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.

Stretching southward from the two great river systems of the Congo and the Zambesi to the confluence of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and thus comprising roughly the southern third of the African continent, there lies a vast area, about two-thirds the size of the United States, which constitutes in its entirety one of the principal problem-children of the world community. Consisting largely of an arid central plateau, with lower coastal strips only partially suitable for human habitation, this region harbors a population of some 41,000,000, of whom, in approximate terms, 34,000,000 might be of black African origin, 4,500,000 of European, and the remainder of mixed or other blood. It is made up of a number of highly disparate political entities: the great Portuguese dependencies of Angola and Mozambique, the highly controversial territories of Rhodesia and South West Africa, the Republic of South Africa, and the three former British High Commission territories, now independent: Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana.

With the exception of these last-named entities, which make up only a small portion of the whole, there is no part of this area which has not been in recent years the subject of violent discontent, debate, protest and conflict in the United Nations and in world opinion generally. Controversy has centered, of course, on the political relations existing there between people of European origin and the black Africans who constitute everywhere the majority. This is scarcely surprising. The area contains at least 90 percent of the entire white population of Africa, as against 11 percent of its Blacks. Of the white inhabitants, furthermore, a considerable proportion have been settled in Africa for many generations, having even in some instances come no later than did the Blacks to the settlement of the regions in which they are now residing. In these circumstances racial problems were bound to be of a different order -- greater in scale, emotionally more acute -- than elsewhere in Africa. It could scarcely have been otherwise. This distinction notwithstanding, the demands of the international community, particularly as formulated by the senior bodies of the United Nations, have tended to be no different than those previously raised with relation to the African countries farther north: i.e. immediate decolonization, in the case of the Portuguese territories, and the establishment everywhere of régimes drawn, whether by democratic means or otherwise, from the black African majorities.

Elsewhere in Africa these demands have been generally accepted. In southern Africa, aside from the three former High Commission territories, the controlling powers have resolutely refused to accept them, alleging them to be demagogically inspired, historically unjust, economically unrealistic and detrimental even to the interests of the black African populations involved. The resulting political conflict, massive and tragic, has now weighed heavily, over a period of several years, on the stability of international life: preëmpting large sections of U.N. debate, complicating relations among outside powers, interfering with normal cultural and commercial as well as political contacts throughout the region, reducing greatly the contribution this region, itself the seat of most of the industrial strength of Africa, could make to the life of the remainder of the continent and indeed to world affairs generally.

II

It may be best, in tackling the bundle of problems that southern Africa presents, to go first to the one that is the most difficult and recalcitrant of all as well as being the one that involves the largest number of people, namely, South Africa itself.

It should perhaps be made clear at the outset that the present examination does not rest on any disposition to minimize the evils of South African apartheid. These are real, ubiquitous, shocking and depressing. It is idle to argue whether the fault proceeds from the nature of the theories these policies are designed to serve or from the manner in which the theories are put into execution. No merits of theory could justify, and no deficiencies of execution excuse, the inequities and inhumanities which the present system obviously produces. This is a painful indictment to make for one who has many South African friends whose goodwill he credits and whose feelings he respects. Candor, unfortunately, permits no other judgment.

One can accept, and even sympathize with, the theory that in a country which is a veritable jumble of cultures and races each of the cultural or racial groups should enjoy the privilege of retaining its traditional identity and developing its life in its own way. But none of this would seem to necessitate or to justify either the general condition of denial to the majority of the population of any effective voice in the shaping of the larger aspects of its own condition or a whole series of specific anomalies, injustices and hardships which the laws and practices of the South African régime now impose. Among these latter might be mentioned: the viciousness of the pass laws and their enforcement; the absurdities and extremisms of petty apartheid; the multitudinous hardships inflicted on the urban Bantu by the régime's insistence on clinging to the absurd theory of the temporary nature of their residence in the urban areas; the power and disposition of the police to ignore, almost at will, the protection afforded to the individual by an otherwise excellent judicial system; the magnitude of the disparities in wages and in public expenditure on education as between Whites and non-Whites; and the hardships worked by the recent inclusion under the strictures of apartheid of the Asians and the Cape Coloureds -- the latter, in particular, a people, largely Afrikaans-speaking, who have no culture, no tongue and no remembered past other than those of the Whites who inflict these strictures upon them. (This listing is only illustrative, not inclusive.)

There are, on the other hand, a number of circumstances relative to this indictment, often ignored in Western opinion, which, while they do not excuse the conditions in question, go far to explain them and to make clear why suitable alternatives are not always easy to discover.

It should be recognized, first of all, that the South African Whites, and the Afrikaners in particular, are confronted with a very real problem when it comes to maintaining, in the face of a large black African majority, their own historical and cultural identity. It is a remarkable identity, forged and affirmed over the course of centuries, at times in struggle and adversity, and against a background of circumstances in some respects different from that which any other people has ever had to face. It is an identity in which, as in the case of the Israeli, national components are mixed, for better or for worse, with religious ones; and the Afrikaners are no more inclined to jeopardize it, by placing themselves entirely in the power of a surrounding foreign majority, than are their Middle Eastern counterparts. They would die rather than do so; and it is simply useless to come at them with demands which suggest that it is this that is expected of them.