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Never, never, and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world. nelson mandela Cape Town Bloemfontein Durban Pretoria Johannesburg SOUTH AFRICA LESOTHO SWAZILAND
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Never, never, and never again shall it

be that this beautiful land will again

experience the oppression of one by

another and suffer the indignity of

being the skunk of the world.

nelson mandela

Cape Town

BloemfonteinDurban

Pretoria

Johannesburg

SOUTH AFRICALESOTHO

SWAZILAND

A Journey toward Reconciliation

There have been many momentous steps in SouthAfrica’s journey toward democracy and reconcilia-tion between blacks and whites. One of them be-

gan on 25 August 1993 with an event that seemed likely tobe only a tragic footnote in the history of the last days ofapartheid.

Amy Biehl was a twenty-five-year-old Fulbrightscholar who had come to South Africa to help prepare for the first multiracial elections, which eventually wereheld in April 1994. As an undergraduate at Stanford Uni-versity, Biehl had become fascinated with South Africaand the actions of Nelson Mandela, first during his longimprisonment and then as the leader of the main groupin the transition toward racial equality. Therefore, shemoved to South Africa to do what she could.

Biehl had spent that fateful day with black friendshelping organize a voter registration campaign. She wasdriving the friends back to their home in Guguletu town-ship on the outskirts of Cape Town. A gang of black teen-age boys from the Pan-African Congress were chanting“one settler, one bullet” and forced her to stop her car.Four of them dragged Biehl from the car, beat her, andthen stabbed her to death.

Despite its deserved reputation for reconciliation,

Chapter 20

South Africa

CHAPTER OUTLINE

� A Journey towardReconciliation

� Thinking about South Africa

� The Apartheid State

� The New South Africa

� Feedback

� Conclusion: South Africa inPeril or a Role Model?

The Basics: South AfricaSize 1,219,912 sq. km (almost twice the

size of Texas)

Population 44.3 million

Percentage of popu- 30lation under 15

GDP per capita $11,100

Currency 6.75 Rand � $1

Ethnic groups black, 79%; white, 9.6%; colored,8.9%; Indian/Asian, 2.5%

Languages 11 official, including English, Afri-kaans, and 9 African languages

Religion 80% Christian, 1.5% Muslim, 15.1% None or indigenous reli-gions, 3.7% Other

Capital Pretoria (administrative), Cape Town(legislative), Bloemfontein (Judicial)

President Thabo Mbeki (1999)

2 Chapter 20 South Africa

South Africa was a very violent place between the time ofMandela’s release from prison in 1990 and his inaugura-tion as president in 1994. Thousands were killed in vio-lence that ranged from the explicitly political to the ex-plicitly criminal. Biehl’s murder lay somewhere in themiddle, because it was carried out by highly politicizedteenagers but was completely unprovoked.

At the time, her death caused a brief stir in the me-dia, but only because Biehl was a white American and asupporter of racial equality in the new South Africa. Hermurderers were duly arrested, convicted, and sentencedto eighteen years in prison.

It was only three years later that the Biehl story be-came worth including here. As was their right, the fouryoung men applied for amnesty to the Truth and Recon-ciliation Commission. We will explore it in detail lateron. Here, it is enough to know that the commission hadthe power to grant amnesty to people who committedpolitical crimes under apartheid, publicly acknowledgedtheir actions, and apologized genuinely for them.

There were over twenty-two thousand applicationsfor amnesty, and these four young men did not seem like good candidates to get it. But then Amy’s parentsstepped in.

Peter and Linda Biehl had done a lot of soul search-ing in the three years since their daughter’s murder.Along with the grief that accompanies the loss of a childcame the realization that her work and her cause were allthe more important because of her death.

So, in keeping with the South African commitmentto reconciliation, they decided to continue their daugh-ter’s work in the only way they could. First, they appearedbefore the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in sup-port of her murderers’ request for amnesty. Second, theymet with the mother of one of the young men.

After that emotional trip to South Africa, they de-voted their lives to the newly formed Amy Biehl Founda-tion in the United States and the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust in South Africa (www.amybiehl.org). The Biehlscontributed quite a bit of their own money and raisedmore than $2.5 million (including $1.9 million from theU.S. Agency for International Development) to fund thekinds of projects Amy believed in throughout the CapeTown region. Among other things, the foundation hashelped finance a group of small bakeries, training pro-grams for troubled teenagers, and a series of after-schoolprograms for children. In keeping with Amy’s love forcompetitive sports, it has also opened a driving range in a poor area of Cape Town; the foundation’s websiteasks for donations of clubs and balls because poor blacksdon’t have their own.

Most remarkably, the Biehls learned that two of the

men responsible for Amy’s death wanted to meet withthem. The other two—who had been primarily respon-sible for the murder itself—had committed other crimesand disappeared. These two, however, had taken advan-tage of the amnesty program and had put their personalpriorities in order. Then, in what can only be called theultimate gesture of reconciliation, the Biehls decided touse foundation funds to help pay for their training andhired them afterward. Their logic was the same as thatfor all the foundation’s work—if they can help South Af-ricans escape poverty and the legacy of apartheid, andthen help improve conditions in their country, it is worththe money.

Linda Biehl is well known in South Africa (PeterBiehl died in April 2002). Strangers come up to her on thestreet to hug and thank her for all she has done. And asthese lines were being written, the community leaders ofGuguletu were making plans to rename the street Amydied on in her honor.

Thinking about South Africa

There are no other Amy Biehls in Comparative Poli-tics. This is because there could not have been apolitically significant young woman like her in any

of the other countries it covers.In none of them did the horrors and the hopes of

political life attract young idealists like her to make long-term commitments of their time. In none of them wasthere the kind of social and political chaos that made the all-but-random killings of young people—black andwhite—a part of everyday life.

In other words, Amy was drawn to South Africa forthe same reasons it should be included in courses oncomparative politics. In her day, South Africa had justtaken the first steps from having one of the most brutal,repressive, and racist regimes in history toward being acountry that ranks among the world’s leaders in recon-ciling people with its negative history.

