A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  From time to time, President Botha and his colleagues made vague promises of domestic reform. In August 1988, Chris Heunis, minister of constitutional development and planning, declared that “the road of reform we have chosen is irreversible.” In the same month, a government spokesman said that equal political rights for all was the ultimate aim of government planning.38 On the vital question of political empowerment, however, the best the government could offer Africans was thirty out of fifty-nine seats in a National Council that would have had merely advisory powers. Twelve of those African seats, moreover, were to have been held by representatives of the nonindependent homeland governments, and the other eighteen seats were to have been occupied by Africans elected indirectly by the councillors who succeeded in the township elections in October 1988. African nationalist leaders and several homeland leaders promptly condemned the proposal. No Black of “caliber or representativeness” would sit on the National Council, said Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi of KwaZulu. That idea, like its predecessors, was stillborn.39

  Botha and his colleagues, thinking in racial categories, could not contemplate giving Africans an effective say in national politics because they feared that it would lead to rule by the African majority and that the consequences would be calamitous for the white population. President Botha made his meaning clear on August 18, 1988, when, addressing the National party’s annual congress in Durban, he said, “As far as I’m concerned, I’m not even considering the possibility of black majority government in South Africa.”40

  The government made a great effort to acquire legitimacy for the township administrations, the existing African councillors having been totally discredited. But African nationalists boycotted the municipal elections that were held on a segregated basis in October 1988. Only 905 out of 1,839 seats for black councillors were contested, and in 183 wards there were no nominations at all. In the contested wards, only 25 percent of the registered voters cast their ballots—that is, 3 percent of the African population of South Africa (including all ten Homelands).41

  While the government was trying to create institutions Africans could respect, it was losing ground among the white electorate. In the general election for the House of Assembly on May 6, 1987, the National party share of the vote fell to 5 2 percent (from 57 percent in 1981). Although that still gave the National party a commanding majority with 133 seats in the House of Assembly, the Conservative party, which stood for a reversion to strict Verwoerdian apartheid, polled 26 percent of the vote and won twenty-three seats, displacing the Progressive Federal party, which won only 14 percent of the vote and twenty seats, as the official parliamentary opposition.42 The swing to the right in white politics continued in the elections in white municipalities in October 1988, when the Conservative party won control of most of the small towns in the Transvaal and nearly got a majority in Pretoria.43 In the same period, unidentified persons destroyed the headquarters of four major antiapartheid organizations—COSATU, the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, the South African Council of Churches, and the Black Sash. In February 1988, several hundred armed members of the extra-parliamentary Afrikaner Weer-stand Beweging marched through the streets of Pretoria to the Union Buildings and presented a petition calling on the government to create a “traditional Boer state” without Blacks.44

  While white opinion was swinging to the right, black opinion was moving in the opposite direction. The government’s attempt to co-opt significant elements in the Coloured and Indian communities by providing them with Houses in the tricameral Parliament was not a success. Since the new constitution had been inaugurated in 1984, many Coloureds and Indians had denounced those who participated, and in 1987, Allan Hendrickse, the leader of the party that controlled the Coloured House, resigned from the cabinet. In 1988, both the Coloured and the Indian houses blocked the government’s attempt to enact legislation that would have imposed heavy penalties for violations of the residential segregation in the Group Areas Act.45

  Official attempts to appease Africans were no more successful. Oupa Thando Mthimkulu expressed the feelings of many people in the townships in his poem about the Soweto uprising:

  Nineteen seventy-six

  You stand accused of deaths

  Imprisonment

  Exiles

  and detentions.

