Apartheid. USA 1988

[p. VII]

Preface

Returning from my first visit to South Africa in December 1986, I came across an article in the New York Times concerning Richard Wright's famous novel, Native Son, published as long ago as 1940. The original edition is stored in the British Museum, of all places, and carries an introduction by Dorothy Canfield. She wrote, ‘How to produce neuroses in sheep and psychopatic upsets in rats and other animals has been known to research scientists for so long, that accounts of these experiments have filtered out to us, the general public.’ She went on, ‘Our (American) society puts negro youths in a situation of the animal in the psychological laboratory in which a neurosis is to be caused. Native Son is the first report in fiction we have had from those who succumb to these distracting cross-currents of contradictory nerve impulses, from those whose behavior patterns give evidence of the same bewildered, senseless tangle of abnormal nerve-reactions studied in animals by psychologists in laboratory experiments.’^1.

That was the exact moment I decided to collect and compile the information contained in this book. I had first come to the United States in 1948, presumably when Wright was recording Native Son. I attended Yale College at the time. Even going down as far south as Washington DC, one was confronted with the most blatant forms of ‘apartheid’ imaginable, dimensions of racial segregation no longer to be found in South Africa today. It was a dozen years prior to President John F Kennedy using the Army in the South to get a handful of black pupils into an all-white school. Now, 25 years hence, the United States lectures the world, and especially South Africa, for its racial problems and social inequalities between blacks and whites. Surely, some of this criticism is wholly justified and very much in order, but for the United States, and its lawmakers, to feel entitled to punish South Africa - regardless of the fact that a majority

1. The New York Times Sunday Magazine, December 7, 1986.

[p. VIII]

of its black citizens suffer most from self-righteous American attitudes - seems to me ludicrous in the extreme and approaches gangsterism. It shows once more US ignorance of foreign realities.

I have lived as a journalist, author and lecturer in the United States since 1958. Anyone who assumes that Americans have solved their own minority problems between ruling white classes and blacks, Hispanics, Indians and all other disadvantaged groups in society, is dreaming. Data offered here from the New York Times, and some other responsible sources, clearly demonstrate that while blacks constitute only a relatively small group of American citizens, ‘apartheid’-problems have far from disappeared from the American scene. When I submitted this manuscript to ex-mayor Nelson Botile of Soweto, his first reaction was, ‘Every black person in South Africa should read this report.’ I am grateful to him for his foreword to this edition.

Having now completed five fact-finding assignments here over the past two years, I am not presenting the continuing racial strife in the United States in an effort to minimize the seriousness of lingering segregation in South Africa. Eventually, ‘apartheid’ is doomed wherever it has endured. What this report does intend to demonstrate is that, following some forty years of concentrated efforts to eliminate racial barriers, the black minority in the US is far from liberated. There are some who believe that liberation will come, provided all citizens are granted the right to vote. Not tomorrow, or next week, but today at noon. The history of blacks in America who do possess the right to vote, does not suggest however, that racial barriers between blacks and whites seized to exist once blacks were granted an equal right to cast their votes. On the contrary, in 1988, blacks are still under-represented at all levels of decisionmaking processes. What I do mean to stress, is that to bring the black majority of South Africa across the board on a more equal psychological, social, economic and political footing with the white minority will be unquestionably a

[p. IX]

protracted operation that could be likened to the incredibly difficult task of separating the heads of Siamese twins, Mpho and Mphonyana in Soweto's Baragwanath Hospital in 1988. The healing of social injustice needs patience, understanding and an intelligent approach. It is not wishful thinking that will bring freedom to all South Africans, or for that matter, unbridled emotionalism or senseless terrorism. We are talking of a reversal of a state of mind and the recognition of the basic dignity of all humanity.

I would also like to express gratitude to Carl Nöffke, director of the America Institute at the Rand Afrikaans University for co-sponsoring the publication of this sober tableau of racial realities in the United States between the end of 1986 and the spring of 1988. Some of the loud-mouthed critics of South Africa abroad should perhaps have another close look at the lingering mess existing within the borders of the lands in which they administer their own responsibility. To assume that limpet-mines will alter a state of mind, or as Mrs Winnie Mandela has done, to shout ‘we will necklace South Africa to freedom’, is besides posturing criminal behaviour, the surest way NOT to serve the imperative interests of the black majority. Nor will sanctions do the job, as some clergymen who are not supported by the black masses in South Africa and mostly represent themselves, advocate. Or, as Dr. Victor Dhlomo, Zulu Minister of Education, put the question during a conversation we had in Ulundi, ‘Do we have to destroy South Africa in order to destroy ‘apartheid?’

I would like to think that the reading of this report would contribute to a more sober view of the current struggle to eliminate step by step the wholly unjust system of ‘apartheid’ in South Africa, especially when it is realized once more, with the facts in hand, how difficult it is to erase racial inequality from the minds of all people, even in a society like the United States.

WILLEM OLTMANS

Johannesburg, December 1988