The BasicsOne of the best recent books about race and politics inthe United States is Andrew Hacker’s Two Nations: Blackand White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. His title is evenmore fitting for South Africa.

Historically, no country had done more to sepa-rate the races. Although apartheid was the country’s of-ficial policy only from the late 1940s until the early 1990s,Europeans systematically discriminated against othergroups from the time they first established permanent

Chapter 20 South Africa 3

� TABLE 20.1 Race and Personal Income in South Africa, 1988

PERCENTAGE OF PERCENTAGE OF RACE THE POPULATION DISPOSABLE INCOME

Black 75.2 34Coloured 8.6 9Indian/Asian 2.6 4White 13.6 54

settlements in the region during the seventeenth cen-tury. The society they created over the next 340 years was one that separated the races, created inequality, and bred more hostility than most Americans can evendream of.

Table 20.1 presents statistical data on the four ma-jor racial groups in South Africa during the last years ofapartheid. Only about one in seven South Africans iswhite. In 1988, however, they accounted for over half of all income of South Africans and controlled a muchhigher percentage of the nation’s wealth.

To be counted as white under apartheid, a personhad to have “blood” from no other ethnic group. Thisdoes not mean that the white community is homoge-neous. In fact, it has three main subdivisions. A majorityof whites are Afrikaners— descendents of the originalDutch colonists plus settlers from Germany and Francewho were assimilated into Afrikaner culture. About two-fifths of the white population either is of English origin orwas assimilated into the English culture after moving toSouth Africa. Finally, there is a small Jewish population,most of which is part of English culture. It is worth not-ing, however, that Jews played a major role in the anti-apartheid struggle, especially as members of the SouthAfrican Communist Party (SACP).

Blacks make up three-quarters of the population.They, too, are a diverse group, as can be seen in the factthat there are nine official African languages in additionto English and Afrikaans. The black share of the popula-tion will continue to grow for the foreseeable future forthe simple reason that its birth rate far outpaces that ofwhites. Thus, current projections suggest that blacks willmake up about 87 percent and whites only 6 percent ofthe population in 2035.

The blacks do not share the affluence of the whites.In urban areas, most live in ramshackle huts or decrepittrailers. In the countryside, few of them have electricity,running water, and any of the other basic amenities oflife that whites take for granted.

Almost 9 percent of South Africans are coloured.Some are descendents of the Khoikhoi who lived in thearea around what is now Cape Town before the Brit-

ish arrived. Others trace their roots to slaves who werebrought to South Africa from what is now Malaysia.Most, however, owe their relatively light skins to forcedsexual relations between white men and black women.

South Africa also has a small but influential Asian or“Indian” population (“Indian” in quotes because manyof their ancestors came from today’s Pakistan and Ban-gladesh as well as India). They are known as Indians be-cause the subcontinent was not divided in those ways inthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whenmost of their ancestors were brought to South Africa asindentured servants.

The country is also religiously diverse. Almost 80 per-cent of the population, including almost all the whites,are Christian. About 2 percent are Muslims and Hindus.The rest practice a variety of traditional religions.

Apartheid and Its Legacy

When Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as president ofSouth Africa, the country abandoned a regime that de-nied basic civil and political rights to more than 80 per-cent of its population, in favor of one of the most openand democratic governments in the world.

Although this new multiracial South Africa is the fo-cus of the chapter, understanding events since Mandelabecame president requires us to spend at least as muchtime examining apartheid, because its legacy is still themost important force determining how politics is playedout in South Africa. To see this, consider the Truth andReconciliation Commission again. For much of 1997–98,the commission heard testimony from both perpetratorsand victims of human rights abuse under apartheid. Inhis introduction to its report, the commission’s chair,Archbishop Desmond Tutu, proudly announced thatSouth Africans now knew as much as they could everknow of what happened from 1960 until Mandela be-came president. However, as Tutu also had to acknowl-edge, being aware of what happened is one thing, andhealing the gaping wounds of apartheid will be quite another.

The problems facing the country are daunting. Notonly does South Africa have to deal with pain in thehearts and minds of so many of its people, blacks andwhites alike, but it has to rebuild an economy in whichboth groups can prosper. And it has to do so in a countryin which most people are both impoverished and ex-tremely impatient and in which, as one consequence,the crime rate is among the highest in the world. Weshould hardly be surprised that blacks are lashing out atsymbols of continued white power and privilege, but thisdoes not make the challenge facing Thabo Mbeki, Man-dela’s successor, any easier.

4 Chapter 20 South Africa

During apartheid, the government codified South Afri-can law so that it had explicit definitions for what the

Afrikaner elite saw as four racial groups:

� Whites—people of European origin with no trace of“other blood” in their families

� Coloureds—part of a grab bag category, includingpeople of mixed racial origin but also descendents of Malaysians and others brought to South Africa asslaves, and of the Khoikhoi and other lighter-skinnedpeople who lived in what is today’s Western Cape before the whites arrived

� Asians or Indians—the descendents of people whoemigrated from what was colonial India

� Africans or blacks—everyone else whose family rootsare on the continent

The Language of Race in South Africa

� TABLE 20.2 Key Events in South African History before Apartheid

YEAR EVENT

1652 Dutch arrive1806 British take over Cape Colony for good1816–1828 African wars1820 British settlers arrive1835–40 Great Trek1867 Diamond mining begins1886 Gold mining begins1899–1903 Boer War1910 Union of South Africa formed1912 ANC formed1948 National Party elected

Key QuestionsIn other words, we can—and will— explore the same ba-sic issues covered in the printed version of ComparativePolitics: the evolution of the state, political culture, formsof political participation, the current state, public policy,and feedback. And we will consider the legacy of imperi-alism, economic development, and other policy issuesthat are central to political life in any third-world coun-try today.

However, we also have to ask five questions that areunique to South Africa:

� How could such a small minority develop suchsweeping control over such a huge majority andmaintain it for so long?

� What impact did apartheid have on the people ofSouth Africa, majority and minority alike?

� What constellation of domestic and internationalforces brought the regime down in the late 1980sand early 1990s?

� What are the new regime’s prospects, either forproducing a viable multiracial democracy or for re-dressing the huge inequities?

