The Other Vast Wasteland

It is afternoon, and the Bantu houseboy is in the living room cleaning the carpet. Someone has left the TV on. The boy looks up at the screen, sees a chorus line of white girls in scanty costumes. Suddenly seized by lust, he runs upstairs and rapes the lady of the house.

The scene is hypothetical, but it has been endlessly conjured up to explain why Africa's most technically advanced nation still lacks mass television. In white-ruled South Africa, the government refuses to permit TV on the ground that it would corrupt both the white minority and nonwhite majority.* Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd has more or less put TV in a category with atom bombs and poison gas. "They are modern things, but that does not mean they are desirable. The government has to watch for any dangers to the people, both spiritual and physical." Minister of Posts and Telegraphs Albert Hertzog has put the government view just as bluntly: "The effect of the wrong picture on children, the less developed, and other races can be highly detrimental." He is on record with the pledge: "As far as I am concerned, we will never have television."

The Nationalist government, composed mostly of Dutch-descended Boers, also fears that canned TV programs from the U.S. and Britain would further "anglicize" South Africa, 37% of whose white population is English-speaking. Beyond that, the Nationalists feel that Anglo-Saxon liberalism reflected in such programs could subtly undermine apartheid--although a good packager ought to be able to find some pretty safe fare. Still, Hertzog accuses South Africa's English-dominated business community, and specifically Diamond Tycoon Harry F. Oppenheimer, of plotting to bring in television, which could mean "the destruction of white South Africa."

Meanwhile, South Africans console themselves by going to the movies; with a logic of sorts the government considers the movies less dangerous than TV, because at least they do not reach everyone's home free. Oddly, South Africans also keep buying TV sets--"for when the time comes." Popular pressure for TV is growing, and some closed-circuit transmissions for industrial and medical groups have been permitted. Reportedly, Verwoerd may use the promise of TV as a vote-getting device to enhance his party's expected victory in the next election. And it is even beginning to dawn on some stubborn Nationalists that television, under strict government control, could be a powerful tool to spread their apartheid gospel in black and white, and maybe even color.

*Even though, by latest count, 15 other African countries have TV. Among them: the ex-French Congo, Gabon, the Ivory Coast, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, the Sudan, Uganda.

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