Black Rage, White Fist

Day after day, the number of detainees grew–first 500, then 800, finally 1,000. Police jeeps and trucks rumbled through the dusty, despair-ridden black townships that surround South Africa’s towns and cities, stopping at this house and that. A man was pulled out here, a woman there. The security forces arrested political activists, church workers, students, labor organizers, youthful militants–anyone, it seemed, who might conceivably lead a protest against the white minority government of State President P.W. Botha. At times the detentions seemed carefully planned, at others indiscriminate: near Johannesburg, 22 bus passengers were taken into custody as they returned from a funeral. Virtually all those arrested in police actions were black.

Thus last week the most densely populated areas of stricken and divided South Africa fell under an iron-like state of emergency. The crackdown by the Botha government came after ten months of black protest against apartheid, the country’s rigidly enforced structure of racial separation, and followed earlier, ineffective repressions by the government. Almost 500 people, practically all of them black, died during that extended and bloody period of confrontation, some at the hands of fellow blacks, the majority as the result of police action to put down the unrest. Botha’s proclamation of the emergency was intended to end the violence and bring about what General Johan Coetzee, the national police commissioner, described as a “cooling down of the situation as soon as possible.” Under the emergency regulations, police were allowed to enter homes, seize property, detain without charge and order people from one location to another. Journalists were barred from areas where sweeps by security forces were under way.

Yet the violence did not end. In the first week of the emergency, police and army units repeatedly clashed with black protesters, who sometimes fought with rocks against tear gas, sjamboks (short leather whips) and gunfire. Early in the week four blacks died after security forces opened fire with shotguns on 400 demonstrators in the township of Daveyton, near Johannesburg. By week’s end 16 had been killed since the declaration of the emergency. The toll was surprisingly low, given the number of people involved in the areas covered by the decree. But the potential for more violence was great.

Once again South Africa was gripped by painful and potentially dangerous spasms of repression-unrest-repression, a cycle that has periodically haunted the country since the early ’60s. With each peak of confrontation the state of affairs has worsened, while the essential issues have remained as unresolved as ever. Not since 1960, when 69 black protesters were killed by police at Sharpeville, had the government been forced to impose a state of emergency, a fact that caused concern not only in Pretoria, South Africa’s capital, but in nations around the world.

The Reagan Administration took an unusually strong position, criticizing the emergency and denouncing apartheid as “repugnant” and “largely responsible” for the current problems, but indicated that it would not abandon its policy of “constructive engagement,” an attempt to change South African attitudes and policies through quiet diplomacy. France withdrew its ambassador from Pretoria, as the U.S. had done six weeks earlier, and imposed a ban on future French investments in South Africa as a means of pressuring the country to institute meaningful reform. Like the U.S., Britain condemned apartheid, but refrained from supporting sanctions. At the United Nations, the Security Council adopted a French-Danish resolution in favor of voluntary economic penalties against South Africa, with the U.S. and Britain abstaining.

In South Africa, criticism was no less severe. Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, an Afrikaner and the leader of the Progressive Federal Party, the white opposition in Parliament, declared that “the government seems to have neither the ability, the plans, nor the talent to bring about effective negotiation policies [with black South Africans]. Every opportunity of consequence has been neglected or rejected. I ask this government, What in heaven’s name are you doing?” Slabbert demanded that Parliament be called into session to debate the emergency. Botha refused, saying that the time had come for action, “not further debate.”

Echoing Slabbert’s call, the Rev. Christiaan Beyers Naudé, a clergyman who is also an Afrikaner and who has stood in the forefront of the civil rights struggle for two decades, declared, “No state of emergency is going to bring about peace unless, first of all, the doors are opened for the political prisoners [and] people are given the opportunity to express to all concerned what kind of country they want and what kind of life they want to live.” To the Rev. Allan Boesak, a “colored,” or mixed-race, clergyman who has recently emerged as a provocative advocate of change, the prospect was for “more repression, more deaths and more disappearances of more leaders.” The only solution, he said, was to negotiate political reform with blacks. “The days when force could be used to suppress opponents of apartheid have gone.”

