A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  The government also established tight controls over the communications media. The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), a public corporation controlled by government appointees, had a monopoly on radio broadcasting and on television when it began to operate in South Africa in 1976. Chaired by Piet J. Meyer, who had been interned as an Ossewa Brandwag leader during World War II, the SABC became an instrument of official propaganda. Other government-appointed bodies exercised wide powers of censorship. In 1977, for example, they banned 1,246 publications, 41 periodicals, and 44 films. Most of those banned publications were books and pamphlets dealing with such radical opposition movements as the African National Congress, so that it became difficult for South Africans to find out what opposition movements were doing and thinking.24

  The impact of the Nationalist regime on the mentality of Afrikaners was profound. Their language was unique, and most Afrikaners experienced little but the Nationalist world perspective from cradle to grave: at home, in Afrikaans-language schools and universities, in Dutch Reformed churchs, in social groups, on radio and television, and in books and newspapers. In particular, their schools imbued them with a political mythology derived from a historiography that distorted the past for nationalist purposes. For example, it made heroes out of the border ruffians who were responsible for the Slagtersnek rebellion in 1815, and it associated God with the victory of the Afrikaner commando over the Zulu at the battle of Blood River on December 16, 1838.25

  The Nationalist government inherited a substantial coercive apparatus from its predecessors. It expanded that apparatus prodigiously.26 Among its first punitive laws was the Suppression of Communism Act (1950), which defined communism in sweeping terms and gave the minister of justice summary powers over anyone who in his opinion was likely to further any of the aims of communism. The minister could “ban” a person and prevent him or her from joining specified organizations, communicating with another banned person, or publishing anything at all; or he could confine the person to his or her house without the right to receive visitors. The minister did not have to give reasons for his decision, and the victim had no legal means of challenging it.

  The repressive legislation escalated from the mid-1950s onward. The catalog includes the Riotous Assemblies Act (1956), the Unlawful Organizations Act (1960), the Sabotage Act (1962), the General Law Amendment Act (1966), the Terrorism Act (1967), and the Internal Security Act (1976). That mass of legislation gave the police vast powers to arrest people without trial and hold them indefinitely in solitary confinement, without revealing their identities and without giving them access to anyone except government officials. The government could ban any organization, prohibit the holding of meetings of any sort, and prevent organizations from receiving funds from abroad. There were also laws giving the government special powers over Africans, such as the Bantu Laws Amendment Act (1964), which empowered the government to expel any African from any of the towns or the white farming areas at any time. The Public Safety Act (1953) included a provision that empowered the government to declare a state of emergency in any or every part of the country and to rule by proclamation, if it considered that the safety of the public or the maintenance of public order was seriously threatened and that the ordinary law was inadequate to preserve it. Most of those repressive laws barred the courts from inquiring into the ways in which officials used their delegated powers. Although some judges sought to protect individuals by finding humane interpretations in the laws, their capacity to do so was very limited.

  To administer the laws of apartheid, the bureaucracy grew enormously. By 1977, about 540,000 Whites were employed in the public sector (including the central, provincial, and homeland governments, the local authorities, the statutory public bodies, the railways and harbors service, and the postal service), and Afrikaners occupied more than 90 percent of the top positions. The vast majority of the white bureaucrats were ardent supporters of apartheid. Most of the black bureaucrats, numbering about 820,000, were reliable servants of the regime on which they depended for their livelihood.27

  To enforce the laws of apartheid, the government had powerful resources. Few black civilians were licensed to carry firearms, whereas most white men and many white women possessed firearms and were experienced in using them. The South African police force was well trained and equipped. In 1978, it had 35,000 members (55 percent of them white) and 31,000 reserves. The police force included a security branch, which was responsible for interrogating political suspects and frequently resorted to torture.28

  Whereas the police were relatively few in proportion to the population, the Nationalist government embarked on a massive program of military expansion. In 1978, defense absorbed nearly 21 percent of the budget and 5.1 percent of the gross national product. By that time, every young white man was subject to two years’ compulsory military service, and the active duty defense force comprised 16,600 permanent members (about 5,000 of whom were black) and 38,400 white conscripts. There were also 255,000 white citizen reserves. The police and the army, navy, and air force were well armed. ARMSCOR, a state corporation, and its subsidiaries manufactured a high proportion of the country’s military needs, including armored cars, mortars, guns, bombs, mines, fighter aircraft, missiles, and tear gas and napalm. Local production was supplemented by military hardware and technology imported from Europe, the United States, Israel, and Taiwan. The flow continued, mainly from Taiwan and Israel, despite the international arms embargo imposed by the United Nations in 1977. The South African armed forces were far the most powerful and disciplined in Africa south of the Sahara.29

  Apartheid Society

  South Africa in the apartheid era was unique. It became increasingly distinctive from other countries as decolonization and desegregation spread elsewhere. South Africa was a partly industrialized society with deep divisions based on legally prescribed biological criteria. As the economy expanded, industry absorbed more and more black workers, but racial categories continued to define the primary social cleavages.

