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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, JANUARY 18, 1985
South African whites of a more liberal persuasion were also offended by the
Senator's simplistic moral posturing.
With an obvious reference to the
Chappaquidick incident, the FINANCIAL MAIL headlined:
"He's Teaching Us
Morals?" An accompanying editorial said that "nothing about [Kennedy] sug
gests that he is•••in a position to pass moral judgment." Perhaps the best
reporting on the visit for the U.S. press appeared in the LOS ANGELES TIMES.
The TIMES has a new correspondent in South Africa, Michael Parks. He is
quite perceptive, and rather free of reportorial bias. The following is a
summary by Parks of the Kennedy visit (January 16 issue). It dramatically
shows how impervious to the facts the Kennedy troupe was:
Parks reveals
some rather amazing confessions on the part of the Kennedy aides, such as
admitting they had thought South Africa was just a "black and white issue."
They also displayed remarkable callousness as to the future wellbeing of
the Afrikaner people.
Whatever Senator Edward M. Kennedy's recent trip to South Africa
does to mobilize U.S. public opinion against the policy of racial
separation here, his controversial visit left this country's
anti-apartheid opposition--black as well as white--in disar
ray•••• "Most of us are now wishing that he had never come," said
a prominent member of the United Democratic Front, a multiracial
alliance of 645 anti-apartheid groups. "There may be benefits in
the future--we hope so--but the costs were very great."•••
The Kennedy trip was•••targeted principally on the United States
rather than South Africa. The senator's appearances here were
the carefully arranged media events typical of U.S. political
campaigns. His speeches, resonant with the rhetoric of his late
brothers, John and Robert, largely went over the heads of his
local audiences and were really pitched to American audiences•..•
"Fact finding" was really not the point of the trip. Kennedy had
come, it was clear from the outset, to launch a broad anti
apartheid campaign in the United States, to make South Africa one
of the top American foreign policy issues and to� the Reagan
Administration from "constructive engagement" to full confronta
tion if possible.
The visit thus was conceived largely in terms of U.S. politics,
and its far-reaching and unforeseen ramifications in South Afri
can politics were not taken into account. "We have to deal with
Tutu, we have to deal with Boesak [liberal Coloured cleric ], and
we really don't know what these AZAPO folks (the Azanian People's
Organization) are all about," a Kennedy aide said as the senator
began his tour. "Frankly·
, � did not realize the complexity of
politics here. We thought--can
.!.
say it?--it was just black and
white."
In U.S. terms, recalling America's own civil rights campaigns,
the politics might have seemed a matter of "black and white"
but•••South Africa's blacks are as politically divided as its
whites--and the recurrent anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti
Kennedy demonstrations by black militants proved it.
When questions were raised about the strong bias against the gov
ernment in Kennedy's tour, both in the places that he visited and