South Africa

The rise and fall of apartheid

Nancy L. Clark, William H. Worger

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000555097
• Edición: 4
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia africana

This new edition of South Africa examines the history of South Africa from 1948 to the present, covering the economic background to racial segregation, the introduction of the oppressive policy of apartheid, the eventual collapse of White supremacy, and the legacy of apartheid to the present day.Fully revised, the fourth edition incorporates new original research, particularly from the records of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and includes additional popular culture images, such as posters linked to the international anti-apartheid struggle. These help to further emphasise the mounting popular opposition to state repression in the 1970s and 1980s. By developing an analysis of recent economic and political issues that are rooted in the apartheid regime, particularly the continuing divide between rich and poor along racial lines and the impact of public corruption known as 'state capture', South Africa provides a current, clear, and succinct introduction to the ideology and practice of apartheid.Illustrated with photographs, maps, and figures, and including a Chronology, Glossary, Who's Who, and updated Further Reading section, the fourth edition of South Africa is an essential text for students studying all aspects of apartheid in South Africa.

Part I Setting the scene

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003091981-2

Apartheid, literally ‘apartness’ or separateness in the Afrikaans and Dutch languages, is the name that was given to a policy of separating people by race, with regard to where they lived, where they went to school, where they worked, and where they died. The word is pronounced ‘apart-hate’, as one can hear when Dr Hendrik Verwoerd (prime minister 1958–1966) explained his understanding of the policy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPCln9czoys). This policy was introduced in South Africa in 1948 by the National Party government and it remained official practice until the fall from power of that party in 1994.

Racial discrimination did not begin in South Africa in 1948. Indeed, it can be traced back to the beginnings of Dutch colonisation of the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 and the establishment thereafter of an economy based on the use of slaves imported from East Africa and Southeast Asia. Even after the end of slavery in the 1830s, racial discrimination continued in myriad forms as European settlement expanded, the British government conquered African societies, and imperialists and settlers alike spoke of the ‘civilising mission’ of White rule and favoured, almost without exception, the segregation of Black from White.

Neither racial discrimination nor segregationist policies distinguished South Africa from a multitude of other societies, especially those of the colonial world, during the first half of the twentieth century. Before the Second World War no European powers considered that any of their colonies would enjoy full independence in the near future. None allowed colonised people to vote except in the most limited fashion, such as a few representatives to advisory councils. All practised various forms of social and economic discrimination, favouring White settlers and officials in housing, education, and jobs at the expense of indigenous peoples. That was colonialism. And people of colour living in the southern United States half a century after the end of the Civil War still experienced many of the same indignities as the colonised peoples of Asia and Africa.

All this changed after the Second World War, with the abrupt ending of colonialism in Asia and Africa during the 1940s and 1950s, and the implementation of apartheid in South Africa. The word apartheid was coined in the mid-1930s, and was first used as a way of expressing the importance of Afrikaners maintaining a cultural identity separate from that of English-speaking Europeans in South Africa. During the war years, however, the word took on new connotations. Afrikaner politicians, embroiled in a world conflict that they denounced as the product of British imperialism, and appealing for political support to an Afrikaans-speaking, urban, working-class electorate that felt exploited by British capitalists on one side and threatened by cheaper Black workers on the other, engaged in a campaign of race-baiting. Although apartheid did not appear in a dictionary until 1950, it really entered the public lexicon in 1947 and 1948 as the United and National parties strove against each other for electoral support. As used and developed in the course of election campaigning, apartheid came to stand for support of the physical separation of Black and White, this separation to be achieved by legislative policies and state action.

Plate 1.1 H. F. Verwoerd in March 1951, when he was minister of native affairs. Often regarded as the architect of apartheid in practice, Verwoerd served as prime minister of South Africa from 1958 until he was stabbed to death by Dimitri Tsafendas, a parliamentary messenger, in the South African House of Parliament on 6 September 1966. © Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images

As a proactive and dynamic policy, apartheid marked a real divide from what had gone before, not in general support for the separation of the races, but in the extent of such separation and in the means to be used to attain that separation. Gwendolen Carter, a political scientist who spent a year in South Africa in the early 1950s studying the implementation of apartheid at first hand, remarked that what distinguished the National Party government from its predecessors was the way that it had acted, ‘decisively and forcefully’, to enact its programmes of racial separation ‘through legislation which they have been prepared to put into force in the face of the most bitter criticism … from Europeans as well as non-Europeans’. The Nationalists, Carter argued in the first comprehensive study of apartheid, were intent on using legislative action ‘to make the African the different kind of person that theory [apartheid] says he is’. She argued that this determination to force theory into reality was based on two fundamental concerns: first, ‘to try to direct his energies away from his desire for more power and a better return for his labor in the European areas’; second, as a way to deal with the conundrum of ‘how to maintain European supremacy in every sphere of life and at the same time advance the industrial revolution in South Africa which helps to make that country independent of outside influences’ (Carter, 1958: 15, 411–412).

