ANNEXES
MR. MALCOLM FRASER (CO-CHAIRMAN), Proposed by the Prime Minister of Australia, was the Prime Minister of Australia 1975-83, having held a number of Cabinet positions since 1968. He entered Parliament in 1955, after graduating from Oxford University in 1952. As Prime Minister, Mr. Fraser chaired the Commonwealth summit held in Melbourne in 1981 and was responsible for initiating the series of Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional Meetings for the Asia/Pacific region. Lately an International Fellow of Harvard University, Mr Fraser was Chairman of the United Nations Panel of Eminent Persons which recently reported on the Activities of Transnational Corporations in South Africa and Namibia. He is a member of the Inter Action Council of former Heads of Government formed in 1983.
GENERAL OLUSEGUN OBASANJO (CO-CHAIRMAN), proposed jointly by the President of Zambia and the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, was the head of the Federal Military Government of Nigeria 1976-79, when he handed over power to an elected civilian government, headed by President Shehu Shagari. A Fellow of the University of Ibadan from 1979, General Obasanjo served on the Independent (Palme) Commission on Disarmament and Security, and he is a member of the Inter Action Council of former Heads of Government. As an officer in the Nigerian army, which he joined in 1958, he served with the United Nations forces in the Congo in 196o. He served as Federal Commissioner for Works and Housing in 1975 and was promoted Lt-General in 1976 and General in 1979.
LORD BARBER OF WENTBRIDGE, proposed by the Prime Minister of Britain, has been Chairman of the Standard Chartered Bank since 1974. Having served as Economic Secretary to the British Treasury 1959-62, Financial Secretary to the Treasury 1962-3 and Minister of Health 1963-4, Lord Barber was Chancellor of the Exchequer 1970-74. He was Chairman of the Conservative Party 1967-70 and a member of the Falkland Islands Inquiry Committee (Franks Committee) in 1982. A graduate of Oxford University and a barrister, he entered Parliament in 19Si.
DAME NITA BARROW was proposed by the Prime Minister of The Bahamas. A Barbadian national, Dame Nita Barrow was President of the World YWCA 1975-83 and has been a President of the World Council of Churches since 1983 and President of the International Council for Adult Education since 1982. She was the convener of the Non-Governmental Organizations Forum for the World Conference to review the United Nations Decade for Women held in Nairobi in 1985. After being Principal Nursing Officer in Jamaica and Nursing Adviser to the Pan-American Health Organization for the Commonwealth Caribbean, she served as Associate Director (1972-5) and as Director (1975-81) of the Christian Medical Commission of the World Council of Churches in Geneva. She was made a Dame of St Andrew in 1980.
MR. J0HN MALECELA, proposed by the President of Zambia and the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, was Foreign Minister of Tanzania 1972-5. He later held other positions in the Cabinet (Agriculture 1978-80, Minerals 1980-82, Communications and Transport 1982-4 and Communications and Works 1984-5) until he relinquished office at the end of 1985. He was Vice-Chairman of the Independent (Maitland) Commission for Worldwide Telecommunications Development. As Tanzania's Permanent Representative at the United Nations 1964-8, Mr. Malecela was elected Chairman of the United Nations Committee on Decolonisation in 1967. He was a Minister in the East African Community before becoming a Minister in Tanzania in 1972. He studied at the Universities of Bombay and Cambridge.
SARDAR SWARAN SINGH, proposed by the Prime Minister of India, has been in public life since 1946 and served as India's Minister of External Affairs 1964-6 and 1970-74 and as Minister of Defence 1966-70 and 1974-5. He had held a number of other portfolios in the Indian Government from 1952 onwards. A leader of the Indian delegation to the United Nations General Assembly on eight occasions, he was elected to the Executive Board of UNESCO in 1985. He was a member of the United Nations Panel of Eminent Persons on Regional and Inter-regional Co-operation 1982-4 and has been Co-Chairman of the Policy Board of the Inter Action Council since 1983. He played an active role during the Indian Freedom movement and was in charge of legal defence of all political activists of all parties. He was on the Partition Committee of the Punjab.
THE MOST REVEREND EDWARD WALTER SCOTT, proposed by the Prime Minister of Canada, has been the Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada since 1971. Educated at the University of British Columbia and the Anglican Theological College of British Columbia, he was ordained in 1942. He served as Director of Social Service and Priest-in-Charge of Indian Work in the Diocese of Rupertsland 1960-64 and Associate Secretary of the Council for Social Service of the Anglican Church 1964-6 and was Bishop of Kootenay 1966-71. Archbishop Scott was Moderator of the Executive and Central Committees of the World Council of Churches 1975-83. He was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1978.
A Special Unit was established in the Commonwealth Secretariat to provide professional and administrative support to the Group for the duration of its work, particularly during its visits to South Africa. It drew upon resources Secretariat-wide.
The Commonwealth comprises the English-speaking world but for the United States and a few other countries. Its forty-nine sovereign member nations are located in every continent and ocean. Nearly one third of the states of the modern international community, their populations are over a quarter of the world's people.
Uniquely in the international community outside the United Nations, the Commonwealth brings together countries at all levels of economic development. It embraces different political systems, but all its member countries acknowledge the Queen as Head of the Commonwealth.
The contemporary Commonwealth evolved out of the old British connection. Hence the different countries share both principles and practice: principles of freedom, democracy and multiracialism; practices of law, administration and education. The Commonwealth's peoples speak many languages but communicate easily through the shared language of English.
The Commonwealth's organic evolution has been matched by the growth of consultation and co-operation to meet the needs of its member countries. The modern equivalent of the old Imperial Conferences and Prime Ministers' Meetings is the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting at which Presidents and Prime Ministers discuss issues of importance to them and the world community. Programmes of co-operation are administered by the London-based Commonwealth Secretariat set up in 1965.
The Commonwealth, an outcome of decolonisation, holds self-determination as a central principle. It has long been concerned to help extend political freedoms to all the people of South Africa. In 1961 South Africa was forced to leave the Commonwealth because of its racist policies. The Commonwealth has been prominent in the world campaign against apartheid. Decisions of Commonwealth leaders led the way in the international arms embargo against South Africa and its sporting isolation through the Commonwealth's 1977 Gleneagles Agreement.
In 1985, at their summit at Nassau in the Bahamas, Commonwealth leaders decided on further pressure for change in South Africa and appointed the Commonwealth Group of Eminent Persons to promote in that country a political dialogue aimed at replacing apartheid by popular government.
