A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  In August 1983, a thousand delegates of all races, representing 575 organizations—trade unions, sporting bodies, community groups, and women’s and youth organizations—founded the United Democratic Front (UDF) to coordinate internal opposition to apartheid. The conference declared that it aimed to create a united democratic South Africa, free of Homelands and group areas and based on the will of the people. It provided continuity by endorsing the Freedom Charter and including prominent former-ANC members as participants. It recognized the need for “unity in struggle through which all democrats, regardless of race, religion or colour shall take part together.”20

  During the next three years, there was vigorous resistance to the apartheid regime in every city and nearly every Homeland in the country. In 1983 and 1984, workers domiciled in the Ciskei boycotted the commuter buses that carried them to East London. Bus companies were boycotted when they tried to increase fares on the Witwatersrand. The Coloured and Asian elections of 1984 were marked by widespread violence. In the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging triangle, bloody demonstrations ensued when the African councils that the government had established increased rents, which formed their principal source of revenue. By year’s end, official statistics reported 175 people killed in such incidents, including four black councillors killed by enraged crowds. There was also an unprecedented number of strikes, including a major strike by black miners. Moreover, the government reported fifty-eight incidents of sabotage against state departments, petrol depots, power installations, and railroad lines, and twenty-six attacks on police.21

  The year 1985 was still more disturbed. School boycotts and bus boycotts often led to violence. There were worker stayaways, clashes between township residents and security forces, and attacks on black police and councillors. Rural disturbances included resistance to a government decision to transfer an African community from the Bophuthatswana Homeland to the KwaNdebele Homeland for political purposes. The number of recorded insurgency attacks rose to 136, the recorded death toll in political violence to 879. There were also 390 strikes involving 240,000 workers. The protests continued into 1986. By that time, the formal machinery of local government had broken down in parts of the black townships. Fearing for their lives, many black councillors had resigned and informal groups had assumed control.22

  There was also a great deal of violence among black South Africans. Circumstances varied from place to place. In some locations, rival gangs, brutalized by the conditions in which they lived and only loosely associated with the national political struggle, fought for mastery. In others, government officials cultivated and gave surreptitious assistance to vigilante mobs, as in the destruction of the Crossroads settlement near Cape Town.23

  Organizations affiliated with the UDF commanded the allegiance of most political activists, including people who had formerly been inspired by the Black Consciousness movement. Some, however, disagreed with the UDF’s inclusive policy and adhered to the original Black Consciousness line that Whites could not be trusted to cooperate with Africans. They were in a distinct minority. More significant was Inkatha, a movement founded in 1928 and led by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, head of the KwaZulu administration, since 1975. Buthelezi claimed that Inkatha was a national liberation movement, and initially he seemed to reach an accommodation with the black nationalists. But it soon became clear that Inkatha was an ethnic movement. It drew on the Zulu military tradition, derived its main support among rural Zulu, and was divisive in the black resistance to apartheid. In parts of Natal and KwaZulu, Inkatha gangs and Zulu supporters of the UDF had violent confrontations. Buthelezi was tolerated by the South African government and was popular in conservative circles overseas, since he opposed sanctions and spoke out strongly for the capitalist system. The UDF was more heterogeneous and included people who were for as well as against sanctions, and socialists as well as capitalists.24

  The government claimed that the UDF was a surrogate for the banned ANC. Although that was an exaggeration, the ANC acquired great prestige during the 1980s. The UDF respected its policies, as embodied in the Freedom Charter, and most UDF supporters treated the ANC as the prospective government of South Africa and the imprisoned Nelson Mandela as their prospective president.

  South Africa’s Foreign Relations, 1978-1986

  The Botha government used South Africa’s economic superiority to dominate the neighboring countries and prevent them from providing sanctuary for militant refugees. South Africa’s economic leverage over the region was formidable (map 9). The South African Customs Union integrated Lesotho, Botswana, and Swaziland into the South African economy. The giant Anglo American Corporation of South Africa and its subsidiaries had substantial interests in Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, as well as Namibia. South African railroads and ports dominated commodity transport throughout the region. South Africa controlled the supply of oil and electricity to its neighbors. South Africa also employed 280,000 migrant workers from other countries in the region in 1984, and miners’ remittances to them amounted to R 538 million in 1983. In 1980, in an effort to reduce their dependence on South Africa, Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe founded a Southern African Development Coordination Conference, but they were unable to make substantial progress toward their goal.25

