Namibia: Unhappy Holiday

South Africa takes over again

"Degrading." A "futile exercise." With those brusque dismissals, Dirk Mudge, 55, a blunt-spoken rancher and politician, rang down the curtain last week on the latest act in southern Africa's longest-running shadow play: progress, or more accurately the lack of it, toward independent self-government for the vast and arid territory of Namibia. For more than three decades, South Africa has ruled Namibia in defiance of world opinion and United Nations resolutions. For the past four years Mudge and fellow members of his multiracial Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (D.T.A.) exercised nominal authority over local affairs in the territory. Now all 41 D.T.A. members were resigning from Namibia's 50-seat National Assembly, leaving control in the hands of. a South African administrator-general. The reason offered for the D.T.A. defection was, as critics of South Africa have maintained all along, that the local government was no more than a façade for decisions actually taken in Pretoria, South Africa's capital.

The immediate cause of Mudge's pull-out was a dispute over national holidays. Four of ten red-letter days on the current Namibian calendar are of South African origin, and Mudge had proposed keeping only dates of purely local significance. Among the holidays to be dropped was the Dec. 16 Day of the Vow, a commemoration of an 1838 victory by white Afrikaners over the Zulu nation in the Battle of Blood River. Members of Namibia's white minority (75,600 out of a total population of more than 1 million) complained, and South Africa vetoed the legislation. As Mudge retold it, that was only the latest in a long series of occasions on which South Africa had ignored, modified or nullified the actions of the assembly's executive organ, the Ministers' Council. Said he: "We will never again take part in any form of government in the territory that is being controlled by Pretoria. What we now want is a meaningful government, not one which has been patched together [by South Africa]. Our priority is elections that will get us international recognition."

South Africa's response to Mudge's departure was a bland assurance that direct rule from Pretoria would be imposed only temporarily. But no mention was made of new elections to fill the vacant seats in the assembly at Windhoek, Namibia's capital. That omission was greeted cynically by Western diplomats. Said a European representative at the U.N.: "The game Pretoria is playing is obvious. It wants to procrastinate as much as possible."