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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, NOVEMBER 18, 1983
PAGE 9
Under terms of the new Constitution, Coloreds and Indians will gain a
measure of representation through their own separate Parliaments.
A
powerful executive president will have the power to resolve disputes
between the three legislatures.
The president will be elected by an
electoral college of 50 whites, 25 Coloreds and 13 Indians. It is widely
expected that Mr. Botha will become president when the new tri-cameral
legislative system comes into effect, sometime in mid-to-late 1984.
The world, as expected, was not impressed with South Africa's decisive
change of direction. The U.N. General Assembly heaped scorn on Pretoria to
the tune of a 141-0 vote of condemnation. The main bone of contention, of
course, is that the new constitution does not provide for adding South
Africa's native Black African peoples--70% of the population--to the
national voting rolls.
In this regard, the South African policy of
"separate development" remains essentially the same as before. In other
words, Africans are to exercise their political rights in their various
national homelands, which are in the process of being elevated to the level
of independent states. Four of these homelands have already sought, and
have been given, independence from South Africa, though the world community
disdains recognition of them.
( It is possible that, in the future, some
sort of political representation will be given to those Africans who have
more or less permanently left their homelands and who live and work in
"white" areas.)
The new change is far from the "cosmetic sham" that South Africa's critics
contend.
Both the Colored community (2.7 million people, largely
concentrated in Cape Province) and the Indians (850,000, mainly in the
Durban, Natal region) are "first world" peoples, closely intermingled with
South Africa's whites (who number roughly four million) in culture and
language. Yet they have existed in somewhat of an inbetween world which
could not go on forever. They both have no homelands to retreat to. The
whites' self-interest in this whole issue is the hope that these two
groups, in concert with the whites, will make South Africa stand stronger
against world pressures.
Whether such harmonious cooperation occurs or
not, only time will tell.
(For the Coloreds, the new arrangement
represents a fair turnabout. They were once on the national voting rolls
but were removed by the Afrikaner-based National Party when it came to
power in 1948. The Indians have never had national-level voting power. But
both groups have conducted their own affairs at the local level. I saw some
very lively Indian election campaigns in Natal in 1976.)
Comparisons are not exact, but South Africa's Coloreds--a racially-mixed
group going back to the country's very origins--are roughly comparable to
blacks in the United States.
America's blacks, in fact, were known as
"colored people," or Negroes, prior to the civil rights era. The leading
U.S. civil rights organization is still the NAACP--the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People.
As with American blacks, South
African Coloreds can vary a great deal in skin color, from light to quite
black.
The essential factor is that the Coloreds are acculturated Europeans,
similar to the manner that U.S. blacks, since the repeal of slavery, have
acclimated themselves to the customs of the essentially white-dominated
society. The Coloreds have no "tribal homeland"; they speak a European
language (most of them speak Afrikaans); they move about in the white
world, while retaining their own personal associations and living areas. A