  You lost the battle

  You

  were not revolutionary

  Enough

  We do not boast about you

  Year of fire, year of ash.46

  Township residents often clashed with police and soldiers, who were present in strength. There was also a spate of sabotage in South Africa, most of it attributed to the ANC. Between June 1986 and September 1988, more than a hundred explosions caused 31 deaths and 565 injuries in streets, restaurants, cinemas, shopping centers, and sports complexes in the major cities.47

  Black workers contributed to the resistance. The government plan to control the trade unions by legalizing and registering them backfired. In 1987, there were 1,148 strikes—an unprecedented number. Most serious was a strike by the National Union of Mineworkers, led by Cyril Rama-phosa, when more than half of the country’s 500,000 miners took part in a stoppage that lasted three weeks, during which 9 miners were killed and up to 300 were injured. Although they failed to achieve more than the 23 percent wage increase the Chamber of Mines had offered, they did receive improved death and holiday benefits.48

  Because most secular antiapartheid leaders were in exile, in prison, or banned, clergy were thrust into the fore of the struggle against apartheid. Especially prominent were Desmond Tutu, Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984; Allan Boesak, moderator of the Dutch Reformed Mission church and president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches; and Beyers Naude, general secretary of the South African Council of Churches from 1985 to 1987, and his successor in that office, Frank Chikane. In June 1988, they and twenty-two other clergy, representing sixteen denominations, openly defied the state of emergency regulations by calling on all Christians to boycott the elections of October 26 for segregated municipal councils. “The truth cannot be bound by unjust laws,” they declared. “By involving themselves in the elections, Christians would be participating in their oppression or the oppression of others.” No elections could be free and fair under the emergency because “the structures of the constitutional system in South Africa are based on racial and ethnic identity.”49

  The government, meanwhile, was suffering setbacks abroad. In spite of its claim to be recognized as “the regional power” in Southern Africa, the financial and human costs of intervening in Angola and administering Namibia proved excessive. In 1988, the army incurred losses in engagements with well-equipped Cuban and Angolan troops in southern Angola, and on December 22, South Africa signed an accord with Cuba and Angola through the mediation of the United States and the cooperation of the Soviet Union. There was to be a phased withdrawal of 52,000 Cuban troops from Angola and of South African troops from Namibia. A U.N. peace-keeping force was to monitor an election for a constituent assembly, and Namibia was to become independent during 1990, in accordance with the provisions of U.N. Security Council Resolution 435 of 1978. South Africa also undertook to stop assisting UNITA in Angola. South Africa did derive two substantial benefits from the agreement. The ANC was obliged to close its Angolan bases, and South Africa was not debarred from exercising sovereignty over Walvis Bay during the transition. Walvis Bay, an enclave on the Namibian coast, was the only effective port for Namibia, but it had been annexed to the Cape Colony in 1884 and had been treated as part of South Africa since 1910.50 Nevertheless, by 1989, it was evident that the policies of the Botha government were bankrupt.

  The time had come for negotiations.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Political Transition, 1989-1994

  Between 1989 and 1994, South Africans surprised the world. Although the country was wracked by unprecedented violence and teetered on the brink
of civil war, black and white politicians put an end to more than three hundred years of white domination and fashioned a nonracial constitution, which effectively transferred political power from the white minority to the black majority. May 10,1994, the day the presidency of South Africa passed from an Afrikaner who led the party of white supremacy to the leader of an African nationalist movement, was the culmination of one of the finest achievements of the twentieth century.1

  The Background to Negotiations

  In the mid- and late 1980s, while the government was trying to establish control of the African townships under a state of emergency, ineluctable processes were undermining the regime’s long-term prospects. One was demographic. According to official census reports, the white population of South Africa (including the Homelands) dropped from its peak of 21 percent of the total in 1936 to 15 percent in 1985. In 1988, officials estimated that by the year 2005 Whites would form only 10 percent of the population. (In fact, it sank to that level by 1999.) Moreover, the African surge to the cities, propelled by the rapid increase of the African population and the persistent deterioration of the Homelands, was continuing unabated. Even though most newcomers were living in shacks without electricity or water, the African population of the townships doubled from 5.2 million to 10.6 million between 1951 and 1980. Demographers foresaw that by the year 2000, Africans would outnumber Whites by five to one in the urban areas.2