From Botha’s point of view, the declaration of the emergency could hardly have received a more dramatic boost if it had been conceived by the South African Broadcasting Corp. The frightful scene that became the prelude to the imposition of the decree was portrayed in full color on the 6 o’clock news on July 20. A screaming black crowd, apparently acting on the accusation of one pointed finger and one shout of “Informer!,” turned on a young black woman at a funeral in the township of Duduza, outside Johannesburg. The woman was stoned, beaten, stripped and burned to death, all on nationwide television. At 8 p.m., saying that “this state of affairs can no longer be tolerated,” Botha announced that emergency regulations would go into effect in 36 magisterial districts in the violence-ridden eastern Cape and in areas around Johannesburg (pop. 1.5 million), the country’s largest city.

Three days later, as the unrest, powered by what Naudé calls “the anger of the voteless,” flickered on despite the emergency, another prominent churchman spoke at a mass funeral service in the township of KwaThema, 35 miles east of Johannesburg, to deliver a message to both black and white South Africans. He was Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu of Johannesburg, the black South African who last year was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his long struggle against apartheid. Only two weeks before, the dynamic, gray-haired bishop had saved the life of a black suspected of being a police informer after an angry mob had seized the man, set his car ablaze and tried to throw him into the flames.

Now, as Tutu stood atop a table in KwaThema’s dusty sports stadium, surrounded by a crowd of 30,000, he spoke of the death of 15 local people in recent police actions. He denounced the government for its brutality, for its determination to keep the country’s black majority in check, and for its decision to give the security forces free rein to stamp out dissent.

But then, fairly shouting so that his words could be heard throughout the stadium, his hands stabbing the air, he turned to the televised death of the young woman in Duduza. Said Tutu: “If you do this kind of thing again, I will find it difficult to speak for the cause of liberation. If the violence continues, I will pack my bags, collect my family and leave this beautiful country that I love so passionately and so deeply … I say to you that I condemn in the strongest possible terms what happened in Duduza. Our cause is just and noble. That is why it will prevail and bring victory to us. You cannot use methods to attain the goal of liberation that our enemy will use against us.”

With most of the crowd supporting him, but a few booing him for his moderation, the bishop continued, “Pictures of that woman being burned were shown around the world. There are many people around the world that support us. When they saw that woman burning on television, they must have said that maybe we are not ready for freedom. Let us not spoil things by such methods.” The meeting ended with Tutu leading the crowd in chanting, “We dedicate ourselves to the freedom struggle/ for all of us black and white./ We shall be free.”

The bishop’s warning that the images of bloodshed would be used against the black protesters was soon borne out. In the face of the international furor over the government’s harsh crackdown, Foreign Minister Roelof (“Pik”) Botha (no kin to President Botha), sounding a theme that would be invoked repeatedly by the government, declared that South Africa would not allow its future to be decided by “perpetrators of violence who burn people alive.”

At the same time, President Botha made it clear how strongly he disagreed with criticism from overseas. Sputtering that he was “speechless” at the steps taken by France, Botha said, “It amazes me that a Western government that takes an interest in Africa and in the interests of black people can take exception to a government that restores order when Communist powers and Communist-inspired powers murder black people and try to disrupt the normal life of black communities.”

Behind Botha’s obdurate stand is the tacit admission that his tentative reforms over the past two years have been less than successful. His white constituents, the majority of them Afrikaners, whose African roots go back to the landing of Dutch settlers in Cape Town in 1652, are more split than ever. A verligte (enlightened) faction, which forms a significant part of Botha’s ruling National Party, is aware that some form of political accommodation with blacks must come eventually. A verkrampte (literally “cramped,” or hard-line) breakaway group is determined to keep things as they are, if by sjambok and shotgun. At the same time, the black majority is torn between appeals by nationalists, who believe that nothing less than force will ever wrest power from the whites, and by moderates, who preach reform and peaceful evolution toward power sharing by all races.

