A Touch of Sweet Reasonableness

When Balthazar Johannes Vorster took over as South Africa's Prime Minister six months ago, the world had little reason to expect that he would be much different from the assassinated Hendrik Verwoerd, the apostle of apartheid. Vorster had, after all, been Verwoerd's police boss for five years, and he looked even tougher and more unbending than the white-thatched Verwoerd. But Vorster has been a considerable surprise. While not basically changing South Africa's policy of racial separation, he has proved far more reasonable than his predecessor, injecting some humanity and even humor into South Africa's heavy ideological climate. South Africans call his style billikheid--sweet reasonableness.

Far more relaxed than Verwoerd, Vorster allows himself to be photographed playing golf in baggy shorts, and even invites opposition newsmen into his chambers for regular background briefings. He slyly chides visiting foreigners for their one-dimensional view of South Africa with his startling salutation: "Welcome to the happiest police state in the world."

"There was something almost diabolical about Verwoerd," says Helen Suzman, the opposition Progressive Party's only member in Parliament, "something on a different plane, above influencing, that actually made me frightened of the man. Vorster is flesh and blood."

No More Snapping. Vorster has even taken a few hesitant steps toward easing apartheid. At his behest, three new apartheid bills have been taken off the docket of the current session of Parliament, and the government last week amended the old Verwoerd ban on interracial sports to permit South Africa to send an integrated team to the 1968 Olympics. Vorster also created something of a stir last month by receiving a trade delegation from the black African nation of Malawi with full honors (including limousines driven by white chauffeurs), entertained Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan of the tiny new state of Lesotho at lunch in Cape Town's stately Mount Nelson Hotel--breaking at least three apartheid restrictions in the process. Last week Vorster's government announced that it will grant limited autonomy to a tribal area in South West Africa known as Ovamboland, thus making at least one hesitant concession to United Nations demands that it get out of the entire territory.

While somewhat moderating apartheid at home, Vorster is also busy trying to convince the rest of the world that it is a necessary course for South Africa. He is overhauling the government's dour propaganda organs, has ordered the foreign ministry to publish reasoned presentations of the South African viewpoint. South African diplomats have been instructed to stop snapping at their critics and to try to charm them with sweet reasonableness. South Africans going overseas are supplied with booklets instructing them how to answer delicate questions, and Vorster recently urged all whites staying at home to start a letter-writing campaign to present "the truth" to their European friends and relatives. His government even claims to have started secret trade talks with a dozen or so supposedly hostile black nations.

Severe Repression. In South Africa proper, of course, the nonwhites are still severely repressed. For all the billikheid, in fact, Vorster's regime is pressing for early passage of two new bills aimed at the so-called "Colored" (mulatto) population, which once enjoyed almost equal privileges with the whites. The bill would empower the government to draft Colored youths into a labor corps in which they could be subjected to "the performance of any kind of work." The bill would also automatically deny white status to anyone, even blue-eyed blondes, unable to prove that both parents were bona fide whites.

Although Vorster obviously has no intention of scuttling apartheid overnight, the few changes he has made so far have given moderate South African whites the first hint of encouragement in nearly two decades of Nationalist Party rule. "The best that can be hoped for," notes Johannesburg's influential Financial Mail, "is that sufficient non-whites will respond to any relaxation of apartheid that is forthcoming to make the Nationalist Party feel it was worth making. The worst that can be feared is that the government's good intentions will be snubbed, encouraging South Africa to retreat into even lonelier isolation."

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