1976 TRIP to South Africa
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From The Collected Works of Milton Friedman, compiled and edited by Robert Leeson and Charles G. Palm. With Rose Friedman. "Record of a Trip to Southern Africa, March 20-April 9, 1976." Unpublished typescript transcribed from a tape, dictated 7-9 April 1976. Excerpts published in Two Lucky People: Memoirs, by Milton and Rose Friedman, pp. 435-440. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998. This is nearly the end of our stay in Southern Africa and yet it is the first time I have gotten around to dictating something about our trip here. This is partly because the program has been very full and we have been very active all the time, but it is also partly because you get immersed in the activities as they go on and it is hard to exercise the discipline required to recall what has been going on. It probably would have been more sensible to have dictated this at the end of each day rather than retrospectively as I am now doing. Today is April 7 and we are in the Wankie National Game Reserve with about three- quarters of an hour before our driver and car shows up to take us hopefully on an expedition to view some of the big game. We arrived in Johannesburg without particular incident on March 20. It was raining when we got to Johannesburg, but in any event we saw essentially nothing of it since we were only at the airport. We changed to the Cape Town plane and made our way to Cape Town where we were met at the airport by Meyer Feldberg. He drove us out to the hotel where we stayed. The hotel where we stayed was the President Hotel, which is one of a series of hotels run by the Miekle-Southern Sun Hotel chain. We subsequently stayed in a Southern Sun Hotel in Durban and also in Johannesburg, and the extremely fine hotel we are now staying in at the Wankie Game Reserve is also a Southern Sun Hotel. We had a fine suite there and the hotel is right off the beach in the Cape Town Seapoint District. That really is not part of Cape Town proper but is rather like a suburb at the western end of the town. I am not absolutely sure about my geography, but it is at one end of the town. Much of Cape Town is on two sides of Table Mountain. This is on one side of Table From The Collected Works of Milton Friedman, compiled and edited by Robert Leeson and Charles G. Palm. Mountain toward the bay; the University of Cape Town is on the other side of Table Mountain. From our hotel we could see Lion’s Head Mountain in back of the hotel and, looking the other way, the ocean and the beach. The beach is a tremendously long one, all along the seashore side of Cape Town. On Saturday we were somewhat tired, to put it mildly, after getting to Cape Town. So on that first night we slept right through until noon the next day. We then got up, had some breakfast, and just simply took a long walk along the beach before we went out to the Feldbergs for dinner. The Minister of Finance, O. P. Horwood, was supposed to have been a guest at the dinner but he did not show because he or his wife—I have forgotten which—was sick, but later on I had a session with him. Among the other people who were there was the American ambassador, Bowdler, a very pleasant person who said about three words during the whole dinner. If the essence of diplomacy is knowing how to keep your tongue, he is an excellent diplomat. We saw him also several days later when he had a cocktail party for us at the Embassy, and that did not change the image which he presented. The other people who were there at the first dinner were Mr. Len Abrahamse, an Afrikaans who is chairman of a major bank in South Africa, and Mr. Len Shawzin, who is chairman of a chain store group. There were other guests who were friends of the Feldbergs. The Feldbergs live in a suburb, Kenilworth, which is very near the University but is also a very nice residential section. The striking feature about each one of these South African towns, including Cape Town, is the complete segregation of the population of various groups. The total population of Cape Town is a little over a million of whom about 400,000 are listed as Whites, 108,000 as Bantu, 600,000 as Coloreds, and 11,000 as Asians. Under the earlier regime many years ago there were no segregated living quarters. But when the Afrikaans party came into power in 1948 and instituted the explicit policy of apartheid, with the policy of separating the various racial groups and providing for their separate development, it in the first place disenfranchised the Coloreds who before that had been on the voting rolls and, in 2 From The Collected Works of Milton Friedman, compiled and edited by Robert Leeson and Charles G. Palm. the second place, specified specific areas in the city in which Whites could live, Coloreds could live, and Bantu or Blacks could live. This has been the source, of course, of great unhappiness among the various groups. The driver from the Cape Town School of Business who drove us back and forth throughout the period we were there, a fellow whose first name was Jack (I never did get.his last name), was Colored. He was very unhappy about the fact that he had formerly been able to live within a 10 or 15 minute walk of the University where he worked, but he now had to live in a section separated out for the Coloreds which involved something like a half-hour or more bus trip to the University. At any rate, to return to the main theme, the Feldbergs live in the main part of Cape Town. Almost the whole of the central part, as with everyone of the other major cities, is reserved to the Whites. The Coloreds and the Bantu live on the outskirts of the city in separately organized areas. This has a very curious effect. It produces a situation for a city like Cape Town or Johannesburg which is almost the opposite of that for New York City. In New York City it is said that it is White by day and Black by night since the people who come in from the surrounding suburbs are the Whites who work in New York City while much of the resident population of New York City is Black. On the other hand, in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and the like, it is the other way around. During the day the city is flooded with Blacks who come in from the surrounding areas in which they are required to live in order to work, and then at nighttime there is exactly the reverse movement and the city is all White. The discussion after dinner ranged, of course, very widely over quite a number of subjects. But the thing that impressed us at this dinner, and at every other affair at which we were, was that the problem of the immediate situation of South Africa and Rhodesia was at the top of everybody’s head. Everyone was almost obsessed with the issue of whether there was any possible long-term future. In South Africa there was almost an acceptance of the fact that Rhodesia was gone, that it was just a matter of time, and that it might be only a very short 3 From The Collected Works of Milton Friedman, compiled and edited by Robert Leeson and Charles G. Palm. period of time until Rhodesia was overrun. In Rhodesia the atmosphere changed and there, there was a good deal more confidence that Rhodesia was in fairly stable condition and that the long-run problem of South Africa was really worse than the long-run problem of Rhodesia. There is an element of truth in this latter contention in view of the fact that the relations between the racial groups are quite different in the two areas. In South Africa, the explicit policy of apartheid has unquestionably alienated many groups of Blacks and instilled a great deal of bitterness in them vis-à-vis the Whites, though I must say this was not evident on the surface. All of the Blacks whom we saw in South Africa seemed very cheerful and in very good spirits, but I am sure that this was highly misleading. In Rhodesia, on the other hand, there has never been a policy of segregation; there has been a policy rather of open treatment. I am exaggerating that, because there are also rules about areas where Europeans may live and areas where Africans may live. One striking feature of terminology, however, shows the difference. In South Africa, the reference is always to Whites and Blacks, with the Whites in turn divided between the English-speaking and the Afrikaans, and the Coloreds and Indians always listed separately from the Blacks. In Rhodesia, the breakdown that is made is Europeans versus Africans, with the Whites, Coloreds, and Indians being lumped as Europeans, and the rest, who would be called Bantu or Black in South Africa, being designated as Africans. The fundamental reason for this difference, of course, is that the Afrikaner descendants of the Boers, who settled in Cape Town over 300 years ago, regard themselves as White Africans and not as Europeans.