South Africa: Small Favors

More power to some people

"We have a vote in favor of evolutionary reform." So proclaimed a buoyant South African Prime Minister Pieter W. Botha last week, and for once he was not merely wishing aloud. By a two-to-one majority, some 2.1 million voters — a fraction of the white-dominated country's 30 million inhabitants — had endorsed a proposal sponsored by Botha's ruling National Party to rewrite the South African constitution and soften its policy of whites-only rule. Botha also hailed the outcome of the referendum as "overwhelming." There Prime Minister was stretching matters a bit. Nonetheless, a milestone of sorts had been achieved in South Africa's long and sordid history of apartheid. As a result of the "yes" vote, the nation's 2.8 million coloreds (citizens of mixed race) and 900,000 Asians will for the first time be allowed a modicum of parliamentary power alongside the governing minority of 4.5 million whites. Botha has promised to implement the change by the latter part of next year.

The referendum was a personal triumph for Botha. After taking office in 1978, he claimed that South Africans must "adapt or die" in confronting the racial segregation policies that have made their country an international outcast. His ideas of adaptation, however, have never included any role in national decision making for South Africa's 21 million blacks. In the new constitutional order, the black majority will still be consigned to the government's long-term program of "separate development," meaning citizenship in artificial "independent homelands" without claims to South African political rights.

Even with that large proviso in his plans, Botha's referendum has created deep fissures among white South Africans. During the bitter three-month campaign, those divisions erupted in a bitter broedertwis (Afrikaans for fraternal feud), while the referendum became known as the Great Divide.

Botha's plan, announced more than a year ago, would have South Africa's single-chamber, whites-only parliament replaced by a tricameral parliament composed of three separate but very unequal chambers: one each for whites, coloreds and Asians. The white House of Assembly will have 178 members, the colored House of Representatives 85, and the Asian House of Delegates 45. Each chamber will have a Ministers' Council to control its "own" affairs. Each chamber will also contribute members to a white-dominated council, designated to coordinate government policy under the direction of an executive State President. Whites will control the electoral college that chooses the new President. In other words, while coloreds and Asians will now have a voice in government, the decisive role will still belong to the whites.