South Africa Stiff Challenge, Swift Reaction

The headline of the full-page advertisement that appeared last week in 22 English-language newspapers across South Africa said simply, LET THE A.N.C. SPEAK FOR ITSELF. The ad then urged State President P.W. Botha to legalize the outlawed African National Congress, which that very day was holding a 75th-anniversary celebration at its headquarters-in-exile in Lusaka, Zambia. Prominently featured in the advertisement was a silhouette of Nelson Mandela, the A.N.C.'s symbolic leader, who is serving out a life sentence at Pollsmoor Prison, near Cape Town. The advertisement, placed by 18 antiapartheid and church groups, asserted that "there can be no solution to this country's problems without the participation of the A.N.C."

The government's response to the ad was swift. By midnight it had extended emergency press regulations to forbid publication of "any advertisement or report calculated to improve or promote the public image or esteem of an organization which is unlawful." Likewise forbidden were attempts to praise, defend, explain or justify the actions of illegal political groups. The import of the new rules was clear: any positive mention of the A.N.C. would be judged "subversive" and subject editors to a $9,000 fine, a ten-year prison term or closure of their publications.

The ad represented the most brazen of several challenges last week to the Pretoria government. In the coastal city of Port Elizabeth, the Rev. Allan Hendrickse, one of Botha's two nonwhite Cabinet ministers, led a group of 30 | protesters to whites-only King's Beach for a chilly ten-minute "splashabout" in defiance of the law. Proclaimed Hendrickse: "This is God's beach!" In the Transvaal, Ster-Kinekor, South Africa's main distributor of foreign films, said it would stop supplying U.S. productions from Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures unless whites-only admissions policies were dropped. Ster-Kinekor said it was under pressure from the two U.S. filmmakers.

Such continuing pressure on Pretoria was cold comfort to A.N.C. President Oliver Tambo as he presided over anniversary festivities in Lusaka. There were speeches, rallies and a birthday cake decorated with icing in black, green and gold, the A.N.C.'s colors. But the most remarkable event was Tambo's speech, in which he played down the bloody guerrilla tactics that the A.N.C. has advocated in recent years. Instead, he embarked on a more moderate approach, pledging that "civilians, both black and white," would not be harmed by A.N.C. fighters. He called on whites to "come together in a massive democratic coalition" with blacks. Declared Tambo: "Our white compatriots have to learn the truth, that it is not democracy that threatens their future. Rather, it is racist tyranny."