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South Africa's Future: Violence or Negotiation?
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12766 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1987 |
3,087 Words |
| Author
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Mangosuthu G. Buthelezi
Mangosuthu G. Buthelezi is chief minister of KwaZulu,
president of Inkatha (the largest black political organization
in South African history), and chairman of the South Africa
Black Alliance. He spoke at the Heritage Foundation on
November 24, 1986. |
The idiom of the American media and the content of American debate on South Africa indicates to me that people in the United States just have not grasped the extent to which the politics of negotiation is under siege in South Africa. Some would report: What politics of negotiation? And they would point to white political recalcitrance and the refusal of the state president to actually get going with meaningful reform. Such people have to understand that the politics of negotiation starts a long time before people actually sit around a negotiating table. The actual negotiations around that table will be a culminating event of the politics of negotiation. It is the process that leads to negotiations that is now so threatened in South Africa.
Americans are aware of the fact that, when it comes to the final negotiations about who is actually going to form a government in any country, negotiations invariably fail. If this were not the case you would not have Beirut-type situations and you would not have many of the revolutions that take place across the length and breadth of the world. Revolutionaries in South Africa already are just not interested in negotiations. ZANU and ZAPU leaders did not enter negotiations until they had in fact already defeated the Smith regime in all but final deed. The collapse of Smith's government was inevitable by the time he went into negotiations, and this inevitability made the Lancaster House negotiations possible. Frelimo leaders did not negotiate before they had won the fight against the Portuguese colonial administration in all but final deed. The ANC Mission in Exile see themselves moving to a similar position, so they do not want negotiations now.
The final kill
What prospects are there, then, for negotiations to get off the ground in South Africa? This is not my question. It is a skeptical American question. There is pessimism about the politics of negotiation now in South Africa because these Americans I am referring to are drawing parallels between what happened in Mozambique and Zimbabwe and what is happening in South Africa. People like Randall Robinson already in fact believe that if the ANC is not the central negotiating party on the side of blacks, there is no prospect for successful negotiations. This was also the view of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group. They, too, persist in seeing the ANC Mission in Exile as a prime negotiating partner, or perhaps the only black negotiating power, and they retain some kind of idealistic belief that, if Pretoria started to move toward the negotiating table, the ANC would soften its approach and participate in black democracy which
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