
          In South_Africa--The Politics of an Inquiry for Change
          By Wilson, FrancisFrancis Wilson
          Vol. 10, No. 1, 1988, pp. 4, 6-8
          
          It is very difficult to be balanced when one talks about South
Africa On the one hand one can make it too horrendous for words. On
the other hand one can oversimplify and say, 'Well, you know it's not
so bad.' The difficult thing to convey about South_Africa is that it
is both realities are true. South_Africa is horrible beyond belief in
terms of the destruction of the rule of law, yet it remains an
extraordinarily vibrant society, a beautiful place to live, with a lot
of laughter and humor.
          I find I can communicate something about the ambiguities of living
in South_Africa to people from Eastern Europe very easily. They
understand. I suspect that Americans who have lived in the South and
have been through the exhilarating and scary days of the civil_rights
movement also will understand, in a way that the rest of the United
States does not.
          Our problem is simple to frame, but incredibly difficult to
answer. It is this: What can one do to contribute effectively to
meaningful change in South_Africa?
          Coming of age in the sixties as I did, when we compared the African
South with the American South we shared a shameful history of slavery
and racism. But by 1964 you were on the move. The Brown decision of 1954 had put the law firmly on your
side. Membership in the wider Union usually put the federal_government
on your side, resulting in the Civil_Rights_Act and voter_registration
drives. You also had press freedom and the power of
television.
          I have been fascinated reading in a new biography of Martin Luther
King of the strategies that were being used--the enormous importance
of using television, using the federal_government. In South_Africa we
do not have that. It is a very different ball game.
          In South_Africa at the same time there was the massive crackdown of
1960 and the Rivonia trial of 1964 which effectively closed down moat
political activity for a decade. African leaders were all jailed or
exiled. Govan Mbeki emerged recently--twenty-three years later--an old
man. Nelson Mandela and the other political leaders of the ANC, the
PAC and other organizations are still incarcerated. The rule of law
has been systematically abrogated--detention without trial, literally
dozens of people killed in jail, widespread reports of torture,
television and radio under the total control of the state, press
freedom systematically eroded.
          So many people feel that the only thing to do is to leave the
country and join the liberation army. That strategy is certainly
pursued by many South_Africans, particularly black South_Africans. I
make no judgment about that; I am simply reporting it. I live in South
Africa and I am simply telling you what I perceive. We also need to
note as we struggle with strategies that no strategy of the last
twenty-five years has been effective; change has not taken place. We
have to live with this. We are all wrestling--those in exile and those
who live inside the country--with 'What do we do? How does change come
about?'
          It is in that context that I want to look at the Carnegie
Inquiry. I don't see it as the answer--far from it--to change in South
Africa, but it does contribute.
          As we started thinking about this inquiry into poverty in South
Africa the realities of state power hit us immediately--the state
could bar all access to information.
          They could simply say, 'Look nobody is going to move around and get
that information. 'They could have cut off all funds from the United
States. They could have banned the organizers, and banning is a very
effective weapon; there simply is a decree by the Minister, who signs
a little piece of paper that says for the next five years you may not
meet more than one other person at any time of the day or night;
nothing that you say may be published; you may attend no meetings; and
you may not move outside a certain rigid geographical boundary. That
has happened to lots of friends of mine. Research workers can be
harassed. Informants, those who talk, can be harassed by the state. Of
course, the state can refuse all radio and television dissemination of
the inquiry's results. Those are the realities of state power when one
starts talking about a research program.
          At the same time, the integrity of the inquiry required that those
who were poor and their leaders, and that means primarily black South
Africans, did not perceive this inquiry to be by a bunch of strange,
hostile outsiders. We needed an inquiry that was independent, yes, but
not an inquiry that was on the side of the rich. So we had a lot of
hard questions to answer. How will this inquiry actually benefit the
poor? Why all this American money? What are the motives behind that?
What are the political credentials of the inquiry? On whose authority
is it being conducted?
          With these two sets of pressures 

you can see that the inquiry was
going to have a tough time. That process took us something like two
years. It all began with a conversation which happened to take place
in my office in January 1980 when the International Director of the
Carnegie Corporation of New_York breezed in and we started talking
about research in South_Africa, that maybe the time was ripe for
another inquiry into poverty. Why another inquiry? When old Andrew
Carnegie died he decreed in his will that 10 percent of the income of
the Carnegie Corporation of New_York should be spent in what was, when
he died, the British Empire because, as you know, he was a
Scot. Lawyers studied this will and decided that no matter what had
happened subsequently to South_Africa it was still part of the British
Empire as far as the Carnegie Corporation or the will was
concerned. So Carnegie down the years has spent money in South_Africa
on libraries and other philanthropies, including the Carnegie
Commission, a study on poverty in 1928-32. Being South_Africa and
being in 1930, this commission managed an inquiry into poverty that
focused entirely and exclusively on whites. Poverty among whites was,
of course, a major problem. Large numbers of white, primarily
Afrikaans-speaking South_Africans had been pushed off the land by
drought and--a picture you're familiar with--and were coming into the
cities. The Carnegie Corporation put up the money and there was a
famous inquiry which is still a model of social inquiry into
poverty.
