A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  The ideology of Black Consciousness penetrated the urban schools. On June 16,1976, thousands of black schoolchildren in Soweto demonstrated against the government’s insistence that half of their subjects be taught in Afrikaans—as they saw it, the language of the oppressor. The protests became nationwide after the police shot and killed a thirteen-year-old African student during the demonstration. The government reacted brutally. By February 1977, according to an official commission of inquiry, at least 575 people had been killed, including 494 Africans, 75 Coloureds, 5 Whites, and 1 Indian. Of the victims, 134 were under age eighteen. During 1977, the government also banned SASO and all its affiliated organizations and jailed numerous black leaders. Police arrested and killed Steve Biko. He died from brain damage caused by injuries to his skull. After inflicting the injuries, police transported Biko naked in the back of a van for 750 miles on the night before he died.65

  After those events, thousands of young black South Africans fled the country and received military training in camps in Tanzania and Angola. The militant wings of the ANC and the PAC planned to infiltrate trained men and women into South Africa from the north, attack police stations, explode bombs in public places, deposit caches of arms, and, ultimately, launch a guerrilla war.

  South Africa in the World

  The postwar world was quite a different place from the imperialist world of the 1930s. While apartheid was taking root in South Africa, political power was flowing in the opposite direction in the rest of Africa.66 In 1957, following the decolonization of its Asian territories, Britain transferred power to African nationalists in the Gold Coast (Ghana), soon to be followed by the other British territories in West Africa—Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and the Gambia. In i960, the French relinquished political control over their two federations of colonies in west and central Africa, and the Belgians withdrew from the Congo (Zaire), their vast territory in central Africa.

  By that time, African nationalism had swept eastward and southward into the British territories where there were significant pockets of white settlers. Early in i960, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of Britain toured tropical Africa and then visited South Africa. On February 3, in the Parliament in Cape Town, he spoke of “the wind of change” that was sweeping over the continent and made it clear that Britain would not support South Africa if it tried to resist African nationalism. Over the next four years, the British transferred power to local nationalist parties in Tanganyika (Tanzania), Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). In 1965, the white settler government of Rhodesia postponed a similar outcome by asserting sovereignty over the colony and making a unilateral declaration of independence. No country recognized Rhodesian independence, however, and local Africans resorted to guerrilla warfare against the regime.67 Between 1966 and 1968 Britain transferred power to Africans in three other neighbors of South Africa—Basutoland (Lesotho), Bechuanaland Protectorate (Botswana), and Swaziland. Successive governments in Pretoria had tried to persuade London to allow South Africa to incorporate those three territories, as had been envisaged by the South Africa Act of 1909. But after 1961, when South Africa became a republic and left the Commonwealth, incorporation was no Jonger possible.68

  African nationalism continued to transform the Southern African region. In 1974, African resistance to Portuguese colonialism led to a coup in Lisbon, and the following year Angola and Mozambique gained independence.69 By 1978, the white settler regime in Rhodesia was barely surviving a fierce civil war and international sanctions, and South Africa was controlling Namibia only by defying the United Nations.

  The United Nations differed from its predecessor, the League of Nations. Whereas the European powers had dominated the League of Nations, which the United States never joined, the Soviet Union and China, as well as France, Britain, and the United States, had permanent seats and vetoes in the U.N. Security Council, and other countries, including third world countries, served in turn on the Security Council and formed a majority in the General Assembly.70 From 1952 onward, the General Assembly passed annual resolutions condemning apartheid. Then, as the number of independent Asian and African states increased, each with a seat in the General Assembly, the United Nations devoted more and more attention to racism in South Africa. By 1967, the General Assembly had created both a Special Committee on Apartheid and a Unit on Apartheid, which issued a stream of publications exposing and denouncing the effects of South Africa’s racial policies. The General Assembly also declared that South Africa’s mandate over South West Africa (Namibia) was terminated and established a U.N. Council for Namibia. In 1971, the International Court of Justice gave an advisory opinion to the effect that South Africa’s control of Namibia was illegal.71 Two years later, the General Assembly declared apartheid to be “a crime against humanity.” In 1977, after South Africa’s police were known to have killed Steve Biko and its government had suppressed numerous antiapartheid movements, the Security Council unanimously voted a mandatory arms embargo against South Africa. That was the first time the United Nations had done that to a member state.

