South Africa stands at the brink of historic, fundamental change. In three weeks the country’s black majority will choose a government for the first time. But the election campaign has brought an upsurge of political violence. Right-wing whites and traditionalist blacks disagree with the terms of the imminent transfer of power. The most powerful of them is Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who is boycotting the vote in an effort to retain his power base in coastal Natal province. There, the death rate from killings has jumped to 10 a day, the highest rate in a decade of civil conflict. Last week Buthelezi’s supporters for the third time prevented the ANC from holding a rally in a Natal stadium. Five residents of KwaMashu township outside the port city of Durban were lured to a meeting and murdered in reprisal for the Johannesburg killings. And a white ex-policeman boasted of having trained thousands of members of Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party in guerrilla warfare. Bowing to pressure from the ANC and his own security advisers, President F.W. de Klerk finally turned to the same tactic once used to hold down ANC-led resistance to white-minority rule. He imposed a state of emergency in Natal and deployed the first of thousands of troops. “Law and order will be maintained, and elections will take place on the scheduled date,” he said.
With or without a state of emergency, there’s not much suspense in the election outcome. just over four years after ANC leader Nelson Mandela walked out of jail and began negotiations with de Klerk’s white-minority government, he is poised to step into the presidency, The ANC will win a majority of the popular vote; the question is whether it will win two thirds of the ballots. the margin it needs to unilaterally draft a permanant constitution. De Klerk, bead of the National Party, is expected to become opposition leader and serve under Mandela as a ceremonial vice president in a coalition government. Buthelezi’s support has slipped below 10 percent nationally, and polls show that he would lose even Natal if he ran.
But without a healthy voter turnout and an orderly transfer of power, Mandela’s government may not be seen as truly representative. And the new president needs credibility to attract enough foreign investment to even begin to meet the inflated expectations of the black electorate. Political violence chips away at that credibility. The imposition of emergency law, too, is a setback. It places a “cloud over the legitimacy of the elections,” said the Johannesburg-based Human Rights Commission.
Chief Buthelezi is playing the ANC’s old game, what he calls “resistance politics.” It is a curious reversal. During the ANC’s years of exile, Buthelezi’s opposition to the ANC’s calls for international economic sanctions made him a favorite of conservative foreign leaders. Now his tactics may help maintain an unofficial “capital boycott” by nervous investors. Once it was the ANC that vowed to make white-ruled South Africa “ungovernable.” Last week Buthelezi warned that his supporters consider the state of emergency in Natal an invasion. And although Buthelezi said he would attend a summit meeting with Mandela and de Klerk this week, he is sticking to his demand that the elections be postponed.
If the Zulu march on Johannesburg last week was calculated to shake confidence in the next government, it succeeded. The shoot-out took place literally under the noses of executives responsible for selling South Africa internationally. It tarnished Mandela’s image as a statesman. After the shootings outside the ANC headquarters, Mandela personally prevented police who arrived with a search warrant from entering the building. Mandela also was asked whether the emergency decree was a precedent for the way a future ANC government would treat political opponents. He refused to answer what he described as an “esoteric” question.
The state of emergency throws the main job of peacekeeping to the army. Unlike the South African police, it has gained respect among blacks for impartiality. A majority of its members now are black. Still, military experts questioned whether troops can ensure a free vote in Natal. During the nationwide state of emergency imposed between 1986 and 1990, Natal’s internal war raged unabated. And there aren’t many troops available. Whites Do longer are drafted, and the deployment of troops to three troubled “homelands” in the last three weeks has stretched the active-duty forces to the breaking point. By Election Day only about 5,000 troops will be in Natal, a mountainous region where many villages are linked by footpaths ideal country for guerrilla warfare. “It’s not an attempt to pacify Natal,” said Jakkie Cilliers, director of the Institute for Defense Policy in Johannesburg. “The purpose is to provide a semblance of security at polling booths and rallies.”
ANC strategists worry that voter turnout in Natal could fall below 50 percent. In that case, Buthelezi can be expected to claim majority support for his boycott. But Natal isn’t the only region where getting out the vote is an uphill struggle, in spite of hefty international funding for voter education. Some right-wing city councils in rural areas have prohibited electioneering, and some white farmers have forbidden black workers to attend voter work-shops. Few of the country’s 18 million eligible black voters have ever voted; more than half of them are illiterate. As many as 4 million people still lack the documents that will be required by election officials at the polls. “There are large areas where people don’t even know an election is taking place,” says Philip Frankel, a political scientist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Still, most blacks hunger for a say in government. One poll found that fully 84 percent intend to vote. Many blacks wondered if they would ever have the right to go to the polls. It would be ironic if, in the end, their path were blocked by fellow blacks.
