Join the Movement

The Italian Jewish novelist Prime Levi, who has devoted much of his life to trying to express what he witnessed as a prisoner at Auschwitz, has written that "our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man." When we write of radical evil in the world, we can record the details of its existence, the facts about its operation, but we cannot translate the darkness itself. More words betray us.

We encounter this problem in talking about South Africa. We report the grim facts about the apartheid state, the last government in the world to enforce racial supremacy and domination through law. If you are born Black, you have a one in four chance of dying before the age of one and an even chance of living to the age of five, but you have no chance of voting because it is against the law. You cannot own land or travel freely or live with your family except at the government's discretion.

The 72 percent of the population which is Black shares 13 percent of the nation's worst land, while the whites live in a splendor J.R. Ewing's family would appreciate. The government has "relocated" over 3 million Blacks by ripping them out of their homes and dumping them on to Bantustans, the restrictive homelands which double as cultural prisons. And since we started school in September, South Africa's police forces have gunned down more than 240 Blacks, arrested 3000 more, and waded into peaceful demonstrations of elementary school children with swinging billy clubs, electric shock batons, and tear gas. The list of casualties grows daily.

We report also the facts about American corporate complicity with this state, the connection which sustains apartheid. U.S. corporations have $14 billion invested in South Africa, a fact which led the Senate Subcommittee on Africa to conclude in 1978 that the "net effect of American investment has been to strengthen the economic and military self-sufficiency of South Africa's apartheid regime."

Companies like IBM, Exxon, and Ford (all of which Harvard invests in) furnish South Africa with the military and computer technology it needs to discipline and monitor the Black population, murder dissenters, and invade other nations.

General Motors, in case anyone is tempted to believe that American corporations are fighting apartheid ("Let's stay in and fight," a member of Harvard's Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility solemnly pronounced not long ago at the Law School), has stated its intention to cooperate with the South African government "in the event of civil unrest," magnanimously suggesting that its "vehicles may be taken over for Civil Defense purposes."

Says Bishop Desmond Tutu, the winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize. "Those who invest in South Africa should not think they are doing us a favor; they are here for what they get out of our cheap and abundant labor and they should know that they are buttressing one of the world's most vicious systems."

And, finally, we report the facts of Harvard's complicity with this system: a cool $565 million invested in companies operating in the apartheid state. While claiming the total divestment would be over reacting, the University paradoxically refuses to invest in companies that do a majority of their business in South Africa, on the grounds that these companies profit from apartheid.

But this maneuver gives the game away, destroying Harvard's own argument, for if it is wrong for a $10 million company to do $6 million worth of business with apartheid, surely it is equally wrong for a $5 billion company to do $2 billion worth of business there.

As Harvard's rationale unravels and Black South Africa, led by Bishop Tutu, demands total corporate disengagement, we no longer hear the early assertion that divestment would be wrong, simply that it would be "ineffective." The University which was going to single-handedly reform a racist, computerized police state from within (what happened?) all of a sudden does not have the power to influence the policy of business in its country.

But as we restate the facts about apartheid and refuge the illogic of the University's rhetorical evasions, our words cease to "express the offense, fail to communicate the ongoing demolition of a people. As South African police set dogs loose on schoolchildren and as Black activists get taken away in the middle of the night, we at Harvard get bogged down in rhetorical diversions, "progress" reports, committee minutes, media ploys, the whole debilitating bureaucratization of the debate. The issue loses its moral cogency.

Here, then, is the first reason to join today's protest: it refocuses our attention on the central question facing our community. Should Harvard join the swelling movement to end apartheid or should it continue to profit from the windfall of oppression in South Africa?

By returning the gaze of the community to this core question, public protest invites us to ask why Harvard is acting as both a beneficiary of, and accomplice to, racial oppression. We are forced to examine the tear in our own social fabric, the racial separation of truth and power, which allows such a scandal to go on in the midst of a community dedicated to the ideals of truth and justice. Are we a community which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing?

