The Isolation of South Africa

DAN JACOBSON

ON May 31 of this year the Union of South Africa declared itself a republic, and on that day it ceased to be a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. At the conference in London of the Commonwealth prime ministers in March, Dr. Verwoerd, the South African Premier, formally withdrew his application for continued membership in the Commonwealth after the declaration of the republic. His decision to withdraw followed upon days of tense and protracted argument over South Africa’s racial policies, during which the nature of the Commonwealth and the future of South Africa were perhaps more closely examined than ever before. In South Africa itself, the course of the conference was followed by a degree of intentness and public anxiety comparable to that which marked the country’s entry into World War II in 1939.

The Commonwealth as an institution is a subject on which many Americans admit to some confusion; and this is hardly surprising, for it is a subject on which many people inside the Commonwealth are confused too. So loose and obscure is the Commonwealth link that it is far easier to define what the Commonwealth is not than what it is. It is not an empire. It is not an alliance. It is not a treaty organization. It is not British; it is not monarchical, for several of the countries in it are republics. It includes countries which are undoubtedly parliamentary democracies and others which are nothing of the kind — one thinks here of Pakistan, or even of Ghana. Now that South Africa is going out of the Commonwealth, many people are saying that the essence of the Commonwealth is its multiracialism; nevertheless, it manages to accommodate a country like Australia, which maintains an impenetrable barrier against immigration from any nonwhite country.

In fact, the reason for the existence of the Commonwealth cannot be found in any single highminded principle or ideal of politics or society, but in the history that brought all these countries into association with one another. Every country in the Commonwealth, apart from Britain itself, was once one of Britain’s colonies. These former colonies are now fully independent in every way, but they continue to recognize the Queen as head of the Commonwealth. All Commonwealth citizens are entitled to come into Britain without formality, to live and work there for as long as they like, and to enjoy all the privileges of British citizenship while they are there. And every year the premiers of the Commonwealth meet in formal conference to discuss problems affecting one another. and world affairs generally.

The advantages of this association may not appear to be great, but it is no small thing, politically, as Asia and Africa move into the postimperial phase of their history, that the Asian and African members of the Commonwealth should have chosen voluntarily to continue a cordial association with their former political rulers. It seems to me something to be grateful for, the world being as disrupted, angry, and dangerous as it is, that the Commonwealth brings together for regular consultation on equal terms the governments of countries which are rich and poor, black and white, highly developed or only now entering into the industrial society.

I would not really choose, however, to define the value of the Commonwealth in terms of politics and power. I would say, rather, that for the individual citizen of any Commonwealth country, the value of the relation is a psychological or moral one. On both the personal and the public levels, the very existence of the Commonwealth is a sign that its peoples have accepted the fact that they are all creatures of chance and history and that this is nothing to be ashamed of. For people who were too long thought of contemptuously as “natives,” or even for those white settlers who have been disdainfully dubbed “colonials,” there is a great temptation to look upon the past purely as a source of shame and rage, and therefore as something to be broken away from as abruptly as possible. But we cannot break from our pasts, either as individuals or as nations, and if we try, the effects arc often disastrous. What we can do is to attempt to learn from the past, and it is for this reason that the Commonwealth relation, in its aspect of self-acceptance, seems to me to make for health and creativity.

But the relation is valuable because of the help it offers to the peoples of the Commonwealth, both in their view of the past and in their view of their present selves. Most of the countries in the Commonwealth are newly established; many of them are poor; all of them, even the wealthiest and oldest, even Britain itself, can be said to be in search of a sense of national identity and purpose. And in that search for national identity (which, for the citizen, is a search for personal identity too), the Commonwealth relation is unquestionably helpful, even liberating. Every citizen of the Commonwealth can feci himself to be a citizen not only of his ow n country, but of a larger group of nations, and as a result, the intellectual and physical possibilities the world offers to him seem very much larger than they would otherwise be. I know from my own experience that, long before I had left South Africa to come to Britain, I felt the relation between my own country and the other countries of the Commonwealth, Britain especially, as something living, as a kind of promise. And what I felt then, I know that West Africans and Pakistanis feel now. The Commonwealth keeps open certain lines of communication, along which can move ideas, books, controversies, cultural contrasts and similarities, and, of course, thousands of people. They pass, they meet each other and are enriched by the meeting.

I HAVE dealt at some length with these aspects of the Commonwealth relation because I think they are of significance in discussing the circumstances of South Africa’s withdrawal. If one is to understand the Afrikaner Nationalists, the ruling group in South Africa, one must attempt to see them as the heirs and descendants of a people — the Boers — who throughout their three hundred years of history have made one attempt after another to sever themselves not only from the physical domination of Britain but from those continuing moral and intellectual traditions of Europe (and America) which we associate with democracy, equality, and political liberty. Confusingly, this struggle by the Boers could at one time be presented as a struggle for liberty; after all, during the Anglo-Boer War at the beginning of this century, when the two original Boer republics were crushed by the British, everyone of liberal sentiment in Europe and America was on the side ol the Boers. But liberty, for the Boers, was always a racial principle, never a human one, as it was for the liberal thinkers of the West. To the Boers, liberty meant liberty for the Boers, but never liberty, too. for the Negroes, whom the Boers fought and subjugated, even while they fought against being subjugated themselves by the British.