  In 1963, meanwhile, independent African states founded the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which set up a Liberation Committee with headquarters in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The Liberation Committee established camps for refugees from South Africa and provided them with education and military training. But although the new African regimes earnestly desired to eradicate apartheid, they lacked the means to do so. They were weak regimes, preoccupied with survival. Singly or in combination, they could not match South Africa’s military power. In varying degrees all of South Africa’s neighbors were economically dependent on South Africa. Lesotho was exceptionally vulnerable. Entirely surrounded by South Africa, its main source of income came from the wages its people earned in white South African mines and factories and on white South African farms. Even Zambia imported food from South Africa and exported half of its copper—the source of 95 percent of its export-earnings—via South African railroads and South African ports.72

  Down to 1978, international opposition to apartheid, though strong in rhetoric, was weak in substance. The South African government mustered an effective response to the challenges resulting from changes in the world order. The response included skillfully formulated ideological components. As decolonization swept through tropical Africa, Verwoerd presented his Homelands policy as an analogous process. In 1961, he told a London audience:

  We do not only seek and fight for a solution which will mean our survival as a white race, but we seek a solution which will ensure survival and full development—political and economic—to each of the other racial groups. ... We want each of our population groups to control and to govern themselves, as is the case with other Nations. ... In the transition stage the guardian must teach and guide his ward. That is our policy of separate development. South Africa will proceed in all honesty and fairness to secure peace, prosperity and justice for all, by means of political independence coupled with economic interdependence.73

  Above all, South African foreign propaganda was well tuned to the cold war fears and prejudices of Europeans and Americans. It portrayed South Africa as a stable, civilized, and indispensable member of the “free world” in its unremitting struggle against international communism. Moscow’s aim was world domination. The imperial powers were leaving tropical Africa open to communist infiltration. The ANC was a communist organization, directed by Moscow. Communists were responsible for the uprisings of 1960 and 1976-77.74 For domestic consumption, this formula was accompanied by the assurance that the interests of the white population were the first priority of the government. “Our motto,” said Verwoerd, “is to maintain white supremacy for all time to come over our own people and our own country, by force if necessary.”75

  How real was the “communist menace”? The Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, especially East Germany, did indeed champion the interests of the third world against Western imperialism. They supplied arms to resistance movement
s in colonial Angola, Mozambique, and Rhodesia. In Rhodesia, however, the Soviets supported the weaker of the two African movements, whereas its communist rival, China, supported Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), which triumphed in the election held on the eve of the independence of what had been Rhodesia in 1980.

  When the Portuguese left Angola in 1975, the Soviet Union armed and transported Cuban troops to help the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) consolidate its control over rival African nationalist organizations and to resist an invasion launched by the South African army in collusion with the United States. The Soviet Union and its allies also had close links with the ANC. They provided education and military training for South African refugees, and they were the main suppliers of arms for the military wing of the ANC that began to infiltrate guerrillas into South Africa in the late 1970s. Moreover, the ANC included communists in its ranks and among its leaders.

  Yet Southern Africa never had high priority on the Soviet agenda. Moscow was mainly concerned with preserving its hegemony in Eastern Europe, defending its border with China, and increasing its influence in Southeast Asia and the Horn of Africa. It was not practicable for Moscow to risk a military confrontation with the Western powers in distant Southern Africa. The level of Soviet trade with Southern Africa was insignificant; so was the level of its aid to the black Southern African states. The ANC, moreover, was an open organization and its top leaders—Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo—were not communists. At minimal cost, the Soviet Union was deriving advantages from the equivocation of the Western powers in the face of the rampant racism and discriminatory state capitalism of South Africa. Pretoria’s rhetoric against communism was a skillful attempt to divert attention from the domestic causes of black resistance in South Africa. Black South Africans needed no foreign indoctrination to oppose apartheid.76

  The South African regime also benefited from material factors. After World War II, technological developments were drawing the world together and the capitalist world economy was becoming increasingly integrated. South Africa possessed a distinctive place in it as the producer of a wide range of valuable minerals, which accounted for about three-quarters of South Africa’s foreign exchange earnings. In 1979, according to the U.S. Bureau of Mines, besides producing 60 percent of the world’s annual supply of gold, South Africa produced significant quantities of four minerals that were essential for Western industry and defense: 47 percent of the world’s platinum group of metals (which are used as catalytic agents for refining petroleum and for reducing automobile emissions) and 33 percent of the world’s chromium, 21 percent of the world’s manganese, and 42 percent of the world’s vanadium (some of which are indispensable in the production of steel). South Africa was known to contain vast reserves of all those minerals. And South Africa was still the world’s major producer of gem diamonds and a producer of significant quantities of asbestos, coal, copper, iron, nickel, phosphates, silver, uranium, and zinc.77

  The South African economy was extremely attractive to American and European business and defense interests. In 1948, Britain, the former colonial power, had far the largest foreign stake in the South African economy, but in the 1950s and, particularly, during the boom years of the 1960s and early 1970s, American and continental European trade and investments grew spectacularly. By 1978, the United States had surpassed Britain as South Africa’s principal trading partner and the Japanese as well as the Europeans were trading with South Africa on an increasing scale. By then, too, $26.3 billion of foreign capital was invested in South Africa. About 40 percent of the total was British capital, 20 percent was American, and 10 percent was West German, while the Swiss and the French contributed about 5 percent each. About 40 percent of the total consisted of direct investment in the South African subsidiaries or affiliates of American companies, such as Ford, General Motors, Mobil, and Caltex Oil, and 60 percent of the total consisted of indirect investment—American and European bank loans, and shares in South African gold-mining and other stock. The returns on foreign investment were high. American returns averaged over 15 percent in 1970—74, declined to 9 percent in 1975, and rose again to 14 percent in 1976-78.78

