Unbanned in Johannesburg? - African National Congress holds rally

POLITICAL change moves on apace in South Africa, no less headily , or confusedly, than in the Communist bloc. The African National Congress is still a "banned organization"; but last week it was permitted to stage a huge rally in a Johannesburg soccer stadium to welcome the eight ANC leaders released from prison. The government, faced with the need to abolish the last vestiges of aparetheid but also with the cautionary examples of dictatorship and economic collapse in South Africa's neighbors to the north, is obviously trying to gauge what degree of change will decrease tension--and what degree might create a dangerous revolution of rising expectations.

One card the government holds: even some fairly radical blacks have also noticed the economic effects of doctrinaire socialism. They will say, when it is pointed out to them that blacks in South Africa are much better off economically than blacks elsewhere in Africa, that they don't want to be compared with blacks elsewhere in Africa, they want to be compared with South African whites. Hence the point of an editorial in the Johannesburg newspaper Business Day which said that the government's best hope is to unban some of these Marxist organizations (though not their military arms) and engage them in debate. If they start being seen not as martyrs, but as purveyors of nostrums that are collapsing everywhere else in the world, there may yet be a way to foster genuine change while avoiding the fate of Rhodesia.