SOUTH AFRICA: Clinging to the Land of Thirst

In the Afrikaans language. South West Africa, or Namibia,* is known as a dorsland, or land of thirst. It is a vast, desolate, sun-scorched and sand-blown country—desert for the most part, wild scrubland for the rest. Its Skeleton Coast takes its name from the eerie hulks of ships that foundered on the sandy shore, from ghost towns partly buried beneath the shifting desert, and from stark tombstones of long-dead diamond seekers.

Since 1915, when Afrikaner General Louis Botha rode into Windhoek, the capital, and accepted the surrender of the German colony there, the territory of South West Africa has been ruled by South Africa. Last week, following nearly two decades of argument over the fate of the area’s 650,000 predominantly black inhabitants, the World Court voted 13 to 2 to end that mandate on grounds that the continued presence of South Africa was a “flagrant violation of the United Nations charter” and should be ended immediately. The court’s verdict was “advisory” and therefore not binding. South African Prime Minister John Vorster quickly announced that he would ignore it.

The ruling is the latest effort by the international community to embarrass South Africa into abandoning its apartheid dominance of Namibia. Pressure to lever South Africa out of the territory began after World War II. Proponents of Namibian independence accuse South Africa of genocide and racial extermination, claiming that blacks are herded into “concentration camps” to be killed off as a result of inadequate medical attention. Some Afro-Asian petitioners to the U.N. went so far as to charge South Africa with constructing a “laboratory of death” in the desert for the production of atomic bombs and nerve gas to try out on the blacks.

Reporters invited into the country in recent weeks found no evidence of genocide or concentration camps (the alleged “death house” proved to be an institute for aeronomy). What they did find was an ambitious and costly experiment to prove that apartheid can work. Vorster says that South Africa’s administration is designed “to promote the well-being and progress of the inhabitants.”

Separate Development. Twice the size of California, Namibia is populated by a number of disparate tribes, ranging from the dominant Ovambos (350,000) to a community of 10,000 bushmen, the Stone Age aborigines of Africa, who use the Kokerboom tree to make quivers for their arrows. Each group has its own identity and roughly defined territory, or “homeland”; that is true of even the 16,000 “basters” (literally, bastards), a mulatto group in Rehoboth.

The crux of the program is to divide South West Africa into eleven Bantustans, or homelands. The goal is self-determination and eventual independence for the black “nations” of the territory; it is identical to the plan that the Pretoria government is working out to create eight black Bantustans within South Africa’s own borders.

Vorster & Co. argue that under separate racial development the inhabitants of South West Africa, particularly the nonwhites, have never had it so good. Since 1964, when the program was initiated. South Africa has spent more than $200 million, much of it on Ovamboland, near the Angola border. During that time, the Ovambos have increased the number of teachers from 550 to 1,200, of schools from 130 to 220, and of pupils from 25,000 to 60,000 (nearly 60% of the school-age population). They have also acquired a $2.8 million hospital, and will soon receive $84 million for water supplies.

Of course, all the money does not go in one direction. Most of the $100 million-a-year diamond crop from the Skeleton Coast and offshore sea beds is harvested by South Africa’s De Beers. The Pretoria government reaps roughly $50 million in taxes from diamond and other mining, including U.S. copper and zinc interests. An ambitious British-backed development in uranium mining is one of several new ventures in the region.

For the Best. Within South West Africa, the Bantustan plan and the World Court’s decision have been greeted with responses ranging from indifference to incomprehension. Few of the 96,000 whites—chiefly Afrikaners, Germans and Britons—doubt that South African rule is for the best. Among blacks, there is tribal loyalty but no feeling of nationhood. Says Dr. Romanus Kapungu, a doctor in canon law from Rome University and chief councilor of the Kavango tribal authority: “If you asked most of our people, they wouldn’t know what all the fuss is about.”

That is undoubtedly true. So is Pretoria’s contention that if a plebiscite was held, the vote would be overwhelming for continued South African rule. The whites are for it; the chiefs, who see its immediate benefits, are for it, and the tribesmen listen to the chiefs. Only outside force or the fall of South Africa’s white-supremacist government could change the situation, and both are extremely remote possibilities.

* So named after the Namib Desert, a broiling blanket of sand where almost nothing can live but the gemsbok, an antelope-like creature that gets its moisture from desert grass.