The countries are: Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, The Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Botswana, Britain, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Cyprus, Dominica, Fiji, The Gambia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Malta, Mauritius, Nauru, New Zealand, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, St Christopher-Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Tanzania, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu. Uganda, Vanuatu, Western Samoa, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
Over the last six months a remarkable thing happened in one of the saddest corners of our small world. A group of seven people from five continents, black and white and brown, gave everything they had to offer - integrity, humanity, compassion, understanding and a wide experience - to holding back a darkening storm. It was remarkable most of all because, against the odds, the Commonwealth Group of Eminent Persons (a title each of them eschewed) showed, by the quality of their efforts for peaceful change in South Africa, that both change and peace are within the grasp of its people. For a brief moment, the world - and, pre-eminently, South Africans of all races - glimpsed a path of negotiation to a more worthy future.
This Report is an account of that mission to South Africa and a statement by the seven who undertook it of the realities they confronted and the perils they fear could lie ahead for all races in South Africa. It is a Report to Commonwealth leaders, but it is a testimony to all the world. It arose out of the Commonwealth Meeting in Nassau in October 1985, but it is rooted in the concern of Governments and people everywhere. Those concerns are about the inhumanities of the apartheid system and the even more terrible human suffering that lies not far ahead if a way is not found urgently to compel the dismantling of apartheid and the establishment of a non-racial representative Government in South Africa.
The message is clear: apartheid must end. It will end - if necessary, through a bloody struggle whose cost in lives may be counted in millions and whose agonies will reverberate in every corner of our multiracial world. But it could end by peaceful means - by a genuine process of negotiation - once white South Africa accepts that the evil system by which it has sustained its dominance must end and is ready by deeds to bring it about. The Group's account shows with unique authenticity how far the Government of South Africa is from that acceptance and that readiness. It shows too that not all white South Africans stand rooted on the banks of the Rubicon; some are ready and willing to cross. And the Group's Report confirms that on the other bank those so long oppressed in South Africa, the victims of apartheid, are ready even now to join in a peaceful process of building a new South Africa in which all its people, black and white, coloured and Indian, will share in fairness and with dignity.
The Report conveys yet another message, not to South Africa but to all of us beyond it. It is a call to action, a challenge not to stand aside. The means left open to the world community are few, but they are real. Whether we call them 'sanctions' or, as the Group has done, 'economic measures', they come to the same thing: effective economic pressure, applied particularly by those major economic powers that are South Africa's principal trading partners and to which it looks for major financial flows; pressure which demands change while there is still time to bring it about by peaceful means.
When Commonwealth leaders agreed on the establishment of the Group at Nassau, they saw it as part of a programme of common action. One aspect of that programme was the set of measures against South Africa which they agreed upon as a result of their debate on sanctions. They also agreed that if, in their opinion, adequate progress had not been made towards the objectives of the Accord within six months, they would consider the adoption of further measures, and others beyond them, on a continuing and incremental basis, in order to secure the desired result within a limited period. The task of the Group was to advance the process of change in South Africa 'by all practicable means'. For the time being, at any rate, their efforts to achieve this by facilitating the process of dialogue among South Africans have been thwarted by the Government. The Group's Report makes it clear that, in the six months of their efforts, there has been no progress towards the dismantling of apartheid and the establishment of a non-racial representative Government - the essential objectives of the Accord.
The challenge that the Group's Report throws down to us all is reinforced by the circumstances in which the Government of South Africa sought to nullify this Commonwealth effort: its calculated assault on the peace process itself. The Commonwealth Group has opened up and explored the path to change. The Government of South Africa refuses to take it - indeed, would like, it seems, to seal it off. Sanctions and peace for South Africa have now become one and the same. As the Group says, even now the absence of real economic pressure on the Government - and its belief that it may never have to face such pressure - are helping to defer change. Ordinary black people throughout South Africa look to the world for more than just moral clarity. Those outside who say that sanctions will 'hurt the blacks' do not know how intense black suffering already is. It is, in any case, a judgement they have no right to make, when the blacks themselves see sanctions, and any additional suffering these involve, as preferable to the far greater tragedy they would otherwise face. This they said to the Group over and over again.
One final word; and one of hope. As this Report intimately demonstrates, the human spirit survives in South Africa in so many ways. In the courage of young children, in the churches, in the great coalition that makes up the United Democratic Front, among the women who bear some of the heaviest burdens and women's groups like Black Sash who keep faith with the spirit of caring. But, most of all, its survival is symbolized in the person of Nelson Mandela. The walls of South Africa's prisons confine him, but his spirit soars above them: a spirit of freedom, of nationalism rising above 'group', of courage and resolve that humiliates oppression; a spirit of non-racialism that looks to a democratic South Africa acknowledging black and white as fellow South Africans; a spirit that can release his entire country from bondage.
The human spirit in South Africa is crying out for the world's help, for the world's solidarity. It is proclaiming for all who allow themselves to hear that it is not freedom that white South Africa should fear but freedom's denial.
Shridath Ramphal
Marlborough House
London SW1
June 1986
COMMONWEALTH GROUP OF EMINENT PERSONS
Established pursuant to the Commonwealth Accord on Southern Africa, Nasau,
October 1985
| Cables: COMSECGEN LONDON SW1 Telex: 27678 Telephone: 01-839 3411 |
Marlborough House Pall Mall London SW1Y 5HX 7 June 1986 |
H E Mr. Shridath S Ramphal
Commonwealth Secretary-General
Marlborough House
Pall Mall
LONDON SW1
Dear Secretary-General,
We forward herewith our Report and would be grateful if you could arrange to
have it transmitted to Commonwealth Heads of Government.
It is not often that the chance arises to try and serve a whole country, arrest its drift to civil war, and initiate a process that might usher in a new era. We were given such a chance. If we are sad that our efforts to achieve these objectives in South Africa have been unavailing, it is not so much out of a sense of disappointment at the personal level, but acute consciousness and concern at the consequences of our failure for the future of that country.
We had fervently hoped we might succeed. Our Report in the case would have been brief. The Report which we now present is, of course, of a different character.
We have had a unique opportunity of dealing with all the parties principally concerned with events in South Africa and of visiting many of the countries of Southern Africa and talking with their leaders. In present circumstances this imposes on us a particular obligation to speak with frankness to Commonwealth leaders, indeed to the world community, of our experience and to provide with candour our assessments and our judgements.
We hope that our Report can contribute to the fulfilment of the objectives of the Nassau Accord which remains so central to the prospects for a new South Africa. It must serve not only as a record of our efforts, but as a reminder to the Commonwealth and the wider international community of the true nature of the situation in South Africa and the prospects for the future as we see them. We remain wholly convinced that those objectives Commonwealth leaders identified at Nassau must continue to be pursued through every means possible.
We take some satisfaction in the fact that, despite considerable scepticism on all sides at the outset of our work, the process gradually gained the confidence of many of the parties involved and lifted the expectations of people, white and black, in South Africa (and, we believe, of people in many other countries) to new levels of hope. Such increased hope was understandable. Certainly, as we proceeded with our work, we became convinced that, not only was it a matter of the utmost urgency to dismantle apartheid and erect structures of democracy in South Africa in terms of a non-racial representative Government, but that it was essential to break the cycle of violence in the country if these objectives were to be achieved. We are convinced that all this is attainable. We deeply regret that the Government of South Africa at the end made it impossible for us to proceed further.
