Africa

by Guy Arnold

  Another, very distinct political player emerged during the 1980s in the person of the Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi. He built up his Inkatha Movement, which he had established as a Zulu cultural organization, into a political party. Buthelezi was concerned both with national power and Zulu regional power in the new South Africa. Increasing violence between members of Inkatha and the ANC or its allies of the UDF and COSATU became a feature of the late 1980s and into the 1990s and accounted for more than 4,000 deaths in Natal over the last years of the decade, with further violence to follow in the 1990s. Buthelezi, who had ‘worked’ the homeland system, was tainted with accusations of collaboration with the apartheid government. ‘The sharp increase in violence in the townships surrounding Durban during 1983 led to allegations of collaboration between Inkatha and the state. Township dwellers, violence monitors, and journalists cited examples of how Inkatha “impis” received direct help from the police, with transporting “impis” to scenes of violence, police declining to interfere when residents were attacked, and systematic inability on the part of the police to arrest those responsible for attacks.’40 One of the most incisive critics of the whole apartheid system was Allan Boesak, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church and President of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. In a book titled If This Is Treason he argued that neutrality was not possible. ‘More particularly: in a situation where there is a constant struggle for justice and human dignity and against structures promoting iniquity, neutrality is not possible. On the contrary, neutrality is the most revolting partisanship there is. It is to take the side of the powerful, of injustice, without accepting responsibility for it.’ He deals with the argument that Africans in power might behave as badly as the whites and therefore that the whites are justified in holding onto power.

  But this is a false dilemma. The question is not so much what shall we do one day if a black government should do something wrong. The question is what are we doing right now, while this white government is doing what it is doing… Saying ‘yes’ to co-operation with the very government that maintains this violent system without first fundamentally changing it is taking responsibility for the continuation of violence. The choice for violence, therefore, has not been made by those who resist the perpetuation of the system in the hope of working for a better society, but precisely by those who have abandoned the struggle for a better society by strengthening the present one.41

  Boesak became a major thorn in the side of the government; one of his principal arguments was that the violence came from the government side and that the oppressed had every right to answer it with violence.

  By the end of the decade most options for South Africa looked bleak. As the journalist Allister Sparks pointed out, there was the possibility of producing a generation of black youth so brutalized and desensitized by its violent encounters with white South Africa’s repressive forces that it would lose all sense of life’s values. On the other side, there was no northern country to which the whites could withdraw, with the result that ‘White South Africans will change only when the perceived consequences of changing seem less painful than the perceived consequences of continuing as they are. And that is a matter of perceptions rather than of reality’.42 Further, as a result of Afrikaner dominance, ‘Three decades of power and deferential treatment had wrought its own changes. The poor whites had come in from the cold, had been cosseted into middle-class prosperity and were enjoying the warmth. The spread of capitalism was doing its corroding, corrupting work. The ethnic fire of the Afrikaner cracker’s belly was going out, to be replaced by the acquisitiveness and consumer culture of an urban bourgeoisie.’ It was to the poor whites that Treurnicht, with his adherence to rigid apartheid, appealed.

  Luckily for South Africa as a whole the whites did begin to see that change would be less painful than holding on to a system that was collapsing about their heads. Moderate Afrikaners moved towards the liberals and the process of change was lubricated by overwhelming economic pressures as South African big business made plain that if it had to choose between the future expansion of business and maintaining apartheid, then it was ready to ditch apartheid. And so at last, after a century of conflict and pain, the whites accepted that a real accommodation with the black majority was essential to their own survival. As early as 1981 Botha had announced that Mandela’s release would be considered if he would give guarantees not to commit acts that violated the laws. Mandela rejected the suggestion and said, ‘Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts…’ What is fascinating about the 1980s is the increasing awareness on the part of the whites that they could not perpetuate their system; they could only buy time for it to continue a little longer. By the middle of the decade the largest white exodus since Sharpeville was under way with about 50,000 leaving the country on what came to be called the ‘chicken run’, with a majority heading for Britain. About 1.7 million whites then qualified for foreign nationality.43 The Israelis, surrounded by hostile Arabs, compared themselves with the white South Africans, surrounded by a majority of hostile blacks. ‘Diplomatically isolated though she was, South Africa could rely on the support of Israel. Prime Minister Golda Meir had made the analogy with the Afrikaner clear when she said: “It is not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away. They did not exist.”’44 That was denial on a grand scale but it gave the hard-liner Afrikaner a certain comfort. In fact, even if some whites held out to the bitter end for the maintenance of white domination, the decision to abandon apartheid was taken in 1986 when the Urban Areas Act, which was the basis for the pass laws and influx control, was abolished to be followed by the repeal of the Mixed Marriages and Immorality Act and the Prohibition of Political Interference Act.

