South Africa 306 Solutions to a Baffling Problem

Since a solution to South Africa's grinding racial conflict seems to be beyond grasp, how about 306 solutions? That is exactly the suggestion made in a best-selling book that has raised a new controversy -- and won some surprising backers -- throughout the country. The book, South Africa: The Solution, proposes a Swiss-style confederation that would include a weak central government and 306 local bodies that could choose their own economic and social systems. Black radicals could set up Marxist cantons if they wished, and Afrikaner right-wingers could have their all-white enclaves. Everyone else could choose various systems somewhere between the extremes.

Sales of the book, in English and Afrikaans, have topped 25,000 and kept it on the nonfiction best-seller list for a year, a huge success in a country where nonfiction books usually sell no more than 5,000 copies. Husband-and- Wife Authors Leon Louw and Frances Kendall say they decided to write the book because those who oppose the apartheid system "know what they are against but need something to be for." Says Louw: "The struggle in this country is over who should dominate whom -- that is, who controls the very powerful central government. Our solution entails not having such a central government. We want to make it possible to let the tiger -- the black majority -- out of the cage without whites being eaten."

Louw, a lawyer who heads South Africa's Free Market Foundation, and Kendall, editor of a conservative newsletter, offer a libertarian plan that favors the least possible government and the freest possible enterprise. They point out, however, that their own preferences need not be accepted, since the cantonal system would allow residents of each local unit to select by vote the system they prefer. "All the existing political parties and movements would be likely to come to power somewhere," Louw says. "Then we'll be able to see what works."

At the top level of government, the authors propose a two-house parliament based on proportional representation of the political parties in the cantons. The central government's power would be limited strictly to essential national interests, such as the conduct of defense, national finance and foreign relations. Both houses, Louw and Kendall assume, would have a black majority. So too would almost all the cantons.

The cantons, the book suggests, should be the 306 magisterial districts that already exist in South Africa. Each canton would have its own parliament and possibly its own constitution. Every level of government would be barred from passing laws that discriminate on racial grounds and would be required to apply all laws equally to all races. "In other words," write the authors, "government would be color-blind."

In a more controversial passage, The Solution suggests that "all citizens would have the right to integrate or segregate voluntarily at their own expense." While no laws imposing segregation would be constitutional, neither would any that forced integration. Thus private firms would be free to discriminate. For economic reasons, however, the authors believe very few firms would refuse to deal with or serve blacks.