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Amid the evasions, rationalizations and semantic games, some very real change is occurring, even though many white Africans still oppose even the small concessions the government has made. "Change" itself, like "progress," is a dirty word, regarded as a code term for subversion. The euphemism to be used is "movement." Two years ago, a leading Afrikaans writer, Leon Rousseau, was savaged by fellow Afrikaners when he called for "penance" and a "national admission of guilt." Yet this spring the Afrikaner Writers Guild adopted a resolution declaring itself against "a dispensation in which the majority of our population is denied humanitarian and basic rights." In a new interracial group called Women for Peace, Afrikaners have started a continuing dialogue with blacks, discussing their problems and busing in children from the black townships to play with their own. Another group of women, most of them white, called the Black Sash, has demonstrated against "unjust" laws for many years and runs advice offices to help Africans who run afoul of the pass laws (the regulations that require blacks to carry identity papers at all times and restrict their movements). Most South African businessmen are convinced that blacks must be brought along farther and faster in the economy. There have been some changes in "petty apartheid." Whites boast that "international" hotels have been opened to blacks, and that blacks now participate in white sports, which has great symbolic meaning. All this would have been impressive ten or 15 years ago, but in today's world it is far too little and too late.
In the dreaded area of "power sharing," too, a minority has recognized that change must come. But even the most progressive whites do not look for one-man, one-vote reform, under which the whites would obviously be outvoted. They are more or less desperately searching for other devices. One of the most frequently heard catch phrases has to do with moving away from the "Westminster system" of parliamentary representation toward some form of presidential or federal system. One notion is to qualify black suffrage on the basis of education or property. Another is to have the several "communities"—whites, blacks, coloreds (people of mixed blood)—choose representative bodies to run their local affairs. They would come together in a sort of federal body, but not on the basis of proportional representation, in order to protect the whites from being outvoted. Who would preside over this body, and how it could equitably handle national matters such as taxation, is not clear. Vorster professes to be skeptical of all such schemes. With characteristic bluntness he says: "Any alternative to the Westminster model is for whites, not for blacks. You either have the vote or you don't have it. There is no in-between stage."