� In other words, can South Africa get beyondHacker’s two nations: black and white, separate,hostile, and unequal?

In addressing those questions, we will deviate a bit fromthe structure used in most of the other chapters on indi-

vidual countries. As with Russia, the other country in thisbook that has recently undergone a regime change, wewill actually cycle through the themes of comparativepolitics twice by exploring the apartheid and multiracialstates separately.

The Apartheid State

South Africa was one of the few third-world coun-tries in which whites from the colonial powersdominated political life after independence. What’s

more, the South African experience was complicated bythe fact that it had two different imperial powers, GreatBritain and the Netherlands

ImperialismThat made South Africa’s experience with imperialismdifferent from that of the rest of Africa for two reasons.First, it was colonized two centuries earlier than most ofthe continent. Second, and more importantly for ourpurposes, it had by far the largest white population onthe continent, one that was well established before theEuropean powers began their “scramble for Africa” latein the nineteenth century. (See table 20.2.)

As was the case with most of Europe’s encounters inAfrica prior to the eighteenth century, the Dutch wantedto create outposts to support their growing trade withAsia. The outposts were needed to resupply ships dur-ing their trips to and from their main base in Indonesia.The area around what is now Cape Town provided anideal harbor and climate. It was also sparsely populated.Therefore, the Dutch sent Jan van Riebeeck and a smallgroup of settlers to take over the area in 1652.

For the next 150 years, there weren’t all that manyDutch colonists. A 1793 census, for instance, listed only

Chapter 20 South Africa 5

Whites in the United States, Canada, Australia, andNew Zealand have no trouble identifying themselves

as Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders,respectively. But they have a much harder time understand-ing how whites in South Africa can think of themselves asAfricans.

However, many of those families have been in SouthAfrican longer than all but a handful of American or Cana-dian families have inhabited North America. Australia andNew Zealand were colonized much later.

On a more practical level, it can be extremely difficultfor those millions of South Africans—especially the Afrika-ners—to move “back” to “where they came from” even ifthey wanted to.

This point is well understood by all but a handful ofmilitant pan-Africanists in South Africa today.

Who Is an African?13,830 burghers, or free Dutch citizens, in the entireCape Colony. Nonetheless, they had spread out through-out today’s Western Cape Province. In the process, theyhad established themselves as farmers (boers) as well astraders and so had doomed the pastoral civilization ofthe Khoikhoi. And by that time, the Boers had been therefor many generations and saw themselves as every bit asAfrican as the descendents of British and French mi-grants to North America identified themselves as Ameri-cans or Canadians.

The Boers (now more commonly called Afrikaners)might have remained a relatively small group inhabitinga limited part of current South Africa had the region notbeen caught up in the conflicts sweeping Europe in thelate eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1795Britain seized the Cape Colony from the Dutch, though it would be another eleven years before they took con-trol of it permanently. This ignited a century of on-again,off-again armed struggles between English and Dutchforces. There were a series of Dutch uprisings early in the nineteenth century, and tensions between the twocommunities mounted when the British started sendingsettlers in 1820.

Finally, in 1835, most of the Boers in the Cape Col-ony area set off on the Great Trek. These so-called voer-trekkers loaded their families (and their slaves) into wag-ons and headed northeastward toward what are now thetwo Transvaal provinces— Gauteng and the Orange FreeState—so they could reestablish their communities ontheir own terms.

The regions the Afrikaners trekked into were moredensely populated by Africans who did not want to seetheir lands taken over and who set at them in ways remi-niscent of Indian attacks on American wagon trains thatheaded west a few decades later. The most important of these occurred in 1838 at Blood River (Bloemfon-tein), where a vastly outnumbered group of voertrekkerscircled their wagons, prayed to their God, and somehowmanaged to defeat their Zulu foe. The Battle of BloodRiver remains the most important symbol of Afrikanerresistance and solidarity.

By 1840 the voertrekkers were well established intheir new homeland. Later in the decade, another com-munity was established by Boers who left Natal on theeast coast after it became a British colony as well.

Tensions between the British and Dutch did not goaway, however. In 1867 and 1886, vast deposits of dia-monds and gold, respectively, were discovered in thearea around Johannesburg and Pretoria. Thousands ofEnglish (and black) workers were transported to theseboomtowns. Finally, in 1895, the British governor of the

Cape Colony, Cecil Rhodes (founder of the De Beerscompany and of the estate that funds Rhodes scholar-ships), called on the English workers to rise up againstthe Dutch.

After four tense years, Paul Kruger, president of theBoer Republic, declared war on the British in October1899. Even though their forces were outnumbered bymore than five to one, the Afrikaners fought ferociously.The British responded with brutality of their own, creat-ing the world’s first concentration camps in which atleast twenty thousand civilians died.

Finally, the two sides agreed to a treaty in 1902, andthe Transvaal Province and the Orange Free State be-came British colonies in 1906 and 1907, respectively. In1910 the Union of South Africa brought the four coloniestogether as a dominion, which meant that they had asingle administration dominated by whites.

Apologists for the South African regime pointed outthat it was democratic and presided over the most af-fluent economy (by far) on the continent. What’s more,they would point out, black Africans benefited becausethey, too, lived better than their counterparts elsewhere.(See table 20.3.)

Such claims should not obscure a more importantpoint: If South Africa in this era was a democracy, it wasa democracy for the few. Whites never made up morethan 20 percent of the population, yet they controlled thestate lock, stock, and barrel. They also were far better offthan the rest of South Africa’s population. The data most

6 Chapter 20 South Africa

� TABLE 20.3 Key Events during the Apartheid Years

DATE EVENT

1948 Election of National Party1953 Adoption of Freedom Charter1960 Sharpville Massacre1964 Mandela and others jailed1966 Assassination of Verwoerd1977 UN arms embargo1983 UDF formed1984 New constitution1986 Pass law abolished1990 Mandela released, ban on organizations lifted

favorable to the regime showed that whites were at leastfive times wealthier than blacks, and most indicators re-vealed an even wider gap.

