Apartheid also brought into being a women’s organization, the Black Sash. The white, mainly English-speaking, middle-class members of the Black Sash devised a skillful method of embarrassing Nationalist politicians and attracting media attention. Wearing white dresses with black sashes, they stood silently with heads bowed in places where politicians were due to pass, such as the entrance to Parliament buildings. The government banned such demonstrations in 1976, but the Black Sash remained in existence, running offices that gave legal advice to Africans who fell foul of the apartheid laws.45
Authors, too, were exposing the effects of apartheid. Alan Paton, who in 1947 had written the best-selling Cry, the Beloved Country, calling for humane race relations, published a series of pungent criticisms of apartheid in the 1950s and 1960s. “God save us all,” he wrote, “from the South Africa of the Group Areas Act, which knows no reason, justice, or mercy.”46 By the 1970s, such authors as André Brink, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and Athol Fugard were demonstrating the destructive effects of South African racism in perceptive novels and plays. Other white critics included lawyers who deplored the disregard for human rights and the rule of law; historians who recalled that apartheid was an attempt to reverse the process of economic integration that had operated in South Africa for over three hundred years; and an archaeologist who declared, “Science provides no evidence that any single one of the assumptions underlying South Africa’s racial legislation is justified.”47 Furthermore, the “Native Representatives” who sat in Parliament until that form of representation was abolished in i960 and Helen Suzman, the only Progressive party member of Parliament from 1961 to 1974, vigorously opposed every racially oppressive bill.48
Nevertheless, before the late 1970s no powerful economic interest was fundamentally opposed to apartheid. White industrial workers benefited from an economic system that gave them a virtual monopoly not only of skilled jobs and high wages but also of workers’ legal participation in the industrial bargaining process. White bureaucrats depended on a system that provided them with sheltered employment. Farmers, too, had reason to be satisfied with a government that gave them generous subsidies and ensured their supply of cheap black labor, and then helped them to dispose of it when there was a surplus.
The relation between mining and industrial capitalism and apartheid is a highly controversial subject. Some have argued that capitalism was inexorably opposed to apartheid and that economic growth was bound to erode and destroy it; others have charged capitalists with being the real creators and sustainers of apartheid.49 Each argument draws attention to one part of the complex reality. On the one hand, it was white South African politicians, organized in an ethnic party that excluded most major capitalists, who devised and enforced apartheid. On the other hand, though apartheid imposed costs on the different sectors of business, it also benefited all of them, and although they criticized specific actions of the government, all sectors accommodated apartheid before 1978.
The behavior of Harry Oppenheimer, the South African financial giant, was most ambiguous. In 1957, he succeeded his father as head of the great global “empire” that included the Anglo American Corporation and De Beers Consolidated Mines. “It controlled forty percent of South Africa’s gold, eighty percent of the world’s diamonds, a sixth of the world’s copper and it was the country’s largest producer of coal.”50 He subsidized the Progressive party, which was launched in 1959, recommended the incorporation of educated Africans into the political system, and through the Urban Foundation, established in 1976, contributed to welfare projects in African urban areas. Yet he had no respect for African culture and, though admitting that the migrant labor system was bad in principle, treated it as essential for the gold-mining industry.
The behavior of manufacturing industrialists, too, was most equivocal. As manufacturing became more diversified and sophisticated, it was increasingly hampered by the small size of the domestic market for its products, by the shortage of skilled workers, and by the inefficiency of black workers through their lack of education. By the late 1960s, not only the Federated Chamber of Industries, which represented the English-speaking manufacturers, but also the Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut, the organization of Afrikaner businesspeople, were criticizing aspects of influx control, the industrial color bar, and the black educational system as obstacles to the creation of a skilled black work force. Nevertheless, manufacturing was expanding and making substantial profits throughout the period in spite of the constraints imposed by apartheid. Industry, moreover, had relatively little influence in government circles, compared with mining, agriculture, and white labor, and its leaders, like other white South Africans, believed in white supremacy. Consequently, although they pressed for economic reforms within the apartheid framework, even the manufacturing industrialists stopped short of working for changes in the political system before 1978.51
Lacking substantial support from the other side of the color line, black South Africans continued to face immense odds in coping with their erstwhile conquerors. Poor, unarmed, and insecure, most experienced life as a continuous struggle for survival. For many Africans, success involved adapting to apartheid by circumventing the law, living in the informal economy, or acquiring a powerful patron—a chief or a white person. Other Africans found a niche in the formal economy as teachers, nurses, or industrial workers. Such people ceased to be marginal. They formed the nucleus of an African middle class and an African working class.52
Needled by the increasing brutality of the government and inspired by contemporary events in tropical Africa and other parts of the world, black leaders gradually transcended their regional, ethnic* and class divisions and devised more effective means of mobilizing the masses and confronting the regime. Soon after the National party came to power, a new generation took control of the African National Congress, spurred by the wartime protests in Johannesburg and the miners’ strike of 1946. In 1949, the annual conference elected three members of the Youth League to the national executive: Walter Sisulu (b. 1912), Oliver Tambo (b. 1917), and Nelson Mandela (b. 1918). All three were from the Transkei and had attended mission schools. Both Tambo and Mandela had been expelled from Fort Hare, but they had later qualified as lawyers by correspondence at the University of South Africa and shared a practice in Johannesburg. Mandela was the dominant personality in the group. A member of the Thembu ruling family in the Transkei, he was a man of powerful physique, commanding bearing, sharp intelligence, and deep commitment to the cause of African liberation. Three years later, the conference elected Albert Lutuli as president-general of the ANC. Born in about 1898, Lutuli bridged the old and new elites. He was the elected chief of a small Zulu community in Natal, a teacher at Adams College (the leading African high school in Natal), a polished orator in English and in Zulu, a devout Christian, and a man of impeccable moral character.53