  9. modern southern Africa

  South Africa also used its military superiority to restrain neighboring governments from pursuing antiapartheid policies. Between 1981 and 1983, South African commandos raided or carried out undercover operations against every one of its neighbors. In addition, the South African armed forces continued to occupy Namibia, and South Africa intervened substantially in both of the former Portuguese territories. It cooperated with the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), which was also supplied with arms by the United States, in its civil war against the government of Angola; and it provided arms and financial and technical assistance to the Mozambique National Resistance (M.N.R. or RENAMO), a motley collection of ex-Portuguese colonials and local chiefs and peasants who were wreaking widespread havoc in Mozambique. So destructive was this activity that in 1984, in the Nkomati Accord (an agreement signed on the banks of the Komati River), Mozambique undertook not to assist the ANC, while South Africa promised to stop aiding RENAMO. In the same year, South Africa promised to remove its troops from Angola. But South Africa did not honor those commitments; it continued to aid both UNITA and RENAMO.26

  The Botha government was fortunate in the shifts in domestic politics in London and Washington. Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of Britain in 1979, and although her government then presided over the negotiations that led to the transfer of power in Zimbabwe, she was adamantly opposed to sanctions against South Africa. In ensuing years, Thatcher rejected demands by other members of the Commonwealth that Britain should join them in taking strong economic measures against apartheid. The Reagan administration, too, opposed sanctions and ignored the increasingly popular antiapartheid lobby in the United States. Chester Crocker, Ronald Reagan’s able assistant secretary of state for African affairs, devoted most of his time and energy to a prolonged diplomatic effort to remove Cuban troops from Angola in exchange for implementation of the U.N. plan for the liberation of Namibia from South African control. Accepting the premise of National Security Study Memorandum 39, that the only way for meaningful change to come about in South Africa was through the Whites, he formulated a policy of “constructive engagement” toward South Africa, which amounted to encouraging the South African government to reform apartheid and refraining from making contacts with antiapartheid organizations, such as the ANC.27

  Nevertheless, by 1986 foreign countries were beginning to exert substantial pressure on the South African government. As violence erupted in South African townships night after night, millions of television sets in tens of countries showed South African police and soldiers beating and shooting unarmed Blacks. The government stopped journalists from reporting such
incidents in November 1985, but by then South Africa had become a major focus of public attention.

  Margaret Thatcher tried hard to prevent Britain and the Commonwealth countries from taking joint measures against apartheid. Early in 1986, however, seven senior Commonwealth politicians, led by Malcolm Fraser, a former prime minister of Australia, and Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, a former head of the Nigerian government, visited South Africa. The other members were from Barbados, Britain, Canada, India, and Tanzania. A Commonwealth conference had instructed them “to promote ... a political dialogue aimed at replacing apartheid by popular government.” After meeting a wide range of South Africans, from President Botha to Nelson Mandela, on March 13 they made a proposal to the South African government. The government should remove the military from the townships, provide for freedom of assembly and discussion, suspend detention without trial, release Mandela and other political prisoners and detainees, unban the ANC and the PAC, and permit normal political activity; for its part, the ANC should enter into negotiations with the government and suspend violence, which Mandela had agreed to do. On May 19,1986, the mission came to an abrupt end. On that day South African forces attacked alleged ANC bases in Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Zambia—all Commonwealth members. The Commonwealth group then left South Africa and issued a report deploring the conditions in the country, condemning the government, and predicting full-fledged guerrilla warfare unless the cycle of violence was broken.28

  In the United States, meanwhile, antiapartheid protests had developed a powerful momentum. Randall Robinson, the executive director of Trans-Africa, a black lobbying organization, built a coalition of clergy, students, trade unionists, and civil rights leaders. In the two years since November 1984, six thousand Americans, including eighteen members of Congress, had been arrested while picketing the South African embassy and consulates. Many state and city governments and universities sold their investments in companies that did business in South Africa, and American companies themselves began to withdraw from their South African enterprises—forty in 1985, another fifty in 1986. In July 1985, Chase Manhattan bank created a financial crisis in South Africa when it refused to roll over its short-term loans and other banks followed suit.

  The question of punitive economic sanctions against South Africa was hotly debated throughout the United States. Opponents of sanctions argued that economic progress would eventually erode apartheid, that sanctions would hurt Blacks more than Whites, and that Botha’s reform policy was moving South Africa in the right direction. Supporters of sanctions replied that segregation and apartheid had developed in a century of economic growth, that many black South Africans supported sanctions, and that Botha was unrelenting in his refusal to give Africans an effective say in the political system.29

  Accepting Pretoria’s propaganda at face value, President Reagan remained ill-informed about the situation in South Africa and prejudiced in favor of the white population. South Africa, he said in 1985, has “eliminated the segregation we once had in our own country.”30 By September 1985, however, American public opinion was so aroused that, to preempt more vigorous action by Congress, Reagan issued an executive order imposing limited sanctions against South Africa. But the momentum grew. In October 1986, Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act over the president’s veto, banning new investments and bank loans, ending South African air links with the United States, prohibiting a range of South African imports, and threatening to cut off military aid to allies suspected of breaching the international arms embargo against South Africa.