          That inquiry made a major impact. But the very fact of excluding
the blacks, quite apart from immorality, had distorted the
consequences of that inquiry. The commission thought about anything
that could be done to raise whites out of poverty. There was never any
thought that the steps being proposed might be at the expense of
people who were even poorer but who happened to be black. One aspect
of apartheid that you must understand is that there is a strong
working-class component--white South_Africans just emerging out of
poverty, using the state to protect and get themselves out of poverty,
at the expense of black South_Africans.
          However, we could use the fact of the first Carnegie inquiry
because that name had cachet with the government. As an Afrikaaner,
you could not bash a Carnegie inquiry into poverty. It was like
bashing motherhood. That inquiry had been very important in the
emergence of white South_Africans from poverty with the vehicle of the
National party.
          While looking at the possibility of an inquiry, I started talking
to people in the highways and byways of South_Africa. By and large
white South_Africans responded that an inquiry into poverty was a
great idea, and they patted me on the head and sent me on my way. When
I tried this out on black South_Africans, they looked at me very sadly
and said, 'Listen chum, if you are going to spend one single dollar
discovering that there is poverty in South_Africa, forget it. Well
tell you now for free. There is poverty. It's bad. What we are
interested in is action. Unless there is going to be action out of
this thing it's a waste of time.' That is tough thinking for
academics, that we are not just doing research to write nice books,
that the poor are going to say, 'That is worthwhile. We are prepared
that you spend all those dollars if this is going to be helpful to
us.'
          Then there came this subtle political process of insuring that the
inquiry--and I am not saying we succeeded--was not a bunch of rich,
white, urban-based liberals looking at a problem, saying how serious
and sad it is, and writing analytical reports about it. The inquiry
had to be scientific and objective, but it needed empathy with the
poor themselves and they with it. That is a more subtle process. The
poverty is essentially experienced by blacks. It was important to
create an inquiry that had a black center of gravity.
          That is a tough and tall order in the South_African context of the
1980s.
          It took us a long time. I am summarizing two years in an
instant. The model we used was not a commission. We were going to
involve as many people as we possibily could. We based it
at one of the open universities--open in the sense of nonracial. The
Univeraity of Cape Town is such. Twenty percent of our student body is
black. It should be eighty percent but twenty percent is a lot better
than naught which is what it used to be. We also tried to involve all
the other universities, however, the university communities also tend
to be a bunch of urban white liberals.
          To try and get around that problem we established working groups of
professional people. We invited people like Fikile Bam, a lawyer in
the eastern cape who was on Robben Island for ten years. We asked him
to head a working group of lawyers to think as lawyers about the
problem of poverty. Take the facts as given: we know there is poverty;
start thinking about strategies and what you as lawyers need to do
about it. We also asked educationists; John Samuel, one of the senior
black educationists in South_Africa, chaired that working
committee. And Allan Boesak chaired the working party on church and
poverty.
          To those small working groups, we said, 'Spend these two years
wrestling with strategies. How do we do something about the issue of
poverty in the South_Africa in which we live?'
          It was also important to go beyond the boundaries of South
Africa. The first commission drew the boundary around the white skin,
as it were. There is a danger in South_Africa in drawing the boundary
around the nation-state. It is a great temptatation, of
course. It makes a lot of sense. The way in which the South_African
economy has developed is that when the gold mines emerged in the 1880s
labor was recruited from all over southern Africa. By the 1890s
three-fifths of the labor for the gold mines on the Witswatersrand
came from Mozambique. In the 1970s a third of a much bigger labor
force still came from Mozambique. Those workers come a year or two
years at a time and then go back. They are not allowed to bring their
wives and children. In the course of a hundred years of developing the
society on that basis, Mozambique moved from the production of food 

to
the production of gold. They then imported their food. The difficulty
is that Mozambicans are producing that gold outside the borders of
Mozambique. They were building up the wealth of the southern African
economy in which they participated but to which they did not have the
right of access. There was a great danger that if we focused on
poverty only inside South_Africa itself we would make proposals that
would be good for black South_Africans but bad for Mozembicans.