Racial discrimination was a fact of life from the be-ginning. When the British granted the colonies dominionstatus as the Union of South Africa, the whites retainedtheir existing policies toward Africans, coloureds, andAsians. Only in the region around Cape Town in thesouthwest could a small number of coloureds and aneven smaller number of blacks vote. Indeed, it was dur-ing these years that Mohandas Gandhi first became in-volved in politics by defending the interests of the Indiancommunity. And one of the Union’s first acts was a 1913law that prohibited Africans from buying land outside of“reserves,” or land set aside for them—not terribly dif-ferent from American Indian reservations.

That said, apartheid, per se, did not become officialpolicy until after World War II. Prior to then, politics re-volved around the ever-deepening tensions between theEnglish and the Afrikaners. To make a long and compli-cated story short, Afrikaner resentment toward Englisheconomic and cultural domination grew. English re-mained the official and dominant language, and Englishspeakers were much better off economically even thoughthere were more Afrikaners. If anything, the Afrikaners’status worsened—as, for instance, when the largely En-glish mine owners decided to replace the largely Afrika-ner workforce with blacks.

Afrikaners channeled their anger through two mainorganizations. First was the National Party, which be-came their primary electoral outlet. During the inter-war years, this party normally came in second behind the more moderate South African Party and, later, theUnited Party, which recruited support from both the Afrikaner and English communities. The other was thesmaller, secretive, and more militant Broederbond (Bandof Brothers). Membership in it was open only to Prot-estant men and then only by invitation. Ostensibly, it

existed to promote the Afrikaans language, Afrikaner cul-ture, and Calvinist doctrine. In practice, it became a ma-jor source of leaders for the National Party and the apart-heid state after 1949.

World War II was a major watershed for Afrikaners.During the 1930s their racism had deepened to the pointthat many supported Nazi Germany, and some Afrikanerleaders were arrested during the war for doing so. Be-cause of that sentiment, South Africa did not institute adraft, and its volunteer army did not serve outside of Af-rica. Nonetheless, the war deepened Afrikaners’ bitter-ness and brought their community closer together.

The National Party won the 1948 election and cameto power with a clear majority for the first time underPrime Minister Daniel Malan. It then started passing the apartheid legislation we will consider shortly. It re-mained in power until the shift to the multiracial democ-racy headed by Mandela in 1994.

It is hard to overstate how brutal and repressive theNational Party’s regime was. At a time when most othercountries were providing more equality for their racialand ethnic minorities, South Africa went in the other di-rection. It worsened conditions for the majority of itspeople in every way imaginable—from where peoplecould live, to what they could study, to what jobs theycould hold. Needless to say, all nonwhites were excludedfrom political life.

Political Culture and Participation: Democracy for the Few

Under apartheid South Africa had two white subcultures.Both shared an unquestioned assumption that whiteswere superior to blacks and therefore should rule. How-ever, there were important differences between the valuesystems of most Afrikaners and of most English South Africans.

The majority culture was, first and foremost, Dutch.However, it is not the same as the culture we find in theNetherlands today, which is among the most liberal inthe world. Rather, Afrikaners tend to be provincial and,in the minds of some, intolerant, largely because theywere cut off from the liberalizing trends that swept Eu-rope during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Their experiences in South Africa, in fact, made gen-erations of Afrikaners even more intolerant and conser-vative. For two hundred years rural Afrikaners eked out amarginal livelihood in a land without a real legal system,which turned them into what in America were lauded as“rugged individualists” who had to assert their superior-ity over the land and the people they encountered.

The most important of the rightward shifts in Afrika-

Chapter 20 South Africa 7

Since 1838, Afrikaners have celebrated 16 December as the Day of the Covenant. Because they were able to

kill thousands of Zulus and suffer only a single casualty (a wounded hand) at the Battle of Blood River, they wereconvinced that their victory was a sign that they were God’schosen people—superior to the Africans and justified in establishing apartheid.

In an equally symbolic move, in 1994 the new govern-ment changed the name of the holiday to the Day of Rec-onciliation. Four years later, a new monument to honor the Zulus was unveiled next to the one the Afrikaners haderected to honor their heroes.

As a government spokesperson put it on 16 Decem-ber 1994, it was time for South Africans to stop glorifyingthe ways they had killed each other in the past and to real-ize that they could settle their disputes peacefully.

Day of the Covenant/Day of Reconciliation

ner culture occurred following the Battle of Blood River,which strengthened their belief that they had won God’sfavor and were supposed to rule over the inferior “de-scendents of Ham.” It also reinforced their belief thattheir desire to live in rural and pious communities wasGod’s will.

But Afrikaners also always felt threatened and fre-quently believed that they were oppressed. The GreatTrek began because many Boers felt their culture was en-dangered by British rule. The British then treated thembrutally during the Boer War. Finally, the British came to own and run the mines and other industries, even inAfrikaner-dominated areas.

As implied previously, these rather diffuse valuescrystallized into support for apartheid between the twoworld wars when a group of Afrikaner intellectuals com-bined political and theological values into an ideologythat, frankly, paralleled Nazism in important and worri-some ways. Ironically, according to James Barry MunnikHertzog, who founded the National Party in 1914 and be-came its first prime minister a decade later, Afrikanershad to purify themselves to defeat the English, and notthe Africans, who did not pose any sort of threat from hisperspective.

It is hard to underestimate the impact of the DutchReformed Church, which is still referred to as “the Na-tional Party in prayer.” Between the wars Dutch Re-formed clergymen led the way in propounding the beliefthat the Afrikaner volk needed first their own church andthen their own society to reach their potential. This led

1 Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa (Boston: BallantineBooks, 1990), xvii, 31.

them to join the more extreme politicians and the Broe-derbond (membership in these groups, of course, over-lapped tremendously) to demand power for Afrikaners.

As the years wore on, the object of their scorn beganto shift from the English to the Africans. The likes of Dan-iel Malan argued the Afrikaners could be free to developtheir own society and culture only if they enforced astrict and total separation of the races. And it was withthis set of views that the National Party and Malan cameto power in 1948 with a narrow majority of eight seats.

We do not know just how deeply these beliefs in sep-arate national development and black inferiority wereheld at the grassroots level. But all the signs are that theywere popular indeed, especially among the poorest andleast-educated segments of the Afrikaner population.

