Africa

by Guy Arnold

  GROWING ISOLATION

  The failure of détente, the Angolan debacle and then Soweto each worked to increase South Africa’s isolation. The buffer states had fallen away; Britain had finally cancelled the largely irrelevant Simonstown Agreement; France had decided to impose an arms embargo; Washington had left South Africa high and dry in the middle of its Angolan intervention. The only plus arising out of these years – one that followed the events surrounding the Yom Kippur War – was a close alliance with Israel: but that country was not an ally that assisted the South African image. By 1977 South Africa found itself under greater pressures for change than ever before in its modern history, leading Vorster to tell his colleagues that South Africa could no longer rely upon Western support in the event of violent conflict. How, then, could the government meet demands for change? The year did witness the beginning of mild change in the area of what came to be known as petty apartheid but otherwise Vorster had run out of steam with the result that his government intensified repression while offering consultation with its external challengers. It was not a policy that could work.

  The front-line Presidents had a clear set of objectives: to bring an end to minority rule in Rhodesia and Namibia, and in the long run South Africa itself, if possible by minimal violence and negotiation, otherwise by armed struggle. During 1976–77 there was a steady build-up for war and at last the liberation armies were emerging as credible military forces. Vorster was sincere in his desire for peace, for a long-drawn-out war would have the effect of radicalizing the governments on South Africa’s doorstep. The focus of diplomacy at this time was Rhodesia. The arrival of the Democrat Jimmy Carter in the White House in 1977 dealt a further blow to South African hopes. In May of 1977 President Carter sent Vice-President Walter Mondale to meet Vorster in Vienna where he informed him formally that South African-US relations were at a watershed. Thus, suddenly, South Africa faced isolation from the West, prompting the Foreign Minister to say, ‘We cannot negotiate on our destruction, either now or tomorrow.’38 By this time South Africa was coming to be seen more and more as a world problem. Up to 1976 the West had believed that compared with the rest of the continent (despite its internal crises) South Africa was an essentially stable and safe place for Western investment. This perception was destroyed by the events of 1974–77. The wariness of multinational investors was increased by Nigeria, which accelerated economic disengagement from South Africa by compelling Western multinationals to make a choice between doing business with Nigeria or South Africa, but not both. Oil and its huge potential market made Nigeria an increasingly attractive trading partner.

  South Africa, on the other hand, was increasingly on the defensive. The US Carter administration began to call for majority rule in South Africa. Then Soviet President Podgorny visited Zambia, Tanzania and Mozambique to emphasize the growing Soviet influence and interest in the region. In the light of this steadily more hostile external environment, the government began to seek internal allies and endeavoured to split the Coloured and Asian communities away from the Africans by offering separate parliaments for the two groups, a policy that reached its climax, or rather nadir, in 1984. The way the young Black Consciousness leader, Steve Biko, was treated by the police in custody aroused world condemnation. He died of brain injuries after being transported in a police vehicle 800 miles, naked and in manacles, in September 1977. Despite, or perhaps because of, this outcry, the government went in for further repression in October when the Christian Institute and 17 other organizations including the Black Consciousness Movement were suppressed. Fifty of their leaders were detained and two publications that catered for an African readership – The World and The Weekend World – were banned. A defiant Vorster rejected all outside pressures and pursued an increasingly tough line against any opposition. The white opposition was divided. The old United Party finally collapsed, some of its members joining the Progressive Party, which renamed itself the Progressive Federal Party, while the majority of UP members regrouped under the banner of the New Republic Party. Hertzog’s HNP found itself outflanked by Vorster’s ultra-tough line. Despite all the setbacks, Vorster won a landslide majority in the November 1977 elections. During the last years of the decade (1977–80), although there were no new eruptions comparable to Soweto, black rejection of government policies became more obvious and more open and, for example, the election for a government-sponsored Community Council in Soweto attracted a derisory turnout of only six per cent. Chief Buthelezi, meanwhile, had linked his Zulu cultural and political movement, Inkatha, with the Coloured Labour Party and the Indian Reform Party to form the South Africa Black Alliance, which called for a multiracial convention to devise a new constitution for a non-racial South Africa. In May 1978 the radical Azania People’s Organization was founded.

