South Africa: Strategy for Change

Chester A. Crocker

From Foreign Affairs, Winter 1980/81

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Summary:  Something strange is occurring in the U.S.-South African relationship. At a time when our two societies need each other more than before, it is becoming unclear which one is more effective in exploiting divisions in the other. After nearly 20 years in which successive Republican and Democratic administrations have established some modest guidelines for U.S. policy, it has become fashionable to question whether the United States even has a policy toward South Africa. The fragile centrist consensus that so urgently needs to be strengthened among Americans instead founders in a fog of stereotypes and polarized perceptions about the country. On their side, South Africans are so enmeshed in their own internal ferment and so disenchanted with the recent American performance (globally as well as in southern Africa) that they view the United States increasingly as an object for manipulation, an ineffectual and reactive power.

Chester A. Crocker is Director of African Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University and Associate Professor of International Relations at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. Among his recent publications is South Africa into the 1980s, coedited with Richard E. Bissell.

Something strange is occurring in the U.S.-South African relationship. At a time when our two societies need each other more than before, it is becoming unclear which one is more effective in exploiting divisions in the other. After nearly 20 years in which successive Republican and Democratic administrations have established some modest guidelines for U.S. policy, it has become fashionable to question whether the United States even has a policy toward South Africa. The fragile centrist consensus that so urgently needs to be strengthened among Americans instead founders in a fog of stereotypes and polarized perceptions about the country. On their side, South Africans are so enmeshed in their own internal ferment and so disenchanted with the recent American performance (globally as well as in southern Africa) that they view the United States increasingly as an object for manipulation, an ineffectual and reactive power.

With Zimbabwe's independence and Namibia's uncertain but inexorable movement in the same direction, Americans have to come to some minimal level of agreement about the question of South Africa. The problem is that the land of apartheid operates as a magnet for one-dimensional minds. How do we overcome the disturbing tendency to treat this troubled land as a political fire sale to be ransacked for confirmation of previously held convictions?

The beginning of wisdom is to recognize that Americans need to do their homework and become less gullible in responding to the dissonant babble of voices from South Africa. A working familiarity with the country's major actors and institutions would help. South Africa is a vast and varied country, and one rarely meets the residents of Cradock or Koopmansfontein. Instead, one meets the urbane business elite, embittered black exiles, white refugees forecasting Armageddon, or slick hucksters of the status quo peddling a message of krugerrands, the Cape route and chrome reserves. More attention must be focused on those South Africans-the Afrikaners and the African majority-who are shaping and challenging the current order.

Another hurdle is coming to grips with our own parochialism. South Africa is an alien place where people dwell on potential or actual threats to their economic, political and physical survival and where they bargain on the basis of well-founded distrust. In South Africa, most players are speaking to multiple audiences-across borders, across ethnic lines, and within the group. It is worth the effort to become adept at reading between the lines of political rhetoric, much as observers of any other important country do.

The many changes occurring today in South Africa are inherently ambiguous. Nonetheless, it should be possible at least to agree that black politics are characterized by an increasingly confident experimentation with various strategies for challenging white control, while white politics are demonstrating a degree of fluidity and pragmatism that is without precedent in the past generation. The combination does not make meaningful evolutionary change certain, but it does make it possible for the first time in decades.

II

In deciding the course of American policy, we need to have ...

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