South Africa: The Protests Persist

South Africa’s national election next week will take place without the votes of the country’s 26 million blacks, the three-fourths majority. In protest over that gross injustice, during the past month hundreds of South Africa’s blacks, coloreds and whites of conscience have participated in a peaceful campaign of defiance, a controlled civil disobedience effort aimed at halting the segregation of schools, buses and hospitals. The protests are reminiscent of jailed black leader Nelson Mandela’s 1952 campaign and that of the U.S. civil rights movement more than 25 years ago.

South African police have descended upon protesters with a vengeance, blanketing the Johannesburg and Pretoria areas with their oppression. They have rounded up dozens of anti-government protesters in pre-dawn raids; armed with handguns, whips and tear gas, they have turned back schoolteachers who merely tried to present a petition to a government office that called for the release of detained schoolchildren and the withdrawal of police from schools.

South African Law and Order Minister Adriaan Vlok has suggested that by taking part in and encouraging the civil disobedience campaign, Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu is using his church position for political purposes. “I hope,” Mr. Vlok said, that “Anglicans take notice of this.”

We hope they do, too. We also hope that Acting President Frederick W. de Klerk takes notice of the majority’s unrelenting determination to abolish apartheid. De Klerk, a less openly confrontational leader than his predecessor, Pieter W. Botha, has taken some symbolic steps lately--such as meeting with major black leaders in southern Africa--to cast himself as a reasonable man who can bring stability back to South Africa. But at the same time, De Klerk has tried to reassure right-wing whites and nervous members of his ruling National Party that he has no intention of promoting a fully integrated, egalitarian South Africa.

De Klerk is said to want to work to slowly end his country’s isolation from neighboring African countries and from the rest of the world. But he cannot on one hand appeal to worldwide patience and reasonableness while government police enforce totally unreasonable and morally indefensible bans on legitimate protest. Anti-apartheid activists will not be deterred. As Bishop Tutu said recently, “We don’t want apartheid made more comfortable. We want political power. We are not interested in reform. We want to see apartheid abolished.”