The implementation of apartheid captured the attention and incurred the wrath of the newly independent states of Asia and Africa. India led the criticism in the late 1940s, objecting especially that the South African government refused to accord to citizens of the ‘Black’ Commonwealth the same rights and privileges given to citizens of the ‘White’ Commonwealth. Apartheid gained even greater international prominence in 1952 when representatives of 13 Asian and African states (Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen) stressed to their fellow members of the United Nations that apartheid was ‘creating a dangerous and explosive situation’ in South Africa, and that the policy as implemented constituted ‘both a threat to international peace and a flagrant violation of the basic principles and fundamental freedoms which are enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations’ (United Nations, 1994: 223).

Such international criticism gained wider currency during the 1960s and 1970s as the South African government pursued the implementation of its apartheid policies in brutal fashion, symbolised especially by the police killing on 21 March 1960 of over 70 Africans demonstrating peacefully at Sharpeville against the country’s notorious ‘pass’ law (see Chapter 3). In October 1966 the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 21 March as the ‘International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination’, and in December of the same year condemned ‘the policies of apartheid practised by the Government of South Africa as a crime against humanity’. In 1977, after the harsh crushing of the Soweto uprising (see Chapter 4), the UN sought to give teeth to its condemnation by voting unanimously to implement a mandatory embargo by all its member states on the trade in arms to South Africa. The Secretary-General at the time, Kurt Waldheim, explained what was an unprecedented action in the following way: ‘such a gross violation of human rights and so fraught with danger to international peace that a response commensurate with the gravity of the situation was required’ (United Nations, 1994: 50).

Yet South Africa still had stalwart allies amongst the conservative leaders of the US and the United Kingdom. The American policies of Richard Nixon and later Ronald Reagan were based in a mixture of racism and supposed realpolitik in which southern Africa as a whole was viewed as a Cold War battleground between East and West, capitalism and communism, ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’. President Nixon considered African Americans as ‘just down out of the trees’, and said of Africa that ‘there has never in history been an adequate black nation, and they are the only race of which this is true … Africa is hopeless’ (Morgan, 2012: 822). South Africa though was an exception, ‘a dynamic society with an advanced economy’, whose racial policies Nixon claimed not to endorse, but whose importance for control of Africa and its resources was essential to the West (https://michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/antiapartheid/items/show/199). When Reagan became president he wrote to P. W. Botha of the US and South Africa’s ‘shared concerns for the security of southern Africa’ and the need ‘to help stem the growth of Soviet importance in the region’ (https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116766). Botha played on these concerns as he reached out to Reagan and Thatcher in 1980:

The Soviet threat of engulfing South Africa is of immediate concern to all of us. The Soviet Union is already established in Ethiopia, Angola and Mocambique, and its influence in other African countries poses a direct threat to the whole of Africa. But the prime target is Southern Africa. That is why the struggle for Zimbabwe/Rhodesia is so important and why Soviet aims in South West Africa must be frustrated, not only in the interests of Southern Africa, but also of the West.

(Botha to Thatcher, 5 February 1980, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/119634)

It was during the 1980s that world attention finally focused on apartheid. Whereas in the 1950s and the 1960s the South African government could at least plead for patience from its critics by arguing that it was experimenting with a new policy and needed time to see if apartheid would work in practice, during the late 1970s and the 1980s it had become obvious to most observers that apartheid could never work as espoused by its adherents, and indeed was nothing more than an elaborate yet ultimately flimsy mask attempting to disguise an extraordinarily oppressive system of White rule over Black. (This view was not news to Black South Africans or to many students of the country’s history and politics, but it did finally capture world media headlines.) During the 1980s, as South Africa disintegrated into a form of civil war as Black opponents of apartheid fought, increasingly successfully, to make apartheid unworkable and South Africa ungovernable, most of the rest of the world joined in the near-universal condemnation of the South African government and supported international steps to bring apartheid to an end, especially by enforcing boycotts (economic, political, sporting, and so forth). The high point, symbolically, of this process of a developing international consensus came with the passage in 1986, by a two-thirds vote of the US Congress overriding an attempted veto by President Reagan of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. Among other steps, the Act banned Americans from making new investments in South Africa, from exporting computers (so necessary to the workings of the apartheid police state), from selling oil, and from direct air travel between the United States and South Africa. Within less than five years of the outbreak of civil war and the implementation of international sanctions, the National Party government, to the surprise of all commentators, in 1990 renounced apartheid and stated its acceptance of the principle that all people in South Africa, Black as well as White, should participate in the electoral process. Four years later, in 1994, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, who had spent the years 1963 to 1990 incarcerated as a political prisoner, became the first president of the new South Africa. This book examines the origins of the policy of apartheid, its implementation, its ultimate collapse, and its legacy.

