In the Afrikaans language. South West Africa, or Namibia,* is known as a dorsland, or land of thirst. It is a vast, desolate, sun-scorched and sand-blown country—desert for the most part, wild scrubland for the rest. Its Skeleton Coast takes its name from the eerie hulks of ships that foundered on the sandy shore, from ghost towns partly buried beneath the shifting desert, and from stark tombstones of long-dead diamond seekers.
Since 1915, when Afrikaner General Louis Botha rode into Windhoek, the capital, and accepted the surrender of the German colony there, the territory of South West Africa has been ruled by South Africa. Last week, following nearly two decades of argument over the fate of the area's 650,000 predominantly black inhabitants, the World Court voted 13 to 2 to end that mandate on grounds that the continued presence of South Africa was a "flagrant violation of the United Nations charter" and should be ended immediately. The court's verdict was "advisory" and therefore not binding. South African Prime Minister John Vorster quickly announced that he would ignore it.
The ruling is the latest effort by the international community to embarrass South Africa into abandoning its apartheid dominance of Namibia. Pressure to lever South Africa out of the territory began after World War II. Proponents of Namibian independence accuse South Africa of genocide and racial extermination, claiming that blacks are herded into "concentration camps" to be killed off as a result of inadequate medical attention. Some Afro-Asian petitioners to the U.N. went so far as to charge South Africa with constructing a "laboratory of death" in the desert for the production of atomic bombs and nerve gas to try out on the blacks.
Reporters invited into the country in recent weeks found no evidence of genocide or concentration camps (the alleged "death house" proved to be an institute for aeronomy). What they did find was an ambitious and costly experiment to prove that apartheid can work. Vorster says that South Africa's administration is designed "to promote the well-being and progress of the inhabitants."
Separate Development. Twice the size of California, Namibia is populated by a number of disparate tribes, ranging from the dominant Ovambos (350,000) to a community of 10,000 bushmen, the Stone Age aborigines of Africa, who use the Kokerboom tree to make quivers for their arrows. Each group has its own identity and roughly defined territory, or "homeland"; that is true of even the 16,000 "basters" (literally, bastards), a mulatto group in Rehoboth.
The crux of the program is to divide South West Africa into eleven Bantustans, or homelands. The goal is self-determination and eventual independence for the black "nations" of the territory; it is identical to the plan that the Pretoria government is working out to create eight black Bantustans within South Africa's own borders.