And this dual struggle is being carried on by the Afrikaner Nationalist movement in political terms today. Dr. Verwoerd talks of “positive apartheid" and “separate development for the Bantu,” but for him liberty remains liberty for the whites only; it is never to be extended to the blacks. And Great Britain, the other old enemy of the Boers, has become an enemy in a new sense, by withdrawing from Africa and helping in the creation of viable black states. It is doing so precisely because those ideas of political liberty and racial equality have proved to be irresistibly potent. They have been potent at home, in making it impossible for any sensitive Englishman to feel anything but embarrassment about the “imperial mission” or the “white man’s burden,” and they have been potent among the former colonial peoples, who learned from their overlords that the state of subjection was a shameful one. So that, even faster than the European withdrawal from Asia and Africa, there arose the tide of local nationalism and anticolonialism.

When Europe was expansionist and imperialist, it was still too “liberal,” even then, for the Boers. So they cut themselves off from it, as much as they could. And to this day, the Afrikaner Nationalists’ ideas, at their most respectable, are those of a hundred years ago; at their least respectable, they are not ideas at all, but merely delusions and fantasies. But while it was all very well for the Boers to seek isolation from European power and ideas when there were no other powers or ideas to consider, today there are other powers in Africa, black powers; not yet great, except in terms of aspiration, but powers nevertheless. What can Dr. Verwoerd, who believes in liberty for the white man only, say to these new powers? How can he not struggle, suddenly, to restore the links with Europe which he and his movement had been so anxious to sever for so long? But the Europe with which he would have liked to be linked, the Europe of a hundred years ago, no longer exists. Hence the three days of anguished negotiations, with Dr. Verwoerd unable to move forward to compromise with the Afro-Asian states, or to draw support for his stand from the older “white” states in the Commonwealth. And the negotiations ended, as they had to, with the country’s final, formal exclusion from the community represented at the conference table. In a sense, this was the ultimate victory of Afrikaner Nationalism, but it had to be pressed into surprisingly reluctant hands.

OF COURSE, Dr. Verwoerd has publicly expressed no fear, no doubts, no hesitations. From what one knows about him, it is to be suspected, alas, that he does not feel any hesitation about the ultimate rightness of the path he has chosen, even though for reasons of expediency he may have sued and bargained in London. And one fears, too, that for the overwhelming majority of his followers, Dr. Verwoerd’s are the only policies imaginable. Few of the Afrikaner Nationalists seem to have Dr. Verwoerd’s total imperturbability in the face of increasing discontent among the Union’s Africans and an increasingly hostile outside world; but, in an extraordinary way, their own fears merely make them admire all the more, and follow all the more blindly, the man who never admits to a moment’s anxiety or self-doubt. I would say quite definitely that for the present there is no prospect whatsoever of Dr. Verwoerd’s being voted out of power, and that this withdrawal from the Commonwealth has drawn his followers even more closely behind him than before.

It must be remembered, of course, that elections in South Africa are a “whites only” affair, and that among the whites, the Afrikaners are in a great majority. Furthermore, among the Afrikaners one is looked upon as something little short of a traitor if one is not a supporter of the Nationalist Party. There are many thousands of such “traitors,” but even in alliance with the Englishspeaking opposition there are not enough of them to vote the government out of power. For assurance, the vote is heavily loaded against the cities and in favor of the rural constituencies, where the Nationalist Party has always been strongest.

The position of the English-speaking South Africans is really most anomalous. The Englishspeaking community is the wealthiest in South Africa (it is estimated that 90 per cent of locally invested capital is in its hands); it is by far the most highly educated and sophisticated group in the country. Yet, during all the years of Nationalist domination, the English community has not had a single representative holding any office in the government. During that time the government has been pursuing policies which have been deliberately aimed at extirpating the British influence from South African life.

