South Africa: The Great White Laager

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wait on white customers in Johannesburg department stores, serve as typists, cashiers and bookkeepers for commercial firms, work beside whites at the lathes in auto plants and steel mills. The nation's gold mines are negotiating with the white miners' union for permission to put blacks into 2,000 skilled jobs that are now vacant. Africans have already taken over more than 10,000 traditionally white jobs on the government railroads, and are rapidly replacing whites behind the wheels of heavy trucks.

Verwoerd often boasts that the blacks of South Africa are better off than anywhere else on the continent. Economically he is right. What with decent paychecks (minimum daily wage for an unskilled laborer is $2.80) and easy credit, many an urban African can afford to buy imbuia wood furniture for his dining room, neat school uniforms for his children, and in some cases even a car for himself. Every year countless thousands of blacks from nearby countries flood into the republic looking for work—and the bright lights of the city life.

Verwoerd's regime has spent millions of dollars moving Africans out of Johannesburg's squalid shantytown "locations" and into new government housing in townships farther from the city. It has also built hundreds of schools, can point to the fact that the African literacy rate has nearly doubled in the past decade. But, points out a Johannesburg professor, "relative to its resources, South Africa does less for the African than any other country."

Murder in the Heart. On the surface, many Africans seem to be happy enough about apartheid. "We know what we have is ours, even if it is the gift of the white boss," says Ephraim Tchabalata, who has grown rich on a chain of dry-cleaning establishments and filling stations. The streets of the cities echo with the laughter of Africans, and the townships rock to the Beatle beat of guitars, strummed by young men wearing the cowboy hats that have become the latest rage. But all too often the smiles hide resentment. Says one African: "If I walk in the streets of Johannesburg and a white man kicks me, I will grin and say, 'Baas, you would have made a great soccer player.' But there is murder in my heart. I wear different masks for different white people all the time."

Not all the white people are happy with Verwoerd's state of affairs. There is a vocal minority of racists even more extremist than he is, who accuse him of doing too much for the "bloody kaffirs." His regime is widely criticized, moreover, for its refusal to allow television in South Africa—a restriction in tended both to keep out foreign "liberalist" programs (such as I Spy) and to protect the Afrikaans language against the incursions of English (there are no packaged shows in Afrikaans). A recent opinion poll showed that two-thirds of all white South Africans want TV, but Minister of Posts and Telegraphs Albert Hertzog, one of the most powerful men in the Nationalist Party, refuses to budge. "No, not, and never," he says, adding that TV is "the greatest destroyer of family life in the Western world."

Many whites, of course, are opposed to apartheid; in 1960 Verwoerd survived an assassination attempt by an anti-apartheid white farmer who shot him in the ear and jowl at a Johannesburg cattle show. But the opposition