Regardless of the University's reaction to today's protest, we know that only persistent unrest and agitation in the student body will cause a change in Harvard's position. As Frederick Douglass said, "Power concedes nothing without a struggle," a truth attested to not only by the general history of popular movements in our nation, from the Abolitionists to the Civil Rights movement to the movement against the Vietnam War to the women's movement, but from the specific experience of students at Harvard in fighting for divestment.

The University only formed its Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility when it needed to take the heat off after hundreds of Black students, objecting to Harvard's investments in Gulf Oil's South Africa holdings, took over University Hall in 1972. The ban on investments in banks that loan directly to the South African government closely followed the resurgence of anti-apartheid student activities in 1979. And when the University casually tried to retract that ban on loans to the pariah state, an overflow crowd of 400 students at an open meeting in 1982 denounced the move and stopped Harvard's retreat from an already minimalist and indefensible position.

All of the hoopla and fanfare accompanying the $1 million Baker in February (it was as if the government threw away one bullet and called it disarmament) reflects the University's continued anxiety about the issue and its creative, if transparent, strategy of trying to defuse the movement at Harvard which is now sweeping the nation. We know that Harvard only moves on this issue when it gets pushed.

By protesting today, we recapture the moral meaning of the divestment issue and revive the possibility of effective political mobilization. Instead of approaching the issue the way the Corporation does, from the patronizing and paralyzing perspective of ruling American elites judging what is best for South Africa, we join to growing solidarity movement in America that has heard Black South Africa's defiant and ringing calls for total disinvestment.

Dozens of states, cities, unions, and churches have divested their monies from South African holdings. This group includes Connecticut, Massachusetts, Boston, Maryland, New York, the United Auto Workers, Ohio University, Michigan State, Wesleyan the University of Massachusetts, and the Harvard Law Review. Taking a stand against Harvard's investment assumes primary importance now because it is only President Bok's personal campaign against divestment which has conferred any legitimacy at all on the untenable and fading proposition that universities should not care where these invest.

Harvard now plays the leading role in the campaign against divestment, but the people who populate and run the University--the students and teachers and workers--overwhelmingly favor ending Harvard's financial endorsement of apartheid. It is our special responsibility to urge President Bok to call off his perplexing and losing battle against sanctions and to use his position and enormous influence to become a leader in the movement for divestment.

This movement that we propel forward with today's demonstration, the movement we ask President Bok to join, will recover the sense of community dialogue that has been shot by official Harvard's stubborn refusal to debate this issue in public. By speaking and acting together, participants today will generate what political philosopher Hannah Arendt called "public space," a realm for the engagement of mind and body in collective discourse and action to resolve common problems.

We have the chance today to make a statement so clear and loud that could turn Harvard around, which in turn could begin a process of disengaging American business support from the apartheid regime, Practicing democracy at Harvard can bolster the struggle for democracy in South Africa. Apologists for investment in South Africa claim that divestment would be ineffective; what they fear is how effective it really would be.

In joining and building this movement for justice South Africa, we engage in a project that takes morality seriously.

For a moment, perhaps more, we try to project ourselves into lives led unlike our own, conjuring the terror and degradation the Black non-citizens of South Africa must endure. As we challenge this offense against humanity, we begin to sense the reality of a system that demolishes people, a system that ravages and devours workers, a system that murders, imprisons, tortures, silences, represses, a system that places whites over Blacks as a matter of law.

We protest today--thousands of students and workers--because Martin Luther King, Jr. taught us, "Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere." We assemble on the 17th anniversary of Dr. King's death to honor his prescient insistence that American business leave South Africa and to call forth the power of his faith and vision and courage in a movement to end a policy which implicates all of us in savagery and shameful actions, a policy that spills blood in our name.

Black South Africans face the death penalty for advocating divestiture, but we do not. We must speak out today, and then every day, until Harvard divests from apartheid.

Duncan Kennedy '64 is a professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Jamin B. Raskin '83 is a first-year Law student and a member of the Law School Divestment Committee.