A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  Crime

  Serious crime also threatened implosion. Zuma was no more successful than his predecessors in reducing it. The growing inequalities in South African society seemed to feed the incidence of crime, particularly violent crime. In 2011, the U.N. Office for Drugs and Crime reported that South Africa had the tenth-highest murder rate in the world.315 Other studies placed it even higher. With regard to rape, the country ranked alongside conflict zones like Sierra Leone, Colombia, and Afghanistan. It also had among the highest rates of child and baby rape in the world; this was partly the consequence of the widespread myth that a cure for AIDS was to have sex with a child or a virgin. Particularly brutal rapes such as that of teenager Anene Booysen316 were front-page news.317 Many attacks were within the family.318 Women’s groups estimated that one rape occurred every 17 seconds and that one in nine rapes went unreported.319

  Political killings by the apartheid state of its black rivals and by antiapartheid groups, notably the UDF and Inkatha, of each other’s members were replaced by murders of local politicians by their political challengers.320 In 2011 and 2012 there were more than 40 political assassinations in KwaZulu-Natal alone.321 There also was increasing violence directed at white farmers, with many attacks racially motivated. Between 3,000 and 4,000 farmers had been killed since the end of apartheid.322 Widely reported internationally was the 2010 murder of former right-wing AWB leader Eugene Terreblanche.

  The government tried feebly to show that it was making inroads.323 Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa characterized the statistics for the year ended April 2012 as a “mixed bag.”324 Criticism was immediate. The head of the crime and justice section of the Institute for Security Studies complained that trends over time were appalling. Moreover, there was no disaggregation of the statistics, so the numbers were not helpful. For example, the single appellation “sexual offences” encompassed nearly 50 different types of crime. Absent a breakdown, it was impossible to tell which offenses were rising, which were declining, and where certain types of offenses were most prevalent. The DA spokeswoman on police alleged the government used such broad categories to “hide the real situation on the ground.”325

  Underreporting was significant. The South African Institute of Race Relations estimated that in 2011, 3.3 million crimes were committed but only 48 percent were reported.326 The annual Victims of Crime Survey for 2012 attributed the phenomenon of underreporting to a lack of confidence in the police, which led people to look to gangs, vigilante groups, and private security companies for help. Indeed, by 2013 there were more than 400,000 registered private security guards, a force bigger than the police and army combined.327 Some of the deep distrust of police had its origins in apartheid, when the black masses viewed the police as instruments of state violence and oppression. The lack of respect for police created in that era survived despite majority rule and a police service so Africanized that by 2013 only 12 percent of the force was white.328

  The culture of police corruption and brutality transcended any changes in racial composition. The police seemingly operated outside the legal institutions South Africans had fought so long to create. In 2008, South African journalist Jonny Steinberg, after hundreds of hours on patrol with the police, said there was only a pretense of apprehending criminals.329 That year, Thabo Mbeki’s National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi was placed on special leave pending a court case on alleged corruption and obstruction of justice. He later received a fifteen-year prison sentence.330 In July 2009, Zuma appointed as the new commissioner Bheki Cele, the minister for community and safety in Zuma’s KwaZulu-Natal, who would, Zuma pledged, overhaul the criminal justice system and reduce crime.331

  Zuma’s aspirations were not realized. Three years later, Zuma fired Cele amid an inquiry into irregularities surrounding his signing of a lease worth some $100 million for new police headquarters. In his place, Zuma appointed Mangashi Victoria Phiyega, a woman with impeccable ANC credentials and considerable administrative experience but no familiarity with policing, thus making it unlikely that she easily would alter police culture.332 By then, polls found two-thirds of South Africans thought the police were the most corrupt officials in the country.333 Their view was not without justification. In 2009, Cele had said that police officers who dealt with the worst criminals should “shoot the bastards.”334 Since 2005, the number of deaths in police custody or through police action had risen annually, reaching 720 in 2012.335

  Besides the shootings at Marikana, there were other shocking episodes, and some ANC leaders were loose-tongued with the language of authoritarianism. After the ANC held planning meetings in January 2013, Ngoako Ramathlodi, a deputy minister of prisons, claimed that the government would use an “iron fist” against the “seas of anarchy.”336 On February 14, Zuma announced a series of “tough” measures to deal with poor citizens protesting against a lack of services. That same day, South African star Olympian and Paralympian Oscar Pistorius killed his girlfriend, an act he blamed on a mistake when he thought intruders, in South Africa a common phenomenon, had entered his home in the middle of the night. The incident prompted Time magazine to run a cover story about “South Africa’s culture of violence.”337 Making matters worse, also in February, after a very public display of violence and perhaps xenophobia, nine policemen were jailed in the death of a 27-year-old Mozambican taxi driver, Mido Macia, who had aroused their ire by parking on the wrong side of the road in Daveyton, east of Johannesburg. The police manhandled Macia and handcuffed him to the back of their van, which then dragged him through the streets to the police station, where he was found dead in a cell two hours later.

