by refusing to consider any new legislation at all, thus producing a constitutional confrontation. In the end, the National Party had to fix up a deal with Labour. It will resubmit the five withdrawn bills to a special joint session of all three chambers this month. The bills will be much the same, but Labour insists it had made its mark. It says the joint debates are a first step towards joint voting and, ultimately, dissolution of the racial barriers between the chambers. Mr Hendrickse and his son Peter, who is also a Labour member of Parliament, promise that their party will continue to demand total abolition of the Group Areas Act, which the family has special reasons to hate. Their former home in Uitenhage, and the church in which Mr Allan Hendrickse and his father before him used to preach, have been bulldozed in the name of racial exclusiveness. To make things sourer still, Mr Hendrickse, a former Minister of United Congregational Church, was banned by his own people from preaching when he joined Parliament.

Early in 1987, when he was a member of Mr Botha’s Cabinet, Mr Hendrickse caused a great public row by diving into "God’s own sea” from a beach in Port Elizabeth reserved for whites. In August, 1987 he resigned from the Cabinet just in time to avoid being dismissed. He then threatened to block Mr Botha’s plan to postpone a general election for whites until 1992, unless the president agreed to scrap the Group Areas Act.

It is not an idle threat. The President’s problem is that, under the constitution he himself devised, he needs Mr Hendrickse’s help if the election is to be postponed. The Constitution says it should be held by early 1990 at the latest.

Mr Botha thinks that is much too soon after the whites-only election of May 1987, at which his party heavily lost votes to the Conservatives. But all three parliamentary chambers must agree if the constitution is to be amended. Mr Hendrickse can thus block the change. Mr Botha also needs Mr Hendrickse’s help in redrawing (white) constituency boundaries. The Constitution says this must be done by 1990, to reflect the shift of population from the Cape, where the National Party has its strongest support, to the Conservative stronghold of the Transvaal.

A simple reshuffle of the 166 white constituencies would give the Conservatives more seats, the National Party fewer. But if Mr Botha can increase the number of white seats, he can keep 50 seats in the Cape, almost all of which would be held by his own party. Again, this would require a constitutional amendment, and therefore the assent of the Coloured chamber. Brown power? Parliamentary power is, of course, rigged to give the last word to the party with a majority in the white chamber. The only small threat comes from an unlikely coalition between Coloured Indian and white Opposition members. But Mr Hendrickse’s manoeuvres allow him to exert the maximum force the Constitution allows.

He claims that his party helped push the Government to repeal laws against inter-racial sex and marriage, and against multi-racial political parties. He believes the Group Areas Act could be next. If Mr Hendrickse has scored a triumph for the politics of participation, it has not visibly impressed his fellow-churchman,

Archbishop Desmond Tutu. On September 4, the Anglican prelate defied the emergency regulations and risked a fine or imprisonment by calling on black people not to vote in October’s elections. Unlike Mr Hendrickse, he advocates a boycott of Government institutions to block Mr Botha’s constitutional schemes. Properly elected black town councils are an integral part of Mr Botha’s plan. He wants township councillors to form an electoral college and choose nine members of a new national advisory council, which would in turn help in the drafting of a new Constitution. The idea of such a council has been rejected by black leaders all along the spectrum, from the Zulu leader, Mr Mangosuthu Buthelezi, to the president of the -African National Congress, Mr Oliver Tambo. But Mr Hendrickse’s Labour party voted for it at a joint session of Parliament in June. The Labour Party resists white power on some issues, but it has not joined hands with those calling for black power either. Copyright — The Economist