The World: POISED BETWEEN PEACE AND WAR

(9 of 10)

"I used to be able to take white friends there," a black reporter told a white colleague recently, "and they would be welcome. But if I smuggled you in now, there would be trouble." Last month, when a white commission went to Soweto to investigate the rioting, its members got some straight talk from Tolica J. Makhaya, the council chairman (or mayor). "You are facing the last generation of blacks who are willing to negotiate," Makhaya declared. "The younger generation is calling us fools because we achieve nothing. You must meet with black leaders the government has detained, and talk with them, because black people now regard these men as their leaders."

If black unrest continues to mount, as seems likely, the Vorster regime could face problems within its own constituency. White business, deep in recession, depends heavily on black labor (90% of total employment in both agriculture and mining, 68% in service industries). But because of the slump, black unemployment is approaching 2 million. Even the Afrikaans press is calling for reform, attacking the tough pass laws (requiring every black over 16 to carry a passbook at all times) as "unjust humiliation." In the meantime, however, South Africans have taken out more than 200,000 new firearms licenses in the past year, bringing the total to nearly 1.2 million for the 4.3 million whites. "If I had them," boasts a Johannesburg gunsmith, "I could sell 1,000 pistols today."

The specter is a somber one: of frightened individuals preparing for a racial Armageddon. In Rhodesia, no group has been more willful and less realistic than the whites, who refused throughout the 1960s to consider the alternative path of an orderly transition to majority rule. It is good for them, for the Rhodesian blacks, and for just about everybody else that the wrongheaded rebellion is at an end, and the financial "safety net" will certainly ease the blow. Yet, as members of Kissinger's flying squad of negotiators acknowledged, there was something poignant about the way Smith finally bowed to the inevitable — and to the unknown.

One U.S. diplomat present reflected that these events were taking place on such alien soil: in a Western democracy the rights of a minority are protected, and a minority usually has a chance of becoming a majority; in an African setting, where parties and governments and dynasties are determined by race (or even tribe), a decision taken today by a Smith or a Vorster is irrevocable. Obviously, the Rhodesian white minority had no right to think that it could rule indefinitely. Yet, as the whites well knew, there are precious few black-ruled states in Africa where the whites who stayed behind have been able to retain their full rights of citizenship.