South Africa Win Some, Lose Some

By Bruce W. Nelan/Johannesburg

No one can say that State President P.W. Botha did not thoroughly prepare for last week's segregated local elections. Determined to boost the number of black voters in order to prove that they preferred officially sponsored "reform" to violent revolution, the government banned 18 antiapartheid organizations in February for organizing a boycott of the racially divided balloting. In June the government declared it a crime to advocate a boycott, but many defiant black clergymen and academics urged one anyway.

Even more worrisome to the government's sense of security was the threat from the far-right Conservative Party, which has become the fastest-growing party in the country's history since it split from the ruling Nationalists in 1982. As the Nationalists see it, black activists cannot topple them from power, but the Conservatives might. Calling for a return to total apartheid and accusing Botha of betraying white Afrikaners, the Conservatives became the official opposition in Parliament last year. All the party's parliamentary seats are in Transvaal province, the northernmost region settled by the voortrekkers who drove their ox wagons across the veld to escape British rule 150 years ago, but last week the Conservatives challenged the National Party at the local level in all four of the country's provinces.

Botha was not a candidate, but he was a clear winner in the white election. In their Transvaal stronghold, the Conservative challengers captured most of the rural and small-town councils. But in spite of their confident predictions, they were unable to gain significantly in the other provinces. The National Party turned back the opposition's all-out attempt to take over the Pretoria city council, won an absolute majority in Johannesburg for the first time and seized control of Pietermaritzburg, the English-speaking capital of Natal, from a coalition of liberals.

In the black townships, however, the government's repression-and-persuasion campaign to bring out a symbolic vote of support for segregated politics was defeated by an overwhelming boycott. Although only 26.3% of registered black voters had gone to the polls, Chris Heunis, the minister in charge of planning a new constitution, claimed that "the government's objectives were undoubtedly met." If so, the government had set decidedly modest objectives. Since only 1.5 million of the more than 20 million blacks living outside the four "independent homelands" are registered, the turnout translates into less than 2.0% of South Africa's blacks.

For Botha, the next step is a white parliamentary election, which must be held no later than March 1990. Over the past year, the Conservative surge looked as if it might be unstoppable, and Botha unsuccessfully tried to ! engineer a constitutional amendment that would postpone the test for two more years. Now that the rightist threat seems to be at least temporarily quarantined in the Transvaal, many in Parliament speculate that he will call an election early next year and thus project his brand of crabbed and segregated reform into the middle of the next decade.