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Africa raises haunting questions of history and conscience. As a Westerner in Africa, one finds it hard to avoid the familiar but stunning fact that no advanced civilization, no written language ever existed south of the Sahara. One contemplates the mysterious ruins of Zimbabwe, from which black nationalists have taken the new name for Rhodesia, and which are pointed to with pride as a remnant of a great African past. No one is sure who built this temple city, probably in the last half of the 15th century, but one is struck by the fact that, for all its grandeur, it was erected stone by stone, without mortar, with the most primitive technology, at a time when the Pyramids were ancient, when the Acropolis was old, when Chartres was no longer new. It is no use denying that in Africa one often feels a sense of Western cultural superiority, and this contributes to the white South African attitude.
Anthropologists used to explain Africa's lack of development as a result of climate; more recently it has been argued that African culture was not backward, only different from the West's. In any event, one must remember that in a sense Africa is our common past (through fossil finds of increasing antiquity, man's evolutionary origins have been traced to East Africa). Besides, there are intimations in Africa's remnants of unspoiled nature, of secure tribal life, that we have lost something in what we regard as our gains. But the greatest of these gains is indeed crucial: Western technology is an unprecedented equalizing force, largely erasing the differences of tradition, culture, race that white South Africans have enshrined as religion.
It is understandable that the South Africans' sense of reality is different from ours. They are caught in a tragedy of history, not entirely of their own making. If 4 million white Americans were living in a country with 21 million blacks (or 21 million American Indians, as South Africans often gleefully suggest), how would they act? Wouldn't they also fear that any significant political concession would, in Vorster's word, "swamp" them? Wouldn't they try to hold on to what they built (with black labor, of course)? And yet the longer real change is delayed, the harder it will be to achieve any sort of moderate settlement or work out a partnership between black and white. Right now that may still be possible—just barely. The situations are different, but Rhodesia's Ian Smith could have had a much better deal, with a moderate black regime, ten years ago than he can possibly have now. If the South African government refuses to change, it will assure an interminable series of explosions, terror, guerrilla war, the radicalization of the blacks.
It is difficult to ask the South Africans to risk so much. Yet if they fail to move, they risk still more. Even if they manage to delay the inevitable for a generation or more, they will simply transfer the burden to their offspring. They may buy time for themselves, but they will doom their own children to the terrible battle with the children of Soweto.