Principle of Vital Importance

Every weekday for more than eight months now, through winter freeze and summer swelter, scores of Americans, black and white, have been assembling in front of the large, sand-colored South African embassy on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington to demonstrate their revulsion from apartheid. Every weekday for those eight months, some of the protesters have been arrested. Through last week, Washington police had detained nearly 3,000 antiapartheid demonstrators; in virtually all the cases, they were quickly freed after posting $50 bail, and none were prosecuted. Among those arrested since last November are 22 Congressmen, former First Daughter Amy Carter, two of the late Robert Kennedy’s children, and Coretta King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr.

As the situation in South Africa has grown more inflamed, the protest in Washington has kept pace. In response to Pretoria’s imposition of a partial state of emergency, 1,500 demonstrators gathered outside the South African embassy last week; 43 were taken into custody, including John Jacob, the president of the National Urban League, and 35 of that organization’s officials. Noting that he had never been arrested in a demonstration before, Jacob said, “It is an experience to be considered only when the principle is of vital importance.”

More than any other international issue since the Viet Nam War, the question of apartheid has touched off a wave of public protest and voluntary arrest in the U.S. that is far from being confined to Washington. While demonstrators have been taking to the streets of the capital, others across the country have sought to pressure state and local governments, universities and colleges to rid themselves of holdings that involve U.S. and foreign companies with interests in South Africa. Both houses of Congress have called for economic sanctions against Pretoria, and divestiture proposals have come before virtually every state legislature. “Many Americans knew nothing about apartheid before the demonstrations began,” says Randall Robinson, executive director of Transafrica, a black-led lobbying group that coordinates the Washington protests. “Now there is a new understanding of South African repression.”

Outside the capital, the protest movement has been most visible on college campuses, where, in raising their fists against apartheid, demonstrators have also raised memories of the ’60s. At the University of California, Berkeley, about 200 protesters staged a sleep-in vigil in April that culminated in 159 arrests. Harvard has seen a dozen demonstrations, including a silent ten-day vigil in front of the college’s spiritual center, the statue of Founder John Harvard. At Cornell, students built a settlement of mock South African shanties and lived inside them until a fire swept through the area and the local fire department declared the huts a hazard.

For all that, the results of the protests have been somewhat less than conclusive. So far this year, 14 universities and colleges (among them Dartmouth College and Georgetown University) have taken steps to sell their South Africa-related holdings. The majority of schools, however, maintain a policy of “selective divestment,” under which they have refused to sever relations with companies that observe the Sullivan principles, the corporate guidelines drafted by American Churchman Leon Sullivan in the late ’70s to ensure nondiscriminatory treatment of all employees in South African workplaces. Berkeley, for example, has decided to review each investment on a case-by-case basis; Harvard has so far cut its connection to only one South Africa-linked concern, Baker International Corp., a California mining-equipment manufacturer that declined to answer an inquiry by the school as to whether the firm was adhering to the Sullivan rules.

Some critics have accused the protesters of fastening onto a fashionable issue that offers clear-cut rights and wrongs but no solutions. Stanford President Donald Kennedy, for example, has talked of “chic arrest by appointment,” noting that easy arrests “demean the principles of civil disobedience” without really interfering with the students’ daily routine. Others have suggested that many demonstrators are either quixotic in telling institutions what to do with their money or hypocritical in making divestment demands of the same firms from which they may later be seeking jobs. Says Michael Ascroft, an antiapartheid campaigner at the University of Iowa: “Even a lot of people who are behind us don’t really seem to know why they are behind us.”

Nonetheless, the surge in the U.S. is confined neither to the young nor to the purely idealistic. Local politicians recently passed a binding resolution in Georgia’s Fulton County, which includes the city of Atlanta, demanding divestment. The Massachusetts state legislature approved a measure that empowers the city of Boston to withdraw its funds from banks doing business with South Africa. In Michigan, state officials intend to push through a bill this year that would force the state’s pension funds to divest $2.8 billion. When classes resume this, fall, moreover, student protests will doubtless revive.

As for charges by some that they are assailing problems abroad while ignoring injustices at home, the demonstrators remain resolutely unshaken. “People active on the South African issue are active on issues of equality at home too,” says Harvard Junior Evan Grossman. “They see the connection between apartheid over there and apartheid in this country.” As long as South Africa continues in turmoil, brushfires of protest seem certain to continue to flare half a world away. –By Pico Iyer. Reported by Hays Corey/Washington and William Sonzski/Boston, with other bureaus