In northeast South Africa, in the heart of Zululand, my fellow travelers and I stayed with a group of Roman Catholic missionaries. Our guide and translator was Father John Berte, a simple and wonderful Italian missionary who moved to Zululand seven years ago to ”replace a friend who died here.”
He expects to die in South Africa, too, he told us. (The Catholic Church in South Africa is working hard for change but carries the yoke of years of silent partnership with the perpetrators and architects of apartheid.)
By bringing teachers, health services, some self-help activities and the hope of his religious principles into the tribal areas, Father Berte and his colleagues are part of the increasingly universal fight against the symptoms and roots of apartheid.
”I know it sounds dramatic,” he said, ”but I would be glad to die if I knew that the people leading the cause I would die for had really thought through to what will replace what we have now.” Over and over, he shook his head and whispered, ”Who is watching for South Africa`s tomorrow?”
All of us in the West who join in moral outrage and opposition to apartheid should consider the whispered plea of Father John Berte. By nearly all accounts in South Africa, the West`s strategy of disinvestment is working to force government reform and unify opposition to the pro-apartheid government. Ultimately, this is expected to be a major contributing force in apartheid`s collapse.
In the West, and particularly here in the United States, the campaign has used the slogan, ”If you`re not for disinvestment then you are for apartheid.” This slogan and campaign have worked to galvanize and focus near- universal hostility and frustration toward an intractable and morally tortured domestic policy. But the purpose of this strategy has been immediate: to bring down the government of P.W. Botha. It has not attended to the nation- state`s future; it is a strategy that works for today, but ”who is watching out for tomorrow?”
It is a strategy the South African government has brought upon itself. People anywhere have only four vehicles by which to influence or participate in political change: participatory democracy (the vote); patient moral suasion; economic force; and physical violence.
The South African government has virtually invited external intervention by denying its people any nonviolent means of solving their internal problems. Appeals to morality and patience have had little domestic effect, making violence of some sort–physical or economic–all but inevitable. Within South Africa, nonwhites have little access to economic force and so are resorting to physical violence. The rest of the world is trying to exercise economic force –a form of violence, insofar as one of its aims is to topple a government, but also (potentially) a constructive force if those who exercise it watch out for tomorrow.
Whether change comes to South Africa through the overthrow or the reform of the current government, that nation`s blacks, coloreds and Indians–85 percent of the total population–will for the first time have access to government leadership and significant political and economic power. The status quo will shift, and this–along with the escalating exodus of Western industry –will ensure that the white-controlled economy will not be able to continue in its current form. South Africa`s future economy will either be built upon shared ownership, leadership and employment among nonwhites and whites or it will change hands entirely to nonwhite control. In either case, nonwhites will play different economic roles and have different economic opportunities than they do now.
However, today few nonwhite South Africans have access to education in the literacy, technical and managerial skills necessary to function in (much less to lead) an industrial economy. Fewer still have had access to employment and training opportunities through which they could acquire these skills. If the economic South Africa of tomorrow will demand these skills, then the strategies we employ today must attend to them.
Disinvestment, by itself, plays no role in shaping tomorrow`s nonwhite-controlled economy. It simply ensures that it will happen. By itself, disinvestment contributes to revolution and to the collapse of the current government, but it does not contribute to the prospect of either a
transitional economy or a brand-new economy through opportunities to improve nonwhite education, to enhance the skills and upward mobility of the nonwhite work force, to train nonwhite business leaders and to move industrial sites closer to the homelands. In other words, the strategy of disinvestment pays no attention to tomorrow. This is why disinvestment, by itself, is simply not enough.
”If you`re not for disinvestment then you are for apartheid” is too simplistic an equation because it fails to attend to tomorrow. If we in the West are interested in helping South Africa shape a more democratic future, our campaign must support the shaping of a shared vision of what will be and not just the destruction of what exists. This means we must take disinvestment one step further; we must not only force change but also provide resources and opportunities for building the democratic political economy that South Africa may grow into.
To do this, we will need to think and speak in terms of a transitional
”replacement economy” created with new money and by the shifting of Western investments from the current (government-controlled) economy into economic activities that will enhance the prospects of successful nonwhite economic participation and leadership. We will need to get used to new terms: ”Selective disinvestment,” by which Western money is removed from only the South African investments that permit the government to continue to enforce apartheid and that do not enhance the replacement economy.
”Targeted investment,” by which Western investors are encouraged to place new money–along with the money they have selectively disinvested–into educational and employment training for nonwhites, into industrial development in and around the homelands, and into other investments that enhance the replacement economy.
And ”targeted philanthropy,” by which important facets of the replacement economy not likely to yield a direct or immediate profit for investors (such as early literacy education) may be supported by Western contributors through local charities.
We will need to employ new investment strategies, such as creating new industrial sites in and around the homelands, and implementing, along with them, a timeline for the training, development and transition of indigenous industrial leadership into ownership, partnership or subsidiary relationships. This is a call for the reorientation of an incredibly successful and volatile international campaign. It is a call for Western leaders and industrialists to adopt new strategies regarding South Africa–strategies we have not yet heard in the West, but that are supported by anti-apartheid South Africans. It is a call for the West to mount its campaign against apartheid on a higher plane; to not only disinvest today, but to invest in tomorrow.
