South Africa and free enterprise

National Review, March 4, 1988 by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

SOUTH AFRICA AND FREE ENTERPRISE

IT IS IRONIC that many countries ostensibly dedicated to the cause of freedom are doing their level best to destory free enterprise in South Africa, by their unthinking imposition of economic sanctions. Luckily they have not quite succeeded, and their ally, the Communist-dominated African National Congress (ANC), is no longer doing so well.

The government in Pretoria, meanwhile, has been trying very hard to speed up the growth of a black middle class. This has a dual purpose: to increase the number of well-heeled consumers who not only produce but buy goods, and to foster a class of property-owning blacks who would be resistant to revolutionary slogans.

Thanks to the fact that so many English-speaking South Africans voted for the (largely Afrikaner) National Party last time around, the present government has a comfortable enough majority in parliament that it can enact real reforms, not just cosmetic changes. De facto apartheid is withering away, and, on the purely economic front, the living standards of South African blacks have risen dramatically in recent years (while, owing to heavy taxation, the living standards of whites have leveled off).

If the government and the majority of the white population have made every effort to help the incipient black middle class, it is not least because in so doing they make the entire country richer. Everyone comes out ahead. (Everyone, that is, except the ANC, which has declared that a black bourgeoisie would be nothing more than a tool of the white bourgeoisie.) Several agencies, run by the government and funded by the South African business community, have been given the specific task of helping blacks make the transition. One such agency, the Small Business Development Corporation, gives credit and makes loans to blacks involved in existing or planned commercial enterprises. Parallel efforts have likewise been undertaken by the blacks themselves. The Reverend John Gogotya, for example, in the Cape Province, recently founded the Federal Democratic Party, dedicated to organic political evolution and non-violance, as well as the Organization for Advancement and Upgrading, which promotes education, industriousness, and social ambition among blacks. In Natal Province, Zulu Chief Buthelezi's Inkatha Movement has similar aims.

The new opportunities have not been lost on the country's blacks. Many South African blacks, it turns out, have a real knack for business, as well as a keen appreciation of the good things in life. And as barriers to material prosperity have fallen, so too have most of the barriers erected by apartheid: all the universities, the best hotels, the best restaurants have opened their doors to blacks. (Public schools, admittedly, are still segregated; private schools, mostly controlled by the churches, are integrated.)

What most impressed me on my latest trip, though, were the budding shantytown trading posts. In the slums of Soweto, near Johannesburg, and in Khayelitsha, near Crossroads, small shopos appear overnight as black squatters make the most of every opportunity they get to do business, legally or otherwise. The racially mixed South Africans ("coloureds") have done at least as well. Mitchell Plains, for instance, a coloured district near Capetown, is a bustling place with a cheerful, vaguely Italian atmosphere, elegantly dressed women, nice shops, arcades, and fountains.

Blacks are also making their way in white enterprises. In the mining, steel, and iron industries, however, the progress has been repeatedly blocked by the white trade unions. This is not surprising: the trade unions, afriad of black competition, were the main advocates of apartheid during the 1920s under the leadership of Bill Andrews. Andrews ended up as the General Secretary of the South African communist Party, and, in the violent demonstrations that shook Johannesburg sixty-odd years ago, demonstrators carried banners inscribed with the words, "Workers of the world, unite to keep South Africa white!"

Big business, by contrast, is traditionally color-blind. White enterprises have opened their doors to black employees--and not just as typists and secretaries. In the Development Bank of Southern Africa, a vast outfit active in various southern African countries, I met John September, a black junior executive who had studied in Switzerland, worked in a Swiss bank, and married a Frenchwoman. Before accepting his present position back home in South Africa, he insisted that his wife would not like to live in Soweto, not even in its elegant section, where one finds the villas of archbishop Tutu and Winnie Mandela. So the Septembers live in a pleasant white neighborhood, are socially accepted by many of their neighbors, and send their children to an integrated school. Thanks to his mastery of four languages, September is frequently sent to Europe by this firm.

THE UNITED STATES' racial experience has almost nothing in common with South Africa's. It is this fact that makes one hopeful that South Africa will be able to dismantle apartheid gradually, and with a minimum of violence and bloodshed. And as for people like His Grace, the Nobel Prize-winning Episcopal Archbishop of Johannesburg--people who want change now, at whatever price--the comment I heard from a black pastor in the Low German Reformed Church was brief and to the point: "Tutu--for me this is a four-letter word."