Given the increasingly monolithic, corporate nature of our society, it is not easy to find a good bank--one that does not cheat its customers or invest their moneys in crooked business ventures or corrupt foreign governments. So it was with no small feeling of good fortune that we at discovered such a mom-and-pop-type bank just two blocks from our office in northeast Washington, D.C.
Some 20 Sojourners staffers kept their paltry checking accounts at that small bank. We came to know the tellers and account managers by name, and they came to know us, too, even following with chatterbox concern the wedding plans of two Sojourners customers.
So when Citicorp, America's biggest bank and the largest U.S. investor in South Africa's apartheid government, took over our neighborhood bank last year, we felt we had lost more than just a bank. One by one we closed our accounts, talking with tellers and writing letters to bank managers explaining that we could not do business with America's premier corporate supporter of apartheid and an institution with $700 million in outstanding loans in South Africa.
Then in June Citicorp announced it was selling its South African subsidiary. Citicorp, the last U.S. bank with direct operations in that country, thus became the 136th U.S. corporation to withdraw from South Africa or to declare its intention to leave that country since 1984. And since Citicorp's action, the total number of U.S. firms to disinvest their South African operations has risen to more than 150.
But Citicorp, like almost all of the divesting corporations, insisted that its action was not taken in response to anti-apartheid pressure or for political or moral reasons. Citicorp and the other firms claimed they were leaving South Africa for purely economic reasons. But there is no such thing as pure economics, especially in South Africa.
Citicorp itself was facing increasing shareholder opposition to its South African operations; 15 percent of its shareholders had voted in favor of a pullout. Churches and other groups were withdrawing their accounts from Citicorp banks, and business analysts suggest that Citicorp's expanded domestic operations, such as its takeover of our local bank, were forcing the corporation to be more vulnerable and responsive to public pressure.
Such "political," anti-apartheid pressure had indeed begun to affect the economic bottom lines of Citicorp and other U.S. corporations in South Africa. More than 116 colleges and universities, 19 state governments, and 83 cities and counties have divested themselves of more than $22 billion worth of stocks and bonds in U.S. companies doing business in South Africa. Certainly that is political action with economic impact.
And more than 21 states, 72 cities, and 14 counties have adopted "selective purchasing laws" that prohibit or restrict the awarding of public contracts to U.S. firms involved in South Africa. Because of such laws, U.S. corporations have found themselves, for the first time, losing business in the United States because they were doing business in South Africa. So when those firms insist they are leaving South Africa for economic reasons, anti-apartheid activists should not doubt their own impact on such actions.
PERHAPS ONE OF the most significant actions taken against U.S. corporate involvement in South Africa, an action likely to affect some 193 U.S. firms still operating in that country, is the revocation of the Sullivan Principles, a 10-year-old code of corporate conduct for U.S. companies operating in South Africa. The principles had been formulated by the Rev. Leon Sullivan, a prominent civil rights leader, as a compromise.
Unable to persuade the directors of General Motors Corp. or other U.S. corporations to withdraw their operations from South Africa, Sullivan devised a set of guidelines to encourage U.S. companies to treat their black workers more equitably. Many U.S. corporations signed the principles, but far fewer actually followed them. Many companies did not even sign the guidelines.
But the very history of the Sullivan Principles revealed their fundamental failing. The Sullivan Principles failed from the outset because they sought to reform the apartheid system rather than radically change it. The principles encouraged positive social action by U.S. corporations, but they were unacceptable because they sought to justify U.S. corporate participation in a grossly unjust economic and political system.
Leon Sullivan, like many persons who sincerely oppose apartheid, for 10 years believed that the withdrawal of U.S. corporations from South Africa would do South African blacks more harm than good. But, after 10 years of increasing violence and repression in South Africa and much personal agony, Sullivan concluded in June that the U.S. corporate presence in that country must be discontinued.
Perhaps Rev. Sullivan realized that integrated factories provided by U.S. companies following his principles were no substitute for the fundamental human and political rights the South African government has denied the majority of its citizens. In fact, such "progressive" corporate programs have enabled the apartheid system to prosper and, therefore, contributed to the further denial of basic rights to 23 million black South Africans.
U.S. companies have never employed more than 120,000 South African workers, only 2.3 percent of the white work force and less than 1 percent of black workers. So, when corporations have and will argue that their withdrawal from South Africa would hurt black workers--whose cheap labor they have exploited for decades--most of all, they are being both self-serving and embarrassingly hypocritical. Rev. Sullivan finally came to believe that even if the withdrawal of U.S. corporations did hurt black workers in the short run, the continued presence of U.S. companies would hurt them far more seriously in the long run.
Other divestment critics argue that the withdrawal of U.S. companies from South Africa will not change apartheid. They point to the increasing entrenchment of the apartheid government, the renewed state of emergency, and the thousands of black South Africans, many of them under 18 years of age, who continue to languish in South African prisons. On those points they are certainly correct.
But Rev. Sullivan saw among the blacks of South Africa the more than 2,500 killed over the past three years, the increasing desperation of millions who have no political recourse, and the growing numbers who are embracing violence in their efforts to end apartheid. Sullivan, like many of us, doesn't know if corporate divestiture will "work." But he knows that it is morally right, a fact that far outweighs questions of effectiveness. That it is right, nonviolent, and potentially effective is enough.
"Apartheid is against the will of God and humanity," Rev. Sullivan said in announcing the end of his principles. "Every American moral, economic, and political force must be brought to bear to help influence the South African government to move toward dismantling the apartheid system before it is too late," he said. Amen.
Vicki Kemper was new editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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