  In South Africa, meanwhile, the government’s reforms, combined with widespread black resistance, evoked a political backlash among white bureaucrats who lived by administering apartheid, semiskilled workers threatened by black competition, and ideologues steeped in racist simplicities. The Conservative party, led by Andries Treurnicht, a former cabinet minister, was cutting into the government’s majorities in by-elections on a platform of strict Verwoerdian apartheid. Still further to the right was the Herstigte Nasionale party (Reestablished National party), and beyond that, the Afrikaner Weerstand Beweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement), an extraparliamentary group, used swastika-like symbols and broke up government meetings.31

  The government’s problems were compounded by a deteriorating economic situation, engendered in large part by the political uncertainty and the withdrawal of foreign investment. The annual rate of inflation rose from 11 percent in 1983 to 13.25 percent in 1984, 16.2 percent in 1985, and 18.6 percent in 1986. Real growth per capita declined in 1985 and 1986. Unemployment was rising continuously.32

  In those circumstances, National party members were tugging the government in different directions. Doves wanted to keep trying to appease the West. Hawks prevailed on May 19, 1986, when the military raids on neighboring states ended negotiations with the Commonwealth group. Thereafter the reform program ground to a halt. Botha himself realized that foreigners would never be satisfied unless he gave the franchise to Africans. That he was not willing to do.

  Between July 20, 1985, and March 7, 1986, the government applied a state of emergency in many parts of the country. On June 12, 1986, it proclaimed what became an annually renewed, indefinite, nationwide state of emergency and arrested hundreds of antiapartheid activists. The emergency regulations gave every police officer broad powers of arrest, detention, and interrogation, without a warrant; they empowered the police commissioner to ban any meeting; and they prohibited all coverage of unrest by television and radio reporters and severely curtailed newspaper coverage. The government had resorted to legalized tyranny.33

  The State of Emergency

  In proclaiming the state of emergency, the Botha government’s primary objective was to reestablish control over the republic, especially over the African townships. The government also continued to pursue two other goals: the durable pacification of South Africa and hegemony over South Africa’s neighbors. But none of those goals was fully attainable; moreover, they were mutually incompatible. First, the use of emergency powers in the search for domestic control reduced the manifestations of resistance but did not remove its underlying causes. Second, the government’s reform program created a backlash within the white electorate but stopped short of giving Africans—the majority of the population—a substantial say in government, which alone might have achieved durable pacification. Third, the employment of emergency powers at home and the use of South Africa’s economic and military strength to overawe its neighbors provoked increased economic pressures from the industrialized countries, with serious consequences for the national economy.

  To reestablish control of the black population, the government resorted to bannings, arrests, detentions, and treason trials. Police interrogators tortured victims, and unidentified persons who were widely believed to be members of the security police assassinated antiapartheid activists inside and outside South Africa. The South African Defence Force said that South Africa was in a state of war and deployed 5,000 to 8,000 soldiers in the townships to augment the police. On February 12, 1987, Adriaan Vlok, minister of law and order, admitted that 13,300 people, a high proportion of whom were children, had been detained under the emergency regulations; unofficial estimates ran as high as 29,000. On March 2,1987, Vlok also admitted that 43 people had died in police custody and that 263 people detained since the beginning of the state of emergency had been hospitalized. In 1988, a study by doctors of the National Medical and Dental Association revealed that about 78 percent of a test group of 131 detainees had been mentally abused through interrogation, threats, or humiliation. During that year the government banned more than thirty organizations, including the UDF and AZAPO, and severely curtailed the activities of COSATU, the largest and most militant black trade union federation.34

  These events were largely unreported because of draconian restrictions on the communications media.35 In 1987, however, the International Commission of Jurists sent four Western European lawyers to South Africa. In May 1988, they rep
orted that “an undemocratic government has extended the executive power of the state so as to undermine the rule of law and destroy basic human rights. ... We have found that the government has allowed intimidation of suspects and accused persons, and interference with legal processes by the security forces ... to take place on a large scale and in a variety of ways. ... We stress particularly the widespread use of torture and violence, even against children, which is habitually denied by the government and thus goes unpunished, though plainly illegal.”36

  South African forces also continued to invade neighboring countries. According to a report by a British Commonwealth committee, South Africa’s destabilizing tactics between 1980 and 1989 led to the deaths of one million people, made a further three million homeless, and caused $35 billion worth of damage to the economies of neighboring states. This included raids into every one of its neighbors, massive support for RENAMO in Mozambique in spite of Botha’s promise to the contrary, large-scale military invasions of Angola, and continued military occupation of Namibia. In February 1988, moreover, a South African force intervened to thwart a coup against the government of the “independent” homeland of Bophuthatswana.37