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In the poor white neighborhoods near Johannesburg, where the red brick row houses resemble those of Soweto, people are equally apprehensive. Says Mrs. Hestor Nortje, a widow: "We can live with the blacks, but can they live with us? There is so much suspicion, you don't know whether a man is going to kill you or not. If you live in the same area, the blacks will take the attitude they are better than the whites and take over."
As for blacks, their traditional concern has been with poverty and injustice, not revolution. They are anxious about wages, about their children's schooling, about losing their jobs and thus their legal right to remain in the urban townships. Their leaders, for the most part today, are in prison, in detention or in hiding. They have few spokesmen. Despite the current wave of arrests and bannings, tangible evidence of the power of the state, riots and strikes will probably go on. South Africa's best-known writer, Alan Paton (Cry, the Beloved Country), has described the black-white confrontation as "a nightmare of noncompromising power creating a noncompromising opposition." In Soweto, a former engineering student says defiantly, "They create the fury, then they suppress it. They feel they have controlled the situation by detaining our leaders, but we feel it is a declaration of war."
There is some evidence that one goal of the present crackdown on dissent is to reassure the right-wing verkrampte (narrow-minded) members of Vorster's National Party. To foreigners, the gruff Prime Minister may seem to be nothing more than a formidable reactionary. "He travels in an ox wagon always one length behind the train of history," a ranking British official observed last year. But Vorster is a pragmatist by comparison with many of his Afrikaner colleagues in government and a very shrewd politician as well. Thus, the new constitution could be interpreted as a concession to white moderates, including the verligte (enlightened) wing of the National Party, in that it gives coloreds and Asians a modest role in government. Conceivably, this gesture toward multiracialism in South Africa could be a first step toward allowing some black participation later.
Vorster need not be too worried about he U.N.'s mandatory arms embargo. Eventually, the embargo could hurt South Africa by depriving it of sophisticated new weaponry and technology. But as of today, South Africa's 41,000-man army is one of the best trained and best equipped on the continent; 130,000 reserves can be mobilized against invasion—or insurrection—within 48 hours. The only real gaps in the country's arms production at present are helicopter technology and warships. Last week France announced that it was canceling delivery of two submarines and two missile-launching corvettes, even though the ships had been ordered before the ban. The Israelis also said they would abide by the embargo, but some diplomats wondered whether the Israelis might be willing to circumvent it. Israel has been deeply involved in a number of military projects with the South Africans.