The minority English were somewhat more tolerant.They were the commercial elite in the predominantly Af-rikaner regions of the Transvaal and Orange Free State,and they ran the country politically as well. The Englishsettlers also arrived in South Africa later, when liberaland democratic values had put down deeper roots intheir culture of origin. But make no mistake: With the ex-ception of a handful of Marxists (to be discussed shortly)and some unusually progressive liberals, English speak-ers supported at least a modified form of apartheid fortwo reasons. First, most felt that the Africans were not“ready” to govern themselves, an attitude frequentlyfound among British colonists around the world. Sec-ond, and in the long run more importantly, they stood tolose their economic power should the country move tomajority rule.

The journalist Allister Sparks summed up the situa-tion and the ties between the two white subcultures suc-cinctly and powerfully just as apartheid was beginning tounravel:

White South Africans are not evil, as much of theworld believes. But they are blinded by the illusionthey have created for themselves that they live in awhite country in Africa, that it belongs to them byright and to no others. It is this which makes SouthAfrica’s race problem so much more intractable.Prejudice is there, to be sure. But that is only part ofit. The other part is a power struggle for control of acountry, between a racial minority long imbuedwith the belief that its divinely ordained nationalexistence depends on retaining control of the na-tion-state and a disinherited majority demandingrestitution of its rights, which would make that impossible.1

8 Chapter 20 South Africa

2 Leonard Thompson, The Republic of South Africa (Boston:Little Brown, 1966).

Parties and Elections

In the mid-1960s, Leonard Thompson described theSouth African party system as having a right and a cen-ter but not a left.2 From 1909 on, electoral life had pittedan ethnocentric Afrikaner party against one or morecompetitors that tried to find a middle ground and thatappealed to English voters as well.

The election of 1948 brought the right wing topower. It then won every election until 1994, when Afri-cans, Asians, and coloureds voted for the first time.

The National Party held on to power despite oftennot winning a majority of the overall vote. Thus, in 1961,it won 105 of 156 seats despite earning only 46 percent ofthe vote. It could do this because South Africa used thesame first-past-the-post electoral system as Britain does,which can turn a small plurality in the vote into an over-whelming parliamentary majority. The effects of the sys-tem were magnified by the unusual demographics of theSouth African electorate. First, it was small. Fewer than800,000 people voted in those 156 districts, or an averageof just over 5,000 in each (by contrast, a typical U.S.House of Representatives district has about 500,000 vot-ers). Second, because the English population was con-centrated in a few areas, there were few truly competitivedistricts. Overall, seventy candidates for the 156 seatswon without any opposition at all.

There were opposition parties. The United Partyearned almost 300,000 votes and won forty-nine seatsthat same year. It appealed primarily to moderate Afrika-ners and to the bulk of the English-speaking electorate. Itwas also in a difficult position. Although it opposed theharshness of apartheid, it did not favor getting rid of it altogether. Indeed, like all the centrist parties over theyears, it simply did not offer a credible alternative to theright on either apartheid or the other policies that mat-tered to the electorate.

The real, but powerless, opposition came from theLiberal and Progressive parties, which, together, won al-most 15 percent of the vote. However, because of theelectoral system, they elected only two MPs. And most ofthe time they could count on getting only one—the Pro-gressives’ Helen Suzman, who was a lonely voice argu-ing against apartheid from “within the system” for manyyears.

The Rest of the Country

It is difficult to talk about public opinion and politicalparticipation for the vast majority of the South Africanpopulation. They were legally denied the right to partici-

pate, which meant that their opinions effectively did notcount.

Most Africans acted accordingly and did not even tryto take part in political life. There was, however, a small,mostly middle-class opposition that tried to find a nichebetween participation in an electoral process that wasshut off to them and outright revolution.

Two such groups bear at least a brief mention here,though we will return to them both in discussing whyapartheid collapsed.

One was the South African Communist Party(SACP), which had first organized among whites in themines and factories during the interwar period. And be-cause white manual laborers’ jobs were being taken overby Africans, the party was initially not all that supportiveof racial equality. By the 1940s, however, a combinationof shifts in the world communist movement and its ownnew, mostly Jewish leadership led it to oppose apartheid.Not surprisingly, it was banned by the new governmentin 1950 and had a limited impact while operating under-ground after that.

The African National Congress (ANC) was the mostimportant of the largely African-based organizations.Formed in 1912, it initially endorsed the nonviolent resis-tance of the Indian Congress on which it was patterned.But with the emergence of its Youth League (whosemembers included Nelson Mandela) in the 1950s, itadopted the more militant Freedom Charter (1955) andopened its Defiance Campaign against apartheid. Al-though the ANC was officially a legal organization, theregime constantly harassed it, among other things tryingto stop the meeting at which the Freedom Charter wasadopted. The government proved willing to do whateverwas necessary to put down later efforts like the DefianceCampaign.

In short, as the 1950s drew to an end, many of itsyounger leaders were coming to doubt the efficacy ofnonviolence. The last straw came with the SharpevilleMassacre on 21 March 1960, when government troopsfired on marchers in a peaceful rally called by another organization, killing at least sixty-seven. In its after-math, all the leading ANC and other groups’ leaders werearrested.

Over the next year, the ANC reluctantly decided toadd violence to its tactics and formed Umkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation) to wage a guerrilla struggle.It, too, was quickly thwarted, and the regime used thepretext of violence to ban the ANC and arrest most of its leaders. Some, like Mandela, would spend the nexttwenty-five years in prison.

The events that occurred between Sharpeville in1960 and the imprisonment of Mandela and his col-

Chapter 20 South Africa 9

� TABLE 20.4 Prime Ministers and Presidents of South Africa since 1948

PRIME MINISTER/ STARTED PRIME MINISTER/ STARTED PRESIDENT TERM PRESIDENT TERM

Daniel Malan 1948 P. W. Botha 1978Johannes Strjdom 1954 F. W. de Klerk 1989Hendrik Verwoerd 1958 Nelson Mandela 1994B. J. Vorster 1966 Thabo Mbeki 1999

leagues in 1964 mark the end of the period in which therewere at least some ways for Africans and their allies toparticipate politically. By 1964 these had been com-pletely shut off, so we can defer further discussion oftheir involvement until the section on the new South Africa.