Historiography

Writing about South Africa’s history and politics has in its authorship and its intellectual and cultural approaches mirrored the divide between Black and White that has permeated daily life. The earliest historical writing about South Africa, produced in the latter half of the nineteenth century, reflected the Eurocentric and paternalistic biases of high imperialism. These historians, often civil servants in the colonial administration, wrote of the incursion of Europeans into southern Africa as an essential step in the raising up and improvement of indigenous peoples at a time when popular theories of Social Darwinism remarked on the survival of the fittest within a social order that was assumed to be naturally hierarchical, with Nordic Whites at the top and Australian and southern African hunter-gatherer peoples at the bottom. For these writers, the attributes needed by Africans in order to move up the hierarchy, in essence to prove that they were ‘civilised’, were acceptance of the superiority of European religion – demonstrated by conversion to Christianity – and a willingness to endure the hardships of manual labour, particularly in the diamond and gold mines that were being developed from the 1870s onwards. Refusal to convert or to work (at least on the terms offered by White employers) was deemed a sign of barbarism (Worger, 1999). Much of the content and many of the themes of this nineteenth-century literature continued to dominate the school texts read by elementary and high school pupils, Black and White, in South Africa’s state education system through to the 1990s (Worger, 1999).

Following this primarily pro-English literature, a distinct settler version emerged in the 1880s and 1890s, and blossomed in the early part of the twentieth century, among the Dutch-speaking settlers who perceived themselves as victims of British imperialism. In their historical works they focused on events such as the Great Trek of the 1830s, when Dutch-speaking settlers opposed to British policies favouring the emancipation of slaves had moved beyond British colonial borders into the interior of the subcontinent, on the wars that they had fought with African leaders, whom they depicted without exception as treacherous and unworthy of ruling the lands that the settlers coveted for themselves, and on the wars fought by the British in the late nineteenth century to seize control of the South African gold industry. Alongside the anti-imperial and the anti-Black elements, there was a strong radical theme running through the early Afrikaner nationalist literature, linking Afrikaners’ struggles for independence to those of the early American colonists, and condemning late nineteenth-century British imperialism as nothing but a mask for the greed of mining capitalism that had left most Afrikaners poor and landless after the South African War of 1899–1902 (Smith, 1988).

Often overlooked in historiographical surveys, a defect of assuming that only academic writing constitutes ‘history’, have been the considerable contributions of Black writers. Literacy became widespread in the second half of the nineteenth century, largely as the result of missionaries who, in carrying the word of God, did so through the technology of the printing press and the founding of newspapers targeted at African audiences. Although missionaries expected their converts to accept and proselytise the word of God and the benefits of European civilisation exactly as taught to them, many of those same converts were struck by the contrast between the theory of what they were taught – that all were equal in the eyes of God and the discrimination that they suffered in their daily lives. While often praising certain features of European culture – Shakespeare and cricket in particular – these writers also documented the harsh treatment meted out to Blacks in the mines and farms of South Africa (Plaatje, 1987 [1916]). Others, especially from the 1920s onwards, took a more radical line, criticising what they perceived as the class basis of imperial rule, and thereby evoking some of the same themes as early Afrikaner writing, albeit from the point of view of a Black working class rather than that of a White landless class. For these writers, only class revolution would truly free Blacks from their oppressive conditions (Nzula et al., 1979).

The emergence of apartheid as theory and practice in the 1950s and 1960s encouraged the growth of what has sometimes been referred to as the liberal ‘school’, though few would identify themselves as members, seeing such a label as too much of a straitjacket. In essence, though, the liberals could be seen as those who identified ideas as more important than material conditions in influencing or perhaps determining the way in which people act. Particular lines of interpretation associated with liberal viewpoints are that the racial discrimination so prevalent in apartheid South Africa was a product primarily of Afrikaners as distinct from English-speaking South Africans, and that these racist attributes of Afrikaners could be traced primarily to experiences that they had undergone in the nineteenth century (frontier wars against Africans and the resulting development of racial antipathies loomed large, as did, in some works, the influence of slavery and slaveholding).

During the 1970s, a time when Black workers led strikes and boycotts against their oppressive working conditions, a new line of interpretation emerged and rapidly became dominant. Sometimes styled, not always by the authors themselves, as ‘radical’ or ‘revisionist’, this literature, strongly influenced by a reading of Karl Marx, remarked on the benefits of apartheid to business and focused on the historical origins of many of apartheid’s most notorious features – racially discriminatory legislation, urban segregation, migrant labour, rural poverty – not in the Afrikaner republics but in the industrial centres of Kimberley (diamonds) and Johannesburg (gold) developed by English capitalists. For the revisionists, racism was not an antiquated feature of the past kept alive by backward-looking Afrikaners, but the very essence of a ‘modern’ industrial economy that was built, above all, on the exploitation of cheap Black labour. The argument ran that South African racism was primarily, though not exclusively, the product of a search...