Throughout our work we have had the benefit of assistance by members of the Commonwealth Secretariat. The highly professional and dedicated support which they have provided has been outstanding, as has their unceasing effort over a period of considerable pressure. We are most grateful for their excellent work which has played a key part in enabling us to undertake our task. We especially wish to place on record our appreciation of the role which you, the Deputy Secretary-General, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, and the Assistant Secretary-General, Mr. Moni Malhoutra, have played personally in advising and supporting us.
As you have requested, we shall hold ourselves available for the Review Meeting of Commonwealth leaders due to be held early in August.
Yours sincerely,
(Signed by)
Malcolm Fraser
Anthony Barber
John Malecela
Edward Scott
Olusegun Obasanjo
Nita Barrow
Swaran Singh
Our Group was appointed under the Commonwealth Accord on Southern Africa, agreed by Heads of Government in Nassau in October 1985 as a united Commonwealth response to the challenge of apartheid. The Accord in its entirety (Annex I) provided the framework for our work; it contained both a specific injunction to the Group and a call to the South African Government to undertake five particular steps.
The South African Government was urged to declare that the system of apartheid would be dismantled and specific and meaningful action taken in fulfilment of that intent; to terminate the state of emergency; to release immediately and unconditionally Nelson Mandela and all others imprisoned or detained for their opposition to apartheid; and to establish political freedom, specifically lifting the ban on the African National Congress (ANC) and other political parties.
The fifth step - the initiation by Pretoria, in the context of a suspension of violence on all sides, of a process of dialogue with a view to establishing a non-racial and representative government - was of direct concern to the Group. It was our task to encourage, through all practical ways, the evolution of such a process of political dialogue. Naturally, that dialogue would have to be across the lines of colour, politics and religion and would have to involve the true representatives of the majority black populations - and the Accord said so.
While the first four urgent and practical steps called for by Commonwealth leaders were, in a formal sense, distinct from the assignment we were given, each was critically related to our chances of being able to facilitate a meaningful process of dialogue. Only their implementation would create the conditions, and generate the confidence, within which a genuine dialogue of change could take place.
For that reason, our Report takes each of these points in turn, commenting on them in some detail.
We were keenly aware of the limitation of time put on our mission. Once established, we had six months to do our work, in the knowledge that at the end of that period the seven Heads of Government referred to in the Accord would meet to review the situation. Having agreed a package of measures against Pretoria at the Nassau Meeting, Commonwealth Heads of Government would then consider further measures if the Review Meeting deemed progress insufficient.
There was therefore no question of the Group having anything other than a short and specific existence. This was a point we needed to stress repeatedly to those fearful that we were to be a 'Contact Group' with an indefinite life.
We were also aware that our role was limited to the task of facilitating a process of dialogue for change: for ending apartheid and establishing a genuine non-racial democracy in South Africa. It would be for those involved in that process - the representatives of all the people of South Africa - to determine the forms of change; it was not our function to prescribe what form a political settlement might take. That remained the prerogative of the South African people.
Understandable suspicions among most of the principal parties added to the difficulty and sensitivity of our mission. Among black representatives, for example, there was intense distrust of British Government policy and the intentions of the Prime Minister. The Group was wrongly perceived as being a product of the British Government's wish to resist sanctions against South Africa and a device to postpone effective international action. We therefore had a major task to establish the independence and sincerity of our undertaking.
In respect of Pretoria, Commonwealth leaders had themselves anticipated 'the possibility of initial rejection by the South African authorities' of any role for the Group. Our initial exchange of letters with the Government is at Annexes 2 and 3.
To overcome misconceptions and remove apprehensions about the work of the Group, and to build confidence to a point from which meaningful discussions could begin, we agreed on a number of operational principles at the outset.
First, we decided that despite the considerable media interest which our work would attract, we would work quietly and in non-public ways. This meant that, while our work was in progress, we would not make any public comment or, for that matter, respond publicly to what others might say.
Second, we decided that our approach to all parties would be non-confrontational. We went to considerable lengths to create and maintain an atmosphere of cordiality. Even when severely provoked, we remained silent because of the overriding importance of the issues at stake.
Third, the Group recognized that there might be value in functioning in other ways than always as a full Group, particularly at the very beginning of the exercise, when the acceptability of the Group to all parties hung in the balance. The low-key preliminary visit to South Africa of the two Co-Chairmen, General Obasanjo and Mr. Fraser, accompanied by Dame Nita Barrow. was of crucial importance in making contact, allaying suspicions, explaining our purpose and paving the way for the visit of the full Group.
In the same way, the Group sometimes chose to subdivide, to enable simultaneous visits to be made. We also, on occasion, decided to share the task of briefing the Heads of Government of neighbouring and Commonwealth countries, and other members of the international community, about the progress of the initiative. The fact that those outside South Africa who possessed some influence with one or other of the principal parties were kept fully informed enabled the Group to call upon them for assistance and support as the need arose. From time to time, that proved invaluable.
Fourth, it was important, in gaining access to all the principal parties, for the Group to demonstrate its independence. We therefore travelled alone, without any government security personnel, and accompanied only by our own small Secretariat. It was equally important to move extensively around the country, with freedom of access to all those we wished to meet, making contact with as wide a spectrum of opinion as possible, and seeing as much in the townships and elsewhere on the ground as was feasible. In this regard, we acknowledge our particular debt to Prime Minister Mulroney for making available a Canadian Air Force plane which enabled us to cover much more ground within the country than would otherwise have been possible, as well as to visit the Front-Line States.
The programme of our visits, with a list of the groups and personalities whom we met during the course of our work, is set out in Annex 3. This included a total of twenty-one meetings with Ministers of the South African Government, with leaders of political and other organizations, as well as with prominent academic, political, religious and community figures.
Only by such an intensive process of discussion was it possible for the Group to help transform an initial climate of suspicion and distrust into one where the emergence of our negotiating concept became possible.
Apartheid in Perspective
None of us was prepared for the full reality of apartheid.
As a contrivance of social engineering, it is awesome in its cruelty. It is achieved and sustained only through force, creating human misery and deprivation and blighting the lives of millions.
The degree to which apartheid has divided and compartmentalized South African society is nothing short of astounding. We understood why many visitors to South Africa could leave the country enchanted by its natural beauty and impressed by its economic achievement, yet oblivious of the scale of the human tragedy behind the façade of progress.
The living standards of South Africa's white cities and towns must rank with the highest anywhere; those of the black townships which surround them defy description in terms of 'living standards'. Apartheid creates and separates them; black and white live as strangers in the same land.
