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South Africa Explodes: Down With White Minority RuleBy VVAWDOWN WITH WHITE MINORITY RULE You work ten or twelve hours a day, and at the end of your six-day week, your paycheck totals $30. According to the government this is $40 below what it takes to keep you running neck with poverty. Sometimes, to get to work you've got to live in one of the labor camps. Since it would cost a week's wages, you probably won't travel home to see your wife and kids more than twice a year. You may live on a reservation like Soweto. Your hut in Soweto won't have electricity. If you have running water you're lucky because at least half of your neighbors won't. And your kids! They catch tuberculosis at a rate 72 times greater than the children of the white master. Many suffer from malnutrition, and death from starvation is a reality. In many places only 6 out of 10 make it past infancy. This is what it's like to live under the system of apartheid in South Africa. This is only part of the repression. In addition to robbing your labor, robbing your health and killing your kids, they've also stolen your land and stripped your of your dignity. Nineteen million Blacks--80% of the population--are required to live on 13% of the land. The land rich in natural resources such as gold, diamonds, coal, uranium, and other resources needed for industry is, of course, part of the 87% of the land stolen from you. Then there is the pass book. Every African is required to carry one. It tells your name, place of birth, tribe, complete job history and grade of employment. Your employer must sign it every month or you can be imprisoned for up to two years. Without this book you can't get a job, find a house, get married, travel, or even make a pick-up at the postoffice. You can expect to be stopped at least once a day to have your book checked. About 3000 people are arrested every day for violation of pass book laws. This is apartheid--a fascist system whereby a minority of whites exerts its rule over the Black Africans of South Africa (or Azania as the people call it). SOWETO UPRISING Over the last two years South Africa has bee in the news because of massive resistance to this oppression. Resistance has been going on in smaller ways for years, but things are changing. Soweto high school students walked out and demonstrated against their rotten educational system in particular and the whole government in general. Police moved in killing and wounding many, but this spark has ignited a new upsurge of a mass movement of resistance. Students have rallied and protested from Johannesburg to Cape Town. Workers walked off their jobs in the mines and factories. The spirit of rebellion is strong, despite heavy repression from the state which includes brute force and the imprisoning of many. WESTERN INVOLVEMENT How can it be that 10 or 20% of the population can hold down the vast majority? It can't do it without outside help, and it gets that help from countries like the U.S. and Great Britain. Capitalists in South Africa, Great Britain and the U.S. want to keep things like they are. When you only pay your workers $30 a week, the superprofits are tremendous. The rate of return on investments is 19%, which is more than twice as much as here in the U.S. That is why you can see ads in magazines like Business Week which say, "If you buy or invest, South Africa makes all the difference in the world.' And U.S. corporations are investing in South Africa--over 400 of them, including most of the big names. Seventeen percent of foreign investments totaling $1.7 billion dollars come from U.S. corporations. About a third of all money borrowed by South African companies--$2.2 billion--comes from U.S. banks. It is this money which helps the repressive Vorster regime keep in business. The U.S. helps prop up this government with more than money. Despite a United Nations arms embargo against supplying military equipment to South Africa; despite U.S. lip service in support of this embargo; and despite Jimmy Carter's self-righteous human rights ramblings, U.S. weapons are in use in South Africa. The rulers get around the embargo by licensing foreign companies to produce and sell U.S. equipment to South Africa. Today the South African government has M11A1 armored personnel carriers, M-47 Patton tanks, M-41 Walker Bulldog tanks, Lockheed f104A fighter-bombers, F-51D Cavalier counter-insurgency strike airdraft, and Augusta-Bell Iroquois helicopters--all U.S. weapons. SOVIETS WAIT IN THE WINGS While the U.S. and other Western powers are making out big in South Africa, the Soviet Union is waiting on the sidelines hoping to turn the coming armed struggle in South Africa to its own advantage. The USSR wants a go at the riches of South Africa just like they got a piece of the action in Angola, like they are in the process of doing in Ethiopia and would like to do in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia). For the people of South Africa liberation can only come if the western powers are kicked out and the Soviets are kept out. The Africa people have no interest in changing one set of imperialist for another set of imperialist--it would be like exchanging one jailer for another. REBELLION WILL GROW INTO REVOLUTION The days are numbered for Vorster and his kind. The rebellious spirit of Soweto and the thirst for freedom will turn into a full-blown revolution. There is more than just a spirit alive in the country. Concrete steps have been taken. The Pan Africanist Congress is a revolutionary political party which has been operating underground since it was banned 15 years ago. The PAC has formed the Azanian Peoples Liberation Army which is training for the war to overthrow the racist government. Considering the might of the South African government and its backers like the U.S., the task won't be easy, but as we learned in Vietnam, no amount of bombs and modern weaponry can deny a people their freedom when they are willing to fight for it. U.S. OUT OF SOUTHERN AFRICA VICTORY TO THE SOUTHERN AFRICAN PEOPLE When we were in Vietnam we wore our uniforms to fight for the wrong side. After fighting like hell to protect some rich bastard's rubber plantation, being treated like dirt in the military, and then returning to the streets to find the recruiters' promises of jobs and good VA care were so much crap, many vets though back and discovered that we had more in common with the people we were fighting against--the Indochinese--than the rich bosses who sent us over there for their profits. Ok, we wore those filthy rags for the rich once! But now we are going to take them and use them for something good. The people of South Africa are standing up against their racist government and fighting back against the many forms of oppression they face. The rich of this country have a big stake in keeping people working like slaves in the gold, diamond, coal and uranium mines where they make big bucks for the corporations. Our fatigues are going to the Pan Africanist Congress which is a political organization of the