The hottest issue on college campuses today is divestiture: agitation to force university trustees to divest their institutions of all investments in South Africa. This has replaced the Vietnam War, civil rights, and other issues about which college students have marched, demonstrated, and held sit-ins in administrative offices.
With tuition fees increasing every year, one would think that the students would be glad to have college endowment bringing in as high a return as possible in order to keep the charges to students as low as possible. But some students want political decisions to replace financial decisions.
Africa is a tremendous continent, more than 6,000 miles long and 5,000 miles wide. It is rich in gold, diamonds, uranium, chrome, coal, copper and other minerals, as well as agricultural land. Many believe that whoever controls Africa will control the world. It would be a Western default of responsibility to let this rich prize fall into the hands of the Soviet Union and thereby tip the scales of world control in its favor.
The Horn of Africa is one of the two most strategic parts of Africa. On the northeast side of the continent and extending out into the Indian Ocean about 700 miles, the Horn controls the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, and the oil coming out of the Middle East. The Suez Canal is not large enough to accommodate the modern oil tankers, so they go southward around the Cape of Good Hope to reach Europe and the West.
The little country of Somalia on the point of the Horn became a priority target of Soviet-Cuban aggression. On its own, it was doing a good job of defeating Ethiopia and Eritrea and establishing anti-Communist control over the entrance to the Red Sea.
However, when the United States abstained from giving any help to the anti-Communist Somalians, the Soviets sent bombers, arms and heavy equipment, and attacked and defeated Somalia without protest from our State Department or UN Ambassador.
The Soviets now control Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea on the west side of the Red Sea, and Aden and South Yemen on the east side. The question is, are we also going to encourage the Soviets to do likewise at the other strategic point in Africa, the southern tip?
South Africa has a developed technical civilization with the highest standard of living anywhere in Africa, for blacks and whites. Historically, the whites settled South Africa first; the blacks came south later to share in the growing and productive economy which the whites had carved out of the wilderness.
South Africa has been consistently pro-Western and anti-Communist, but American policy, from the State Department to the campuses, has been to treat it like a pariah. It is a strange liberal double standard that apartheid excites student demonstrations, while the millions in Soviet slave labor camps (so well described by former inmates such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and John Noble) produce only yawns.
Ninety percent of African nations are ruled by one party or by a military dictatorship which has eliminated free elections, outlawed opposition parties, and trampled on individual rights. Their future is even bleaker; it is moving toward the total enslavement so characteristic of Communist countries. In South Africa, however, the momentum for black advancement, although slow and halting, is at least in the right direction.
South Africa has the most press freedom and the most newspapers in all of Africa. It has 21 dailies and none of them is government owned. Any visitor to South Africa is amazed at the sharply critical attacks on the government which are published in the newspapers there, more vehement than most U.S. newspapers’ criticism of the Carter Administration. U.S. and European newspapers are freely sold in South Africa.
Divestiture of university investments in South Africa would not have any effect on the policies of the South African government or on the life of the blacks who live there (except perhaps to jeopardize the jobs of the tens of thousands of blacks who work in U.S.-owned companies). As long as South African investments make money for their owners, there will be plenty of buyers for any stocks divested by the universities.