We were struck by the contrasts of residential segregation everywhere. In Cape Town, our point of arrival, we passed the black townships of Guguletu, Nyanga and Langa, the coloured townships of Athlone and the white suburbs of Mowbray and Pinelands, each at once distinctive by its physical appearance. Oddly incongruous in the centre of the city, a large area of District Six lies fallow. Once a coloured and Indian area, it is idle but for a few churches and mosques and some new government buildings. A decade has passed since its vibrant Indian and coloured communities, living harmoniously as neighbours, were forcibly removed, many to the Cape Flats up to 40 kilometres away. Lamp posts on empty streets stand as witnesses to the agonies of that removal. But memories are deeply etched into the conscience of Capetonians of all races, and private developers contemplating the redevelopment of District Six have counted the consequences in public wrath and have not proceeded.
Crossroads, on the outskirts of Cape Town, is in many ways a symbol of the apartheid system. Here, in defiance of the 'homelands' policy and the Group Areas Act and of persistent attempts to remove them forcibly to their allotted areas, thousands of families have chosen to squat. When we visited in March the community, despite severe hardship, was sticking together. Its families were crowded into crude shanties, fashioned from discarded sheets of corrugated iron and lined with cardboard and polythene in an attempt to keep out the cold. The shanties have neither sewage system nor electricity and are serviced only by a few communal water taps. Yet, in a triumph of the human spirit, the people were clean, the shacks generally tidy.
Even in conditions such as these the infant mortality rate, we were told, is barely a quarter of that in the 'homelands': a telling commentary on the degree of deprivation there. Indeed, the almost total absence of employment opportunities in the 'homelands' is one of the factors forcing families into Crossroads. Another is, of course, the possibility of their being together as families, even in these squalid conditions.
Beyond Crossroads, we saw for ourselves the state of overcrowded (and much of it ramshackle) black urban housing - in townships such as Johannesburg's Soweto, where perhaps almost 2 million people were living in housing designed for 800,000; the squalor of Port Elizabeth's Soweto, built on what resembles a rubbish dump; the conditions in Durban's Kwa Mashu, in Johannesburg's Alexandra, in Pretoria's Mamelodi.
By contrast, most white suburbs were pictures of affluence, well away from the sights and sounds of black townships. For the greater part, whites are able to go about their daily lives without any direct exposure to the conditions in the townships.
We were sought out by squatters from the Cape Town suburb of Hout Bay, blacks continuing to live in the mixed black/ coloured townships where they had been born, resisting continuing attempts to move them to the solely black township of Khayelitsha on the windswept Cape Flats. Not only do they wish to remain in the community they regard as home, but their R300 per month income would be consumed almost entirely by the cost of commuting: removal to Khayelitsha would effectively result in their becoming unemployed.
The pattern of segregation we first witnessed in Cape Town was even more stark away from the city. In the Karoo each pleasant white farming centre has its own satellite black and coloured township, squalid reservoirs quarantined from white areas but from which they draw labour. The neat white town of Cradock has its swimming pool; in the neighbouring black township of Lingelihle children have only a cesspit in which to play and keep cool. This story was frequently repeated - throughout the Midlands, in the Eastern Cape, on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth and in the commuter belts of Johannesburg and Pretoria. Indeed, as we drove around the country it quickly became apparent that whether in urban areas or in the countryside, we would be able to tell, without ever seeing a single inhabitant, in which group's 'area' we were - so stark are the Government-ordained disparities.
Despite economic and social disparities of long-standing and elements of racial discrimination, South Africa was not always like this. However, when in 1948 the incoming National Party Government, controlled by the Afrikaners, embarked on its systematic programme of apartheid, the Group Areas Act was passed. Under this law, urban blacks, coloureds, Indians and whites, already segregated to some degree, were all to be compelled to live in their 'own' areas - areas designated by the State.
To make the Group Areas Act effective it is, of course, first necessary to classify each and every individual. This is provided for in the Population Registration Act, a rigid system based on appearance, general acceptance and descent, which divides up the population first into black, white and coloured. The coloured grouping is then subdivided into Cape coloured, Cape Malay, Griqua, Indian, Chinese, 'other Asiatic' and 'other coloured'. Blacks now form ten 'national units', each with its 'reserve'. Thus has the so-called 'nation of minorities' been fashioned by government flat. Whites alone, despite their linguistic, historical and cultural differences, are spared such sub-classification.
The 'reserves', the areas to which, under legislation Of 1913 and 1936, blacks were restricted if they wished to buy additional land, have a long history. They were, however, used by the architects of apartheid not only to create the so-called 'homelands' but as the basis of a more formal and enduring division of the country, giving some 86.3 per cent of its land to whites and a meagre 13.7 per cent to about six times as many blacks. The 86.3 per cent becomes a 'white' country, a white South Africa; the 13.7 per cent was to be fragmented into ten 'self-governing homelands' for the blacks, each destined to achieve 'independence'. Thus, a predominantly black country becomes predominantly white, and the black becomes an alien in his own land. More than this, each black was assigned to a particular part of the country according to his tribal origin, language and culture, even though these distinctions had faded with the move to the cities. That this approach was at best haphazard is illustrated by the number of 'homelands'. Various numbers were considered. Simply to have two, based on the Sotho and Nguni linguistic groupings, would have been to create artificial 'states' so large that they might one day rebound on their makers. Enough were needed to diffuse power sufficiently. Eight were established: subsequently this became ten. The 'homelands' lack of geographical unity gives the lie to any basis in history. One 'homeland', KwaZulu, is now a jumble of some ten jigsaw pieces - an archipelagic 'state' scattered across a continental white 'sea'. Lebowa and Bophuthatswana each have six such distinct 'island' areas. In 1972, before more recent consolidations were made. KwaZulu had as many as twenty-nine separate island blocks; the Ciskei and Bophuthatswana each had nineteen.
Those living outside the areas designated for them were moved - voluntarily if they agreed, forcibly if they did not. Whites were not exempted, and thousands were relocated. But overwhelmingly the burden fell on blacks, millions of whom were moved, often to be dumped without compensation in distant, and areas designated as their 'homelands'. If not with quite the same crudeness of former years, the system of removals continues today, even as the Government asserts that apartheid is dead.
Progressively as the 'homelands' moved to 'independence', blacks would be
stripped of their South African citizenship, would have, instead, the
citizenship of a new, 'independent homeland state' and require visas to enter
'white' South Africa, other than for short periods. As of 1986, four 'homelands'
have been accorded 'independence' - Transkei, Bophuthatswana,
Ciskei and Venda. KwaNdebele is due to become the fifth, on 11 December 1986.
