Despite the calls for new election s by the extremist, and powerful, Conservative Party and an outbreak of right-wing terrorism, the South African stock-market hit an all time high following President F W de Klerk’s lifting of the ban on the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress and the South African Communist Party. Stronge?
Not, not really. South Africa’s businessmen have been at the forefront of attempts, often illegal, to encourage a dialogue between their government and the ANC. The economy, buoyant in the ‘70s with growth rates of 5-6 per cent, has cooled as apartheid South Africa found itself increasingly isolated from the international community. Last year growth had showed to the glacial peace of 1 per cent. Not good for business — nor good for the state, witness Poland, Hungary, Romania and the rest of Eastern Europe.
References to the fate of Eastern Europe’s out-of-touch governments were evident in President F W de Klerk’s landmark speech in which he opened up channels of democratic expression to all South Africans, and in particular removed most of the obstacles to a dialogue with the ANC. He is clearly aware that if South Africa’s whites are to avoid the lot of Europe’s communists they must display a willingness to compromise and an openness to change.
What has changed? Everything and nothing. The representatives of black South Africa have been invited in from exile and prison, yet must operate from the political wilderness of the back ghettos where nobody can vote.
The strictures and structures of apartheid remain untouched. That ignominious list of statutes that ensure that the back man stands unequal before the law reads as before: the Group Areas Act, the Land Act and the Population Registration Act that allots to all South Africans a racial coding that determines their fortune in life.
State of emergency regulations still threaten any returning ANC leader with summary arrest and detention and press censorship, despite some relaxation, remains strict.
So it is not surprising the Nelson Mandela, the living embodiment of the South African freedom struggle, is refusing to leave the jail in which he has been kept since his arrest in 1962. His price is reported to be the incomplete lifting of the state of emergency, a price the government may be willing to pay given his symbolic value, especially in the West.
Yet the potential for fundamental change is there in President F W de Klerk’s speech. It heralds a realisation within the white establishment that their interests are no longer served by ignoring the demands of the majority. It is courageous too. His opposition is demanding new elections, elections they suspect that can win on this issue. The police made clear their feelings when they teargassed blacks peacefully celebrating the legalisation of the ANC.
It has also raised expectations within the international community that apartheid can be dismantled, and dismantled swiftly. President F W de Klerk will not have forgotten the severe economic consequences of the world’s anger when his former leader P W Botha shied away from his path of reform.
Nor must he forget that while the steps he has announced might appear enormous strides from the distorted perspective of the laager, to the majority of his citizens they appear only as an inching across the start line.
In his speech he talked of the “political and economic upheaval [that] surged forward in an unstoppable tide” across Eastern Europe. The indications are that he realises that his metaphor is equally applicable to his own country. He must not fear to draw the conclusion that recent history has taught us: that before such a tide only those deeply committed to fundamental reform can survive.