From the time he assumed the national leadership, becoming Prime Minister in 1978 and State President under a new constitution in 1984, Botha was regarded by South African standards as something of a reformer. He had inherited the apartheid system as defined by the late Hendrik Verwoerd, an elaborate concept that provided not only for racial segregation but for the creation of a group of separate tribal “homelands,” in which all of the country’s blacks would eventually have theoretical citizenship, even though most would continue to live where they always had, in the black townships of white-ruled South Africa. By this curious bit of legerdemain, the Afrikaners hoped to keep in check the potential political power of blacks, who now number 23.9 million, compared with the whites’ 4.9 million, the 2.9 million coloreds, and the nearly 1 million people of Indian descent.

Evidently recognizing some of the inadequacies of apartheid, Botha set out to change parts of the system. Perhaps his most notable accomplishment was the creation of separate, if largely powerless, houses of Parliament for the coloreds and for the Indians. Earlier this year, as part of its effort to remove some of the rough edges of apartheid, the government decided that mixed marriages and sexual relations between whites and nonwhites would no longer be forbidden. But these reforms, important as they may be in the context of South Africa, meant little to blacks and did not affect what apartheid is really all about: the preservation of white political power. Botha conceded that ways would have to be found to allow blacks to live legally and permanently in the townships they have long inhabited. But he also reaffirmed his commitment to the homelands concept. Nor did he ever speak of full citizenship for blacks or accept the idea of a house in Parliament for blacks. Most important, Botha made it clear that the principle of one man, one vote was not negotiable under any circumstances.

Botha’s concessions, which the Reagan Administration supports and considers to be a partial vindication of its policy of constructive engagement, were too much for Afrikaner hard-liners but not nearly enough for black political leaders of any persuasion. Unhappily for the government, the reforms coincided with a deepening economic crisis, the worst, in some Johannesburg analysts’ view, since 1929. The price of gold, which provides more than 50% of South African export earnings, has held stagnant since 1983, and inflation (now 16%) and unemployment (estimated at 8.4% among the work force) were on the rise. The recession hit blacks hardest, and under the twin pressures of economic squeeze and political dissatisfaction, violence flared in the black townships. Much of it was directed at blacks who work in the 47,000-man police force (they constitute more than 50%) or in other government agencies and are often thought to be “collaborators.”

Bishop Tutu may speak out against violence and call for a Christian resolution of the nation’s problems. Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, the powerful Zulu leader who has fought apartheid by refusing independence for Kwa-Zulu, his tribal homeland, may talk about some kind of power sharing with whites. But the unemployed young blacks of the townships are more inclined to listen to the voice of the long-banned African National Congress, whose leader, Nelson Mandela, has been imprisoned by the government since 1962. From exile, the acting heads of the 73-year-old nationalist movement have vowed to win independence by intensifying military action and by extending a sporadic sabotage campaign, so far directed more at property than people, to include “soft civilian targets.” Even as Bishop Tutu delivered his cry of the heart at KwaThema last week, some youths, waving the black, green and gold colors of the A.N.C., chanted, “Give us weapons. We want to strike back at the state.”

As always in South Africa, the contrasts are so great that generalizations are difficult. Over the past generation, the thinking of many whites has changed, and along with it their society. Today there is a small but noticeable measure of racial integration in sports, churches, shops and offices, as well as bars, restaurants, hotels and theaters. Rapid industrialization during the past two decades has brought blacks four or five times the pay they received a few years ago, though they still average only about 19% of what whites earn. That is not true, however, of black employees of dozens of major companies like IBM, who receive the same pay as their white counterparts.

Today blacks constitute perhaps 60% of the country’s total work force. There are black doctors, lawyers, bankers, supermarket managers, advertising executives, personnel managers. There are even a few black tycoons who have made fortunes in retailing and trading.

In Cape Town, seat of the legislature, colored and Indian M.P.s shout their disapproval of apartheid within the new tricameral Parliament. In Johannesburg, black and white traffic cops wear the same black serge, receive the same salary and hand out the same tickets. Until ten years ago, television was not permitted by a government that regarded it as immoral and dangerously subversive. Today whites watch The A Team and The Bill Cosby Show and buy Mr. T dolls for their children.

