South Africa’s Slow Revolution : Brick by Brick, Ordinary People Are Dismantling Apartheid

JOHANNESBURG — As U.S. Sen. Paul Simon left South Africa after a few days’ visit recently, he said that he had found no sign that apartheid would end. His comment was reported in the local Sunday Times, right next to a report on the Conservative Party’s launching of a wide-ranging attack on President P.W. Botha’s “integrationist” policies.

The article also reported that some intellectuals within the party believe that our society has already become so economically and residentially integrated that it would be impossible to turn back the clock (as the party promises it will do). Consequently they were advocating the creation of smaller white homelands outside the irreversibly multiracial cities.

Carel Boshoff, son-in-law of H.F. Verwoerd (the prime minister who was the architect of hard-line apartheid), virtually threw in the towel recently when he stated that the Afrikaner was threatened with extinction; the only way to survive, he said, was by negotiating for a rural white homeland. A black journalist asked Boshoff, “You are saying that the Afrikaner cannot dominate forever; is that not an acceptance of defeat?” He replied, “No, we must realize that we are living in a post- colonial era and it is not possible to dominate others forever.”

Thus, while Sen. Simon saw no sign that apartheid will end, the largest white opposition party in this country is mobilizing against what it sees as too many signs that apartheid is ending. How do we explain this contradiction?

A silent socio-economic revolution is transforming South African society, unnoticed by most foreign observers, the local and international media and many of our own political leaders. On the ground, rank-and-file black South Africans have taken matters into their own hands and created practical new situations that have overtaken politicians of all colors. Intuitively exploiting objective forces in their favor (population growth, economic growth, urbanization and shortages of skilled labor), they have shown that there are now real opportunities for people to take action to pursue change themselves, in defiance of government policy. Our multiracial future is already being forged by ordinary people of all colors in universities, cinemas, hotels, beaches, suburbs, shops, offices and factories. By the year 2000 four out of every five school graduates will be black. Black business, which already provides an income base for as many as 3 1/2 million people, is flexing its muscles by forming associations to pool resources and mobilize collective bargaining power. The government has given up trying to suppress private taxis run by black people because the industry is now too big to be suppressed. By the end of the century the South African economy will probably be the most racially integrated on Earth. It definitely will not be a segregated economy.

We need to note that liberation is not an event but a process. Revolution is coming to South Africa. But it will not be single cataclysmic event like the French Revolution or the Russian. It will be like the Industrial Revolution in England--slower, less murderous and more profound.

Blacks right now do not have the power simply to implode the edifice of apartheid. But they do have, and are already employing, the power to dismantle it brick by brick, no matter what the government says or does. The process of emancipation means not only dismantling apartheid systematically in this way, but also at the same time constructing the new South Africa, whose success will depend, crucially, on education.

The point about emancipation is that it is not the monopoly of political activists. It is in fact largely the work of the man or woman in the street. We can see this clearly by looking at our history. I will give four examples.

In the 1970s African workers won a bitter struggle for trade-union rights. Union officials were served with banning orders. So-called ringleaders in the factories were arrested and interrogated. Ordinary workers were dismissed en masse. But African workers kept on joining the unions, which took such strong root in the factories that eventually employers and the government decided that they were a reality that could not be wished away. Accordingly employers began entering into wage negotiations with the unions, and in 1979 the government gave them the official recognition that they had sought all along.

The second example is the fate of the pass laws, which prevented blacks from entering the cities without permits. They were repealed about two years ago, not because of a sudden rush of liberal blood to the government’s head but because hundreds of thousands of black people had simply ignored them and migrated to the so-called white metropolitan areas.

The third example of how ordinary people can effect change is the way in which black people are moving into white residential areas in defiance of the Group Areas Act, which enforces residential segregation. White owners, rental agents and property companies are renting to blacks either directly or through whites who act as fronts. There are 150,000 to 200,000 black people now living in the so-called white areas. Research undertaken by my institute indicates that the government’s current attempts to reinforce the Group Areas Act will fail.

Finally, ordinary people have played a key role in undermining apartheid in education by ignoring the government’s restrictions, permits and quotas. Universities and technical schools are now free to admit people irrespective of race, and multiracial private schools are not only permitted, they are subsidized. Teacher-training colleges and government schools are logically the next institutions to which desegregation will extend.

What we are witnessing all around us is that one apartheid law after another is being taken apart, or rendered unworkable, by the actions of ordinary people. The major question that arises next is whether and how social and economic restructuring will bring about political restructuring. If it does, South Africa will have dealt with its racial problems more successfully than the United States has. Whereas black political emancipation in the States has failed to bring about commensurate economic advancement, political emancipation for black South Africans will not only have been brought about by economic power but will also be underpinned by it.