  The government faced formidable demands for change, which it only appeared able to counter with repression. In the townships the ‘young comrades’ were more in control than the government while opposition to apartheid was orchestrated by church leaders such as Desmond Tutu and Allan Boesak. As the 1987 election approached, the NP suffered a number of defections by its more liberal members, the most notable being Denis Worrall, a former ambassador to London. By 1988 the signs multiplied that the National Party government under Botha had lost its way. It had attempted timid and wholly inadequate reforms whose main effect was to unleash forces it had no idea how to manage except by repression. Moreover, its policies wrought devastation throughout the region. As the ECA estimated in 1989, ‘South Africa’s military aggression and destabilization of its neighbours cost the region US$10 billion in 1988 and over US$60 billion and 1.5 million lives in the first nine years of this (1980s) decade.’

  In January 1989 President Botha had a stroke, and F. W. de Klerk, who had been in Parliament for 17 years and had held a number of portfolios as well as being chairman of the Transvaal National Party, the most important provincial power base, was elected leader of the ruling National Party. Elections for the tricameral parliament were held on 6 September: the NP won 93 seats (a drop of 30 from the 123 it had held in the previous parliament); the Conservative Party increased its seats from 22 to 39 and the Democratic Party gained 12 on its former 21 seats. The Asian and Coloured electorates were more concerned to boycott the elections than return members. Black defiance continued and on the day of the elections the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM) called a general strike. A new group, known as the ‘new nationalists’, composed of businessmen and younger, more radical members of the NP who advocated an end to apartheid and negotiations with the ANC, emerged. On the far right the Afrikaanse Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) under the leadership of Eugene Terre’Blanche opposed any concessions and prepared for violence. Perhaps the greatest irony of all for South Africa and its whites was the degree to which they depended upon the black majority: ‘For all its military might, it is the peculiar weakness of white South Africa that it is totally
dependent on the people it represses.’45

  When de Klerk came to power in 1989 he announced his commitment to change though no one knew what or how much change he intended to implement. In October he released eight political prisoners including the veteran leader Walter Sisulu. Then on 2 February 1990 he gave his speech to the Cape Parliament in which he unbanned the ANC and 33 other black political organizations and announced his determination to end apartheid. A week later he released Nelson Mandela and on 2 May 1990 held the first ever negotiations with the ANC. It is a mistake to imagine that people suddenly change the political and racial views which they have held for a lifetime. They do not. President de Klerk and those closest to him had not undergone any Pauline conversion on the road to Damascus. Rather, they had been brought to reverse the policies of a lifetime because these policies were no longer working; not only were they not working but the whole political edifice which had been so painstakingly created by Malan, Strijdom, Verwoerd and Vorster was on the verge of collapse.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Development Standstill

  The most optimistic assumption about the expansion of the world economy advanced by the World Development Report 1981 forecast virtually no growth in per capita income for the African continent as a whole. In its Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Agenda for Action1 the World Bank begins chapter two as follows: ‘When the sub-Saharan States won independence some 20 years ago, they faced formidable constraints to development. These included under-developed human resources, political fragility, insecurely rooted and ill-suited institutions, a climate and geography hostile to development, and rapid population growth. And while the governments have scored considerable achievements, the legacy of history and the facts of geography continue to hamper African economic progress.’ Such prognostications hardly augured well for the coming decade.

  One of the most critical problems of the preceding 20 years had been the scarcity of trained manpower and the consequent need to depend upon expatriates and a range of volunteers under the auspices of the steadily proliferating non-government organizations (NGOs). At the same time aid, which in its various forms had come to be seen as a necessary prop for governments during the 1970s, became a potent symbol of their dependence during the 1980s. The decade, indeed, was to prove especially difficult for Africa as the continent was buffeted by the effects of world recession, falling commodity prices, a series of devastating natural disasters, and brutal wars in Ethiopia and Angola that involved the two superpowers as part of their many Cold War confrontations. These adverse factors were compounded by growing disenchantment among Western donor nations with the aid process generally, coupled with an increasing tendency to insist upon ever more stringent conditionalities for the aid they did provide. From the sale of arms to both warring factions in a civil war to the sale of goods that did not meet standards laid down as a minimum for health in an ‘advanced’ country, Africa was constantly seen as an easily manipulable market for extra profits by the so-called ‘donor’ countries that made it a condition of their aid that such markets were opened to their unwanted or surplus goods. Belief in a free market, Western style, always meant the freedom of the rich to penetrate the markets of the poor rather than real two-way trade.