Nonetheless, one aspect of their lives has changed hardly at all. South African whites rarely if ever visit black townships and have only the vaguest idea of what life in them is like. Says a Johannesburg travel agent: “Foreign visitors who take the scheduled bus tour to Soweto,” the sprawling black township southwest of Johannesburg, “know more about the place than do most of the city’s whites.” Those tours were temporarily canceled a fortnight ago after a bus carrying American, German and British tourists was stoned by youths.

Every white South African city and town, even the smallest dorp (village), has its Soweto, its KwaThema, its satellite township where the blacks live. It is where the paved road ends and the dirt begins. Asphalt highways cut through Soweto, but the side streets disappear quickly into dust or mud. In the shantytowns, children and old women gather at water points to fill plastic bottles and cans, which they balance atop their heads with hip-swaying confidence as they walk home along potholed paths. The smaller the township, the fewer the amenities. Some communities have only a few electric lights, and none in individual homes. Some have only one outside privy for a row of houses. Night soil is collected by a clanking tractor and trailer. The smoke of coal fires hangs in the air, softening the ugly outlines of the settlements behind a gray-brown veil.

Soweto is atypical, both for its size (pop. 1.2 million) and its relative sophistication. It has a well-established middle class and an unmistakable power elite. But there, as elsewhere, political ferment is accentuated by slum living, lack of amenities, overcrowding, crime and the breakdown of family life. The despair of township life, the prospect of no breakout from such confinement, is felt most keenly by the young. They hold the police in contempt; in Soweto they jokingly refer to patrolling police vehicles as “Zola Budd” and “Mary Decker,” who competed at the Los Angeles Olympics, depending on which vehicle arrives first at the scene of a disturbance. Says Photographer Peter Magubane, who was raised in Soweto and has covered its life since the early 1960s: “Things are getting tougher, more clinical. If there is a protest march or a funeral procession, you will find buckets of water placed at every house along the way. That’s in case there is tear gas, so the marchers can wash it from their eyes and their faces. That was not true at the time of the Soweto riots in 1976. The children have become more politicized. They have left the adults behind. The system is helping people to become united.”

Residents who once looked to policemen for protection, Magubane explains, have changed their minds “after they have had their door kicked down in the dead of night, their houses invaded, their parents hauled out of bed and their relatives beaten. Right now the people here would rather deal with white policemen than black. In the ’80s,” he adds, “the anger is against blacks who work within the system.”

Segregation underscores the differences in the way South African blacks and whites live. A middle-class black, even though he may earn a decent wage (perhaps $4,200), is forced to reside in a ghetto. A middle-class white, earning around $9,000, can live in a three-bedroom house in a pleasant suburb with a live-in maid and a small swimming pool.

Yet the lives of tens of thousands of blacks and whites remain intertwined. Every weekday a black woman in her early 60s, whose first name is Aletta, goes from her home in Soweto to the Parkwood suburb of Johannesburg, where she works half a day for a white family. She is one of thousands of black women who work in white homes and provide the main income for their families. She has been a domestic servant in white households for most of her life. Her husband is dead, and she lives in a four-room house with her three daughters, two of whom have two children each. She earns $60 a month, and she gives her earnings to her eldest daughter, who pays the rent and keeps the rest for housekeeping expenses. Aletta’s passbook, the identification blacks must carry at all times, has not been properly endorsed by previous employers for many years, and so she is not legally registered with her present employer. Occasionally she stays at the big house when the white family goes away, and she knows that if inspectors come around to check her identification she must hide from them. “When there is trouble in Soweto, I don’t worry too much,” she says. “Nobody bothers an old woman. But on the last Friday of the month, the tsotsis [thugs] are out to rob people who have been paid. They don’t care if you are an old woman or a young man. If they think you have money, they will kill you to get it.”

