Listening to the silent majority

[27]

Listening to Mkele I asked myself how many of us connected present problems with their historical setting? I also asked myself, not so much how wide the social and economic distance between blacks and whites was in South Africa, as how deep and unbridgeable the psychological separation between blacks and whites was, built up as it has over the past centuries? And then, there was this amazing development during the 1950's and 1960's, when South Africa experienced and enjoyed unprecedented economic expansion, when legions of foreign investors crowded into the Johannesburg financial centre. At that time apartheid and racial segregation in South Africa reached unprecedented new heights, but were completely ignored by the world community.

Then, in 1960, the serious liberation of black Africa began. Thirty years later the Pope declared war on apartheid, but it should not be forgotten that the Vatican hastily nominated its first black African bishop only in 1960. Also, in the early 1960's, the United States was fighting the

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last big ‘battle of the brains’ between blacks and whites. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy used hundreds of armed soldiers and policemen to escort a handful of black children to all-white schools. The continued device of American apartheid began at a time when Africa was being liberated. At the same time American blacks cannot be compared to the many different and culturally diverse blacks that inhabit South Africa, lending an entirely different dimension to the struggle against racial seperation over here.

It is ironic that now, when the problem of apartheid is being seriously addressed within its borders, the entire outside world seems to have belatedly discovered that something is rotten in the state of South Africa. In this respect, a recent report by Allister Sparks, who returned to South Africa after an absence of only 20 months, was interesting. ‘South Africa has gone black, while I have been away,’ he wrote.^21. ‘The Africanising process has been under way for some time, but it has taken off in the last two years. A convergence of factors has caused it,’ Sparks wrote. ‘The black population is exploding, the homelands are bursting at the seams with over-crowding, ecological devastation and economic desperation; while at the same time the government has taken some of the ideological brakes off the economy to help it keep pace with the urgent need of job creation.’

21. The Sunday Star, Review magazine, April 30, 1989