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The A.N.C. is anathema to the South African government, partly for its Soviet support and the socialist rhetoric of its manifesto, partly because it is a national movement that attempts to override tribal divisions, precisely the opposite of the course taken by the regime. As for the three-year-old U.D.F., officials have accused it of being a stalking-horse for the A.N.C. It is a safe guess that the authorities will be seeking evidence to support this view during the emergency and particularly during the forthcoming treason trials of more than a score of U.D.F. leaders arrested over the past year.
Only in one black area, the Zulu political base of Chief Buthelezi, does the A.N.C face solid opposition. Buthelezi, once a member of the A.N.C., is now contemptuous of its policy of fighting from exile while calling itself the sole legitimate representative of South Africa's black population. Buthelezi points to the 1 million membership of his own political organization, Inkatha, as a contradiction of the A.N.C. claim. Even if the Zulu chief does not enjoy the nationwide popularity of Mandela and perhaps other A.N.C. leaders, he may yet emerge as a man with whom both blacks and whites could work. Last week he dismissed the government's limited reforms and its talk of negotiation as "stage-setting activities." There is "no reason to proclaim that real change is under way," he said, "because preparing to change is not changing."
The current crackdown also brought into the open a perceptible shift in attitude toward South Africa by some of its leading trading partners, including the U.S. Britain, which has at least $7 billion invested in South Africa, was critical of Botha's latest actions but continued to oppose sanctions and divestiture. As a senior Whitehall official explained, "We have the biggest lever, but we also have the most to lose." Nonetheless, London urged upon South Africa a prescription for reform that amounted to little less than a dismantling of apartheid: the release of Mandela and political prisoners, an end to the emergency, abolition of the pass laws, which control the movements of blacks, and the Group Areas Act, which restricts residency and movement of racial groups, and a commitment to "some kind of common citizenship for all South Africans."
France waited to make public its reaction until the ten foreign ministers of the European Community had issued a relatively restrained antiapartheid statement. Then, obviously dissatisfied, the French government announced that it was withdrawing Ambassador Michel Boyer and suspending all new French investment in South Africa. The action will not have a strong or immediate impact on French commercial ties with South Africa, but it underscored the chill in the atmosphere.