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In South Africa, there is criticism of U.S. policy from some who might be most expected to support it. "Even those who once sympathized with Washington's concern over black conditions and rights are dismayed," reports TIME Johannesburg Bureau Chief William McWhirter. "Many young blacks in South Africa, who believe that Washington's way offers no solution at all, are turning instead to the growing influence of Cuba and the Soviet Union. It was only three years ago, during their lightning advance across Angola, that Zambia's anxious President Kenneth Kaunda rushed to confer with Prime Minister John Vorster, describing the Communists as the 'plundering tigers of Africa.' What are those same tigers now doing right? Nothing very different. But at least they are candid about their own self-interest and know when to hand out the arms and shut up."
The Administration's basic problem, the critics charge, is that its rhetoric does not seem to encompass the realities of African politics. White South Africans, particularly, feel that U.S. moral judgments are hypercritical and based on a double standard—an argument that helped Vorster win a huge majority in last fall's national elections. A case in point: Carter in Lagos criticized injustice in South Africa but made no mention of the fact that Nigeria is a tough military dictatorship; criminals are regularly executed every Saturday on the Lagos beach. As the Afrikaner newspaper Beeld put it: "Morality is binding universally or not at all." On Rhodesia, the South Africans feel that Washington has made a number of strategic errors, initially by failing to use enough persuasive force on the Patriotic Front leaders to make some kind of deal with Smith, and then by trying to undercut the internal settlement as the basis for further negotiations.
Another sore point for the South Africans is Namibia. Carter referred to South Africa's intransigence in his Lagos speech, but failed to mention that the Marxist SWAPO (South West African People's Organization) has also rejected a settlement plan put forward by five Western powers. Carter only regretted, and did not condemn, the cold-blooded murder of Herero Chief Clemens Kapuuo, who almost certainly was the victim of a SWAPO assassination campaign directed against moderate black Namibians. One famous South African, Heart Surgeon Christiaan Barnard, charges that Washington refuses to accept admittedly imperfect internal settlements in Namibia as well as Rhodesia, even though the U.S. acquiesced to naked Marxist takeovers in Angola and Mozambique. "It is not majority rule that Carter is asking for," Barnard says, "it is black rule by pre-selected majority."
The critique by black Africa is different but also pointed. Reports TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief David Wood: "The days of the ugly American may be over, as Carter said in Lagos, but some Africans feel that they are being given a superficial, kiss-off kind of attention, a razzle-dazzle diplomacy begun by Henry Kissinger and continued by Andy Young."