Listening to the silent majority

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KaNgwane homeland stretches across some 750 000 hectares land in the northern part of Transvaal along the borders of Mozambique and Swaziland. The population consists of approximately 800 000 people divided over three regions, Nsikazi, Mkomazi, Mswati and Mlondozi. The territory received self-governing status on August 31, 1984. The Legislative Assembly meets in Matsulu. The KaNgwane government is based upon both the traditional authority of the chiefs and their tribal councils. The Assembly has 55 members, 22 of whom are designated Chiefs, while the other 33 members are elected citizens from the four constituent Regional Authorities. The Assembly elects a Chief Minister, who in turn appoints 7 Cabinet Ministers.

As reported earlier, I visited KaNgwane and witnessed at first hand how this homeland is situated in one of the most prosperous and intensively developed areas of South Africa. Anti-Pretoria propaganda presents the case of homelands too often as a case where whites handed the most backward and uninhabitable pieces of real estate to blacks for their use as homelands. In the case of KaNgwane this is blatant nonsense. They have everything: agriculture, cattle breeding, industry and mining. To name a few. The Tonga and Ukukhanya Rice projects, the Ngogola sugar project, 967 hectares of fig tree and Shinyokana plantations, the Schoemansdal coffee project, the Mzinti and Sikwahlane farmers' pro-

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jects, the Louw Creek Suger and subtropical fruits project and the Honingklip tobacco project.^79.

I met Chief Minister Enos Mabuza in his modern office in a Randburg banking complex. He had immediately felt at home in Moscow, he told me. ‘I had always believed that the ussr was a very oppressive country, and that the kgp would follow you wherever you went. But we were warmly received. It showed me that the situation in the Soviet Union has changed. People in the streets didn't look at all oppressed. The new initiatives as developed by Mikhail Gorbachev are really penetrating.’ I pointed out that his words reminded me of my first voyage to South Africa in 1986. I had expected to see blacks treated inhumanely, and poverty and beggars everywhere, whereas, on the contrary, I witnessed a South Africa quite the opposite of what I had imagined it to be.

‘Yes, I tend to agree with you,’ said the Chief Minister. ‘People living abroad develop stereotyped images about us in South Africa. But when they come here in person, they quickly discover this stereotype is unfounded. Of course, the separation of the races cannot be justified. But you also find that the black South African who works hard can reap the fruits of his efforts, whereas in socialist countries in general, there is no opportunity to excel in private initiatives or to achieve personal results in a free way of life. There might well be a form of equality and social security in socialist lands, but individuals are not really free to advance and make the progress that perhaps they would have achieved in a free society. The same thing happens in South Africa in regard to black people. Blacks would be able to achieve much more, if they were not being hampered and limited by the policies of the government.’

I pointed out another aspect in comparing the fate of citizens in the ussr to that of black citizens in South Africa. ‘The people of Soweto can in any case buy almost anything they want in Mrs Marina Maponya's supermarket. Those quantities and that variety in Moscow is available only to Party ‘Nomenklatura’ and foreign diplomats in their apartheidshops. The Chief Minister remained diplomatic and non-committal in his carefully-worded reply. ‘I did not have a chance to visit many shops

79. I am also aware that large corporations in KaNgwane and elsewhere practice a form of colonialism, making huge profits renting out land and at the same time paying labourers very low salaries.

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while in Moscow,’ he said. ‘I was in one big department store, where I was told that there were certain sections reserved for the people you mentioned. But, what indeed is amazing, is that free enterprise is coming off the ground in the ussr. I walked on a Sunday in a Moscow Park. There were thousands of people there. Everybody was selling and buying all kinds of things; paintings, curios, sandwiches and barbecued food. And, they were setting their own prices too. Obviously, the State has no longer anything to do with such initiatives.’ I particularly liked, in this respect, a recent report in the Sunday Times by Tertius Myburgh, who apparently recently ventured into the ussr. He wrote, ‘An average middle-market South African shop like, say, a Pep Store, is like Harrods compared with the average Russian department store. Food shops contain little more than cucumbers, wilted cabbage, potatoes and a few inferior pastries and candies. Rarely is there any butter, and sugar and soap powder are rationed. One genuinely wonders what people eat.’ Myburgh reminds readers that to order the cheapest automobile takes seven years, while he saw one personal computer in two weeks. ‘Quite simply,’ he wrote further, ‘Russia today is a place that, without reform, is doomed to become little more than the largest of the world's underdeveloped countries.’^80.

The most remarkable of all is, perhaps, that had Tertius Myburgh gone to Moscow in 1970 for the first time, as I did, he could have written exactly the same lines. Grosso Modo, the ussr is a totally paralysed society with their ‘one man, one vote, one single party’ system. Consequently, Soviet brains are in a constant coma - completely incapacited since there is such control. Consequently, the mass of Soviet society is at a stage of mental development that the rest of the industrialised world had reached in the thirties, prior to World War II. Having known the Soviet Union for some twenty years, I always wonder how the Mugabes, Kaundas and Dos Santoses of this world can even consider importing one-party Marxist governmental systems into their homelands, because they should have become aware long ago that adopting the Soviet or Chinese Communist solutions to solving the problems of their emerging nations means in practice a short cut to absolute disaster.

80. The Sunday Times, June 11, 1989