  The concept of development has distorted the West’s relations with Africa; instead of viewing African countries as poor countries battling with various problems, the West at this time and later came to view them in an exclusive ‘development’ phase: ‘they are developing; they want to develop; we, the donors, will aid their development; and, as donors, we assume they approach problems of development in the same way as do we the donors’. It was a one-sided equation that did not work. There were many reasons for this: the disparity in power between the two sides; the determination of the donors (principally the West) to further their own political and economic agendas by means of aid and the equal determination of the recipients (from a far weaker power base) to use aid for their own political purposes. These combined to create misunderstandings and suspicions on both sides. Thus, while the stated purpose of aid donors was to assist development, recipients (that is, the ruling elites) on the other hand saw aid as a means to satisfy their supporters rather than to use it in the broader national interest. The equation would change substantially at the end of the decade: ‘While Western creditors – self-described as the donor community – had been content to push the IMF-designed Structural Adjustment Programme as a standard reform package around the African continent through the decade of the 1980s, the collapse of the Soviet bloc saw demands for political reform take the front seat.’2

  The most advanced economies, working in combination through the Group of Seven and the European Union or using their voting power in multilateral organizations such as the World Bank or International Monetary Fund, impose their will upon the world economic system whenever they are able to do so while at the same time working together to prevent the emergence of any system perceived to be antithetical to their interests. The nearest that Third World countries ever came to upsetting this Western-dominated economic order was in the mid-1970s at the time of OPEC power and the proposal to establish a New International Economic Order. The process of economic manipulation has been especially marked in Africa. Aid, the creation of debt, the World Bank and in particular the IMF have each come to be used as mechanisms by means of which the advanced economies direct development in the African recipient countries. Thus, the original purpose of the IMF – to maintain monetary stability by sharing the burden of adjustment between surplus and deficit countries – has long been abandoned. In the first place this has happened because the IMF is unable any longer to control its most powerful members. Instead, the Group of Seven uses the IMF as its instrument to instruct and control the poor nations so that the IMF, which ought to have acted as a guardian of the poor, has instead become a policeman for the interests of the rich. As a result of IMF pressures through the 1980s a number of African countries felt obliged to put in place IMF-inspired structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), whether or not these really suited their circumstances. SAPs were the price to be paid for debt rescheduling and further aid. The lesson was obvious: as long as they remained indebted small African economies would be subject to IMF-dictated economic regimes. The free market arm of Western economic imperialism consisted of the transnational corporations. In Thatcher’s Britain, for example, the Sunday Times exposed a multi-million dollar marketing drive by British American Tobacco (BAT) to sell cheap and highly addictive cigarettes in Africa – an easy, regulation-free market – with levels of tar and nicotine far above those permitted in the West. A corporation letter to the country’s head of medical services stated, ‘BAT Uganda does not believe that cigarette smoking is harmful to health… we should not wish to endanger our potential to export to these countries which do not have a health warning on our packs.’3 Essentially, the donor–recipient relationship was (and remains) one of control. As one shrewd observer noted: ‘The main reason why the one-party state was adjudged a failure in Africa is not principally because it was undemocratic – which it was, at least in Western eyes – but because it presided over widespread economic failure.’4

  During the 1980s, the last decade of the Cold War, donor countries (really by then the West only) forced African countries to accept World Bank and IMF-dictated SAPs. Only if such programmes were accepted would the usually reluctant recipient country then be given the IMF ‘seal of approval’ and only when this had been given could the country in question then obtain the aid it required (if it was lucky) from the principal donor nations. In effect, the IMF told African countries what policies to follow: privatization, lowering tariffs against Western manufactures, cutting subsidies on such vital commodities as sugar, flour and cooking oil that most affected the poorest sections of the community, so that the recipient could more easily repay its debts. These harsh IMF conditionalities, never envisaged in the original structures of the IMF, imposed political conditions upon the
recipients that amounted to blatant interference in their internal affairs, and whether or not these conditions were acceptable to the majority of the people was beside the point: they had to be put in place as the price for continued aid.

  The external pressures exerted upon individual African states by the donor community as a whole were matched internally by the determination of the new elites to ensure their control of their country’s limited resources for their own ends. Having battled their way to the top in societies of strictly limited resources of all kinds, few of these elites were possessed of any genuine socialist outlook that would spread such resources for the good of the new state at large. Rather, they sought to control economic power and indulge a conspicuous consumption that was the badge of having ‘arrived’. All societies produce elites that cling grimly to the attributes and symbols of their power but in a society where the available resources are strictly limited such elites tend to stand out as especially selfish and necessarily opposed to the development of the state as a whole. This is equally true when there is a revolution or coup: the new rulers at once see the advantages of maintaining the old system for their personal benefit. They have not overthrown the former government because of its elitism but because they did not have an adequate share of the limited available resources. Just as the white minority in South Africa saw the coming end of apartheid as inevitable yet clung on as long as possible to a system that benefited it, so also do the entrenched elites in other African states see the long-term effects of their selfishly narrow approach to development yet do nothing to change it. The old Africa that was colonized by the European powers was essentially patrimonial: the chief looked after his tribe or group. The new post-colonial Africa, despite much contrary rhetoric, operates on much the same lines where the ‘Big Man’, who may well be a government minister, is equally expected to look after his own group.