Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 17, 1993 TAG: 9302170172
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
U.S. PART OF APARTHEID FIGHT, SPEAKER SAYS
For years, Randall Robinson has fought apartheid.He has fought for awareness, and he has fought for democracy in South Africa.
And though he often has visited that country, it is here in the West - in America - where people can make a major difference in what happens to South Africa, he said Tuesday.
"A lot of what happens in that country depends on the U.S.," Robinson told a crowd that had waded through slushy streets to Virginia Tech's Haymarket Auditorium. Robinson was the keynote speaker for a one-day symposium on the future of South Africa.
Americans need to make political leaders see the needs in South Africa, said Robinson, who is no stranger to activism.
He formed and is executive director of TransAfrica, a 40,000-member organization that presents and promotes black views on foreign policy. He also was the national coordinator of the Free South Africa Movement in 1984.
He said the American movement against apartheid helped bring about awareness and pressure in South Africa. Now, he says, the West needs to bring about more awareness about South Africa's economic problems - because those problems must be solved before democracy can occur.
Robinson spoke of the time in the early 1980s when Zimbabwe won democracy. Bob Marley was singing and there was an atmosphere of celebration.
"I asked a cab driver what it meant to him; and he told me that for the same work, whites made 10 times what blacks made."
If that situation didn't change, the cab driver said, then democracy meant very little.
"The gap between blacks and whites, economically and financially must be closed," Robinson, a Richmond native, said in his deep, resonant voice. "No democracy is stable in the midst of poverty."
The U.S. has had little to do with South Africa in recent years, Robinson said. The government has been concerned only when there was a fear of Soviet influence. But when the Cold War and the fear of Communism ended, he said, South Africa faded from view.
"The question Africa is asking is: Will America care about us at all now?" Robinson said. He has been waiting for some word from the Clinton administration, but so far he has heard none.
"There are 23 countries in some stage of democratization, asking for help," Robinson said. "In many ways, South Africa is poised on a razor's edge. It is very difficult to form a new democracy from a background of distrust . . . and violence."
The Tech symposium filled up Haymarket Auditorium and brought speakers from embassies, the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress.
State Secretary of Education James Dyke spoke briefly about the need for people to be concerned with ethnic or religious intolerance.
"In this very area, the issue of religious tolerance is on the front burner," he said, referring to a debate over whether Montgomery County should return to the use of Christian names for school holidays.