The World: POISED BETWEEN PEACE AND WAR

(8 of 10)

The Transkei is lucky, in a way, because it is divided into only two parts. The homeland of Boputha Tswana consists of 19 scattered parcels of land, though these will eventually be consolidated into six pieces. The Zulu homeland of KwaZulu was originally in 188 parcels, is now in 29, and will ultimately be consolidated to ten. Scoffs Buthelezi, who is also the Chief Minister of KwaZulu: "A state in ten separate pieces? The very notion is nonsensical." Buthelezi has flatly refused independence for KwaZulu, explaining: "It is meaningless political freedom combined with effective economic slavery." Adds Hudson Ntsanwisi, Chief Minister of poverty-ridden Gazankulu: "We are nothing but a staging ground for South Africa's migratory labor, and a dumping ground for her dispossessed."

While Vorster intends to pursue basic apartheid, including the homelands plan, the system of regulations that South Africans call "petty apartheid" is slowly flaking away. Park benches are now integrated in most cities, and elevator apartheid has almost disappeared; interracial sports are permitted on a limited basis. Blacks are moving into jobs formerly reserved for whites (computer technicians, bank tellers, railroad switchmen), but equal pay for equal work is still a rarity. The average white salary remains twelve times the average black one, and the government spends 17 times as much to educate a white child as a black one. The government has made a few business concessions to coloreds and Asians — the right to equal opportunity with whites in the civil service, for instance, and to serve on racially mixed union boards — but these did not apply to blacks.

Given the rising anger among South Africa's black population, the long-term outlook for the Vorster regime's strategy for survival is uncertain, to say the least. An American official, after talking last month with the Chief Ministers of some of the homelands, whom he had presumed to be moderates, exclaimed: "If these are the moderates, I hope I never meet the radicals; there was blood in their eyes."

Even if the homelands policy works as a device for deflecting future claims by blacks to power in Pretoria, it will do nothing to ameliorate a more immediate problem for the regime: growing anti-white rage among the urban blacks needed to run the South African economy. In Soweto (pop. 1 million), near Johannesburg, less than a third of the blacks' dwellings have electric lights; less than a tenth have running water. In the slum sections, robbery and rape are commonplace; says a woman from the Naledi section of Soweto: "I pray we could have daylight for all 24 hours; people die here when it gets dark."