  Defence became central to all government planning. The South African military budget had grown in proportion as pressures were mounted upon the Republic. In 1960 the military budget stood at R44 million; by 1966–67 R255 million; by 1974–75 R500 million, this latter rise reflecting the armed struggles in Angola, Mozambique and Rhodesia. By 1977 the budget had leapt to R1,300 million and by 1978 to R2,280 million. Following Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980 it went up again to R2,465 million. Writing in The Times at the beginning of the 1970s, Dan van der Vat said that South Africa’s armed forces were the most powerful military machine in Africa south of the Sahara. Apart from a non-combatant Coloured Corps, recruitment and conscription were confined to whites whose ultimate role was the preservation by force of white rule in the face of an internal black uprising. At that time South Africa’s aim for self-sufficiency in arms had nearly been achieved; only warships and long-range reconnaissance planes had to be imported from either Britain or France. The Defence Force relied upon three layers of recruitment: the Permanent Force (10,000 Army, 5,000 Air Force and 3,000 Navy); the Citizen Force of conscripts who had to serve 9–12 months and then went onto an active reserve – at any time the Army had 22,000 Citizen Force conscripts serving with it (the Air Force 3,000 and the Navy 1,250); and finally, the Kommando Force of about 78,000 who trained at weekends and held annual camps.39 The suspicion persisted all through the 1970s that there were secret, informal links between NATO and South Africa, which was one way Western countries such as Britain, France and West Germany could assist South Africa indirectly. During the decade South Africa built up its nuclear capacity with Western (US) and Israeli assistance. In 1976 the then President of the South African Atomic Energy Board, Dr A. J. A. Roux, said, ‘We can ascribe our degree of advancement today in large measure to the training and assistance so willingly provided by the US during the early years of our nuclear programme, when several of the Western world’s nuclear nations co-operated in initiating our scientists and engineers into nuclear science… even our nuclear philosophy, although unmistakably our own, owes much to the thinking of American nuclear scientists.’40 On 22 September 1979 South Africa exploded a nuclear device in the Southern Atlantic. The US State Department asserted that it had ‘no corroborating evidence’ to verify the explosion and ‘no independent evidence’ to link it to South Africa. As defence became an increasing burden once the cordon sanitaire had disappeared while growing internal unrest meant ever more ‘policing’, so the government was obliged to depend more and more upon black troops. The SADF, under Gen. Magnus Malan, called for a total strategy for survival and the General hinted at the need to change social policies. At the end of the decade the length of call-up for white youths was extended while the possibility of military service for women was discussed. South Africa’s long hostile borders now allowed increased infiltration by guerrillas, forcing the government to deploy anti-insurgency units along extensive stretches of its borders with Botswana, Mozambique and Swaziland.

  By 1976 South Africa was deeply affected by the world recession that had assisted the rise of black unemployment to 600,000 or 12 per cent of the total black labour force, while foreign investors were beginning to avoid South
Africa as an investment destination. Examining the 1977 South African budget, introduced by the Finance Minister Owen Horwood, The Economist said: ‘Buried within Mr Horwood’s public borrowing figures, there is an assumption that shows dramatically South Africa’s economic plight today: for the first time in recent years, the government recognizes it cannot bank on inflows of foreign capital. The reasons can be spelled out only too starkly: Angola 1975, Soweto 1976. In the past the Republic could count on an average net inflow of capital of c. 3% of GNP each year, worth about US$1billion at today’s prices… Now South Africans will have to learn to live with only the thinnest trickle of foreign capital…’41