Within this concept the coloureds and Indians both presented difficulty. The
strategy had to concede that the former had not even a fictitious 'homeland'. It
also eventually had to concede the self-evident fact that the Indian population
was a permanent feature of the country, even if during the first decade of
apartheid its eventual 'return' to India was confidently asserted.
However, the whites outnumbered both groups combined.
We did not formally visit the 'independent homelands', none of which is recognized internationally. In our travels criss-crossing the country, however, it was impossible not to enter 'homeland' territory. We therefore had occasion to observe the circumstances of these 'homelands', among them the Transkei, Lebowa, KwaNdebele and KwaZulu. We saw the primitive conditions under which people live, prevented over the years by the pass laws from seeking work in urban areas, and families from joining menfolk there. (The pass laws are now being replaced by 'orderly urbanization', which we discuss later.) We were told of the many who daily make the arduous bus trip between home and white workplace, a heavily subsidized journey of up to four or five hours each way. In the economics of apartheid, the Government prefers the high cost of subsidizing such travel to having more blacks live in the urban areas.
Those in work too far distant to commute, and who have not been granted 'residence rights', often live in the cities for eleven months of the year in 'single men's quarters' - a euphemism for crowded huts with amenities devoid of any semblance of privacy and violating the most basic norms of human decency. We were reminded by Ministers and white businessmen that there are worse slums in other parts of the world. 'Here, there is a First World and a Third World,' we were told. 'Do not judge the Third World by First World standards.' Yet this is to ignore the calculated creation and maintenance of these different worlds in one country, and the determination that the demands of the First World should be met at the expense of the Third. There is abysmal poverty elsewhere in the world, but nowhere is it institutionalized as in South Africa and with as little prospect for its victims to escape the poverty trap.
The apartheid system not only sustains white political dominance; it is equally designed to keep blacks economically weak and confined to low-paid jobs. It excludes blacks from significant ownership of land, severely restricts their business opportunity and ensures cheap labour for white-owned industry, farming and commerce.
The 'homelands' are in reality rural slums, reservoirs of labour for the 'white areas' where more than four-fifths of economic activity is located. Educational provision and employment policy have been equally discriminatory. Blacks do not have equal access to jobs; despite the recent abolition of job reservation laws, inadequate opportunities for education and training and informal bars against black employment maintain white dominance in all white-collar occupations. Further, blacks are paid much less than whites for the same jobs. Average black earnings, as a result of both job and pay discrimination, are less than a quarter of white earnings. Whites - about 15 per cent of the population - are estimated to have received nearly 60 per cent of total personal disposable income in 1984, blacks less than 30 per cent. Some estimates put black unemployment at more than 3 million in a labour force of 7 to 8 million.
In a virtual extension of the 'homelands' policy, South Africa has succeeded in converting the economies of neighbouring countries like Lesotho and Botswana into preserves of labour for its mines and farms. Notwithstanding high unemployment among South Africa's own blacks, it employs some 350,000 workers from neighbouring states as legal migrants with perhaps up to a million others as illegal migrants. This pool of foreign labour helps the South African economy by depressing the general wage level, and the Government to maintain control over the labour force.
The Government points to these workers as demonstrating that conditions in South Africa are not as bad as portrayed. But the fact is that attempts by neighbouring states to improve their economies and reduce dependency on South Africa have been. continuously thwarted by South African economic pressure and military sabotage; South Africa sees in their dependency a measure of political insurance for itself.
In marked contrast to earlier occasions, recent unrest in South Africa has not been confined to the urban areas. It has reached into the white countryside and engulfed the black 'homelands'. Even in an area previously as calm as Bophuthatswana, the measure of consent with which the local administration once governed has now been withdrawn, violence has flared and paratroopers have been used in attempts to restore order. We can understand the blacks' perception of the 'homelands' as very much part of the apartheid system and the claim that the 'homeland' leaders are increasingly both beneficiaries and upholders of that system.
We visited Moutse, an area some 14o kilometres to the north-east of Johannesburg now being compulsorily annexed from 'white' South Africa to be made part of the impoverished 'homeland' of KwaNdebele. Not only is this manifestly against the will of Moutse's 120,000 inhabitants, many of whom saw in us a chance to avoid this fate, but they told us that they bear no cultural affinity whatever with the Ndebele. They regarded their area as being offered to the rulers of KwaNdebele - whose 'vigilantes', they claimed, regularly terrorize Moutse's helpless inhabitants - as a reward for their taking 'independence'.
For apartheid to end, the 'homelands' policy must be abandoned. Yet even while we were there, the Government reaffirmed that 'independence' will be granted to KwaNdebele before the year's end.
One area where change was most manifest, is that of public amenities. When we first arrived the hotels we used were simply designated 'international' as an exception to apartheid's segregation of facilities. Latterly all hotels have been exempted and are now allowed to admit people of all races as residents or as casual patrons of their restaurants and bars. Cinemas are increasingly being desegregated, and the white beach at Port Elizabeth, on whose sands our Co-Chairmen walked amidst controversy, is now open to all. True, segregation signs are still to be seen in many areas - even on toilets in service stations. In some centres, too, economic forces have not yet dictated the desegregation of public transport. But, by and large. public parks, libraries and a host of other facilities are now open to all. However, in numerous establishments the reservation of the right of admission - a euphemism for racial discrimination remains.
There have been other changes. There is increasing desegregation in the work place. Some reforms, however, are halfhearted. The Mixed Marriages Act has been repealed, and life for a few hundred a year has noticeably brightened, but this still involves a racial reclassification in terms of the Group Areas Act. For example, a white who marries a coloured must move to a coloured township.
And so the question remains: does all this make any real difference to the impact of apartheid on the lives of blacks? In a country where the blacks are so poor, where white incomes per capita are ten times those of black and where the responsibilities of the extended family system place a heavy burden on any black in work, those blacks rich enough to dine at Johannesburg's CarIton Hotel or Durban's Maharani are very few in number. And even they, when the meal is over' must return to their designated township. To the casual visitor, apartheid may appear to be on the way out. In its essential elements, it remains very much intact.
In our travels we were also struck by the elegant buildings and manicured grounds of schools in white areas. These contrasted starkly with the shabby buildings, unkempt grounds and high perimeter fences of schools in black townships. Often there were new steel posts along these fence lines. bent askew by black students convinced that the authorities planned to use them to electrify the fences. We found no evidence that this was the case, but their belief illustrates the degree to which communication has collapsed between the authorities and black students. Simply for us to see the disparities between the two types of facilities was more graphic than any statistics. These show that despite recent increases on black education, the Government spends seven times as much on a white child as on a black, and that many black students drop out of school because their parents cannot afford the seemingly modest fees.
