tos@psc70.UUCP (Dr.Schlesinger) (03/07/86)
Here's a piece about South Africa that might be of interest in light
of the apparent assumption of some student activists that University
divestment is needed to get South Africans to understand that apartheid
is a bankrupt policy and must be dismantled:
An editorial from the Pretoria News, a major South African
newspaper, of February 7, 1986:
"For too many years now, with total official sanction, most white
South Africans have ducked the truth. But now it is out. In the words
of no less than Foreign Minister Pik Botha; as long as minority rights
are adequately protected, it is possible that South Africa could be
ruled by a black president.
This came hard on the heels of National Party MP Mr Stoffel van der
Merwe's assertion that it was more or less inevitable that South
Africa would end up with a form of one man, one vote democracy in
which there would be a preponderance of blacks.
Given the relentless racial arithmetic of our country, these may
seem statements of the obvious.
But coming as they do from members and political office-bearers of
the nation which fought so hard for its place in the sun and embarked
on such a giant and such a ruinous enterprise to sustain that place in
the sun, these comments are exceedingly brave. In talking like this,
men like Mr. Botha are setting themselves against the almost hallowed
precept that whites, or Afrikaners at least, will rule themselves.
Of course, the right-wingers have a point. It is certainly true
that Africa is not studded with examples of harmonious black/white
power-sharing. It is obviously true that if this nation is to embrace
all its citizens as equals, standards for all the previously
privileged few will drop.
But the point is that there is no political, social, economic or
even military alternative. That this has been recognized, and stated
in public by men as senior as Mr. Pik Botha is a sign that a golden
shaft of sense has at last penetrated the recesses of the ultimately
doomed castle they started building in 1948.
Implied in Mr. Botha's and Mr. van der Merwe's remarks is a way of
life far more fraught, far more uncomfortable even, than that to
which white South Africans have grown accustomed.
But, despite all the failures of Africa to date and despite our own
often justified fears, we must reach out to that future. Because if we
do not, there will be no future for us at all.
Any comments?
Tom Schlesinger
Plymouth State College
Plymouth, N.H. 03264
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