  Possessing privileged access to high-level jobs and high wages, white South Africans were as prosperous as the middle and upper classes in Europe and North America. Characteristically, they owned cars and lived in substantial houses or apartments in segregated suburbs, with black servants. The state provided them with excellent public services: schools and hospitals; parks and playing fields; buses and trains; roads, water, electricity, telephones, drainage, and sewerage. Social custom, reinforced by the official radio and television and the controlled press, sheltered them from knowing how their black compatriots lived.30 Few Whites ever saw an African, a Coloured, or an Asian home. Fewer still spoke an African language. Wherever White encountered Black, White was boss and Black was servant. Indeed, Whites were conditioned to regard apartheid society as normal, its critics as communists or communist-sympathizers.

  Public services for Blacks were characteristically inadequate or nonexistent. In the Homelands, women still walked miles every day to fetch water and firewood; in the towns, people crowded into single-sex compounds, leaky houses, or improvised shacks. Schools, hospitals, and public transport for Blacks were sharply inferior. Electricity, running water, public telephones, sewage systems, parks, and playing fields were rare.

  Besides their common lot as victims of apartheid, Blacks had varied experiences. Black residents of the cities, the white farming areas, and the African Homelands had vastly different lives. The government accentuated black ethnic differences, favoring Coloureds and Indians over Africans and encouraging internal ethnic divisions among Africans. The government also promoted class divisions among Blacks. It supported collaborators and provided relative security of urban residence for some Africans, whereas it kept African laborers tied to white farms and made it illegal for Africans to leave their Homelands, except as temporary migrant workers.

  There is a story to be told by social historians of the ways in which black people not only survived under apartheid but also created their own
social and economic worlds.31 In the urban ghettos, Africans mingled, regardless of ethnicity. For example, they ignored the government’s attempt to carve up the townships into ethnic divisions; they married across ethnic lines; and members of the younger generation identified themselves as Africans (or even, comprehensively, as Blacks, thus including Coloureds and Indians) rather than as Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Pedi, or Tswana. The story will also emphasize the achievements of African women, who were particularly insecure, since the law codified the inferior status that they had had in precolonial custom and applied it to the very different circumstances of a capitalist state. Under apartheid, African women, many of them heads of households as a result of the persistence of male migrant labor, held the fabric of African society together.32

  Social historians will also record the experiences of African children under apartheid. In a report for the United Nations Children’s Fund, Francis Wilson, an economic historian, and Mamphela Ramphele, a doctor, drew attention to the fact that “children may be socialized into vandalism or find themselves having to adopt violent measures as a matter of survival and, in the process, losing any sense of right and wrong. The impact on children’s minds and values of the physical violence that they witness and experience, not least at the hands of the police, is a matter of grave concern.” Wilson and Ramphele also emphasized “the widespread disorganization of family life due to the migratory labour system” and the political, economic, and social powerlessness experienced by a large proportion of black South African men, which engenders a frustrated rage that all too often manifests itself in domestic violence, particularly against women.33

  These generalizations can be illustrated in the fields of wealth and health. As we have seen, under apartheid there were huge differentials in the wage rates of white and black workers, and although those began to narrow in the 1970s, they remained high, and black unemployment rose to extraordinary levels. Economic inequality has existed everywhere in the modern world, but nowhere was it as great and as systematic as in apartheid South Africa. A University of Cape Town economist stated in 1980 that of ninety countries surveyed by the World Bank, South Africa had the most inequitable distribution of income. Estimates by the World Bank and the Ford Foundation showed that the top 10 percent of the population received 58 percent of the national income and the lowest 40 percent received 6 percent.34

  The Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in South Africa revealed that nearly two-thirds of the African population had incomes below the Minimum Living Level (MLL), defined as the lowest sum on which a household could possibly live in South African social circumstances. African conditions were worst in the places where the government had relocated the largest number of displaced people—notably, QwaQwa, with a population density of 777 per square mile in 1980. Throughout the Homelands, the land was eroded, people were deriving little income from agriculture, and over four-fifths of the people lived below the MLL. In the white farming areas, most black men, women, and children worked for a pittance. In the cities, the wages of some employed Africans were actually below the MLL, and unemployment was high and rising. There was also a vast shortage of housing for Blacks. In Soweto, with a population of over one million by 1978, seventeen to twenty people were living in a typical four-room house; in Crossroads, outside Cape Town, there were more than six people to a bed.35

