Hazardous Courses in Southern Africa

George F. Kennan

From Foreign Affairs, October 1970

George F. Kennan was a career officer in the U.S. Foreign Service from 1926 to 1953, retiring as Ambassador to the Soviet Union. He was later a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Secondly, slight as may seem the prospects for any early change in the political situation of the non-Whites in South Africa, it cannot be said that their situation in other respects is unchanging or that its development does not have hopeful aspects. The Nationalists, when reproached over the evils of apartheid, often say in reply: "Give us time. The native will have, ultimately, no complaint. But we will do things in our own time and our own way." Whether the Nationalist concept of the end to be ultimately achieved is the same as that of the many foreign critics may be doubted; but the point made here is not entirely without substance. Real incomes among the urban Bantu, even allowing for inflationary tendencies, are increasing by about four percent per annum. Bantu are being brought into the labor market at a rate of about 2 1/2 percent per annum. Educational opportunities, already in some respects far ahead of those existing in the black-ruled countries to the north, are showing steady improvement, particularly at the primary and trade school levels. The wage disparities, as between Whites and Blacks, are of course excessive and onerous and deserve prompt correction. But one must not forget that there are severe limits to the pace at which this correction could safely be effected. A sudden and complete removal of these disparities would unquestionably undermine the competitive viability of great sections of the South African mining and industrial establishment, which now give employment to hundreds of thousands of black Africans, and would in many instances force the closing of the enterprises, with consequences disastrous to black African living standards.

In judging South African conditions much depends, invariably, on the perspective of the viewer. It will thus be pointed out, in rebuttal of what has just been said, that if living standards among the Blacks are improving, those of the Whites are improving even faster; and a similar point will be made with respect to educational advancement. All this is true. But it would be wrong to ignore the extent to which the rapid economic development of the country is beginning to exert upon the white leadership an effective discipline in the direction of re-thinking some of the extremisms of apartheid. The severe shortage of white labor is compelling, in ever-increasing degree, the admission of Blacks into positions within the industrial structure which, under a strict interpretation of the apartheid concepts and regulations, they would not have been expected or permitted to occupy. The realization is steadily spreading, furthermore, among white business men and political leaders, that a great modern economy such as that of South Africa cannot continue to thrive or even to achieve a proper balance unless and until the majority of the population comes to command a strong purchasing power and to give proper dimensions to the consumers' market. In general, it may be said that there is a basic conflict between the concepts of separate development that now constitute the official ideology of the régime, on the one hand, and the needs of a successful and rapidly expanding industrial economy, on the other; and if the stormy pace of economic growth is continued, this conflict is bound to produce changes, and favorable ones, in the position of the non-white portions of the population.

Thirdly, it should be recognized that any sound and fair criticism of racial conditions in South Africa must bear in mind the position and interests not just of Whites and black Africans but also of the other racial groups, notably the Indians and the Cape Coloureds. It is by no means certain that their interests would be served by the sweeping, simplistic solutions to which the more emotional of the foreign critics are prone.

Finally, the foreign observer has to bear in mind that while a relaxation or removal of the present racial régime would presumably solve some of the problems of the native black South African, it would solve by no means all of them. Those that would remain would be problems of great seriousness, and ones that could not conceivably be solved except in intimate collaboration with the white community. There could be many illustrations of this; but a particularly vivid one might be found in the problem of the native "homelands" -- the rural areas in which, ideally under the concepts of apartheid, the native Africans are eventually to find their permanent homes and to achieve complete autonomy and, in some instances, even independence.

It is true that these areas (and notably the greatest and most important of them -- the Transkei), over-grazed, poor in resources, poor in capital, and overpopulated as they now are, would be quite incapable, in any foreseeable circumstances, of harboring successfully anything like the totality of the tribal groups theoretically assigned to them, many of whose members now reside in the large urban and industrial centers of the "white" area. To this extent the theory of apartheid is unrealistic as well as unjust. But it would be wrong to assume that the abolition of apartheid would produce anything resembling a solution of this problem.

The basic problem here is, as in other African countries that have no racial difficulty at all, sheer overpopulation. Present estimates are that instead of the expected 19,000,000 black Africans by the year 2,000, the figure on which governmental policies with respect to the homelands have heretofore been based, the actual figure will be closer to 35 to 40 million. The most optimistic estimates of the economic development of the homelands afford no reason to hope that these regions will be able to cope even with the existing black population, let alone anything resembling this increase. The existing program for construction of "border industries" just outside the homelands, to which the inhabitants of the latter could commute on a daily basis, will solve only a small part of the problem. The only other visible alternative is the continued residence of great masses of these people in the major urban areas, where the birth rate among them is only about one-half what it is in the rural areas, and where, theoretically at least, one might hope for a relative stabilization of their numbers.

But there are limits, as can easily be observed even in places remote from South Africa, to the rate at which any great city can successfully absorb immigrants from a primitive rural culture. And it is hard to conceive that any political régime could achieve much more in this respect than the present South African régime is achieving. One has to remember that the municipality of Johannesburg, South Africa's greatest city, has contrived to build on its own outskirts, just in the past two decades, a complete new city of individual homes, nearly 75,000 of them, complete with amenities such as schools, sport facilities and the greatest hospital in the Southern Hemisphere, to house over a half-million black Africans, many of whom previously resided in the most wretched sort of shantytowns. The position of the inhabitants of this vast native "township" leaves much to be desired in a number of respects, particularly as regards policing and transportation; but it would be unfair to the South African authorities not to recognize the magnitude of the effort they have put forward. A glance at the comparable records of great cities elsewhere should suffice to show that it is not likely that this sort of progress in the absorbing of a rural native population into urban areas could be much accelerated under any other conceivable régime.

The foreign critic, therefore, in weighing South Africa's problems, has to remember that the question of racial discrimination represents by no means the totality of them, and that there are some, including a few of the most profound and bitter ones, that could not possibly be mastered without the continued enthusiastic commitment -- and this means in many respects the leadership -- of the white South African community on whose shoulders the responsibilities of government now rest. The two communities are mutually dependent in a way that Whites and Blacks farther north in Africa never were; and the problems of neither can be solved by the destruction or permanent frustration of the other.

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