  Vorster’s long political reign ended in the far-reaching scandal of Muldergate. Following newspaper allegations of unauthorized expenditure by the Department of Information, made in June 1978, the Director of Information, Dr Eschel Rhoodie, resigned. Connie Mulder, one of the most powerful figures in the government who was expected to succeed Vorster, was the Minister of Information and he too resigned although retaining his other portfolio of Plural Relations. On 20 September Vorster announced that he was to resign as Prime Minister on health grounds and seek election as State President. In the contest for the leadership of the NP that followed, Mulder, who stood, was weakened by the allegations of corruption in the Information Ministry, and was defeated by P. W. Botha, the Minister of Defence, who became Prime Minister on 28 September. Meanwhile, a one-man Commission of Inquiry by Justice Anton Mostert, ignoring a request not to do so by the Prime Minister, held a press conference to allege that there had been improper expenditure of millions of rand by the Information Department. This statement forced Mulder to resign from the cabinet. It was followed by the appointment of a judicial Commission of Inquiry under Justice R. P. Erasmus. The Erasmus Commission delivered its first report in December 1978 to reveal that the Ministry of Information had deployed huge sums of money in a secret operation to gain control of the English-language newspaper group, South African Associated News. This effort had failed; however, even more money had been spent secretly to establish a pro-government English language newspaper, The Citizen. The operation was extended to obtain influence in various US, UN and other overseas publications.

  This first report placed the main blame on Mulder, who then had to resign his parliamentary seat, Gen. Hendrik van den Bergh, the recently retired head of BOSS, and Dr Rhoodie, who fled to Europe. Further investigations compromised Vorster and the members of his cabinet. From hiding in Europe, Dr Rhoodie gave a BBC TV interview in which he produced a photocopy of a document authorizing these secret expenditures, signed by the Finance Minister, Owen Horwood. Rhoodie also insisted that Vorster had known of the operations. The second Erasmus report exonerated Vorster but failed to kill the allegations and Mulder was obliged to resign his membership of the Transvaal National Party. Finally, in June 1979, the third Erasmus report was leaked to the press; it stated that Vorster had ‘full knowledge of all irregularities’ of the Department of Information activities. This proved the end of the Vorster era. He had been elected State President when Botha became Prime Minister in September 1978. On 4 June 1979 he resigned, totally compromised by the Muldergate scandal that had devastated the NP. Dr Rhoodie was extradited from Europe back to South Africa, where he was tried and briefly imprisoned. The scandal died at the end of 1979; Botha by then was firmly ensconced as Prime Minister.

  The three ‘outward’ policies that Vorster had essayed over the decade had failed in turn. The dialogue of the early 1970s had not worked because, whereas Vorster wanted to persuade black Africa to come to terms with South Africa, black Africa had only been prepared to enter into a dialogue about dismantling apartheid. Détente had not worked for the same reason. The front-line states, especially Zambia, wanted détente to lift the economic and physical strains of confrontation, but not on South Africa’s terms, which again – effectively – were to accept the apartheid state. Thirdly, Vorster had switched to military intervention in Angola. This proved a disaster for South Africa although, wisely, Vorster had never committed South Africa’s full military strength to the intervention. Yet, although Angola represented a huge rebuff, this did not prevent South Africa embarking upon a policy of destabilizing its neighbours through the 1980s. It was a policy of despair, for despite South Africa’s preponderant strength in relation to its neighbours, to exist in a state of perpetual tension with black Africa to its north meant permanent isolation on the continent to which, in other circumstances, South Africa had so much to contribute.

  Prime Minister Botha faced the 1980s presiding over a very different NP and South Africa than the apparently inviolable white regime Vorster had come to rule in the 1970s. A final twist to the decade came on 18 April 1980 when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe.

  The Decade in Retrospect

  The 1970s witnessed substantial advances in African self-confidence as a number of African countries forged their own development paths while making it plain to the former colonial powers that while they were prepared for amicable and mutually satisfying two-way relations, they did not intend to be dominated by them, either politically or economically. Such intentions were easier to proclaim than to maintain. The Cold War became a major factor in two African theatres: the Horn, where US and Soviet rivalry and readiness to switch sides between Ethiopia and Somalia ensured that a regional war became an international confrontation; and in Southern Africa, where the collapse of the Portuguese Empire brought the ubiquitous Henry Kissinger onto the scene as a would-be political fixer, and raised the stakes in Angola to the level of another superpower confrontation. Elsewhere in Africa the politics of democracy and freedom from colonial oppression, which had seemed so exciting in the 1960s, gave way to the restrictions that came with the one-party state, rule by the military and the increasingly familiar dictator figures such as Amin, Bokassa, Nguema or Mengistu. Africa’s problems were not made easier by the overbearing attitudes of the former metropolitan powers who, too often, seemed to be waiting for African initiatives to founder on inexperience or lack of expertise so that die-hards from the past could say, as they often did, ‘I told you so, they were not ready for independence, we should have stayed longer.’