  Denounced by Zuma and other top officials, the Macia event drew worldwide condemnation. Former intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils railed against “the menacing culture of police brutality” and the “descent into police state depravity.”338 Most damning was the criticism from Graça Machel, wife of Nelson Mandela and a former first lady of Mozambique. Her scathing remarks were thought to represent the voice of Mandela himself, although he was in failing health and no longer made public appearances or statements. Speaking at a memorial service, she decried the “increasing institutionalization of violence” that had yielded a police force “actively aggressive towards a defenceless public.”339 She continued, “South Africa is an angry nation. We are on the precipice of something very dangerous with the potential of not being able to stop the fall. The level of anger and aggression is rising. This is an expression of deeper trouble from the past that has not been addressed. We have to be more cautious about how we deal with a society that is bleeding and breathing pain.”

  Illegal Immigration

  Regardless of whether the attack on Macia was inspired by xenophobia, illegal immigration, particularly from Zimbabwe and Mozambique, had continued to cause social unrest. Although the large-scale violence of the Mbeki years was not repeated, there were intermittent episodes.340 In 2010 the country had anticipated a series of xenophobic attacks that would disrupt the soccer World Cup events, but nothing materialized and the games, which cost R40 billion to stage, were internationally acclaimed as a sporting success.

  The message of the World Cup was one of international peace, with the host eager to showcase the glories of the harmonious and high-achieving Rainbow Nation. Much of the country reveled in a spirit of goodwill not felt since the 1994 election and inauguration of Mandela. For the month of the games, there was a drop in crime, a decline in road accidents, and a swelling of national pride. Mandela himself, in a rare public appearance, attended the final.341 Joy and amity did not endure. In May 2011, residents in two Port Elizabeth townships attacked scores of Somali-owned shops, causing about 200 Somali immigrants to flee.342 Two months later, the African Peer Review Mechanism gave South Africa the lowest possible rating for its handling of xenophobia.343 In July 2012, there were violent incidents on the Cape Flats and in Botshabelo in the Free State. While no one was certain of the number of foreign nationals in South Africa, estimates ranged
from two to seven million, including between one and three million Zimbabweans and the largest number of asylum seekers in the world; it was clear that the government had neither a comprehensive plan for dealing with illegal immigration nor any strategy for minimizing the angry perception of relative deprivation among the poorest members of society.

  Even as South Africa’s economic dominance in Africa made it a prime destination for impoverished people and organized crime from elsewhere on the continent, various factors contributed to a push by South Africans in the other direction. These included the epidemic of violent crime as well as a lack of faith in Zuma’s presidency and the ANC’s ability to bring to fruition the still unfulfilled promises of the first, heady days after apartheid. A huge brain drain threatened economic catastrophe if left unchecked; in 2011, one study estimated that the country had 829,900 unfilled jobs for highly skilled labor.344 The South African Institute of Race Relations had reported in its 2007–8 annual survey that one-fifth of the white population, or 800,000 people, had emigrated since 1995, a scale consistent with “widespread disease, mass natural disasters or large-scale civil conflict.”345 It noted that most of the country’s young Whites, those between 24 and 40, had already left and there were more white men over the age of 60 than young ones. Africans, Coloureds, and Indians also had gone. Although between 1996 and 2008 the number of Blacks obtaining advanced degrees had risen from 361,000 to 1.4 million per annum, the number of such degree holders strongly desiring to emigrate had doubled. In May 2008, a poll of 600 people of different ethnicities, ages, and sexes found that 20 percent were planning to emigrate, a phenomenon it described as “a new tipping point for an exodus . . . across-the-board in terms of race.” More than 95 percent of those hoping to go indicated that their main reason for emigrating was crime. Their ranks included professionals and skilled farmers. Diminishing numbers of skilled farmers and a lack of corporate or black replacements portended an agricultural collapse of the sort experienced in Zimbabwe. The most highly skilled, the very people desperately needed to help South Africa overcome its past, were the ones leaving. While the opposition had tried and failed to have votes of no confidence against Zuma, it was these émigrés, voting with their feet, who had achieved them.

  Clouds over the Rainbow Nation

  In late 2009, the United Nations declared Mandela’s birthday, July 18, Nelson Mandela Day, an annual event on which the citizens of the world were encouraged to do 67 minutes—one for each year of his political activism—of good deeds in honor of Mandela’s struggle for peace and justice.346 In 2013, Mandela’s ninety-fifth birthday, many South Africans marked the event by doing charitable works.347 Zuma, with high symbolism, went to a squatter camp inhabited by many poor Whites to inaugurate government housing for its denizens.348 The day was part of a collective soul-searching about Mandela’s legacy and the kind of nation postapartheid South Africa had become. That self-reflection had begun in earnest with Mandela’s June 8 admission to a Pretoria hospital for a recurrent lung problem—his fourth hospitalization since December—where he remained on his birthday. Relatively little news about his condition appeared, fueling wild speculation. There were fears he was near the end, encouraged partly by court documents filed in a dispute among Mandela family members over the gravesites of three of his children, which alleged he was in a vegetative state. Later, there were reports he was making steady progress.349