The StateLike India, South Africa “inherited” traditional parlia-mentary institutions from its British colonial masters.These bodies and practices were laid out in the Union of South Africa Act, which the country used as its con-stitution from 1910 to 1984. In 1984 it adopted a new constitution for a Second Republic that was designed to,paradoxically, solidify Afrikaner control but give the ap-pearance of more democracy.

It was a large and powerful state. By 1980 it em-ployed over 30 percent of the white workforce. More im-portantly, as we will see in this section and the next, itwas responsible for everything from the state’s securityto its economic development.

Parliamentary Institutions

Not only was South Africa only a democracy for whites, it was also one that became less democratic over thecourse of the National Party’s forty-six years in power intwo ways. First, as discussed in this section, the executivegained power at the expense of the legislature and otherbodies that provide opportunities for democratic ac-countability. Second, as we will see in the next one, theregime established an ever more powerful system of re-pression to keep its opponents at bay.

Prior to 1984 power was vested in a bicameral, all-white parliament. As in Britain, its majority party or par-ties formed a governing coalition and named the cabinetand prime minister, which remained in power as long asthey retained the support of that majority. Some minorchanges were made when South Africa quit the BritishCommonwealth in 1961 and adopted its own constitu-tion. But these were mostly cosmetic, such as replacingthe powerless governor general, who supposedly repre-sented the British Crown as head of state, with an almostequally powerless president. (See table 20.4.)

By the late 1970s, however, the pressures on thestate from outside the parliament were growing, andPrime Ministers B. J. Vorster and P. W. Botha took steps tostrengthen executive authority. Botha, for instance, abol-ished the partially elected Senate and replaced it with aState Council appointed by the prime minister.

In 1983 the parliament adopted a new constitutionthat radically restructured parliamentary institutions.

The traditional British-style dual executive was aban-doned in favor of a single state president, who was cho-sen by an electoral college. The president’s term was the same as the parliament’s, but the president no lon-ger was responsible to it. That is, the parliament could no longer oust a prime minister through a vote of noconfidence.

As a sop to international public opinion, the newparliament had three houses— one each for whites,coloureds, and Asians. However, all real power waslodged in the whites-only executive and its house of par-liament. In fact, most coloureds and Asians recognizedthat these institutions were shams, boycotted the elec-tions, and never participated in them.

In practice, the presidency grew in importance forthe same reasons it did in France after 1958 or Russia af-ter 1991. The president was the one politician with a na-tional mandate, which gave him more exposure and defacto power than earlier prime ministers. Further, it al-lowed Botha and, later, F. W. de Klerk to transfer moreand more power to the State Security Council, to whichwe now turn.

Repressive Apparatus

It would be a mistake to think of the South African stateas a whites-only version of a Western democracy. Espe-cially from the mid-1970s on, it survived in large part be-cause it developed a massive, ruthless, and effective po-lice state led by civil servants who came to be known assecurocrats.

In the 1970s South Africans, who saw themselves asa regional superpower, suffered two setbacks. First, thepolitical scandals that cost Richard Nixon the U.S. presi-dency in 1974 also cost South Africa support from theworld leader who had become its most loyal ally. Sec-ond, revolutions in Angola and Mozambique threw outthe Portuguese colonial rulers, installed radical govern-ments near South Africa’s borders, and gave the ANCbases much closer to the country from which to operate.

In response, the parliament passed the 1982 InternalSecurity Act, which created the National Security Man-agement System headed by the State Security Council.

10 Chapter 20 South Africa

This was a powerful body, consisting of the top cabinetministers and the heads of the many police and militarysecurity units. It defined security in the broadest possibleterms—as anything that might threaten the regime inthe short or long term.

In the eyes of most observers, the council overshad-owed the cabinet as the main decision-making body.And because it was extraconstitutional, there were fewways members of parliament could hold it accountable,assuming, of course, they were interested in doing so.

Ironically, as with the KGB in the Soviet Union in thelate 1970s, the securocrats were not even the most reac-tionary members of the South African elite. In fact, manyrealized that they could not continue to control Africansby force alone and urged some reforms, such as allow-ing blacks to form unions, as long as they were not polit-ical. But few people realized that those reformist ideasexisted at the time, because the visible policy at work was a stepped-up repression that made any lingeringthoughts that this was a democratic regime seem absurd.

Apartheid in Action

In its first years in power, the National Party passed anumber of laws that formalized what had been only par-tially laid out in the statute books prior to then. As wouldbe the case throughout its time in office, the party oftenjustified its actions in other terms, most notably its anti-communism. Nonetheless, the party’s primary motiva-tion was to complete and formalize the separation of theraces that had already been common practice for gener-ations. The most important of the laws were:

� the Population Registration Act (1950), which de-fined all people as members of one of the four racial groups;

� the Group Areas Act (1950), which regulated thesale of property across racial lines; other acts passedfrom 1936 through the mid-1950s gradually tookaway the rights of blacks to live in “white” areasand authorized their (forcible) resettlement;

� the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages (1949) and Im-morality (1950) acts, which banned sexual relationsacross racial lines;

� the Suppression of Communism Act (1950), whichoutlawed the SACP and allowed the state to ban in-dividuals from political life; it and subsequent actswere later used as justification for repressing theANC as well;

� the Bantu Authorities Act (1951), which removedantiregime “chiefs” and replaced them with gov-ernment-appointed ones in “tribal” areas;

� the Native Laws Amendment Act (1953), which allowed only blacks who had been born there tolegally live in urban areas;

� the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953),which provided legal justification for separate, seg-regated facilities;

� the Extension of University Education Act (1959),which prohibited Africans from attending the three major universities that had previously en-rolled some black students (so much for extend-ing education);

� the Bantu Homeland Constitution Act (1971),which allowed for the creation of nominally inde-pendent black homelands.

