Listening to the silent majority

[p. 79]

[61]

Although I was aware of widespread intimidation in black townships by hotheads and quasi-revolutionaries, I was surprised that white officials connected with the town councils could apparently be that easily terrorised as well. Nor is the rabble-rouser mentality necessarily restricted to black brains. Chief Minister Mangosutho Buthelezi of KwaZulu likened attitudes of councillors in the all-white town council of Krugersdorp to the behaviour of ‘Gestapo Guards’. ‘Sheer naked racism is applied against us,’ he said. The Chief Minister was replying to the council's decision to offer him special dispensation as a black to attend a fund-raising function in the all-white Town Hall. His retinue, however, would not be allowed in.^44.

In general, black opposition groups against apartheid are headed by serious, level-headed people. Apparently, the anc and udf are not always able to control hot-heads within their organisations. In the same way, it is unfair to blame white pro-apartheid organisations for the irrational behaviour of three white terrorists, who killed professor David Webster of Witwatersrand University, not to speak of the extreme case of Barend Hendrik Strijdom of the Wit Wolwe, who shot anybody within sight on a Pretoria street. Who knows, perhaps the white member of the Crossroads town council did have legitimate reasons to fear black terrorists. Nevertheless, my project to expose Archbishop Desmond Tutu as hardly expressing a majority view of South African blacks while travelling as a salesman for disinvestment around the world, was effectively squashed out of fear of revenge by Tutu's allies among the radicals in the Cape.

44. The Johannesburg Star, April 5, 1989