  Under apartheid, there were intense contrasts in the health of the different sections of the South African population. White South Africans, like Europeans and North Americans, had a low infant mortality rate (14.9 per thousand live births in 1978) and a long life expectancy (64.5 years for males and 72.3 years for females in 1969—71). Their diseases were those of the industrialized countries—including the highest rate of coronary heart disease in the world—and they enjoyed some of the highest standards of health care in the world. Ninety-eight percent of the medical budget was spent on curative rather than preventive services, and most of it was consumed by white patients. Doctor Christiaan Barnard performed the world’s first heart transplant operation at Groot Schuur Hospital in Cape Town in 1968, and there were many transplants in later years, almost exclusively for white recipients. Medical education concentrated on the problems of the white population. The vast majority of doctors were white, and the medical schools were not substantially changing the balance. At the end of 1980, 657 white, 52 African, 62 Indian, and 18 Coloured medical students qualified as doctors.36

  The government did not keep detailed medical statistics for Africans. In urban areas, black infant mortality rates and life expectancies improved substantially during the 1960s and 1970s, but there was no discernible improvement in the Homelands. The official estimate of the African infant mortality rate in South Africa as a whole in 1974 was 100 to no per 1,000, which was worse than every country in Africa except Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) and Sierra Leone. In South Africa as a whole, the Coloured infant mortality rate was 80.6 per 1,000 and the Indian rate was 25.3 per 1,000 in 1978. Mortality rates for both African and Coloured children aged one to four years old were thirteen times as high as for Whites. The principal cause of these exceptional infant and child mortality rates was inadequate nutrition. An Institute of Race Relations survey revealed in 1978 that 50 percent of all the two- to three-year-old children in the Ciskei were undernourished and that one in ten Ciskeian urban children and one in six Ciskeian rural children had kwashiorkor (a severe protein deficiency disease) and/or marasmus (a wasting disease ultimately induced by contaminated food and water). Official life expectancy figures for Africans were not available in the apartheid period, but official estimates (almost certainly overestimates) put them at 51.2 for males and 58.9 for females in 1965-70.37

  The principal African diseases were those common in third world countries: pneumonia, gastroenteritis, and tuberculosis (TB). Apart from kwashiorkor, TB, which is closely associated with poor socioeconomic conditions, was the most important cause of severe morbidity and death for the African population. According to official statistics, in 1979 there were 45,000 reported cases of TB in South Africa, 78.5 percent of them African, 18.5 percent Coloured, 1.5 percent Indian, and 1.5 percent White. Unofficial estimates are much higher. The head of the Community Health Department at the South African medical school for Africans said that in 1982, 110,000 people had active TB in South Africa, while about 10 million had it in dormant form, and that 82 percent of these were Africans. Moreover, though TB was decreasing among Whites (whose children were routinely inoculated against it), it was increasing among Blacks. Other infectious diseases included typhoid fever (more than three thousand cases reported annually), typhus, measles (which was often fatal among undernourished children), and rheumatic fever. Venereal diseases were prevalent. There were also epidemics of cholera, polio, and bubonic plague, while trachoma was endemic in the northern Transvaal. Many mine workers suffered disabling injuries or contracted lung diseases. In all these cases, the incidence was higher among Africans than among Coloureds and Asians, and far higher than among Whites.38

  Apartheid society was also ridden with mental stress and violence. Suicides were exceptionally frequent among white South Africans.39 Murder was a frequent cause of death among Africans and Coloureds.40 South African society was very different from the benign picture produced by the government’s information services and presented by official guides to foreign visitors.

  Adaptation and Resistance to Apartheid

  There were always some members of the enfranchised population of South Africa who sought to arouse the conscience of their fellow Whites against apartheid. They focused on the gulf between the theory of apartheid (separate freedoms) and its practice (discrimination and inequality) and on the brutality of the apartheid state—the pass laws, forced removals, house arrests, and detentions without trial.41

  Soon after the election of 1948, leaders of all the white South African churches except the Dutch Reformed churches issued statements criticizing apartheid. In following years, many clergy came in
to conflict with the government. In 1968, the South African Council of Churches labeled apartheid a pseudo-gospel in conflict with Christian principles.42 Initially, nearly all the Afrikaner clergy were united in support of apartheid. But in 1962, C. F. Beyers Naudé, a leading Broederbonder and former moderator of the principal Dutch Reformed church in the Transvaal, broke ranks and founded the Christian Institute, which brought black and white Christians of various denominations together, launched a Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society (SPROCAS), and espoused increasingly radical responses to official policies. The government banned Naudé and the institute in 1977, but by that time apartheid was a controversial issue within the Dutch Reformed churches, and in 1978 a group of Afrikaner clergy produced a radical critique of apartheid.43

  The English-medium universities, especially the Universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand, were foci of opposition to apartheid. The National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), founded in 1924, organized a series of spectacular demonstrations in 1959 against the closure of the established universities to black students and in 1966 arranged for a visit by Sen. Robert Kennedy, who denounced apartheid in rousing speeches. In 1973, the government banned eight NUSAS leaders on the ground that they endangered internal security, and the following year it prohibited NUSAS from receiving funds from abroad. Nevertheless, NUSAS continued to introduce fresh generations of white (predominantly English-speaking) students to critical thinking about South African politics and society. In the late 1970s, NUSAS organized conferences on the theme “education for an African future.”44