The state also rigidly enforced the pass laws, whichrequired blacks outside of the homelands to carry whatamounted to internal passports indicating their legal sta-tus regarding residence in white areas. Employers usedthe laws to enforce labor discipline, because any workerwho was fired would have his or her passbook changedand would lose the right to visit, let alone live in, an ur-ban area. Each year an average of one hundred thou-sand Africans were arrested and either jailed or sent back to the homelands for pass law violations. Some-times the state used the laws to ban known opponentsand troublemakers. Passbook checks and arrests wererandom and arbitrary, and thus instilled a sense of fearand uncertainty in the black community.

After 1958 the authorities stopped using overtlyracist rhetoric, claiming they were working for the sepa-rate development of each community. Although this lan-guage often seemed more benign to outsiders, the state’spolicies and actions were just as brutal as they had beenin the first years of apartheid.

The underlying thinking was that, if the races wereto develop separately, they should live separately, or atleast as separately as the economy allowed. Thus, areasof rural South Africa were set aside as homelands for the Africans and supposedly granted a degree of self-government. In practice, these areas, once pejorativelyknown as bantustans, occupied the 13 percent of theland that the whites themselves did not want, that could not economically support their residents, and thathad governments that were puppets of National Partyauthorities.

In urban areas, the government introduced a pol-icy of forced relocation in 1954 when it flattened the Jo-hannesburg suburb of Sophiatown (where, among otherthings, Desmond Tutu had been raised). Its sixty thou-sand residents were forced into a new slum that would

Chapter 20 South Africa 11

3 Cited in Sparks, The Mind of South Africa, 213.

later be known as Soweto (short for South WesternTownships). By the end of the 1980s, some three millionpeople had been uprooted.

This shift toward a language of separate develop-ment became the key to apartheid once Hendrik Ver-woerd (1901– 66) was elected prime minister in 1958. Hisnotion that the real purpose of apartheid was not just toseparate the races but to thereby allow each to developaccording to its own desires and using its own resourcesassuaged a good bit of Afrikaner guilt and provided bet-ter public relations for the regime abroad.

The doctrine of separate development remained thecornerstone of government racial policy until the lastdays of apartheid. The language became less racist, andunder the last two presidents, P. W. Botha and F. W. deKlerk, a few of the least important racial laws were elimi-nated, though without undermining the basics of apart-heid at all. More importantly, the arrogance of the whitesremained, something Verwoerd had expressed well indescribing why they had to control the bantustans:

There is nothing strange about the fact that here inSouth Africa the guardian in his attempts to upliftthe Bantu groups who have been entrusted to hiscare must in various ways exercise supervision overthem during the initial stage.3

Import Substitution from the Right

Left-wing scholars now argue that apartheid was notsimply a racist policy. In addition, they claim, it dramati-cally altered the distribution of wealth and power inSouth African capitalism. As we will see, once apartheidbegan hitting South African whites in their proverbialpocketbooks, support for it plummeted rapidly.

Here, it is important to note that apartheid also con-tributed to the development of a modern economy and,with it, improved living conditions for the Afrikaners.When the National Party came to power, most Afrikanershad been left behind by the industrial development thathad primarily benefited the English. Most Afrikanerswere poor and poorly educated. Many were actuallyworse off than they had been previously because of thedeclining role of farming and the use of cheaper Africanlabor in the mines and factories.

For Afrikaners, political power brought economicpower. And, although they were anything but left wing,first by choice and then out of necessity, they pursuedpolicies much like the import substitution that was usedin many third world countries, especially those with left-of-center governments. In fact, the South African indus-

trial revolution began when World War II cut off access toimported industrial goods its middle class wanted.

After the war, the National Party government de-cided to continue the practice of import substitution andto support the development of South African–based in-dustries, especially those owned and/or operated by Afrikaners.

By the 1970s the nation had no choice but to developits own economy. As we will see, the international com-munity gradually distanced itself from South Africa. Al-though sanctions and the corporate withdrawals werenever complete, South African businesses and consum-ers increasingly had to provide for their own needs.

Thus, for very different reasons, but in ways verysimilar to those of governments using classical forms of import substitutions, the National Party relied on ahighly interventionist state. First and foremost, it used itscontrol over the Bantu Administration Boards to keepthe costs of black labor down and thus encourage foreigninvestment. Second, it actively encouraged an Afrikaner(but not English) capitalist class by, for instance, shiftingits accounts to Afrikaner-owned banks and awarding Afrikaner-owned firms the contracts to rewrite school-books. The government also used taxation and otherlevers to encourage joint ventures between traditionallyEnglish-dominated firms and Afrikaner ones. Overall,the state’s role in investment grew to a high of 37 percentin 1992.

The government erected high tariffs and other barri-ers to imports, and plowed the profits from the sale ofgold, diamonds, and other exports into industrial devel-opment. Thus, it set up parastals (state-controlled com-panies) such as ISCOR (steel), ESKOM (electricity), andSASOL (other forms of energy).

The strategy worked. The growth rate was quite highinto the 1970s. Foreign investment flowed into the coun-try as major industrial firms from Europe, North Amer-ica, and Japan all established subsidiaries (though theJapanese had to be declared honorary whites in order todo business there). Perhaps most important of all po-litically, the Afrikaners prospered. No longer were theyamong the poorest and least-educated white popula-tions in the world. Instead, they enjoyed lifestyles not ter-ribly different from those of most Europeans or English-speaking South Africans.

At this point, two problems emerged, both of whichwill be at the heart of the next section. First, black tradeunions were formed, which, at least in some industries,drove the price of labor up and, hence, reduced the at-tractiveness of doing business in South Africa. Second, as a result of a worldwide antiapartheid movement, for-eign investment declined, and some firms pulled out al-

12 Chapter 20 South Africa

Early in his career, no one would have predicted that F. W. de Klerk would lead the National Party toward

ending apartheid. His family had been involved in NationalParty politics from the days of Paul Kruger in the 1910s. Hisuncle was a leading architect of apartheid, and his fatherwas a senator.

De Klerk earned a law degree in 1958 and was slatedto begin a career as professor of law in 1972 when he wasfirst elected to political office. In 1978 he took up his firstministerial post. In 1986 he became leader of the National

Party in parliament. In that position, he was part of thegroup that convinced P. W. Botha to step down as presi-dent. De Klerk succeeded him and almost immediately gave his famous speech ending the ban on the ANC andannouncing Nelson Mandela’s release from prison.