That is something Aletta shares with her countrymen of every race: a fear of violence, a drive for survival. The Afrikaner right wing is particularly concerned, watching with a sense of both worry and self-justification every development in black Africa, and especially in neighboring Zimbabwe, where the remaining whites are concerned about unrest between black tribal groups, erosion of their own political position, and the plans of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe to turn the country into a one-party state. The creation of South African parliamentary chambers for colored and Indian representation, not to mention the repeal of the racial sex laws, may not amount to much in terms of political power for nonwhites, but the Botha reforms have helped convince the right wing that the President is not sufficiently aware of die svart gevaar (the black peril). Some political observers believe that in the next general election, to be held within five years, the Afrikaner right wing could supplant the relatively liberal Progressive Federal Party as the largest opposition group in the white Parliament.

Like their English-speaking compatriots, the Afrikaners share an unresolved dilemma: how to prepare their country for the future. The Afrikaners in particular are frozen in a time frame by their dour Calvinist faith and their history. Immigrants who first arrived from Europe almost 350 years ago, they are most conscious of the fact that, unlike the former colonialists of the Gold Coast or Mozambique, they have no place to go back to. Out of hand they reject all talk of one man, one vote, maintaining that it would be “one man, one vote, one time,” and then black tyranny forever after.

They fear the authoritarianism prevalent in much of black Africa. They fear the thought of undereducated blacks in control, though they themselves are answerable for the low level of black education in South Africa. They are afraid of being wiped out. But by their very size (4.9 million) and power, they can control the pace of black advance in a way that vastly smaller white minorities could not do elsewhere in Africa. In discussions of power sharing, they have the strength to demand a federal or confederal system in which their rights would be assured.

Among South African moderates, too, a debate has been under way for years as to where the country is heading, whether Armageddon will ever come. Many are convinced that new approaches must be tried, as demonstrated by public-opinion surveys suggesting that large numbers of whites would consider power sharing, and fully expect to live some day in an integrated society. Says Slabbert, the 45-year-old Afrikaner liberal who heads the Progressive Federal Party: “I think Afrikaners are now more willing to explore possibilities of coexistence, and that is definitely a new development.” Alan Paton, the author of Cry, the Beloved Country and onetime leader of the now defunct Liberal Party, says, “The tide has turned. There are some people who expect that we’re going to go from low tide to high tide in two years’ time. But I have absolutely no doubt that a difficult and painful process of evolution is going on, evolution for the better.” Afrikaner Theologian Nico Smith notes that some of his friends find it strange that blacks are not more appreciative of reform. Says he: “Sadly, many Afrikaners can’t understand that blacks are now comparing their circumstances with those of the whites of South Africa, not the blacks of other parts of Africa.”

Asked what South Africa requires today, Cape Businessman Jannie Momberg replies, “It may sound crazy, but what we need for the next ten years is enlightened dictatorship. Not for the black population, but for the whites. I think we’re going to have to force through certain things against the whites for the sake of the country.” If he were the President, says Momberg, “I’d bring Chief Buthelezi into my Cabinet. I’d scrap the bloody three-way Parliament and bring the whites, the Indians and the coloreds into one body, and then I’d look for a federal solution for the next phase, bringing in the blacks.”

Most thoughtful whites and blacks would probably agree that somehow they must find a way to live together. Says Ntatho Motlana, a black physician in Soweto: “It’s a sort of love-hate relationship. But when you get down to it, the relationship exists.” A number of African leaders, including Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, have said that they accept the white South Africans as Africans. “They cannot be pushed over Table Mountain into the sea,” Kaunda once said.

Jannie Momberg is also optimistic about black attitudes at home. “Blacks do not usually go around shouting ‘Kill the whites,’ ” he says. “I’ve seen more black-white race hatred in the streets of New York than I have in South Africa. There is an enormous reservoir of goodwill to be found here. This is what will save this country in the end.”

But how to tap that reservoir? Even if a majority of South African whites were prepared to accept Momberg’s ideas about power sharing, which they are not at present, it is by no means clear whether it would be acceptable to a majority of blacks. With the current wave of police actions and arrests, a familiar pattern is beginning to emerge. The United Democratic Front, founded in 1983 to organize broad-based multiracial opposition to the government, has revealed some sympathy for the outlawed and exiled African National Congress. One by one, U.D.F. leaders have been put under surveillance or detained, actions that are reminiscent of the treatment the A.N.C. suffered before it was declared illegal in 1960. Earlier this year, Botha offered to release the imprisoned Mandela if he would forswear the use of violence in the quest to gain black rule. Though he had been behind bars for 23 years, Mandela said no.