In the evolution of apartheid it was important that blacks should not be over-educated. In 'white' South Africa they were to have a role subservient to whites. Thus education was deliberately withheld to ensure that blacks would not be educated to a level where they would aspire to positions in white society from which they were excluded. As part of this policy mission schools, which had hitherto provided education of a high standard for some blacks, were forced to close. 'Bantu' education was entrusted to the Native Affairs Department rather than the Department of Education, and predominantly white universities that had previously admitted blacks were now prohibited from doing so. Instead, a series of separate inferior universities and 'tribal' colleagues were established.
In the Government's scheme for ending apartheid, Ministers assured us that separate education was to remain. It is an 'own affair', a 'non-negotiable'.
There has, none the less, been a qualitative change in black education which itself fuels the present unrest. As the South African economy has diversified from agriculture and minerals extraction, so the need has grown for a more skilled and mobile black workforce. The Government's response in upgrading levels of black education in recent years - though still far from adequately - has given rise to a generation of students less ready to accept the imposition of apartheid with apathy.
Yet, if apartheid is very much a system designed to serve the whites, it is also an extremely wasteful one. The sheer bureaucracy required to sustain its machinery is vast; the commitment of resources to security for the maintenance of apartheid is massive; a leading economist informed us that Civil Service salaries account for two-thirds of budget expenditure.
Time and again, as we travelled, looked, listened and talked, the exploitative nature of apartheid was forcefully brought home to us. So too the fact that blacks generally are no longer prepared to tolerate either exploitation or gross disparity. There have been waves of protest in the past, invariably put down by the security forces. Today's is without precedent in its scale and intensity. In protest at housing conditions, rent offices have been ransacked and stand, roofless and windowless, in townships where arrears of rent now run into many millions of rand. In frustration at those who have aided the system by joining Government-backed 'town councils', 'collaborators' have been hounded out of office - frequently out of house and home and often 'necklaced' - as angry black residents have vented their fury and assumed responsibility for their own affairs. We saw for ourselves 'collaborators', like members of a leper colony exorcised from the township, living in army tents and under armed guard, at the small rural town of Hanover; elsewhere, others were enclosed behind high wire-meshed fences.
Students have often been on strike over educational issues; schools have been burnt down and destroyed and teachers paid to do nothing. Calls for work stay-aways, consumer boycotts and general strikes achieve a level of response and a solidarity that could not have been dreamt of even five years ago. The dependence of white-owned shops on black purchasing power has been brought home to the white community as never before.
The Government has now been driven to the point where it is unable to police its own laws in some black and coloured townships, where its policies inevitably lead to systematic repression by the security forces. This is paralleled by violent, vigilante action by favoured blacks against people rebelling against apartheid and forcing the pace for a democratic South Africa. There is a widespread belief among black groups and some white elements, like Black Sash, that such action receives active support from the Government.
We deal later in our Report with the all-pervading atmosphere of repression, and of townships encircled by armoured personnel carriers, whose occupants did not hesitate to menace even us with their weapons.
Yet after constant and recurring cycles of repression, black resistance has not only been maintained it has been strengthened and made more resolute. Catalysed in particular by opposition to the Tricameral Parliament, it has resolved into a new and telling strategy for change: to make South Africa ungovernable and apartheid unworkable.
The Government's Programme
In recent years changes have been taking place within South Africa. For whites who have grown up in a rigorous apartheid society, these changes appear to be both major and meaningful. It is necessary to examine these, and other changes foreshadowed by the Government, to assess the direction in which the Government is taking the country. We seek not to enumerate all the details of the Government's programme but rather to describe its underlying philosophy.
As we saw for ourselves, visible changes have indeed taken place. In addition to those already noted, increasing numbers of blacks are being permitted to purchase freehold (if only in black townships). 'Free-trade areas' open to all races have been established in some cities. Black trade unions have been recognized. A uniform identity document is being provided for all population groups, and if blacks will still be fingerprinted on reaching age 16, so too in future will all other sections of the community. In these and other respects, various discriminatory laws have been repealed or are being phased out. However, it needs to be borne in mind that in South Africa there is a multiplicity of laws affecting race.
For the blacks, the great majority of the people of South Africa, the most significant reform since apartheid was introduced has been the move to abolish the 'pass', the hated 'dompas'. For generations the 'pass' (which historically dates from i 8og) has been an ever-present manifestation to the black of his bondage. Without it, he could not work or be in an urban area; failure to produce it upon demand resulted in immediate arrest. It was very much his 'book of life'.
Now the hated 'pass' is to go; those imprisoned for 'pass'-law offences have been released. Yet it is illuminating to note that the abolition of a document symbolic of more human misery than any other aspect of apartheid's administration has evoked no sense of freedom among blacks. More than anything else, this mute black reaction demonstrated to us the current acute lack of trust. The abolition of the 'pass' - the cause for which sixty-nine people died at Sharpeville in 196o, for which Chief Albert Luthuli was banished, and for which in part the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) were banned - has evoked at best scepticism, at worst indifference.
That blacks have cause for scepticism is manifest from this being the second occasion upon which the 'pass' has been rescinded. As long ago as 1952 the Bantu (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act purported to abolish the 'pass' but substituted the 'registration book'. Blacks understandably now wait to see whether in practice the 'common identity document' will bring change or will simply be another exercise in 'change without change'. We note that the identification numbers assigned to people under the Population Registration Act, which code them according to race, are carried forward into the new arrangements.
Our discussions suggest that the pending abolition of 'influx control' will lift a burden from many blacks at present illegally in urban areas and free them to find employment and add their names to (already over-lengthy) housing waiting lists. It could also introduce a new element of mobility. Blacks who are not treated as 'foreigners' (whether by reason of their being from outside the country or as a consequence of the 'independence' of their particular 'homeland') should be free to move to seek employment or to be joined by their families.
However, because the townships are heavily overcrowded and the Government is intent on maintaining racial segregation, the promised new mobility is likely to be heavily circumscribed. Indications of this are already apparent in the Government's White Paper on 'orderly urbanization'. Wide ministerial powers are now being given to deal with squatters and hefty penalties imposed on the owners and occupiers of land where squatters establish themselves. In the total picture, acute housing shortages in all urban areas, stringent enforcement of town planning and health requirements (already foreshadowed) and perpetuation of the Group Areas Act (which confines urban blacks to minute and crowded areas of land) are likely to endure for some considerable time to come. All this will ensure that not only will the white-feared 'black invasion' from rural areas not take place but also that men separated from their families will not be joined by them. The hailed new 'freedom of movement' may in large part be illusory. However, because the new 'common identify document' does not, in the precise terms of the Bill, have to be carried at all times and produced upon demand, the new arrangement, properly administered, does afford some chance that relationships between police and the black community may ease, at least in this area of law enforcement.
Yet the question central to any discussion of the Government's programme of reform is whether or not apartheid is to end. The removal of one of apartheid's manifestations the 'pass' - is not in itself conclusive if the fundamental controls over the lives of blacks are to remain.