  The South African economy was not autarchic. It was vulnerable in three respects. First, it required considerable infusions of foreign capital. Second, except in mining, South Africa did not possess the latest technology and needed to import heavy machinery and electronic and transportation equipment. Third, South Africa produced no natural oil. Nevertheless, except for brief periods after the disturbances following the Sharpeville killings in i960 and the Soweto uprising in 1976, the United States and Western Europe provided the necessary capital and equipment, and although the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an oil embargo on South Africa in 1973, it was unable to enforce it, and most of South Africa’s oil came from Iran until the fall of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979. To reduce its dependence on imports, the government meanwhile created a stockpile of petroleum products, and by 1978 it was producing more than 10 percent of South Africa’s domestic consumption of gasoline in two large oil-from-coal plants created by a state corporation, the South African Coal, Oil and Gas Corporation (SASOL).79

  In those circumstances, powerful interests in the United States and Western Europe were loath to disturb the status quo in South Africa. With their cold war perspective they were prone to exaggerate the communist menace, and with their business perspective they tended to assume that economic growth was bound to erode apartheid.

  Great Britain had especially close ties with South Africa, even after 1961, when South Africa became a republic and left the Commonwealth. Tens of thousands of white South Africans were born in Britain, hundreds of thousands had relatives and close friends there, and the culture of English-speaking white South Africans was oriented toward Britain. The South African economy also meant far more to Britain than to any other country. In 1978, Britain was responsible for about 40 percent of all foreign investment in South Africa and a considerable share of the trade. About 10 percent of British overseas direct investment was in South Africa, and British banks—Standard Chartered and Barclays International—controlled 60 percent of South African bank deposits. Some South African emigres, white as well as black, organized a vigorous antiapartheid movement in Britain, but from 1965 until 1980 Britain’s concern in Southern Africa was focused on the Rhodesian problem, since white Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence was an act of rebellion. British administrations, Conservative as well as Labour, joined in the antiapartheid rhetoric, but even Labour vetoed resolutions for sanctions in the Security Council, except in 1977, when Britain abstained on the resolution for an arms embargo against South Africa.80 South Africa’s other major European trading partners—West Germany, France, and Switzerland—were also disinclined to risk their growing trade and investments in South Africa by taking action against apartheid.81

  Relations between South Africa and the United States became more important as British power ebbed.82 The South African economy meant far less to the United States than to Britain and accounted for only about i percent of American foreign trade and investment. Nevertheless, some sectors of American business were profitably involved in South Africa, and the Pentagon deemed it essential to have access to South Africa’s strategic minerals. Although few South Africans had American origins, as the civil rights movement registered gains in the United States, black American leaders began to identify with black South Africans and to lobby against apartheid.

  Under Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-61), the United States continued to treat South Africa as an ally regardless of its racial policies. The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had contacts with South Africa’s military and security services. As a producer of uranium, South Africa became a member of the International Atomic Energy Board and joined the United States in nuclear research, and an American firm built South Africa’s first nuclear reactor. The adverse effects of the Sharpeville episod
e of i960 were short-lived. The United States voted for U.N. condemnation of apartheid, but business quickly resumed as usual, and that December the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) obtained an agreement to set up three tracking stations in South Africa. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations (1961-69) were more critical of apartheid and committed the United States to stop selling arms to South Africa, but they continued to reject proposals for economic sanctions, and the implications for South Africa of Lyndon Johnson’s support for civil rights at home were overshadowed by the Vietnam War.

  Under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (1969-77) there was a distinct tilt away from the antiapartheid lobby and the relatively liberal Africa Bureau in the State Department toward the Pentagon and big business. In 1969, Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, ordered a review of American policies throughout the world. The administration chose the second of five options outlined in the Southern African review, National Security Study Memorandum 39, which reasoned,

  The whites are here [that is, in Southern Africa] to stay and the only way that constructive change can come about is through them. There is no hope for the blacks to gain the political rights they seek through violence, which will only lead to chaos and increased opportunities for the communists. We can, through selective relaxation of our stance toward the white regimes, encourage some modification of their current racial and colonial policies and through more substantial economic assistance to the black states . . . help to draw the two groups together and exert some influence on both for peaceful change. Our tangible interests form a basis for our contacts in the region, and these can be maintained at an acceptable political cost.83