Why have the English-speaking South Africans offered so little opposition to the government? The answer is perfectly clear. The English-speaking community is wealthy and comfortable; it enjoys what is perhaps the highest standard of living in the world. That standard of living has not yet been directly affected by anything which the Nationalist government has done, though the country’s economic development has been much retarded by the lack of overseas confidence in it. It is difficult, however, under such physically comfortable circumstances, for people really to become deeply agitated over political issues. But this is not the only reason for their quiescence. The English-speaking South Africans know that they can get rid of the Nationalist government only if they form an alliance with the blacks. This is something they are not prepared to do. Most English-speaking South Africans share the color prejudices of the Afrikaner Nationalists, though on the whole they are much less prone to form these prejudices into a dogma or ideology. They feel that their position is constantly being attacked and undermined by the Afrikaner Nationalists, but they would rather endure those attacks than suffer the truly revolutionary change in the structure of the country which an alliance between themselves and the blacks would necessarily bring about. It is for this reason that the talk of “secession” by the English-speaking province of Natal, for example, remains mere talk. And even this latest blow which Dr. Verwoerd has dealt at the self-esteem of the English group is not going to transform their bitter grumbling into action.

In fairness to the English-speaking community, there are a number of other points to be made, however. I think it would be true to say that the Nationalists would like South Africa to resemble the Portuguese African territories to the northeast and northwest of the Union. These territories have been governed by a combination of despotism, silence, and sheer inertia. The combination is a formidable one, and it is one which could keep the South Africa situation frozen indefinitely. It is because of the presence of the English-speaking in South Africa that the Portuguese type of rule is one which the Nationalists will never really be able to employ. Dr. Verwoerd can try to be as despotic as he wishes, but he cannot hope for silence about his despotism, for the Englishlanguage press is alert and liberal in its inclinations. Dr. Verwoerd would gladly accept economic and political inertia as the price for white supremacy; but the capital, energy, and skill of the English-speaking community continue to turn South Africa into a modern, highly industrialized society. And the more industrialized the country becomes, the more palpably nonsensical is the talk of “separate development for the Bantu.”Finally, it must be said that the Liberal and Progressive parties generally draw what support they have from the English-speaking group. Both these parties are small in numbers, but they are doing as much as they can to keep open the lines of communication between black and white in South Africa, and between South Africa and the emergent states to the north — those very states which were instrumental in driving South Africa out of the Commonwealth. It is not surprising that on the issue of Commonwealth membership the white liberals in South Africa were hopelessly divided. Many insisted that it would help their cause if South Africa were branded a pariah among the nations; others felt that no good could possibly come of a move which was bound to increase the country’s moral and intellectual isolation.

There was no similar division among the African leaders, who claim to speak for the voteless, voiceless black majority. Every one of the African leaders who was able to speak on this issue was insistent that South Africa should be driven out of the Commonwealth. The reason for this unanimity is that the African leaders are beginning to believe that external pressure upon South Africa is likely to be the most effective — or at any rale, the least bloody — method of driving the Nationalists out of office, and they saw South Africa’s expulsion from the Commonwealth as a first step in what they hope will be a cumulative process of isolation, boycott, embargo, and, ultimately, diplomatic or even military sanctions.

I believe it most unlikely that such a campaign could be successful unless it were accompanied by persistent and effective opposition by the African masses inside South Africa itself. The scries of strikes and riots which followed upon the Sharpeville shootings last year showed that it is possible for the Africans to make the country very difficult to govern, but the way the strikes and riots were put down showed, too, how much beyond the power of the Africans it is for such opposition to be sustained for any length of time. At the moment, it seems to me that the Africans in South Africa are too weak and too disorganized to offer the kind of resistance which would threaten the government from within and at the same time call down the wrath of its enemies abroad. The South African government does its formidable best to keep the Africans weak and disorganized. Ihe leaders are thrown in jail or banished to the rural areas; the African political parties are banned; the movement of every African is rigidly controlled by the pass and curfew systems. No one who has been to South Africa will underestimate the strength of the Vervvoerd regime or will imagine that it will be easily removed.

Nevertheless, time is clearly on the side of the Africans. Even ten years ago it would have been inconceivable for South Africa to be forced out of the Commonwealth because of its racial policies. But today the Afro-Asian states are strong enough to have more or less insisted upon it and to have had the support of other states in the Commonwealth. The Africans in South Africa cannot but take heart from knowing that people of their color are not merely concerned about them and willing to help them but already wield a certain power in the affairs of the world. What has happened in London is bound to stimulate the growth of a sense of national consciousness among the Africans in South Africa, and, as I have already suggested, the more internal opposition there is to Verwoerd and his government, the more effective is the opposition outside South Africa likely to become.

It is a measure of the complexity of South African affairs that both Dr. Verwoerd’s most fanatical supporters and his most ardent opponents should have bailed South Africa’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth as a victory. Anybody who makes a prophecy about such a complex situation is a rash man. I know that what I fell just a year ago about the possibility of South Africa’s ever becoming a peaceful, decent multiracial state now seems to me to be much too optimistic — and not only because of developments in South Africa itself, but also because of the debacle in the Congo and the unfavorable turn of events in Kenya and the Central African Federation. Even a year ago I was far from being an optimist. Now there is only one prophecy which it is safe to make. Conditions in South Africa will have to grow worse before they grow better. The subject forbids one from ending on any more cheerful note.