  Some form of socialism was the obvious alternative to the systems bequeathed by the departing colonial powers and in at least two countries – Algeria and Tanzania – socialist development paths were adopted and appeared to be achieving remarkable breakthroughs towards the creation of greater equality for their societies. Elsewhere, socialist rhetoric was more in evidence than socialist policies though when these were tried they were too often frustrated, either by outside pressures from a West determined to keep Africa in its Cold War camp or by elites whose concern with power was personal rather than national. At least, during this decade, the outside world watched Africa, anxious to gauge its strengths and wary of it operating as a single continental block, though the dream of African unity remained a dream. Like other Third World countries, Africans embraced the concept of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) that emerged from the 1973 Yom Kippur War/OPEC crisis and for a few short years argued about new possibilities that would never be realized. By the end of the decade a new realism had emerged and the highly competent group of experts who produced Africa 2000 condemned the narrow nationalisms that were emerging throughout the continent, arguing instead for collective action and a renunciation of the crippling dependence upon aid that was becoming so marked a feature of the continent’s relationship with the developed countries.

  Kwame Nkrumah, famously, had said, ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom,’ an injunction that had been eagerly and successfully followed but, far more uneasily through the 1970s, African leaders tried with less success to obtain control over their economic kingdoms. By the end of the decade, as adverse terms of trade, rising debt, rapidly increasing populations and limitations upon infrastructure drove most African countries to seek ever more aid, the donor nations of the West relaxed as they saw f
ew chances that Africa would escape their economic controls, and the Brandt Report of 1980, with all its pious calls for a more equitable world, was little more than a Western-inspired public relations exercise to compensate for the West’s ruthless despatch of the real egalitarianism contained in the NIEO concept.

  The greatest changes occurred in the south of the continent, when in 1975 the Portuguese finally departed from Angola and Mozambique to destroy a military balance, which to that date had supported a status quo that worked in favour of the maintenance of apartheid in South Africa. Smith’s Rhodesia then became expendable and Africa celebrated the emergence of an independent Zimbabwe in 1980. Above all, South Africa, whose apartheid regime appeared immovable in 1970, found by 1980, after a decade of shocks to its system, that it would face the new decade isolated in Africa and threatened with increasing hostility from its erstwhile Western supporters. South Africa was the most advanced economy on the continent; during the 1980s it would have to choose between maintaining rigid apartheid or developing its economy to its full potential, for the two policies were not compatible.

  PART III

  The 1980s

  Basket Case?

  CHAPTER TWENTY - FOUR

  Introduction to the Decade: The OAU Tries to Cope

  When the 1980s began there were 51 independent African states, the whole continent, save for Namibia which remained under South African control, yet the roll call of African states, which ought to have been a source of strength to the continent, hardly seemed so against the many problems that beset it. Crises would escalate, die down, then re-emerge. The year 1982, for example, was an especially fraught one. The Organisation of African Unity (OAU) witnessed a growing division among its members over the question of an independent Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (the former Spanish Sahara) and Morocco’s claim to the territory. There was mounting African anger at the West’s readiness to accommodate South Africa over Namibia and, more generally, over apartheid. And overshadowing everything else was the world recession whose impact upon the continent’s weak economies deprived Africa of any room for political manoeuvre on the international stage. The majority of African economies were underdeveloped and were still heavily dependent upon external trade, investment and aid, and African leaders simply could not afford to quarrel with the West as the slump in commodity prices continued and they required Western economic assistance to survive, a fact that a manipulative West understood all too well. Despite virtual continent-wide independence, Africa was still struggling to free itself from the legacy of colonialism. The inherited colonial boundaries were to cause frictions between states while state structures that had been imposed by the departing colonial powers remained fragile and were often ignored or otherwise subverted by successor governments of doubtful legitimacy. The decade witnessed major armed conflicts, all of which were part of the ongoing unravelling of the colonial heritage.