How should Americans react to the South African situation? Clergymen call for sanctions. Students demand "divestment" by American universities and business interests. Militants agitate for revolution.
A form of inverted American chauvinism interprets all the world's evils in terms of the real or supposed wrongs committed abroad by American investors and spies. According to this interpretation, South Africa - or, for that matter, Iran, Chile, or Greece - would speedily become happy and contented democracies if only the Elders of Wall Street were to cease their plotting. This American ethnocentricity has many other forms. It assumes, for instance, that a system of franchise and political organization functioning well in the United States would be equally successful in a deeply divided, multiethnic, and multiracial country like South Africa.
South Africa is condemned for what is often overlooked elsewhere. A double standard is applied that criticizes South Africa for oppressing its people but does not attack African or other states that do as bad or even worse.
On any objective scale that ranks the "badness" of regimes, South Africa would not rank anywhere near the top. In a list of the world's "worst" governments, South Africa would obviously rank below the fanatic Khmer Rouge in Cambodia for tyrannizing its people.
All communist states oppress and exploit their people more than South Africa does. The record of forced labor, imprisonments, killings, and enforced population movements of Ethiopia, the Soviet Union, East Germany, Vietnam, and China is infinitely higher than anything whites have done to blacks in South Africa. (Since 1900, fewer than 7,000 South African blacks have died in all civil conflicts with the government.) Yet we have normal relations with states that were responsible for systematic discrimination and mass expulsions. We seek to deal with communist regimes; we even work toward peaceful coexistence with them
Double Standards
Conditions for many blacks in South Africa are constantly bad, but they are that way throughout Africa. People are relatively free to come and go in South Africa. There is no Berlin Wall or barbed-wire barricade to keep its people in and others out, as there are in most communist countries. There has been no mass exodus of South Africans as there has been of Ethiopians, East Germans, Cubans, or Cambodians. On the contrary, 1.5 million people voluntarily go to South Africa each year to work and to study. No similar flow of people votes with its feet to get into any communist state. Even Marxist-ruled Mozambique sends its men (about 40,000 a year) to work in South Africa and continues to have extensive trade relations with South Africa.
Even within the African continent, South Africa cannot be given the "highest marks" for oppression and exploitation. The claimants for the title are numerous - Uganda, Ethiopia, the Sudan, Burundi, Nigeria, Angola, Mozambique, Equatorial Guinea. Most of the problems and abuses found in South Africa are also found in the rest of Africa - and indeed, in much of the world. This is understandable. South Africa is an African country; it is not like Great Britain or the United States. One-party regimes are the norm in Africa; there are 21 of
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