In 1952, the ANC and the South African Indian Congress, which had undergone a similar change of leadership, launched a passive resistance campaign that attracted wide support. Large numbers of volunteers defied discriminatory laws and eight thousand were arrested. The ANC called off that campaign early in 1953, however, after rioting had broken out in Port Elizabeth, East London, Cape Town, and Johannesburg and Parliament had enacted severe penalties for civil disobedience.54
In 1955, the ANC formed a coalition representing a broad spectrum of South African society to organize a campaign designed to enlist the participation of the black masses and win the sympathy of the outside world. With the cooperation of the South African Indian Congress, the South African Coloured People’s Organisation, the small, predominantly white Congress of Democrats, and the multiracial South African Congress of Trade Unions, the ANC convened a Congress of the People. On June 26, 1955, 3,000 delegates (over 2,000 Africans, 320 Indians, 230 Coloureds, and 112 Whites) met in an open space at Kliptown near Johannesburg and adopted a Freedom Charter before the crowd was broken up by the police.55
The Freedom Charter was destined to e
ndure as the basic policy statement of the ANC. It was drafted by a small committee, including white members of the Congress of Democrats, after numerous individuals and committees in various parts of the country had submitted lists of grievances. The charter started with the ringing assertion that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.” It then set out a list of basic rights and freedoms, derived largely from ideas then current in liberal circles in Britain, continental Europe, and the United States: equality before the law; freedom of movement, assembly, religion, speech, and the press; the right to vote and to work, with equal pay for equal work, a forty-hour work week, a minimum wage, annual leave, and unemployment benefits; free medical care and free, compulsory, and equal education. The Freedom Charter also included some socialist ideas: “The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole,” and “Restriction of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended, and all the land re-divided amongst those who work it.” But it made a concession to advocates of group rights: “There shall be equal status in the bodies of the state, in the courts, and in the schools for all national groups and races.”56 Critics noted the inconsistencies in the document. Liberals as well as government supporters raised the specter of communism; radicals deplored the concession to “national groups.”
The government responded by enacting further repressive legislation, and in December 1956 it arrested 156 people and charged them with high treason, in the form of a conspiracy to overthrow the state by violence and replace it with a state based on communism. The court was not persuaded that any of the accused had planned to use violence, but the trial dragged on, preoccupying the leadership, until March 1961, when the last thirty were found not guilty.
Though the ANC and its allies in the Congress movement were all male-dominated organizations, Lilian Ngoyi and other women had formed the Federation of South African Women, which organized protests against the decision of the government to extend the pass laws to African women. The demonstrations culminated on August 9, 1956, when 20,000 African women assembled outside the Union Buildings—the national administrative headquarters in Pretoria—delivered a petition to the empty prime minister’s office, and stood in silence for thirty minutes. Two years later the police arrested two thousand African women for refusing to accept passes. Nevertheless, the government stood by its decision and from 1961 African women were obliged by law to carry passes. Other protests were reactions against specific local events. African men and women in the townships around Johannesburg and Pretoria, for example, boycotted the bus company for raising the fares and walked up to twenty miles a day to and from their work between January and April 1957.57
Failure to modify government policy caused frustration and divisions of opinion among politically conscious black South Africans. Whereas Lutuli, Mandela, and their colleagues continued to work for a reconciliation between the races in South Africa, others contended that the alliance with the white-dominated Congress of Democrats had impeded the ANC, as shown by what they regarded as a concession to white interests in the Freedom Charter. They wanted a purely African movement, dedicated to the emancipation of the African population. An African journalist struck a popular note when he wrote: “The masses do not hate an abstraction like ‘oppression’ or ‘capitalism’. . . . They make these things concrete and hate the oppressor—in South Africa the White man.”58 With such forces behind him, Robert $obukwe emerged as an alternative to the Lutuli-Man-dela leadership. Sobukwe, a powerful orator, was born in Graaff-Reinet in the eastern Cape Province in 1924. He was educated at Fort Hare and was a Bantu language instructor at the University of the Witwatersrand. He did not hold the extreme views of some of his followers. Ultimately, according to Sobukwe, Whites might become genuine Africans; but since they benefited from the existing social order, they could not yet identify with the African cause.59
Failing to gain control of the ANC, the Africanists under Sobukwe broke away in 1959 and founded the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). On March 21, 1960, upstaging the ANC, they launched a campaign against the pass laws. Large numbers of Africans assembled at police stations without passes, inviting arrest in the hope of clogging the machinery of justice. At the police station at Sharpeville, near Johannesburg, the police opened fire, killing 67 Africans and wounding 186, most of whom were shot in the back. In the following weeks there were widespread work stoppages, and disturbances in various parts of the country. In Cape Town, on March 30, a crowd of Africans, estimated at between 15,000 and 30,000, marched in orderly procession to the center of the city, near Parliament, which was in session; but the police assured their leader, a twenty-three-year-old university student named Philip Kgosana, that the minister of justice would receive him that evening if he would persuade the people to return home. He told them to go, and they did so. That evening, when Kgosana reported, the police arrested him.60
As the disturbances mounted, the government struck back fiercely. It declared a state of emergency, mobilized the army reserves, outlawed the ANC and the PAC, and arrested 98 Whites, 90 Indians, 36 Coloureds, and 11,279 Africans. The police jailed another 6,800 people, including the PAC leaders, as well as beating hundreds of Africans and compelled them to return to work. These measures broke up the campaign. They also deprived Africans of the last chance of organizing lawful, peaceful, countrywide opposition to apartheid and forced the ANC leaders underground to reconsider their strategy and goals.
