(3 of 8)
Prime Minister John Vorster expresses this view with unshakable conviction. Showing an intransigence that recalls Golda Meir without the humor, he insists that his policy is right and the rest of the world is wrong. "What do you want us to do?" and "We will not commit suicide" are phrases that keep echoing Golda. Blacks will have the vote in their homelands, he insists, but not in white South Africa. "The blacks came here to get jobs, which they need. That is enough. We don't also have to give them political rights. They understand this when they accept the jobs. They will never be part of our Parliament." In other words, the blacks in the "white homeland" are "residents" from other countries, much like the guest workers in Western Europe (a comparison frequently made).
That notion might be tenable if all black Africans were indeed guest workers who came for a few years. Many are, but well over half of all blacks in industrial areas were born there. South Africa's black labor force is indispensable to the survival of the country's industrialized economy—and to the whites' very good life.
To tell these workers that they are foreigners, living in black gulags, and can express their political voice only in distant homelands is sheer fantasy.
Indeed, fantasy abounds. Official South Africa has an extraordinary belief in the Word, in the notion that if something is said, it is done. Thus the government seriously asserts that there is no discrimination based on color, but only separate development, a necessary chance for all groups to safeguard their identities. Race discrimination, of course, is minutely written into the statute books—an outgrowth of the Afrikaners' urge to codify. A prominent member of a South African foundation declares with an almost palpable wink: "We could strip apartheid legislation from the books and yet nothing need change. We could accomplish all the same things by local regulations or custom."