Harvard and Namibia

LAST SPRING, black students seized Massachusetts Hall in an attempt to end Harvard's payments, through a corporation of which it owned a part, to a colonial regime in Angola. Conservatives have pointed gleefully at this year's comparative apathy; but anger at the University's support for racism abroad is not dead. The elected and presumably representative Student Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility called last week for Harvard to support shareholder resolutions to get Continental Oil and Phillips Petroleum out of Namibia.

This is good news, especially since Namibia, the former Southwest Africa, is a showcase for apartheid in all its viciousness. The League of Nations gave South Africa its Namibian mandate. The United Nations, recognizing South Africa's failure to prepare the territory for independence or permit its people a decent existence, revoked the mandate in 1966. Since then South African rule has been as illegal as it is immoral.

Namibia's two revolutionary movements want American corporations to withdraw from the territory because their tax payments help maintain South African rule. It's arguable that the jobs these companies provide and the benefit an independent Namibia will derive from expropriating their holdings are more important than these tax payments. Given South African rule, there is no way to tell how the Namibian people feel about American investments; but the guerillas' claim to speak for them is at least more plausible than that of South Africa's government.

We urge the full ACSR and the Corporation subcommittee on shareholder responsibility to follow the undergraduates' lead on the Namibian question in particular and in opposing racism and imperialism in general.