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And what about the blacks in all this? Although the arguments are about them, they are sometimes almost overlooked as people. Blacks in South Africa have two different incarnations. First there are the blacks on the streets, in the shops, in the factories. Locked into their own form of narrow white tribalism, whites deal with the blacks, pay them, talk of them in cliches, but do not really see them. Then there are "the blacks" as a large, looming abstraction, a vast uncertain threat. It casts an inevitable shadow over the heart breakingly lovely landscape, over everything that is done, every political act, every economic plan, every white hope. In the mind of the white South African, there is usually very little connection between the two incarnations: the houseboy, the factory worker, the shop assistant are so familiar and often so placid that one can scarcely link them with that other, menacing force. Partly that is because black life is hidden and to a great extent silent. And yet slowly, slowly, the two black images are converging. To the whites' shocked disbelief, this happened during the bloody Soweto riots a year ago, when ordinary blacks suddenly turned into embodiments of rage.
Although formal black leadership is constantly harassed and suppressed, there are innumerable blacks who think, talk and, indirectly, lead. Mostly they are bitter and angry. Their bitterness is directed not only at the government but at the liberals, who are seen as more hypocritical than the Afrikaner. When Diamond Tycoon Harry Oppenheimer and other leading, well-meaning white businessmen set up the Urban Foundation to help improve the quality of life of black Africans, the reaction of many black spokesmen was that this would simply ameliorate apartheid rather than change anything basic. Says one black African editor: "Oppenheimer wakes up one morning after a good dream and gives a million dollars. We don't want charity." The black hope for a peaceful solution has drastically diminished, but it has not disappeared. Says another black journalist: "There is not going to be a Congo here. Most black people would gladly move ahead and forget the past."
Yet the young high school students who have virtually taken over the black protest movement, and who were the leaders of the Soweto riots, sound very different (see story page 28). They have a new feeling of power, and they are disillusioned with their parents' efforts to bring about peaceful change and gradual concessions from the government. Most of the young are convinced that this approach has failed. There is much rhetoric about having nothing to live for, but something to die for.