The cloak covering 1980's apart

A Catholic Herald Special Correspondent looks at the apparent changes in the way South Africa is treating its blacks. Below, he assesses the dangers facing black resistance.
MORE than a decade ago Afrikaaner strategists were writing openly about the concessions which would be needed to safeguard their apartheid groundplan. If the majority of South African blacks were to be kept segregated, excluded from the wealth they had helped to create, a minority of blacks would need To benefit from the system. Without co-opted allies South Africa would not survive in the Lice of black resistance and i ate 1.11 Iona! hostility. Socialist governments in Angola and Mozambique. and the mounting tide of guerrilla war in Namibia and Zimbabwe gave urgencyto the task of securing minimal external and internal consent to apartheid.
The linchpin of Afrikaaner strategy was then, and is now, the homelands policy: the banishment of blacks from "white" areas by legislation into rural poverty where they would be policed by tribal elites. Unemployment — between one to two million blacks during the stagnation of the early 1970s and rising today — pushed ever increasing number of workseekers to the towns and industrial areas. The 1976 urban risings showed that time was running out. In the dirt and bloodshed of Soweto the urban black earned his concessions.
The subsequent brutal repression fo the black consciousness groups which had given voice to urban unrest disquieted international business circles and threatened investment. The "stability" of apartheid was in question. To stay on the road the apartheid ox-wagon required urgent remodelling. Or it would end up in the ditch with Ian Smith.
Yet the National Party, rooted in staunch white working class racism, had always proved illsuited to updating. Since taking power in 1948 its language had changed: its policies had not. Widespread surprise greeted Mr P. W. Botha's calls for change: "improvement" of the sex-acrossthe colour-line laws, reform of pass laws. unionisation of black labour, I3 last October, though.
disbelief was turning to liberal adulation. Perhaps he meant business.
So where did this pressure to modernise apartheid come from? Certainly not from traditional "Nats" who were slipping away in disgust to a new extreme rightwing party. It seems to have come from both the trans-national corporations and from the army — both acutely aware or the startling rise in guerrilla incidents within South Africa.
Armies in Africa have often taken power with a mandate to modernise. to do away with the corruption of nationalist politicians, and restore "law and order". There was no military coup during the Information scandal, but, in its shadow. military influence in the councils of State grew immeasurably.
General Magnus Malan, promoted as fast as any black officer in post-Independence Africa, became not merely head of South Africa's Defence Forces but a national ideologue at the elbow of power. His authority, enhanced by the collapse of the rival Vorster-BOSS network in the wake of Muldergate, was consolidated in a National Security Council with its own secretariat.
In Piet Wappens (Weapons) Botha his Minister of Defence from the days of the Angola invasion, now Prime Minister with magisterial control over the National Party machine, the ideology of national security found a skilful and persuasive advocate. South Africa was given a "total strategy"' based on "strategic economic programming for national defence."
The business world not only applauded the limited and strictly controlled unionisation of black labour and concessions to urban blacks promised by government after the Wiehahn and Rickert Commissions. it invested hundreds of millions of Rand in response. Finally, with this years defence budget standing at over 1,600 million Rand, and set to grow by one third in 1980. the militarisation of South Africa is. quite simply, big business.
What does this convergence of
military and industrial interests in South Africa mean to ordinary people? Not just a nightly three minute military slot on the national television news. (The story goes that General Malan summoned the heads of news media and blandly informed them that an atmosphere or war phobia had to be disseminated.) For whites there is indoctrination in schools, "Youth preparedness'' courses, and an intensification of propaganda against "communism". For blacks more and more unemployed will be forced into Bantustans while a handful of their urban relatives enjoy the minor concessions. like modest security of tenure and selfgovernment at the town-council level, demanded by the transnational corporations. Safe in rural poverty. away from the glare of international publicity. they will be moved around at will.
In the towns police brutality. will be moderated for an improvement in South Africa's image; "suicides" in prison arc likely to decrease.
The great trick of making blacks disappear, by banning reporters from "military areas", be declaring blacks citizens or non-entities like Venda, Bophutatswana and Transkei, remains the key to the apartheid . illusion. In this sense nothing has changed since the 1960s. To make blacks disenfranchised aliens in their own land remains the final solution. But apartheid has been obliged to leave the era or oxwagon crudity.
Its 1980 model moves faster and is more subtle and streamlined. It is designed to satisfy western demands. The Church will be asked to jump aboard for a safe ride through the waste land of "Communism". Put that way who could refuse'? Only the majority of blacks who know better than anyone the ultimate destination.
Right: The Agony of Soweto. Two young students carry the body of another student during the 1976 riots.