Crack in the White Monolith

Afrikaners split over a proposal to share power

For the past 34 years, the National Party has ruled South Africa by adhering to a single, all-important policy: perpetuation of power by the country's whites, who number only about 5 million, or 18% of the population. Now, however, deep fissures have appeared within the ruling party. Sixteen members of Parliament, including two Cabinet members, have broken with the government of Prime Minister Pieter W. Botha and formed a new, far-right political group, the Conservative Party. They accused Botha of straying from the apartheid precepts set by the ruling party more than a generation ago. The public debate that erupted as a result may be the fiercest within the country's white community since World War II.

Leading the defectors is Dr. Andries Treurnicht, a former clergyman and editor who had been Botha's Minister of State Administration and Statistics as well as the head of the National Party's right wing. Along with him went Dr. Ferdinand Hartzenberg, who had served as Minister of Education and Training. Exuding confidence, the Prime Minister accused the dissident group of "insubordination" and added that its members would not be missed.

The controversy stems from the general belief that the government is about to restore, after 14 years, some form of voting rights to the country's 2.7 million people of mixed race (or coloreds), and to grant such rights for the first time to 835,000 Indians and others of Asian descent.

Under the government's long-term plan for "separate development," South Africa's 20 million blacks are being designated citizens of the various new "inde pendent homelands," such as Transkei and Bophuthatswana, regardless of where they happen to live. The plan, in depriving blacks of South African citizenship, ensures that whites will be the majority group within South Africa. But that still leaves the coloreds and the Asians, who cannot be disposed of so neatly under the legerdemain of apartheid.

Botha's ruling party is considering the creation of three separate--but not equal--parliaments for whites, coloreds and Asians. A council of Cabinets, with a white majority, would coordinate government policy under the direction of an executive President, who would be chosen by a white-dominated electoral college. In effect, whites would remain in charge, but coloreds and Asians would be represented to some extent.

The power-sharing issue has suddenly become urgent because Botha would like to include colored males in the national service system. But he believes he cannot justifiably do so until the colored community is given a voice in its own affairs.

If the party accepts the proposals, the government may submit them next year to separate referendums of the white, colored and Asian communities. Replying to Treurnicht, whose group opposes any notion of power sharing, Botha declared: "We are not taking a highway to complete integration [but are seeking] the decent, Christian course of action in granting the coloreds the right of self-determination in their own affairs." His Minister of Police Louis le Grange put it more vehemently. The country's whites, he warned, could not reject power sharing forever "and then bluff yourselves into thinking that you are not sitting on a revolution."

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