The World: Vorster: Man on a Wagon Train

The dour, stocky political patriarch of South Africa, Prime Minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster, 60, has the ironfistedness his fellow Afrikaners call kragdadigheid. He was known as “Jackboot John” when he served as Justice Minister under his National Party predecessor, Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd (who was stabbed by a demented clerk on the floor of the South African Parliament in 1966). The son of a Transvaal farmer, Vorster in his youth joined anti-English Afrikaner nationalist movements, becoming a “general” in what was believed to be a terrorist wing of the so-called Ox Wagon Guard, a pro-Nazi movement. His militant opposition to the Allied war effort cost him 20 months of internment. To this day Vorster maintains that what he did during the war “was right.”

Vorster is no liberal. He has been known to order police to investigate people who ask him embarrassing questions at public meetings. He supports apartheid out of deep Afrikaner conviction, even though he has eased some of its more humiliating aspects. But he has also rammed ahead with the Bantustan program of geographical separation by which South Africa will be broken up into racial enclaves. Blacks will be pushed into ten cramped tribal areas, which may eventually become sovereign states; whites will retain control of the richer farm lands, mining lands and urban areas, in which South African blacks will be classed as foreigners.

Yet Vorster has turned white South Africans to the realities of their survival on a black continent, in a way no previous Prime Minister has ever done. “We are of Africa and our destiny is in Africa, nowhere else,” Vorster declared in an epochal “crossroads” speech two years ago, announcing Pretoria’s readiness for political accommodation and economic cooperation with Africa’s black nations. Vorster’s speech moved Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, a black, to exclaim: “This is the voice of reason for which the world has been waiting.”

Implementing his policy of detente with Black Africa, Vorster flew secretly to the Ivory Coast in 1974 to meet with President Felix Houphouet-Boigny and Senegal’s visiting President, Leopold Senghor. Later he made a covert plane trip to Liberia for talks with President William Tolbert. Last year he met publicly with Zambia’s President Kaunda at Victoria Falls on the Rhodesia-Zambia border in what proved to be an unsuccessful effort to achieve a Rhodesian settlement.

South Africa also stepped up economic help to the black regimes. Badly needed mining spares were flown to Zambia. Hotel and low-cost housing projects were started for the Central African Republic and a new national capital built for Malawi, the only black African nation that has diplomatic relations with South Africa.

As black nationalist pressure on neighboring Rhodesia mounted, Vorster began tightening the screws on the government of Prime Minister Ian Smith, now almost totally dependent on South Africa for military help and an outlet to the sea. Last year Vorster withdrew a paramilitary South African police force from Rhodesia. Vorster left South African helicopters behind in Rhodesia and continued to provide arms and ammunition, but he made sure Smith realized that the supply could stop suddenly unless he negotiated seriously with moderate black politicians.

“Vorster is undoubtedly the most skillful politician the National Party has ever produced,” a leading British official remarked last week. “But he travels in an ox wagon always one length behind the train of history.” Yet with the South African white electorate, Afrikaans-and English-speaking alike, no faster pace is possible. For even the modest efforts Vorster has made at easing his country’s racial tensions, the ver-krample (narrow-minded) rightists in his ruling National Party have denounced him as “weak, vacillating, opportunistic.” Now Vorster seems even more politically damaged, and his grand design for dialogue and detente with Black Africa seems in jeopardy.