The Government has used various descriptions in respect of apartheid - that
it is 'outmoded', 'ended' or even 'dead'. As blacks repeatedly pointed out to
us, the South African Government practises a form of 'government by semantics'.
What, then, does the Government mean when it refers to apartheid in this way?
The Government provided us with a definition in the following words:
If by apartheid is meant:
the South African Government rejects that concept and is committed to the dismantling of that system.
The South African Government is committed to reform aimed at the realization of a democratic political system for all the communities of the country. It is the Government's viewpoint that only democratic institutions can meet the demands of justice and fairness.
The South African Government is committed to the removal of discrimination, not only from the statute books but also from South African society as a whole.
The definition only partially eases our task in answering the question, for it is deceptively misleading, particularly in its references to 'decision-making', 'inequality' and 'discrimination'. It must be read with numerous other pronouncements of government policy, including those of the State President and Ministers. These include assertions of a 'right of self-determination for minorities', which the Government in discussions with us clearly sees as embracing separate residential, educational and health facilities. The constant theme is one of 'group rights' at the expense of individual rights and freedoms. In the State President's words, the Government is 'prepared to share its decision-making power with other communities'; he foresees 'participation by all communities', the sharing of power between these communities'. In its unambiguous insistence on a political structure based on communities, the Government is in reality seeking to preserve and entrench a society based on racial groups. While in any ordinary circumstances a requirement that 'there is no domination of one population group over another' might seem reasonable, in the circumstances of South Africa these words have quite a different meaning. Indeed, the State President has specifically ruled out 'the principle of one man one vote in a unitary system'. But more than this: it is the clear intention of the Government that, in whatever constitutional structures that ultimately emerge, each 'group' will hold some form of veto over government decisions affecting it. This would enable whites to prevent the economic and social restructuring of South Africa that is essential if the legacy of four decades of apartheid - and three hundred years of discrimination - is to be remedied.
The concept of white domination - of power-sharing without losing white control - is enshrined in the present Tricameral Constitution under which whites. coloureds and Indians are given their own parliamentary chambers, with some power over their 'own affairs'. Not so blacks, responsibility for whose 'own affairs' is vested in the State President.
The way in which the new Constitution is framed is also instructive, as the Government claims that this introduced 'power-sharing' among the groups concerned. Yet, stripped to its barest essentials, no legislation of any consequence can be enacted without at least white acquiescence. Neither of the other groups holds this power of veto.
The white veto is achieved by having the composition of various joint committees reflect the sizes of the respective racial groups. As, in terms of absolute numbers, whites outnumber Indians and coloureds combined, so too can they outvote them all on such bodies as the electoral college (which elects the State President) and the President's Council (which by a simple majority breaks any deadlock occurring as a result of legislation not being passed in all three 'houses'). These arrangements do not apply to blacks. Were they to do so, the whites would lose the numerical superiority they now insist upon for themselves.
The Constitution, when proposed in 1983, was to go to a referendum. It was endorsed comfortably by whites: liberal whites and those of the far right united in opposition. But such was the hostility to it among all other sections of the community - and not just blacks - that the Government abandoned planned referenda of Indian and coloured voters. Instead it simply imposed the Constitution on the country at large through the existing Parliament. And, from its viewpoint, wisely so. For in the subsequent election to the coloured and Indian 'houses', up to 80 per cent or more of the eligible voters abstained. Those who stood for election now found themselves rejected by many of their own people and, to a large measure, captives of a system many of them had campaigned against over the years with considerable fortitude. The boycott by coloured and Indian voters was so dramatic that it can be seen only as a resounding rejection of the Government's programme by those intended to be its prime beneficiaries.
The Government has sought consistently to dictate both the content and the pace of change. Its approach seeks not to unify the country but to divide and entrench each of its several communities, locking each group into its own economy (although with an element of 'free trade') and limiting economic advancement in the main to the resources available within, and generated by, the group in question. It is an approach which seeks to preserve the whites in their position of political and economic privilege and domination.
To date, the Government's approach to power-sharing has been cast within the parameters of apartheid and with the backstop of a white veto. Out task was to encourage the Government to adopt a genuine approach to power-sharing: an approach which accepted the ending of apartheid and sought a negotiated settlement under which a non-racial and truly representative government would be established, and the legitimate rights of minorities protected. While future constitutional arrangements are not a matter for us, we wholly accept that these should provide adequate and appropriate safeguards and guarantees for minorities. But, of course, anything in the nature of a general and permanent 'group veto' would be totally unacceptable to the black people.
Nor has the Government limited its 'group' approach to government at the national level. Even while we were in the country it was pressing forward with a wholesale reconstruction of Provincial Government built around assigning 'own affairs' matters to the respective parliamentary 'houses' and establishing government-appointed boards to manage common utilities. It was in this context, too, that black 'town councils' were established in the past, with responsibility for housing and the duty to find finance from within their impoverished communities to fund it. The consequential rises in rent have been one of the causes of the present unrest.
The 'group' approach is also enshrined in the Government's proposed 'National Council'. The State President, in January, declared his intention to 'negotiate' the establishment of such a body on an interim basis. The style in which these 'negotiations' have been conducted is instructive, for there has been no discernible attempt whatever to discuss the matter with the principal representatives of black opinion. Nor, indeed, would we have expected any of them to allow themselves to be co-opted into the Tricameral Constitution in this or any other way.
Instead a Bill has now been published to provide a vehicle for discussing a new constitution and to give blacks a say in the process of government 'affecting their interests'. Ostensibly the Bill is the product of negotiation. In reality it simply presses ahead with the Government's own plans for the country's future, without the benefit of any significant consultation and agreement. However, it was suggested to us informally that there could be other forums for negotiations.
The Council, as proposed, is to include leaders of all communities, the leaders of non-independent 'homelands' and 'at least' ten urban black leaders among them. However, as in all such councils and committees, the State President, through his power of appointment, retains control.
It is, in the circumstances, unlikely to achieve 'more national unity', as the Government hopes.
In our view the various reforms undertaken or foreshadowed to date must be viewed against the background of a determination not to give up white control. The harshness of apartheid, in many of its manifestations, has been and is being softened. But the essential pillars remain: the 'homelands' policy, the Population Registration Act, the Group Areas Act. Not only do they remain, but the 'homelands' policy is being further developed: KwaNdebele is to acquire a notional 'independence' in December, and those to regain citizenship under the Government's 1986 legislative programme do not appear to include those who were deprived of it and are now living in the 'homelands'.
The abolition of the 'homelands' policy would mark the beginning of the end of the policy of a white South Africa. From a legal point of view, this could be achieved without difficulty, the only barrier is political will.
