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The unrest comes, ironically, at a time when the regime can point to some measurable improvement in the lot of its black majority. The Botha government has loosened a number of minor racial restrictions and, more important, reformed the country's segregationist labor laws. One effect of that change, according to a leading South African labor and industrial consulting firm, Andrew Levy and Associates Ltd., is that the trade union movement is likely to be come "a major vehicle for black political aspirations."
Black membership in trade unions more than tripled between 1980 and 1983, to 670,000. Blacks now make up 43.4% of total union strength, whites just under 34%, and Indians and people of mixed race not quite 23%. Whites on average still earn more than four times as much as blacks. Yet real income for whites has declined slightly during the past decade, while average black income has climbed by more than 50%, to $1,560 a year. By the year 2000, the black population is expected to account for more than half of South Africa's consumer purchasing power.
The increase in blacks' economic clout has not yet made any significant difference in their li ving conditions or in the tremendous onesidedness of government spending on education ($87 per pupil for blacks, $659 for whites). Blacks are typically crowded into dreary suburban town ships like Soweto (pop. about 1.5 million), where electricity is only now being introduced, almost no stores are permitted, and few homes are privately owned. Blacks cannot live, work or even walk where they want to without permission, and are forbidden to marry across the col or line. Despite the reduction in social or "petty" apartheid, they are still denied equal rights on buses and trains, and in restaurants and hotels in many places.
Some of those conditions may change after the new tricameral Parliament begins its inaugural session in January. President Botha is expected to introduce a substantial agenda of reform legislation, if only to give the limited power-sharing arrangement some badly needed credibility. Informed South African sources expect that laws against mixed marriages and interracial sex will be repealed in the next year. Parliament may also consider legislation to ease current restrictions on nonwhite, especially black, ownership of homes.
An additional prospect for change in South Africa appeared last week in faraway Manhattan. A group of executives representing 120 U.S. corporations, whose firms last year accounted for much of the $2.3 billion in U.S. direct investment in South Africa, unanimously endorsed a new anti-apartheid strategy prepared under the auspices of the Rev. Leon H. Sullivan, pastor of the Zion Baptist Church in Philadelphia, who has long been a civil rights activist. The latest version of the "Sullivan principles" commits the companies to support freedom of mobility for black workers, the unrestricted right of black businesses to locate in South African urban areas, and the eventual end of all apartheid laws. The methods of pursuing those goals, said Sullivan, "will be determined as we go."