  Second, the economy was structurally unsound, and South Africa was in a deep recession. The apartheid state was an extravagance, with three parliamentary chambers, fourteen departments of education, health, and welfare (one for each “race” at the national level, one for each province, and one for each Homeland), large military and security establishments, and financially dependent Homelands. Isolated by sanctions, the South African economy was inefficient. The country did not make good use of its human resources: Whites, however mediocre their talents, had a near monopoly on middle- and upper-level jobs in the bureaucracy and in the private sector. South African products were not competitive with those of the developing countries of Asia, Latin America, and eastern Europe, because South African trade unions had forced wages far above those of such countries. Nor were South African-manufactured products competitive with those of Japan, the United States, Canada, and western European countries, because of low productivity and poor quality. In addition, sanctions and a spate of disinvestments from South Africa were beginning to bite. In particular, South Africa lacked access to foreign capital. As Gerhard de Kock, governor of the South African Reserve Bank, said in 1988: “In the present international political climate the capital account remains the Achilles heel of South Africa’s balance of payments.”3 World Bank figures showed that South Africa’s growth rate was among the lowest in the world. The gross domestic product per capita at constant 1985 prices decreased by 1.1 percent in the period 1980 to 1987. The Bank for International Settlements reported that South Africa’s inflation rate, which was about 15 percent in the period 1980 to 1987 with a slight decrease in 1988, was the third highest among industrialized nations, surpassed only by those of Turkey and Israel.4

  Third, despite the government’s segregation dogma and its Homelands fantasy, white and black South Africans were inextricably interdependent. Africans, no longer self-sufficient peasants, were obliged to seek employment, and Whites needed African labor. The cumulative economic power of black people as consumers, workers, and entrepreneurs was becoming increasingly significant. In 1985, Whites had about 55.5 percent of the disposable income (income from all sources after taxation), Africans had 31.8 percent, Coloureds 8.8 percent, and Indians 3.9 percent; and the black share was rising.5 By 1990, substantial numbers of Blacks were reaching the middle level of employment in industry, and a few had reached the managerial level. Others were prospering in the informal economy. Africans dominated the transport services in the townships, for example. There were about 80,000 unlicensed African-owned taxis, and 45,000 African operators belonged to the South African Bus and Taxi Association.6

  Furthermore, by the end of 1989 profound changes in the wider world were contributing to the demise of apartheid. The Soviet Union was beginning to disintegrate, the communist regimes in eastern Europe were collapsing, and the Berlin Wall had fallen. Moreover, capitalist and communist governments were cooperating in freeing Namibia from South African control—the South-West African People’s Organization won a U.N.-sponsored election in November 1989 and became the government of an independent Namibia in March 1990. These events had two complementary effects. They deprived the liberation movement of its main sources of support. They also made nonsense of the government’s claim to be protecting South Africans from a communist onslaught. In the Western-dominated post-Cold War world, both sides in the South African conflict had an interest in solving their problems peacefully and democratically. The domestic situation pointed in the same direction. It was becoming increasingly evident that the South African government could not maintain white supremacy indefinitely; but it was also apparent that the liberation movement could not overthrow the regime. Either side could damage the other, neither could win total victory. Furthermore, the longer the conflict continued, the worse the damage would be to all South Africans.