Ever since Mandela’s arrest in 1962 on charges of attempted sabotage and treason, his former deputy, Oliver Tambo, now 68, has run the A.N.C. from exile, currently in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. The A.N.C. has received support from the Soviet Union, as well as some Western nations, and is increasingly co operating with the also banned South African Communist Party. The alliance has made it convenient for the Pretoria government to describe the township unrest as Communist inspired. Over the years, the A.N.C. has trained guerrilla fighters at camps in various black African countries and staged a number of border attacks and acts of sabotage. Its present strength is estimated to be about 7,000 armed men, but it suffered a severe setback last year when South Africa and Mozambique signed a nonaggression pact, forcing the A.N.C. to abandon its guerrilla camps in southern Mozambique. More recently, the South African army staged a lightning raid on what it claimed was an A.N.C. installation in Botswana, killing twelve people.

Tambo’s response was that such military setbacks would merely force the A.N.C. to place greater emphasis on sabotage. In the future, he said, the guerrillas would strike not only at military and economic targets but civilian ones as well. The A.N.C. has since demonstrated that it is capable of doing that, though in most cases the victims have been black. What remains in doubt is whether the A.N.C. at present has anywhere near the power it would need to make a serious dent in the country’s finely honed security apparatus.

Since blacks are not allowed to vote, nobody knows for certain how popular the A.N.C. is among them, but it is generally assumed that the organization enjoys considerable strength with young activists in the Johannesburg and Eastern Cape townships. Four years ago, a poll by the English-language Johannesburg Star indicated that 40% of blacks in the major cities would vote for the A.N.C. and 76% considered Mandela the most popular political leader. A survey last March by City Press, a black newspaper in Johannesburg, also put Mandela on top.

The A.N.C. is anathema to the South African government, partly for its Soviet support and the socialist rhetoric of its manifesto, partly because it is a national movement that attempts to override tribal divisions, precisely the opposite of the course taken by the regime. As for the three-year-old U.D.F., officials have accused it of being a stalking-horse for the A.N.C. It is a safe guess that the authorities will be seeking evidence to support this view during the emergency and particularly during the forthcoming treason trials of more than a score of U.D.F. leaders arrested over the past year.

Only in one black area, the Zulu political base of Chief Buthelezi, does the A.N.C face solid opposition. Buthelezi, once a member of the A.N.C., is now contemptuous of its policy of fighting from exile while calling itself the sole legitimate representative of South Africa’s black population. Buthelezi points to the 1 million membership of his own political organization, Inkatha, as a contradiction of the A.N.C. claim. Even if the Zulu chief does not enjoy the nationwide popularity of Mandela and perhaps other A.N.C. leaders, he may yet emerge as a man with whom both blacks and whites could work. Last week he dismissed the government’s limited reforms and its talk of negotiation as “stage-setting activities.” There is “no reason to proclaim that real change is under way,” he said, “because preparing to change is not changing.”

The current crackdown also brought into the open a perceptible shift in attitude toward South Africa by some of its leading trading partners, including the U.S. Britain, which has at least $7 billion invested in South Africa, was critical of Botha’s latest actions but continued to oppose sanctions and divestiture. As a senior Whitehall official explained, “We have the biggest lever, but we also have the most to lose.” Nonetheless, London urged upon South Africa a prescription for reform that amounted to little less than a dismantling of apartheid: the release of Mandela and political prisoners, an end to the emergency, abolition of the pass laws, which control the movements of blacks, and the Group Areas Act, which restricts residency and movement of racial groups, and a commitment to “some kind of common citizenship for all South Africans.”

France waited to make public its reaction until the ten foreign ministers of the European Community had issued a relatively restrained antiapartheid statement. Then, obviously dissatisfied, the French government announced that it was withdrawing Ambassador Michel Boyer and suspending all new French investment in South Africa. The action will not have a strong or immediate impact on French commercial ties with South Africa, but it underscored the chill in the atmosphere.

