WORLD BOYCOTT OF S.AFRICA!
by LANGA JUNE 19 - As this article is being written, the unarmed South African toilers who have risen up against the white racist bastion of the imperialist. West are facing a continuing armed onslaught. So far, according to the BBC, more than 100 people have been killed and some 1, 000 wounded. The wave of struggle began on June 16 in Saweta, the black suburb of Johannesburg, when black students and parents staged a peaceful protest against the introduction of compulsory use of Afrikaans (the Dutch-based language of the Boer settlers) into the segregated schools. The protesters were demanding that English become the language of Instruction. This demand arises not out of love for the British oppressors. (Britain is the main economic power in South Africa, owning the lion's share of the more than E10 thousand million of fixed capital and enjoying the fruits of the exploitation of cheap non-European labor in mining, industry, fransport, commerce, and farming.) The Africans demanded English as the language of instruction, rejecting the use of both Afrikaans and the Bantu languages, because they wanted a language widely spoken on a world scale with significant cultural impact. This unsentimental approach to the language problem stems from the long campaign of political education waged by the Non-European Unity Movement (founded in 1943) for non-racial, non-tribal education as part of a general struggle for full democratic rights. The Soweto martyrs stood up against Vorster's program of Bantuization, retribalization, and retardation of the educational system as a means of perpetuating a docile and cheap labor force. Soweto is a cheap labor ghetto on the outskirts of Johannesburg, populated by nearly a million semi-transient workers. In their native land, they live without any rights. Legally "belonging" to one or another far-off 32 Editeur responsable: René Groslambert, 34 rue Nothomb, 1040 Bruxelles the soweto massacre and non-industrialized Bantu "homeland, " they are denied the right to remain in Soweto permanently. Pariahs in their own country, they are treated as immigrant workers; they are landless, denied any political rights, denied the right to farm, and forced to carry a pass at all times. The viciousness of the repression against the Soweto mobilization is a mesure of the importance of this struggle, which has touched a nerve center of Vorster's Bantustan policy: retribalization. The Soweto protesters have rejected a plan framed by the entire Western alliance after the fall of the Portuguese colonial regime in 1974, a new grand strategy for southern Africa that would preserve the invaluable racist state of South Africa intact. The plan had two parts. The internal aspect was to partition South Africa into Bantustan "homelands" (the fiest to be "independent" would be the Transkei in October 1976) in which the Africans would be "citizens" of "independent" tribal states alongside a white South Africa in which AFricans would be immigrant workers. The Africans would live in the Sowetos, but as foreigners, having "citizenship" in the Transkei or some other "independent" Bantustan. Their language would be their own tribal language (Xhosa, Zulu, etc.) . The second aspect of the strategy that the Vorster regime had worked out with Washington, London, and the capitals of the EEC countries, particularly Bonn, consisted of the establishment of a belt of "independent" African states protecting the northern flank of the "white jewel" and forming part of the growing South African Common Market and the EEC-dominated semi-colonial empire that goes under the name of the Lome Convention. Rhodesia was to become one of the black states in the South African Common Market. Vorster Cont'd on pg. 30