Word: pretoria
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...tall new apartment building stands on a ridge just outside Pretoria, overlooking the main route the blacks take into the city early each morning, before work starts. I am told it houses policemen and their families. South African whites are on the alert these days. If any trouble starts, the police will be able to move right in, with tear gas machines designed especially for South African crowds, and, if that fails to disperse "them," automatic weapons...
...white American, I find it easy to slip into oblivion in South Africa. Much of the countryside, at least around Pretoria, looks much more like the U.S. than Africa. The cities look like smaller versions of our own, and small towns in the Transvaal look just like the Midwest, complete with Kentucky Fried Chicken and Burger King. It looks like home, the part of South Africa where the white population lives--so peaceful, so comfortable and modern. I find it easy to relax, to forget what this standard of living is built...
...South Africans call "petty apartheid"--have been removed in the last few years, as white South Africa tries hard to give its drooping image a facelift. But enough remains to remind you that apartheid exists, that it is not a figment of some fevered radical's exaggeration, that beneath Pretoria's familiar exterior there is something very wrong indeed...
...Africa's last hold-out against Marxism, in an effort to woo American support for their position. Always they ask, both blacks and whites, what the U.S. will do when it comes down to the wire, whether it will intervene, and on which side. Cyrus Vance is in Pretoria this weekend discussing Namibia, so the question is particularly relevant. Unfortunately, I can't answer; neither could he, probably. If South Africa is liberated, the whole western economic structure is likely to change drastically, and it isn't clear to anyone the U.S. won't end up joining South Africa...
...laws to keep South Africans from thinking. The censor's list is long and strict, and the newspapers have to tread carefully when they cover current events. Often the censors are fairly arbitrary, as in one famous case, when they banned Black Beauty (because of its title). While in Pretoria, I realize I have a banned novel in my suitcase, Alex LaGuma's Fog at the Season's End. For a moment, I feel as if the whole South African security force is about to knock on the door; reassured, I realize I am only liable to a $650 fine...