South African people and has started guerilla warfare in that country. They have a small but growing army with basecamps in Tanzania where they are conducting training. VVAW supports the fight of these people for freedom and demands that the U.S. and the USSR get the hell out of their country. In fact, some of the first groups of armed fighters in South Africa are using fatigues that VVAW donated last year at African Liberation Day. We call it the FATIGUES FOR FREEDOM FIGHTERS Campaign. We are collecting uniforms, boots and web gear to be turned over to a representative of the PAC at his year's African Liberation Day activities. The fatigues we're collecting, enough for a company, are a real material aid to them as well as a psychological lift because of the international support they represent. The PAC does not have too much in the way of resources since they not sell out their struggle to either superpower--the U.S. or the USSR. The U.S. is only interested in supporting liberation struggles as a hedge against the governments they support, like Vorter's in South Africa, with all kinds of strings attached to the aid. The USSR's "support," as in Angola, amounts to occupation by Cuban troops. The PAC wants nothing to do with either sellout. VVAW is setting up our Fatigues for Freedom Fighters display at schools, shopping centers, etc, and handing out our leaflets wherever we do work. We are encouraging vets to donate fatigues--they can be sent to VVAW, P.O. Box 20184, Chicago, IL 60620 or given to members of the local VVAW Chapter--and for vets or non-vets who don't have fatigues to donate, we are collecting money to buy boots (these are particularly important to the Freedom Fighters in part because of the distance they have to travel). Response so far has been very good, and we expect to be successful in building more support for the struggle in South Africa, and in unifying and organizing veterans to fight the rich here at home! DEFEND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION On April 15, 15,000 people marched in Washington, D.C., demanding that the Bakke Decision be overturned. This demonstration is but one of the organized waves of people that has been building for over a year, denouncing discrimination and the attacks on the gains made by minorities in the 1960s. This case centers on Allen Bakke, a 34-year-old white engineer, who applied for admission to the University of California Medical School at Davis and was turned down twice. He also applied to 13 other medical school and was rejected by all of them. But, at the urging of a University of California administrator, Bakke filed suit against the university claiming reverse discrimination because, at the University of California, 16 places out of 100 were set aside for economically and educationally disadvantaged students. In recent months the media has been putting out the word that Blacks and other minorities have been pushing whites out of jobs and schools, reversing the old situation into one of whites being discriminated against because of their color. "Reverse discrimination" has become a rallying cry for those who are attempting to reverse the gains won during the civil rights and Black liberation struggles. These struggles hit a high tide in the 60's when what began as a civil rights movement burst into the open rebellions of the ghettos. People refused to live in the same old way. Coming off the rebellions and the struggle they represented, minorities made some gains. Government officials were forced to acknowledge, publically, the existence of "institutionalized racism." As a concession to the struggle, the government was forced to institute some reforms, and one of the important ones was affirmative action. Some schools were opened up, job training and hiring for minorities was advanced, and many open discriminatory policies were ended, giving many minorities the opportunity to move ahead. The speed of some of these changes is indicated by the fact that "Blacks to the back of the bus" ended less than 20 years ago. Prior to the special admissions program at the University of California, a part of affirmative action, only 3 minority students were admitted, one Black and two Mexican-Americans. Of course the history of oppression of minorities by the system goes a lot deeper than admission to medical school, past or present. A quick look at the situation of Blacks today in relation to the rest of the population gives an example of the position of minorities. Black unemployment runs consistently over twice the rate of white unemployment--14% to about 6.5%. For younger Black Vietnam veterans, the figure is well over 30%; for Black young people, the estimates are as high as 60%. The median income for Black families is 60% that of white families, and the figure has actually fallen since the height of the Black liberation movement. But even these statistics don't deal with the everyday oppression of minorities in terms of housing, medical care, education or police repression. As one Black parent commented, "It's bad enough worrying whether my child is going to be able to have a decent education; I worry just sending him to the store whether he'll come home alive." Clearly, the changes and victories of the 60's did not end oppression for minorities. Yet there were important advances. Today, the Bakke case is being used to take on the legality of affirmative action and minority quotas--any kind of program that hits at discrimination against minorities. In addition to the decision of the California Supreme Court (the decision which is now awaiting a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court) that special admissions at U.C. Davis are unconstitutional, other programs are being attacked:
These attacks aren't coming down just because of some racist judges (though there are plenty of them). The whole system is in economic crisis--there's overproduction of goods, there's competition from other capitalists and other imperialist countries which has cut off markets and resources. As usual, the U.S. capitalists throw their crisis on to the backs of the people. Despite minor variations in the monthly unemployment rate, in fact unemployment is up for all workers; everywhere we look, there's a general deterioration of social services--they aren't profitable so throw them out. And when these services are cut, when programs like welfare or food stamps or aid to dependent children are slashed, minorities--where unemployment is heavy--are hit the hardest. The bosses try to squeeze oppressed minorities even harder, driving them further down. While the Bakke decision will be covered up with all kinds of legal mumbo-jumbo, the basic fact is that it is an important spearhead in the attack on past gains. One thing that the demonstration in Washington and others like it, whether around Bakke or police repression or Africa, shows is that people of all nationalities are taking up the fight against national oppression and discrimination whether at home or around the world.
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