          The politics of this was incredibly delicate but important to get
hold of. Over the last three years in southern Africa when Frelimo
took Mozambique to independence, the South_Africans unilaterally cut
the number of migrant workers from 100,000 down to 45,000. Overnight
those 55,000 jobs went to Transkeians. That was good strategy in terms
of poverty inside South_Africa but at the expense of people who are
even poorer. It is enormously important as we think about poverty that
we think about all the poor and not simply a chauvinistic version of
'our' poor, which could be poor whites although we laugh at that
now. It is just as wrong to think about 'our' poor as just within our
political boundary, particularly if the wealth within that boundary
has been built up by people outside it.
          We did not define poverty in advance. We wanted to find what
poverty means for the poor themselves. We found things that I had
never thought about.
          For example, women in the rural areas will spend seven hours at a
time two or three times a week carrying a hundred-pound bundle of wood
five miles. On the way home they will walk under a power line. There
you have poverty in a nutshell in South_Africa--an old lady carrying a
hundred-pound bundle of wood beneath a power line. South_Africa
produces sixty percent of the electricity in Africa. We have no
shortage of energy. But over half of South_Africa households have no
access to electricity. If you are rural and have no money you must
look for wood. As population grows the dead wood is cut down, then
live trees are harvested, then the bushes. You walk further and
further. The ecological consequences are devastating. Thus one of the
things that poverty means in South_Africa is that nobody has thought
of energy distribution. We spend millions on unnecessary nuclear power
plants and do nothing in terms of reforestation, solar energy and
appropriate energy for those who really need it.
          Poverty has many faces, and it is a great mistake to reduce poverty
to a single number.
          The second aspect of the inquiry was analysis, because you need
understanding if you are to develop strategies. Also, the politics was
important. People have different perceptions as to why there is
poverty. Some blame apartheid, some capitalism, some socialism. Some
will say it is because the poor have too many babies, some that the
poor are too lazy. Some will say it is all of the above. People have
their own favorite headline reasons for poverty.
          We wanted to make people argue their case. Is population growth a
problem? If so, how? People say, 'Oh yes if only the poor_people just
wouldn't have so many babies.' That is a victim-blaming approach which
the rich use because it removes them from responsibility. But the
facts show that South_African population growth is not terrible.
          We felt that to have a big, open debate on the causes of poverty
would ensure that nobody could accuse us of not listening to what the
government thought were the reasons of poverty.
          After that two-year process of thinking through and discussing with
everybody how this should come together, we launched the inquiry in
April 1982. We launched it very publicly because the moment we tried
to do anything clandestine the state would have known instantly and
would have shut us down. We made it an open thing in which everybody
must be involved. We went to all the Sunday newspapers and even had a
thirty-second appearance on the television news just after a snake
bite in some small town. One of us was allowed to say something about
the inquiry. This was the one and only time we were allowed near the
television screen.
          There were two years of research and writing, filming and
photography, working groups and discussions. It was brought together
in a conference in April of 1984 where we had far more participation
than we ever expected. Three hundred papers were presented from all
around southern Africa on poverty. Some were microstudies on what
poverty wee in a little town in the middle of the Karoo. We had
macrostudies about housing. We had political studies about many
things. It was an astonishing range of papers. All those who had
written papers came. We allowed no one else. We said, 'no gawkers.'
          We had a conference including a photographic exhibition. One of the
nice things that had happened as a result of the public launching was
that an old friend, Omar Badsha, read about it and phoned up from
Durban. He said, 'Listen man you can't just do all of this stuff with
words. Who ever reads words? What we need is some photographers.' He
took a little bit of money and got the beat photographers in South
Africa and told them to come back with photographic essays about what
poverty means. The striking thing wee that there was not one starving
baby, not because we do not have starving babies in South_Africa, but
because the photographers were saying that the essence of poverty in
South_Africa is human dignity. That is the kind of thing I never would
have thought about in advance. It came out of listening to people as
to what they wanted to say.
          We also produced twelve video films for the total of forty thousand
rend, that is twenty thousand dollars. I think that is a world record
when you know how much films cost to produce. We gave tiny sums of
money to people who were interested in filming and said, 'If you can
make us a movie, that's great but we can't give you more than this
amount of money.' they went off end they did it.
          Part of the politics of that was that in South_Africa you may not
produce movies without the permission of the censors. The way we were
able to work through that was to bring all these videos to a workshop
as unfinished productions, in order to have feedback so that the video
producers could go and make their films better before they were
finalized, so they could then go to the censors. I do not think they
have ever been finalized.
          We had a film festival from around the world on signs of hope
including one on the TVA, "The Electric Valley." [Southern
Changes, August-September 1984] We looked at 

experiments and
ideas in different parts of the world. This was important.
          There was massive press coverage including the Afrikaans papers but
not a second on television. Although we had a reporter from the
broadcasting corporation who got very excited about the whole business
and wrote up a long report and did interviews, she was spiked. Nothing
appeared on the radio or television except one little controversy
where somebody had said that they thought actually blacks in the
homelands and reserves had been doing very well over the last ten
years. That went on but nothing else.
