The Struggle For Southern Africa Is Compromise Progress?
Barbara Ransby
In recent months the fascist dictatorship in South Africa has received yet another facelift. Since taking office in February, South African President F.W. de Klerk has released several key political prisoners, including the prominent African National Congress leader, Walter Sisulu. He has relaxed laws mandating racial segregation in public facilities and overseen the historic, and bloody, transition to self rule in Namibia, a country previously under illegal occupation by the South African military.
All of these changes are important. However, what is more important is that the basic structure of Apartheid remains in place: a political structure which denies 23 million Blacks (more than 80% of the population) the basic right to vote, hold public office, own property in most areas of the country, or to speak put against the government without the threat of arrest. The release of a small fraction of detained political activists and the tacit toleration of a mass African National Congress (ANC) rally two months ago does not negate these basic facts. Rather, these acts were attempts to obscure them.
Some interesting changes are taking place in Southern Africa. The question is what do they really represent? Has the same Nationalist Party which ordered the police massacre of some 69 unarmed demonstrators at Sharpeville in 1960, the brutal assault upon schoolchildren in the Soweto protests of 1976, and the tear gassing of Black funeral mourners in 1985, now had a sudden stroke of conscience? It is doubtful. The reality is that even the most stubborn defenders of Apartheid, are gradually realizing, after decades of relentless Black struggle, economie boycotts and embargoes, rent strikes in the townships and labor strikes in the cities, and the growing militance of white dissidents, that the days of Apartheid are numbered. The issue now is how to move toward a seemingly new system while preserving the privileges of the old. Compromise is the code word for such a transition, both in South África and the recently independent former colony of Namibia.
But even though in many cases "compromise" sounds like a reasonable and nonviolent route to the settlement of disputes, it also presumes goals and objectives which are not fundamentally antagonistic.The so-called compromise currently being worked out between the former elites in Namibia and the leaders of the liberation struggle there, as well as the Lancaster House treaty which marked the negotiated settlement in Zimbabwe in 1980, foreshadow the scenario which could one day take place in South Africa. The difficult question which must be asked, however, is whether or not a just order can be built upon an unequal foundation.
The great fear of many South African elites is not that Blacks will vote or use the same public facilities as whites, but rather, that the immense wealth they have enjoyed for decades will be threatened by a newly empowered Black electorate. This is a concern expressed by the Western allies of South Africa as well. But a compromise in either South África or Namibia which protects that privilege will, in many ways, be starting off on the wrong foot. The wealth and privilege enjoyed by thousands of white South Africans under the Apartheid dictatorship is not wealth that has been earned, but stolen. And if justice is to prevail, all stolen property in the región must be returned to its rightful owners, the indigenous people who have tilled the land for centuries, the workers in the country's industrial centers, and the miners who have harvested the gold and diamonds for the Anglo-American Corporation and many others. Of course white South Africans should have the right to continue to live in South Africa after it is free, but as the Freedom Charter of 1955 written by the ANC and other liberation groups proclaims, South Africa should be a nonracial country in which no vestiges of the inhumane and unjust system of Apartheid remain. This means no vestiges of the economie privileges that have divided the nation either. Forfeiting economie power, however, is not one of the principles around which many elite white South Africans are likely to rally, especially given that amidst a country of malnourished children and homeless families, South Africa's white population enjoys one of the highest per capita standards of living in the world.
The need for principled transition to power for the majority of people in Southern Africa should be the goal of the world community concerned with justice and genuine progress. Such a mission should not be confused with pragmatic solutions which mask a fundamentally unchanged hierarchy, or allow former elites to carry over their unearned privileges into a new political arena in which they will clearly have undue advantages.