The most significant response was Washington’s. Until recently, the Reagan Administration had justified its conciliatory policy toward Pretoria in geopolitical terms: the strategic importance of the sealanes around the Cape of Good Hope and of South Africa as a producer of precious metals and an anti-Communist bastion. Last week’s statements from Washington not only omitted all mention of such considerations, but were delivered in a tougher tone than in the past. Secretary of State George Shultz described apartheid as “an affront to everything we believe in” and viewed South Africa’s present policies as doomed. “The only question to be determined,” he said, “is how [the end] will come about.” The U.S. believes the only solution is for black-white negotiations, said the Secretary. “It cannot be done if repression continues.”

Shultz stressed, however, that the Administration was sticking to its constructive-engagement approach and its opposition to divestiture and sanctions, which it believes have rarely been effective in other situations. Said Shultz: “If you say the alternative is for the U.S. to remove itself, stop all investment, I don’t see that that is taking you where you want to go. You reduce what influence and leverage you have, and you don’t have any contact.” Just in case the message was not heard clearly enough in Pretoria, White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes told a press briefing late in the week that “we want the state of emergency removed … The real cause of violence in South Africa is apartheid.”

The U.S. policy adjustment, which has been building for some months, began with a series of South African actions of which the Administration disapproved. There was the failure of U.S.-supported efforts to secure the independence of Namibia, the territory also known as South West Africa, which South Africa has ruled since 1920, originally under a League of Nations mandate. The Administration had hoped to arrange for Namibian independence in exchange for the removal of Cuban troops from Angola, but that effort at “linkage” failed, in large part because of South Africa’s reluctance to go along with it. Later there was Pretoria’s imposition of an appointed interim government in Windhoek, the Namibian capital. Washington has also been jolted by South African raids into neighboring countries. The incursion into Botswana in June, for example, led to the Administration’s decision to call U.S. Ambassador Herman Nickel home for consultations; Nickel has yet to return to Pretoria.

A senior American diplomat last week explained South African behavior by suggesting that Pretoria has developed “tremendous unease” over the past year amid the steady rise in violence. “There is an anxiety, an uncertainty that has not existed before. They have tried jailing black leaders, but this is not a led movement. There is an unintended partnership between the A.N.C. trying to take credit for the disturbances, and the South African government trying to blame them on the A.N.C. because the government cannot admit to itself that no one person or organization is responsible.”

Even before the state of emergency was invoked, U.S. statements indicated signs of pique and discouragement over events in South Africa. A month ago, after Pretoria put in place its quasi-independent government in Namibia, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Chester Crocker, the architect of the constructive-engagement policy, remarked, “If, by some chance, South Africa intends to go on its own in a totally different direction from the one we’ve been pursuing, they will indeed be on their own.” Other U.S. officials spoke of “broken promises,” “unacceptable behavior” and “unconstructive acts.” Snapped one: “The Afrikaners are a highly destructive people. They have a warped sense of reality. They just don’t look at the long term.”

While that may be true, it should be acknowledged that the long term is not easy to divine. Most analysts agree that the South African government can contain the present violence and that an allout bloodbath is not at hand. The important question is whether the Afrikaners are prepared to recognize the rising warning signs and seek accommodation. As the numbers telling of detention and death climbed, Naudé admonished, “I am saying to the government and the white community: For God’s sake, before this country goes up in flames, please hear the voice of reason that calls for justice and peace in this land.” –By William E. Smith. Reported by Peter Hawthorne and Bruce W. Nelan/Johannesburg and William Stewart/Washington

LAND OF CONTRASTS

[This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine or PDF.]

4.9 (15%) (2.9 coloreds and 1.0 Asians)

23.9[*] (73%) [*] includes “independent” homelands

A few restrictions, but rarely enforced

Outside of homelands, passbook must be carried at all times

All whites are entitled to vote and are represented in the all-white House of Assembly

No representation in South African Parliament, only in homelands. Parliamentary houses for Indians and coloreds were elected in 1984

70 years

57.5 years

$8,260

$1,815

$780

$110

$94

$41

TIME Chart