          We had a number of post-conference papers to fill gape and think
about strategies. A book of photographs, The Cordoned Heart, was
published. A couple of us wrote a report for Unicef on children in
South_Africa. We have four books coming out with edited papers and an
overview book. And there are two films.
          Is that adequate? Where do we go from there? The real question
concerns strategies. We learned that in South_Africa we must think
about strategies in a short-run and in a long-run way.
          In the long run we assume political change. What do we then do in
terms of poverty? Once we assume that there is a democratic non-racial
society in South_Africa we then say, 'and then?' Do you want to
nationalize the gold mines? What kind of land reform do you want? Do
you want Israeli kibbutzim? How do we go on insuring that food is
produced and yet maximize employment? How do we generate employment
for everybody? How do we humanize the workplace? How do we democratize
the economy? Those are the long range questions.
          The short range questions are what can we do in the present that
will make a difference right now, but is consistent with the long
range? I am not so naive as to think that our strategies will bring
change. I am talking about anticipating change and helping to prepare
for change.
          We find ourselves really talking about non-governmental
organizations like the trade union movement and education bodies. We
need to think through the whole process of structure building, which
includes a good deal of luck (let us not underestimate the importance
of luck in a society like South_Africa--luck that you survive). We
need strategic thinking where you say, 'There does seem to be some
space here that we can quietly can get together. It's a gray area in
terms of the law but we think we can move.' In this way
non-governmental bodies do begin to grow.
          The trade unions are a superb example. Until 1973 the trade union
movement had been smashed in South_Africa by eighty years of state
repression. In the last fourteen years the trade unions, playing
superb politics, have been able to negotiate and work their way into a
position where I do not think they can now be destroyed. That is part
of the significance of this last strike of the mineworkers. It was, if
you like, a dry run just to test the limits. The fact that the
National Union of Mine Workers is alive--has not been smashed and is
able to exist--is a major advance and a major shift in the political
balance of power in South_Africa.
          We have to recognize the strategic importance of the trade unions
and find out what can be done to support them. One simply cannot leave
Cyril Ramaphosa standing alone. It is necessary to ask whether there
is a second or a third level of leadership with the technical
education and training to run a huge trade union under the political
pressures that exist in South_Africa.
          At a personal level this is all very challenging. At first one
might regret having been born in this generation of South
Africana. "If only I had been born some years later after the
political change, then I could get on with creative work," a
person might say. But then one may suddenly recognize that the
foundations of the future have to be laid now. This is a very good
time to be working. Although there is not a great deal of apace, the
apace that exists is crucially important and one can use it. There is
less apace now than there was two years ago but there is more space
now than there was in 1965.  It comes and goes.
          We find ourselves at the end of an inquiry like this seeing that it
is very important for South_Africans to consider the long view. We
need to think about the antipoverty strategies that will work once
politics is not the problem that it now is. How do we overcome the
legacy of three hundred years of conquest, a hundred years of this
appallingly biased industrialization with the migrant labor system,
and fifty years of apartheid? Those are tough questions in a society
that does not have untold wealth. How do we bring about economic
equality in what is the most unequal society in the world?
          So we think about the long run, but also about the short run. We
see that we could get this organization going, or that this
organization needs strengthening. What about a children's institute?
That is the approach.
          To conclude, Ed Elson in his introduction of John Lewis and Ray
Marshall today made two points I think are important. First, he quoted
Robert Kennedy, that when an individual stands up he may send forth
ripples which will join with a million other ripples which ultimately
will change everything. That famous statement by Kennedy was first
made at the University of Cape Town. We all share the same dream. It
is a common struggle in different ways. The second point that Ed Elson
made when he was talking about Ray Marshall was that he plants
trees. I thought that was a wonderful analogy. I can remember visiting
Germany a year or two ago and standing in the forests where only a
generation previously the Nazi bullets had been flying. To see this
marvelous forest standing there and hear a friend of mine saying that,
'Yea, we can cut these down now but we are going to need to replant
because in Germany we think in terms of 150-year cycles. We plant for
150 years in Germany.' That took me a little bit beyond planting wheat
for next year.
          Is that not exactly what we are doing? We may not live to harvest
our trees but we certainly need to plant them now, to provide fruit
and shelter for our children and our children's children all over the
world, but certainly in the two Souths.
          
            Dr. Francis Wilson was the banquet speaker at the 1987
SRC annual meeting. A South_African economist, Dr. Wilson is currently
directing the Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in
Southern Africa, a study involving scores of participants. The Inquiry
aims to give voice and leverage to South_Africa's "unheard voices,"
the dispossessed black majority. Dr. Wilson's edited and condensed
remarks follow.
          
        