The year i960 was a watershed in modern South African history. Previously, nearly every ANC leader had been deeply committed to nonviolence. But nonviolent methods had achieved nothing except a series of defeats at the hands of a violent state. In those circumstances, the ANC concluded, and the PAC agreed, that South Africa was not like India, where passive resistance had persuaded the British to quit. As Mandela put it in 1964, when he was on trial for sabotage after his eventual arrest: “We of the ANC had always stood for a non-racial democracy, and we shrank from any policy which might drive the races further apart than they already were. But the hard facts were that fifty years of non-violence had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights .... [I]t would be unrealistic and wrong for African leaders to continue preaching non-violence at a time when the Government met our peaceful demands with force.”61
The first attempts to meet state violence with revolutionary violence were not successful. Umkhonto we Sizwe (The Spear of the Nation, the militant wing of the ANC), Poqo (Pure, the militant wing of the PAC), and the African Resistance Movement (a multiracial organization consisting mainly of young white professionals and students) made over two hundred bomb attacks on post offices and other government buildings and on railroad and electrical installations near the main industrial centers. The government succeeded in breaking the three organizations, however. The police forces achieved a major coup in July 1963, when they arrested seventeen Umkhonto leaders in a house near Johannesburg. By the end of 1964, the first phase of violent resistance was over, and for another decade the country was quiescent. Mandela and Sisulu were serving life sentences on Robben Island four miles from Cape Town. Sobukwe, too, was jailed on Robben Island until 1969, when the government released him but kept him politically impotent by banning him; he lived in Kimberley until his death in 1978. Tambo escaped the net and settled in Lusaka, Zambia, where he became acting president-general of the ANC after the death of Lutuli in 1967.
Quiescence did not mean acquiescence. Three significant developments fueled a spirit of resistance until it broke out in massive confrontations in 1976. First, there was a vigorous movement in the arts. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Johannesburg magazine Drum was a vehicle for black criticism of apartheid. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, copies of books that were published overseas, such as Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History and A
lex La Guma’s A Walk in the Night, and the poetry of Dennis Brutus, evaded the censors and brought a strong liberationist message to the townships. A popular black theater movement made a strong impact on the Witwatersrand and in Durban. As Nomsisi Kraai wrote in the newsletter of the People’s Experimental Theatre, “Black theatre is a dialogue of confrontation, confrontation with the Black situation.”62
Second, the rapid growth of the economy, involving a vast increase in the number of black semiskilled as well as unskilled workers, led to the development of class consciousness among black workers and the creation of an effective black trade union movement, despite its exclusion from the formal bargaining process. The year 1973 marked the beginning of a wave of strikes with demands for higher wages and improved working conditions.63
Third, the government’s attempt to mold the minds of young black people through tight control over their education boomeranged. Black students were profoundly frustrated by the conditions in their schools and colleges. In 1968 Steve Biko, a twenty-two-year-old student, led a secession from the white-controlled National Union of South African Students to found the exclusively black South African Students Organisation (SASO). SASO declared that all the victims of white racism should unite and cease to depend on white organizations that claimed to work for their benefit. As Biko wrote in 1971:
Black consciousness is in essence the realisation by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their subjection—the blackness of their skin—and to operate as a group in order to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude. It seeks to demonstrate the lie that black is an aberration from the “normal” which is white. ... It seeks to infuse the black community with a new-found pride in themselves, their efforts, their value systems, their culture, their religion and their outlook to life. The interrelationship between the consciousness of self and the emancipatory programme is of paramount importance. Blacks no longer seek to reform the system because so doing implies acceptance of the major points around which the system revolves. Blacks are out to completely transform the system and to make of it what they wish.64
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