South Africa Now

In which realization Dr. King foreshadowed the odious concept of constructive engagement 15 years before Chester Crocker made it the cornerstone of Reagan’s policy on the area. Indeed public outcry across Europe and the US against the bloody Apartheid government was widespread in the 1960’s, most especially in light of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, the first indication for most of the public perhaps, that the South African government forces much preferred slaughtering defenseless demonstrators to listening to reason. On Human Rights Day, Dec. 10, 1965, King and Lutuli issued a public appeal for an economic “boycott” of South Africa:

Urge your government to support economic sanctions; Don't buy South African products; Don’t trade or invest in South Africa; Translate public opinion into public action by explaining facts to all peoples, to groups to which you belong, and to countries of which you are citizens until an effective international quarantine of Apartheid is established.

Ignorance of the long-standing nature of the call for divestiture was a local phenomenon as well. During and after the encampments of 1985 and 1986 on the lawn of the administration building at SU (the makeshift town we called “Crossroads”), both the Daily Orange and the local media insisted on acting as though we and other activists on other campuses had, as it were, reinvented the wheel. The Coalition to End Racism and Apartheid was born in October of 1985, but it was built from the membership of several pre-existent groups; however, we considered ourselves lucky if a news story dug far enough back to recall Students for Divestment Now, the most recent of the anti-Apartheid activists at S.U.

Activists at S.U. began demanding economic sanctions, generally in the form of pressing S.U. to divest itself of its South Africa-related holdings, as early as 1975. The calls for sanctions took many forms: the Committee to End Apartheid took to the court during half-time of the S.U./St. John's basketball game, carrying signs demanding divestment; the Student Association passed a resolution calling for divestment in 1978 (as would its successor, SGA, repeatedly over the next few years), Dean Richard Oliker of the School of Management was quoted as advising divestiture in 1978; Students for Divestment Now and later, the Committee to End Racism and Apartheid and People for Peace and Justice picketed and laster invaded meetings of the Board of Trustees throughout the 19809's; the Student Afro-American Society and the Graduate Student Organization got into the habit, it seemed, of passing annual resolutions demanding divestment; the Graduate Student Organization passed a resolution in 1985 censuring the Board of Trustees for ignoring the advice of the Chancellor’s Task Force on South African that S.U. divest; SGA followed suit in censuring the Board; shantytowns erupted in 1985 and 1986, creating enough of a stir that Govenor Cuomo, the scheduled commencement speaker in 1986, demanded that leaders of the shantytowns meet with him outside the Dome because he was afraid that they might otherwise disrupt proceedings inside (I admit it. We kind of disrupted things anyway, but that's another story).

Chief Lutuli’s comment quoted at the outset brings to mind another sanction fantasy, that South African Blacks don't favor sanctions, presumably because they would suffer the most from an economic downturn. Both parts of the argument are silly at their very core. The Black South African voices who have called for sanctions are legion: Lutuli, Steve Biko, Oliver Tambo, Winnie and Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu. Despite the fact that it is still patently illegal in South African to publicly support sanctions or indeed to call for opposition to the government in any way (per the Terrorism Act, which has been selectively enforced, generally against anti-Apartheid activists), polls continually indicate that a majority of South African Blacks support sanctions. Let’s run that one by again: although doing so is punishable by a jail sentence, most blacks support sanctions.

Steve Biko, before being beaten to death by South African police precisely for the crime of publicly opposing the government (you know, “September, ’77, Port Elizabeth, weather “fine” and all that) frequently made the comment that those who professed to worry over Blacks suffering if the economy deteriorated had missed the point. We're already suffering, he would remind: to those who live in constant fear of being shot, beaten, or detained without charge, for those whose children already live in abject poverty and near starvation, an economic downturn is not the major area of concern. Moreover, since U.S. and European corporations operating in South Africa tend to be capital intensive rather than labor intensive, their presence or absence hardly affects the employment situation of the Black work force at all. U.S. corporations doing business in or with South African heave never employed even 2% of the Black South African work force, even at the height of investment and involvement in the early 1980's. Unemployment among the Black South African work force has not dropped below 30% since at least the mid-1980's. Therefore, if at any one time every U.S. corporation were to have severed its ties to South Africa, the resultant increase in the unemployment rate would likely have been minimal, and let’s face it, an increase from, say, 33% to 33.7% just ain’t bloody much. In our next installment we will outline the fact that U.S. corporations tend to benefit the Apartheid government more than any component of the labor force. The only noticeable effort of U.S. corporate disinvolvement with South Africa is to weaken the Apartheid government.

Which brings us to the final fable about economic sanctions: they just don’t work, supposedly. Indeed, this was Reagan's defense for violating the Act he signed into law. The Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 (PL 99-440) imposed very weak economic sanctions against South Africa, with the provision that “if the President determine sthat significant progress toward ending the system of Apartheid and establishing a non-racial democracy in South Africa [has not been made by 1987]... the President shall [recommend which] ...additional measures should be imposed.” The Act specifically defined the evidence which would indicate sufficient progress: repeal of the state of emergency, release of all political prisoners, free participation in the political process to all groups. By 1987, they hadn’t occurred (they still haven't). Yet Reagan, agruing that “punitive sanctions are not the best way to bring freedom to South Africa,” violated the law and refused to impose additional sanctions.

While Reagan, Crocker and many others including lately, George Bush, continued to argue that sanctions don’t work, the numbers indicated otherwise. Despite the fact that the sanctions imposed by the Act were riddled with loopholes (new investments were forbidden, for example, but new short-term financing was not), and despite the fact that of 40 corporations found by the General Accounting Office to have violated the sanctions, none were ever prosecuted, U.S. and worledwide sanctions effectively crippled the South African economy. Gerald De Koch, Chairman of the South African Reserve Bank, reported that sanctions cost the Republic of South Africa $7 billion between 1986 and 1990. The sanctions are the only ureason Nelson Mandela is a free man today, and perhaps it is best to close with his comments upon his release.

"We call on the internation community to continue the campaign to isolate the Apartheid regime.

"To lift sanctions now would be to run the rist of aborint the process toward the complete eradication of Apartheid."

{This article plagiarizes several A.O. articles of the past, mostly mine, a few talks I gave at SUNY Oswego and assorted schools and classes, an article in the April 1986 issue of EQUAL TIME, “Divest Now,” by Cheryl Carpenter, Rick Coughlin, Blaine De Lancey and Doug Margolis, which article in turn drew heavily on Sarah Boone, “U.S. Support of South African Apartheid,” THE BLACK VOICE, November 14, 1983, and various books — by L. Lituak, Kevin Danaher and Ann Seidman.}