We would see little difficulty in an immediate repeal of the Group Areas Act, which we note is presently under a study by a Government Commission In some areas it is already ineffective, such as in the Johannesburg suburb of Hillbrow and in parts of Durban, where non-whites have, through companies and through white nominees, purchased property in white areas. In other areas it has never been imposed, such as in the Cape Town suburb of Observatory, where people of all races live together. If the Act were removed, any change in racial mix would still be very gradual. Certainly, it would not provoke the 'revolutionary chaos' against which the State President has cautioned. Indeed, if all apartheid laws were to be repealed, economic factors alone would militate against dramatic change for a long time.
The Government rejects all Western constitutional models, and we do not criticize them for arguing that any constitution should not be imported from abroad but should reflect the needs and aspirations of the people within. However, the libraries of South African universities are crowded with academic writings, and constitutional models in an industrious but vain search for a solution - both workable and likely to be acceptable to the people at large - in which 'group rights' would be preserved. The 'KwaNatal' discussions presently proceeding in Durban represent the latest attempt in exploring such a solution. It is, we repeat, not for us to dictate what may or may not be acceptable to all the people of South Africa but simply to observe that, in our considered view, peace will never come to South Africa until such time as its constitutional structures have as their foundation the consent of the governed: not that of minorities, not that of groups, but that of the people as a whole.
In terms of the Nassau Accord we have asked ourselves these questions: Has the South African Government declared that the system of apartheid will be dismantled, and has it taken specific and meaningful action in fulfilment of that intent?
Recognizing that, to a specially high degree in South Africa, actions speak louder than words, we are sceptical of the intention of the Government to dismantle completely the system of apartheid in the sense that that system is known and understood the world over. Their actions up to this point do not justify any claim that apartheid is being dismantled. The argument that the considerable change which we have seen is directed to that end founders, irretrievably, on the rocks of 'group rights' and white control.
Attitudes Among the White Community
We recognize the huge difficulties of adjustment facing the white community. As the editor of one leading English daily put it recently: 'It will not be easy for many whites to settle down to what is their inevitable destiny in a multiracial country where the population is three-quarters black'.
There was thus, we sensed, a widely felt need for distractions within the white community. The passion for sport, especially rugby, provided such an opportunity. On the arrival of a 'rebel' New Zealand rugby team, a Rugby Board official was reported as exulting that rugby had 'changed the face of South Africa' by driving Nelson Mandela from the front page on to page six. As 'white' South Africa basked in the illusion of an imagined international respectability, the death toll continued to mount unabated in the townships and in the 'homelands'. The response of whites to the presence of overseas sportsmen - whether representative or not - brought home to us the impact and importance of the international sports boycott of which the Gleneagles Agreement is a vital part. The lengths to which the South African authorities are prepared to go in elevating the importance of visiting teams, and the huge financial inducements they offer, reveal their craving for supposed international recognition. That alone demonstrates the continuing need for this form of pressure, including the strict observance of the Gleneagles Agreement.
Of course, big business has for some years favoured reform. Needing a more skilled and mobile labour force to service South African industry as the economy has moved away from a simple dependence on mining and agriculture, business has called for increased spending on education, better housing and the abolition of influx control.
Through the Urban Foundation a number of businesses have contributed to black home-ownership schemes and have moved to provide amenities in the townships which would otherwise be lacking. The recent visit of several prominent businessmen to Lusaka to meet the ANC is testimony of their clear appreciation of the need for a negotiated settlement.
Some white opinion has opposed apartheid from the very beginning, most notably the woman's organization Black Sash. Added to this are the very many organizations and individuals who have been active - indeed, courageous ~ in combating apartheid in its many manifestations.
Newer sections of the white community have come to embrace the need for change, including, during the course of our visit, a leading group of white students from the academic heartland of Afrikanerdom, the University of Stellenbosch. Their call for negotiations with the ANC and the release of Nelson Mandela was indeed an encouraging sign.
Clearly, a number of Afrikaners, including some who trace their roots back over three hundred years to the original Dutch Colony, feel their whole future threatened and see no country which might match up to their 'fatherland'. Some of them are turning to the misguided notion that their power to subdue blacks by using the full power of the security forces renders them sufficiently strong to resist fundamental change. They close their eyes to the simple fact, acknowledged by Government and business alike, that both whites and blacks separately have it within their power to destroy the country.
Thus in recent months the country has witnessed the emergence of a growing and increasingly assertive extreme right wing as Afrikanerdom begins to fragment under the cumulative weight of the pressures we have described. This phenomenon is not altogether surprising. For two generations, whites in South Africa have lived as beneficiaries of apartheid in a system engineered by a political party which constantly asserted white supremacy. When they witness an apparent change in Government theology, with the rhetoric of total white control giving way to talk of power-sharing, a backlash of some description is inevitable. But just as the far right is a creation of the National Party, so too must it accept responsibility for dealing with it. The need for courageous leadership has never been greater. Certainly, whatever the threat from the extreme right, the Government can still rely on carrying the majority of the white community if it takes bold decisions to bring peace and prosperity to the country as a whole.
Indeed there is a growing number of whites, a number of whom we met, who are 'ahead' of the Government and see the peaceful eradication of apartheid as the only hope. Our impression in this regard is also borne out by a number of recent opinion polls. Dr Alex Boraine, in his speech of resignation in Parliament just before our first visit to South Africa, called on those he knew to be in the ruling National Party and discontented with the Government's progress towards reform to stand up and be counted.
Nevertheless, it remains the case that many whites genuinely entertain fears about their future in any new dispensation. We found a keen awareness of this among responsible black leaders, together with an acknowledgement of the need to allay them.
It is a tragedy that the Government, as a matter of policy, is seeking to deepen these fears. A picture has deliberately been built up of the ANC as an organization dominated by communists and wedded to creating a Marxist State in South Africa. Early in June the Government, in a mass publicity booklet entitled Talking with the ANC, insinuated that Nelson Mandela himself is a communist and that twenty-three out of thirty members of the ANC's National Executive are either members or active supporters of the South African Communist Party.
More detached analysts dispute these figures (which we note are even higher than those given to us by the Government just three weeks ago) and question the picture that is frequently presented by Pretoria of the ANC as a component of international communism, dedicated to the pursuit of revolutionary power. Tom Lodge, for example, one of South Africa's foremost experts on the internal politics of the ANC, regards the Government's figures, and its view of the extent of communist influence in the ANC, as very considerable exaggerations. In his assessment, the ANC is essentially 'a movement of pragmatists, not ideologues'. Its commitment to changing South Africa's present apartheid-based social, economic and political arrangements 'stems not from the logic of an externally derived Marxist revolutionary conspiracy, as is so often asserted by the apologists for the present order. It comes rather from a popular political tradition of which the ANC is a central component. The AN C's radicalism is a reflection of the times and the society that have produced it. It is an indigenous force and an inescapable part of the political reality of this country.'
Everything we have learned is consistent with this assessment.