Arguing with South Africa

How to judge South Africa, and what to do about it, represents an exceptionally painful dilemma for the U.S. TIME Managing Editor Henry Grunwald just completed a two-week tour of the country. His impressions:

Americans should talk to South Africa not about morality, but about reality.

Most Americans would call South Africa's treatment of blacks immoral, but we are in a poor position to preach on this: our own progress in race relations has been too slow and too uncertain. The message we should convey to South Africans is that, right or wrong, their system of apartheid cannot endure. A society based on white supremacy and the absolute separation of the races can survive no more than other institutions that were overtaken by changing worlds, including feudalism, divine-right monarchy, colonialism and laissez-faire capitalism. The most frightening thing about South Africa is not just the system's inhumanity, but its air of illusion, of remoteness from the world and from reality.

To be in South Africa is to argue constantly on behalf of that world, that reality. In one's mind or out loud, one argues with whites ("Why don't you see?"), with blacks ("How do you take it?"), with oneself ("How would you feel if you lived here?").

In these arguments, it must first of all be conceded that justice is rarely simple, and that white South Africans do have a case. The case goes something like this:

White South Africans are not colonial rulers.

There is a large white nation here (more than 4 million whites, as against 270,000 in Rhodesia and 300,000 in preindependence Angola). Besides, white men established the first permanent settlement at the Cape long before blacks arrived in large numbers. True.

Blacks in South Africa are economically better off than most blacks in the newly independent countries. A great deal has been done for black education and welfare in South Africa. True.

If the black majority (21 million) took over, the government would not be democratic. Look at what has happened so far in black Africa, which is generally misruled and where scarcely a democracy in the Western sense survives. Probably true.

We are judged by a double standard: you make excuses for repression, cruelty and (reverse) racism in black African states, but you condemn them here. Often true.

Our blacks are not like your blacks. They are much closer to their primitive tribal origins. Tribal animosities and differences between black Africans—differences of language and culture—are profound. Given these differences, a unitary state would be torn by tribal hostilities. Possibly true.

The idea of "homelands" (quasi-independent territories for the blacks more or less based on tribal areas) is not as absurd as you usually make it out to be, because millions of black Africans do have deep attachments to the tribal areas where they were born and raised. True.

These arguments must be taken seriously. But they are not the end of the debate, only the beginning.