  By the mid-1980s, many influential Whites were facing up to these realities. Since the ANC was the most popular and most effective of the banned black political organizations—the prospects of its principal rival, the Pan Africanist Congress, were blighted by poor leadership—white business people, intellectuals, clergy, and sports administrators made pilgrimages to open dialogues with the ANC leadership in exile. In September 1985, a group of businessmen, led by no less a figure than Gavin Relly, Harry Oppenheimer’s successor as chairman of the giant Anglo American Corporation, met with ANC president Oliver Tambo in Zambia. In 1986, Pieter de Lange, chairman of the elite Afrikaner Broederbond, had a long discussion with Thabo Mbeki, the ANC information director, after attending a Ford Foundation conference in Long Island, New York. In August 1987, sixty-one white South Africans, most of them Afrikaners, led by Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, founder of the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for South Africa and a former leader of the Progressive Federal party, went to Dakar, Senegal, where they held three days of talks with seventeen members of the ANC. In meetings such as these, Mbeki, a suave and intelligent graduate of Sussex University with the style of a stereotypical English gentleman, put the white participants at ease, and both sides grew to realize that they had a common interest in seeking a peaceful solution to the conflict in South Africa. The Dakar session culminated in a joint communique expressing unanimous support for a negotiated settlement. Mbeki praised Slabbert as an Afrikaner pioneer and stressed that both sides were agreed on “the kind of democratic, non-racial South Africa we want.”7

  Not only reform-minded Whites were facing up to the prospect of fundamental change in South Africa. The demands by the Afrikaner Weer-stand Beweging (AWB; Afrikaner Resistance Movement) and other right-wing Afrikaner groups that a white state be carved out of South Africa were evidence that fatalism was infecting the entire white population.8

  Meanwhile, even as the Botha government was trying to manage the situation by brute force, it also secretly began to contact ANC leaders, exploring alternative ways of controlling the country and trying to discover and exploit the ANC’s internal divisions. Aware that Mandela, through sheer force of intellect and personality, had become the leader of the black political prisoners and that his name was a rallying call at home and abroad for liberation, the government hoped to persuade Mandela to accept his freedom on condition that he abstain from politics, or renounce revolutionary ideas and become the head of a “moderate” African movement, including the Homeland politicians. For these purposes, it moved him from Robben Island to Pollsmoor prison in the Cape peninsula. Initially, he was accompanied there by Walter Sisulu and three other prisoners, but in 1985 he was placed alone in a different part of the prison, without access to colleagues
. Mandela rejected several offers of conditional freedom and had no intention of becoming a moderate, but, believing that it would be possible to negotiate an end to apartheid, he wrote to justice minister Kobie Coetsee and requested an interview. In 1988, after they had several sessions, the government appointed a committee comprising Coetsee, two senior prison officers, and Neil Barnard, the director of National Intelligence, to hold a series of meetings with Mandela. The committee urged Mandela to renounce the ANC’s commitment to the armed struggle, its alliance with the Communist party, and its goal of majority rule. Although he refused to do as they asked, his realism and his stress on reconciliation between Whites and Blacks in a postapartheid South Africa made a deep impression on the committee.9

  In December 1988, recognizing that Mandela would probably become the head of a transformed South Africa, the government moved him to a comfortable house on the grounds of the Victor Verster prison near Paarl, about forty miles from Cape Town, where he was treated as an honored guest rather than a prisoner and could entertain visitors. Three months later, Mandela sent President Botha a ten-page memorandum that went to the heart of the matter. “I now consider it necessary in the national interest for the African National Congress and the government to meet urgently to negotiate an effective political settlement.” Responding to the Coetsee committee’s demands, he said that armed struggle was “a legitimate form of self-defense against a morally repugnant system of government”; cooperation with the Communist party was “strictly limited to the struggle against racial oppression”; and “white South Africa will simply have to accept that there will never be peace and stability in the country until the principle [of majority rule] is fully applied.” Mandela also set out his preconditions for the suspense of the armed struggle and the opening of formal negotiations: the government should legalize the ANC, release political prisoners, end the state of emergency, and withdraw its troops from the townships. But he realized that “two central issues would have to be addressed” in the negotiations: “the ANC’s demand for majority rule in a unitary state” and “the concerns of white South Africans over this demand. The most crucial task which will face the government and the ANC will be to reconcile these two positions.”10 As journalist Patti Waldmeir comments, that Mandela memorandum contained “the eventual deal in outline.”11