Cape Town and Durban were a small price to pay for making it clear that
South Africa’s ultimate fate rested in the hands of her own people.
“Hot off the fax machine, Jerry-a genuine historical document. ” Edward
Hurley couldn’t hide his excitement or his relief. He plopped a mass of thin papers on Craig’s desk, threw himself into a chair, and exhaled loudly. He looked more as if he’d run a race instead of just walking over from his office.
Craig arched an eyebrow.
“The Convention’s over?”
Hurley grinned.
“Christ, no. I expect they’ll be squabbling over the fine print for months yet. But that pile there—he pointed to the document on the desk-“shows the broad outline of what they’ve already agreed on.”
Unable to restrain his curiosity any longer, Craig flipped randomly through the pages, scanning boldfaced headings. “
“Powers of the Central
Government. Powers Reserved to the Provinces. Rights of the Individual’
He looked up.
“So what’s the gist?”
“Fundamentally?” At Craig’s nod, Hurley leaned back in his chair, looking even more professorial than ever.
“Not quite one man, one vote, but they’re headed there. For now, a lower house elected by popular vote, but with an upper house where every group has an equal voice. They’re trying to set up a system where everybody participates, but no one dominates. “
Craig chuckled softly.
“Good luck to them making that work. “
Hurley nodded, agreeing.
“Yeah. It is sort of like trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. “
The ambassador pointed to the section headed “Rights of the Individual.”
“What’s in there is more important than the rest, anyway. Guaranteed freedoms of religion, speech, assembly, and all the rest. Equal pay for equal work. Plus equal access to education through integrated schools and universities. The whole idea’s to shift more power to the individual—no matter what his skin color or tribe is.”
“No trace of apartheid?”
“None at all. After your setup in January, nobody even said boo when they proposed stripping away the last vestiges. I’ll say it again, General, you can come over to the State Department whenever you want. We need good diplomats.”
Craig just smiled. He knew the ambassador well enough now to know that no insult had been intended.
“What about all that socialist doctrine the
ANC people were spouting earlier? Nationalizing key industries and the rest?”
Hurley laughed.
“They were pretty quiet about it. Seems like their experiences with Cuban-style ‘fraternal socialism’ soured a number of them on good old Marx and Lenin. Plus they’ve had a close look at what’s left of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. There’s even talk of breaking up existing state-run industries. “
Craig breathed a little easier. His biggest fear had been that the
Constitutional Convention would fall apart while squabbling over economic ideology. Maybe the sheer chaos and horror of the past several months had knocked some sense into South Africa’s inhabitants.
Hurley continued, “Even the basic political framework they’ve picked makes imposing socialism or any other ism more difficult. They’re moving toward a weaker federal government presiding only very loosely over stronger provincial and local governments. Plus they’ll have just one federal capital-Johannesburg. “
He smiled again.
“No more of this crazy shuttling back and forth. Can you see our government moving between D.C. and San Francisco every six months?”
Craig winced at the thought. Things ran badly enough when the government just sat still in Washington.
“Why Johannesburg?”
Hurley shrugged.
“Lots of reasons. Politically, Pretoria generates too many bad memories, and picking Cape Town seemed like a step backward toward the days of British colonial control. Johannesburg’s never been a capital city before. Racially’? Well, Jo’burg’s population distribution’s pretty close to the national average. Both Cape Town and
Pretoria are too white. “
The ambassador shook his head.
“Anyway, the location
doesn’t matter as much because the whole federal government won’t matter as much. After what they went through under Vorster and his predecessors, it’ll be a long time before anybody in this country lets a central government have much power at all.”
Craig frowned.
“That could mean trouble someday. They might need a tougher federal government to impose reform on individual provinces if they go back to apartheid. Hell, a lot of our early civil rights rulings had to be enforced by federal troops.”
“Maybe. All we can do is help them get started.” Hurley tapped the sheaf of documents Craig was still slowly shuffling through.
“And that’s not a bad start.”
“Yeah.” Craig flipped a page and stopped suddenly.
“What in God’s name are these?” He held out an inset map showing proposed boundaries for two
“Reserves”one labeled the Oranjewerker Staat, the other the Azanian
People’s Republic.
Hurley grinned.
“Now those are two of the most bizarre ideas I’ve ever heard seriously proposed in a serious political setting.” He shook his head in disbelief.
“And the strangest thing of all is that they may actually make a certain amount of sense-at least sense South Africa style.
“The idea’s to create a couple of places of last resort for the holdouts on both sides. White diehards can try their cherished whites-only, rural lifestyle in Oranje. And black separatists can enjoy their own company in the APR. Inside each enclave, they’ll be free to live however they want. But outside them, they’ll have to obey the laws of the Federal
Republic.”
Craig laughed.
“Yeah, and we’ll see how long that lasts. The old folks may believe in apartheid of one sort or another, but their kids will start asking some hard questions when they see the rest of the country sorting itself out.”
“Not all the true believers will be in the reserves,” Hurley reminded him.
“Nobody in this damn country knows what it’s like for different races to live together. It took seventy plus years for Soviet-style communism to fade. It could take that long for South Africa to recover fully from this mess. “
Craig nodded. Hurley’s warning was valid. South Africa’s racial and political problems wouldn’t vanish overnight or even in one or two generations. People were too stubborn and contrary to expect overnight brotherly love. Far from it.
Still, at least South Africans of goodwill and common sense now had a decent chance to pull their country together. That was more than most of them had ever expected. Craig smiled down at the draft constitution on his desk. With that as a framework, they might even succeed.
APRIL 12-PROVISIONAL SUPREME COURT, FEDERAL
REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA, JOHANNESBURG
Television cameras had carried the weeklong trial into homes throughout