  Jockeying for the rights to Brand Mandela had already begun in earnest in April when the ANC and the DA got into a row over political pedigree. The DA, responding to ANC claims that the DA would bring back apartheid, launched a “Know your DA” campaign to counter this assertion and attract more, particularly African, members. The DA circulated material showing the late MP Helen Suzman, a party forebear, in an embrace with Mandela.350 Suzman, who for years was the lone voice of opposition in the apartheid parliament and was widely credited with helping focus the attention of many, especially Western, governments on apartheid’s evils, had previously been praised by Mandela. The ANC was mortified. It accused Suzman of not having been a revolutionary. Zuma visited Mandela at home in an apparent effort to bolster Zuma’s credibility by association with the great man. Instead, the ANC was roundly criticized for invading Mandela’s privacy because the released photos showed a smiling Zuma and a frail, blank-faced Mandela.351 It was unclear whether the battling over this ancient history held any appeal to “born frees,” the millions born after the end of apartheid, the oldest of whom were now young adults.352 Many surveys and interviews portrayed them as a generation of pragmatists with little interest in the political struggles of their elders and no passion for politics or voting. Others, without deep allegiances born of the liberation struggle, might well, in time, move the nation toward new political terrain relatively untouched by old loyalties.

  On December 5, Mandela died at his Johannesburg home where he had returned after his release from the hospital at the end of August. The days that followed until his funeral on December 15 in his beloved Qunu in the Eastern Cape were a period of national mourning. As the world honored an extraordinary life, South Africans, in a great display of unity, reflected on Mandela’s achievements and their own. With the twentieth anniversary of the end of white rule fast approaching, there was cause for celebration and lamentation. The country had maintained its tradition of democratic elections, an independent judiciary, a vocal opposition, a vigorous press, and a vibrant civil society. In nearly two decades of ANC leadership, millions had received housing, however crude, and access to clean water, sanitation, electricity, and health care. Many had had a chance for an education, even a university education and its prize of a comfortable life. There was a new black elite and an expanding middle class. Measured by the size of its economy, the scope and sophistication of its infrastructure, the strength of its military, and its integration into the global economy, the country was without peer on the African continent.

  At the same time, South Africa had many features that threatened its continued success and perhaps, ultimately, its very survival. Metastasizing antidemocratic biases and exploding corruption coupled with the giant, widening gap between rich and poor made it ever more difficult for many to achieve the South African dream of a decent living standard and equal opportunity. The country remained a de facto one-party state whose single party increasingly displayed antipathy toward dissent via attacks on the judiciary, the press, the political opposition, and even its own members. The ANC had a sense of entitlement that was reflected in Zuma’s arrogant prediction that the party would “rule until Jesus comes back.” It was a type of conceit common in a region where, by 2014, the dominant parties in the seven countries within the Southern African Development Community would have had political control for some 250 years combined. The fatuous but reflexive accusations of those in power that their critics, including black ones, were racist or, still more ludicrous, foreign spies or agents prevented mature examination of the government’s many failings. The galloping culture of corruption left the government with fewer and fewer resources with which to expand employment and provide housing, basic services, health care, and education to millions of the still destitute; for them, the accommodation between white interests and black power that had yielded the Rainbow Nation had failed utterly to deliver the ANC’s promised better life for all.

  At least politically, there were small points of light. For many ANC supporters, there was the expectation that Ramaphosa would succeed Zuma and revive hope for a truly nonracial nation with universal affluence. With Zuma likely to win a second term, a Ramaphosa presidency was, at best, years away. More probable in the immediate future was an increasingly large and diverse opposition united in its goal of curtailing ANC power. With time, elements within it might even successfully challenge the ANC for control of the country. In that event, a graceful ANC exit from power would represent a true and unprecedented victory for democracy. After all, for nearly 50 years the NP had presided over a one-party state with authorit
arian features. In that way, ANC rule represented continuity rather than a rupture with the past. In the end, despite everything, the NP government had gone gracefully. It could only be wished that if the time came, the ANC would follow that example, too.

  APPENDIX: STATISTICS

  NOTE: South African statistics are particularly poor before World War II and at all times suspect concerning Africans. During the later apartheid years, inhabitants of “independent Homelands” were excluded from official statistics; however, they have been incorporated in these tables. Since the end of apartheid South Africa has conducted three censuses: 1996, 2001, and 2011. To illustrate South Africa’s place in the contemporary world, tables are included comparing South Africa with other countries.

  Table 1

  Population of South Africa, in millions, 1911–2013

  Table 2

  Proportion of population estimated in urban areas

  Table 3