The last months of 1986 saw a steady stream of seemingly positive headlines related to South Africa. The U.S. Congress passed a sanctions bill and overrode the president's veto. IBM, General Motors, and Coca-Cola all announced that they were selling off their assets in South Africa and pulling out of the country. And the quadrennial synod of the white Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa passed resolutions that seemed to indicate a turn away from the church's historic support for the apartheid system.
In the world according to the U.S. media, it would almost be possible to enter 1987 believing that the tide has turned in South Africa and the prospect of real change is at hand. Unfortunately that perception tells us more about the limitations of our media-oriented worldview than it does about the political realities of South Africa. The tendency is to force events into our media time line, which sees only the melodrama of the moment and is incapable of taking in the broader, slower, and inevitably messier drama of a struggle that is already generations old.
Another peculiarly American obstacle to our perception of South Africa is our tendency to vastly overrate the significance of our own initiatives, like sanctions, as instant solutions for other people's problems. But perhaps the most dangerous of all American misperceptions of South Africa is the tendency to impose the assumptions of our history and our political process onto what is sometimes called the "process of change" there. This can cause us to set up all kinds of categories--"moderation" vs. "extremism"; "communist" vs. "anti-communist"; "violent revolutionaries" vs. "responsible critics"--that are totally irrelevant to South African reality. And as a result, we can totally misperceive the nature of "reform" in the South African context.
IN SOUTH AFRICA, "reforms," such as the abolition of some forms of petty segregation, are not steps toward democracy. Instead they are short-term measures aimed at protecting the long-term survival of apartheid's essential tenets, which are "separate development" of South Africa's "many nations" and the political and economic supremacy of the white nation. The so-called "extremist" black church, labor, and political leaders who reject such reforms in fact represent the broad mainstream, or "centrist," sentiment among the country's majority that the only reform worthy of discussion is the abolition of the system.
Unfortunately this process of reform as a tool of the apartheid system can even be seen in the recent changes in the Dutch Reformed Church, which is historically the chief manifestation and principal guardian of Afrikaner national identity. Established when Afrikaners assumed power in 1948, the political system of apartheid was modeled on the system of black, "colored," and Asian "daughter" churches instituted by the Dutch Reformed Church in the late 19th century.
For years now Allan Boesak and other black Reformed leaders have targeted the Dutch Reformed theology of apartheid as one of the key underpinnings of the entire system. They demanded that the "mother" church declare apartheid a heresy and establish complete ecclesial unity with its three "daughters." As a result of this black Reformed campaign, the apartheid church was expelled from the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, which then elected Boesak as its president. Earlier last year Boesak's leadership was further affirmed when he was elected moderator of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, the so-called "colored" daughter church.
Then last October the Dutch Reformed Church approved a statement saying its previous biblical defense of apartheid "must be recognized as an error and rejected." The church also stated that "apartheid as a sociopolitical system, which causes injustice to people and incorrectly gives one group preference over the other, cannot be accepted on Christian ethical grounds." The whites-only church also amended its bylaws to allow congregations to admit individual blacks as members if they so choose.
Internationally, and among the Afrikaners, these resolutions were regarded as an important sign that the ideology of apartheid is eroding at its very core. When, a few days later, stories appeared reporting the negative reaction of Boesak and others to the church statements, the black church leaders appeared to be die-hard extremists who were not amenable to compromise.
But upon closer examination, it is clear that the Afrikaner church reforms are, like those of their political counterparts, mostly too little, too late. They are significant in that they represent a compromise by the ruling elite with a growing number of dissident white Reformed clergy. But they also are a sign of how out of touch South Africa's white minority is with the religious and political life of the country's majority. The measure to allow "individual" black membership in white congregations was a substitute for a church union measure that was decisively voted down. And even the admission of "error" in previous endorsements of apartheid is carefully worded to leave the door open for a system of "separate development" that might be applied more fairly.
IN THE POLITICAL arena, South Africa's rulers continue a two-headed policy of repression and "reform." Currently the apartheid government is plotting a more sophisticated "counterinsurgency" strategy of repression in the black townships, while simultaneously encouraging talk of various "compromise solutions" aimed at a system of nominal "power-sharing" with blacks.
The major missing piece for any such compromise solution is a semi-credible black leadership willing to participate in it. Toward that end the regime and its allies abroad have gone to great lengths to promote Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi as a "moderate" alternative to the "radical" leadership of the United Democratic Front and the exiled African National Congress.
Buthelezi serves as head of KwaZulu, a Zulu "homeland" created from scattered fragments of South Africa's Natal province. While Buthelezi has refused the "independence" granted to other such homelands, his acceptance of homeland rule has branded him as a collaborator among most black South Africans.
Buthelezi's political organization, Inkatha, based almost solely among Natal Zulus, has remained mysteriously immune to the state of emergency restrictions that have decimated other black organizations. Last June, while all public meetings were banned by the state, Inkatha was able to hold a rally in Soweto, with Buthelezi's arrival protected by a heavily armed detail of South African police. According to the New York Times, almost half of Buthelezi's crowd had to be bussed in from Natal despite the fact that Soweto is home to more than 250,000 Zulus.
The most reliable polling data among black South Africans shows that support for Buthelezi is limited almost totally to his ethnic and geographic base. And even there he barely garners majority support. Nelson Mandela, of course, tops the polls by a landslide.
Unfortunately Buthelezi's marginal status among his own people is not reflected in the Western media. Within the last year, the New York Times has called him a black leader "ready to work with whites for nonviolent change" and "a voice for moderation and negotiation." The ostensibly more liberal Washington Post says, "Buthelezi is regarded by many as perhaps the only man, white or black, who can bring about reconciliation between the races in South Africa and an end to apartheid." Each of those quotes appeared in a regular news article, not an editorial.
As this is written, Buthelezi is commencing a month-long speaking tour of the United States. Following in the footsteps of his Angolan counterpart Jonas Savimbi, he apparently hopes to win in the United States the legitimacy that eludes him at home. Oddly enough, one of his first stops is at the Heritage Foundation, an ultra-conservative think tank with a history of hatching foreign policy ideas (contra aid, Star Wars, aid to Savimbi) that eventually become administration dogma.
Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.
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