Listening to the silent majority

[28]

Nimrod Mkele stressed the historic roots of black poverty. But then, isn't black poverty a universal symptom, hardly restricted to South Africa? Let alone to the system of apartheid? In the richest, most democratically-governed nation of the world, the United-States where ‘one man, one vote’ is liberally practiced, the so-called black underclass rose between 1970 and 1980 from 750 000 to 2 500 000. What will the figure for poor urban blacks be in 1990? Four million?^22. The miserable black poor amount to 15 percent of all American blacks. When the United States, with by far the strongest and most expansive economy in the world, fails to solve the problem of black poverty, why should armchair critics else-

22. Newsweek magazine, The Urban Institute, March 7, 1988

[p. 35]

where blame 5 million South African whites for the protracted problems of the 23 million blacks living in their midst?

For the same reason, those black South African leaders and commentators who imply that shaking off the shackles of apartheid would get the black masses once and for all onto their feet, is simplistic and misleading. Utopia has not arrived anywhere in the world where liberation became a reality; not even in so-called worker's paradises as the Soviet Union or China, or other socialist states; nor will it happen in South Africa when the political climax of one man, one vote is reached. ‘One Rolls Royce would finance 400 University students,’ said psychologist Mkele in an outrageously emotional outburst in Black Enterprise. This is, of course, untrue. And do the Soweto blacks who drive Mecedeses and BMW's agree with him?