For their efforts in the transition, de Klerk and Man-dela were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. De Klerkresigned as deputy president in 1996, took the NationalParty into opposition, and then retired from active political life (www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1993/klerk-bio.html).

F. W. D E K L E R K

4 Cited in Patti Waldmeier, Anatomy of a Miracle (New York:Penguin Books, 1997), 142.

together. Neither change dealt the economy a crushingblow, but it stagnated in the early 1980s and suffered alimited, but real, decline in the second half of the decade.

The economic changes led to an intriguing contra-diction that left-wing analysts, again, are convinced con-tributed heavily to the end of apartheid. As industrializa-tion progressed and more and more Afrikaners attainedmiddle-class status, they had no choice but to employ Af-rican workers, even though the apartheid laws bannedAfricans from living in the urban areas where the facto-ries were located. The Afrikaners thus tacitly allowed asystem of temporary migration of black workers, which,as we will see, only served to indirectly heighten opposi-tion to the regime.

The New South Africa

On 2 February 1990 President F. W. de Klerkopened the new session of the National Assem-bly with a political bombshell:

The prohibition of the African National Congress,the Pan Africanist Congress, the South AfricanCommunist Party and a number of subsidiary or-ganizations is being rescinded. The government has taken a firm decision to release Mr. NelsonMandela unconditionally.4

Apartheid always had its opponents. Some, like thepredominantly English-speaking liberals, tried to reducediscrimination by working inside the system. But mostothers had no choice but to act as revolutionaries of oneform or another. Because they had no vote and no civil

rights, there were no “inside-the-system” options opento them.

Neither group of opponents had much of an impactthrough the mid-1980s. Indeed, most observers assumedthat the apartheid state was firmly in place. It did notseem to be quite as strong as the Soviet Union, but fewpeople expected either to disappear. Indeed, most peoplewere surprised by de Klerk’s speech, precisely becausethe regime did not seem to be in jeopardy.

In retrospect, it was probably just a matter of timebefore apartheid collapsed. Although repression couldkeep the state in place and make it look invincible, theNational Party government was fighting a losing battle. If nothing else, the numbers were stacked against it. Inthe 1960s more blacks were born than there were whitesof any age. Once some cracks in white and Afrikanerunity appeared, apartheid collapsed remarkably quickly,though not in the same ways that communism did inEastern Europe.

The Hurting StalemateIt is not wholly accurate to say that the opposition over-threw the old regime. Rather, the two sides reached whatstudents of international conflict resolution call a hurt-ing stalemate, in which each side comes to the twin con-clusions. It cannot win, and the costs of continuing thestruggle outweigh any conceivable benefits. A hurtingstalemate does not necessarily lead to successful negoti-ations, as the struggles between the Israelis and thePalestinians illustrate.

Indeed, it is safe to say that such a stalemate hadbeen reached in South Africa long before negotiationsbegan in earnest in 1989. The moment was seized, how-ever, because remarkable leaders, most notably Mandelaand de Klerk, took the political risk of gradually bringing

Chapter 20 South Africa 13

5 Cited in Waldmeier, Anatomy of a Miracle. 94.

Desmond Tutu grew up in a middle-class (by black stan-dards) family. His father was a teacher, and that was

the younger Tutu’s first career as well. He came to the min-istry relatively late, having been ordained an Anglican priestin 1960 at the age of twenty-nine. Much of his first fifteenyears in the ministry was spent either teaching or engagingin further study.

He rose through the ranks of the church hierarchyquite quickly, having been named bishop of Lesotho in1977 and secretary general of the South African Council of Churches in 1980. Nine years later he became Anglicanarchbishop for all of South Africa after winning the 1984

Nobel Peace Prize. Tutu was widely respected at home andabroad for his moral courage and for his compassion to-ward his adversaries.

In 1996 he retired from his position in the church inorder to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.Tutu spent much of his time building the case against apart-heid abroad and was a scholar in residence at the CarterCenter at Emory University in Atlanta in the months afterpresenting Mandela with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report (www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1984/tutu-bio.html).

D E S M O N D T U T U

the African National Congress (ANC) and the NationalParty together.

As Mandela himself put it,

It was clear to me that a military victory was a dis-tant if not impossible dream. It simply did not makesense for both sides to lose thousands if not millionsof lives in a conflict that was unnecessary. It wastime to talk.5

The Sources of ResistanceResistance to apartheid came from five main sources,each of which gained strength in the 1980s.

In the long run, the liberals were the least important.Nonetheless, there were some crusading moderates, likethe journalist David Wood, who broke the story aboutSteve Biko’s execution (discussed more later), who occa-sionally dented apartheid’s armor. In all likelihood, theyhad the greatest impact internationally as people of goodfaith who demonstrated to opinion leaders in Britain andthe United States that apartheid was unacceptable andthat there was a nonrevolutionary alternative to it.

Second were the churches. As in the American Southduring segregation, one of the few jobs an educatedblack could aspire to was the clergy. And because the Anglican (Episcopalian in the United States) and some ofthe Calvinist churches were part of worldwide denomi-nations, their African ministers gained a degree of inter-national exposure denied other blacks.

Two names stand out here. The coloured, Dutch-reformed Alan Boeszak was a major force attacking the

immorality of apartheid until his own involvement in anaffair forced him to resign from the clergy and destroyedhis political credibility. More important to this day isDesmond Tutu, who was named Anglican archbishop forSouth Africa in 1989 and who won the 1984 Nobel PeacePrize. The very naming of a black to head the AnglicanChurch was a political act. In addition, Tutu is a remark-ably charismatic man who would have been seen as oneof the world’s great leaders if he were not part of the samemovement as Mandela. Even more than Boeszak, Tutucould appeal not only to Africans inside the country butto liberals at home and abroad.

Third was the loosely organized and largely sponta-neous Black Consciousness movement, which probablydid the most to build opposition in the African commu-nity in South Africa itself. It burst on the scene in 1978,largely the inspiration of Steve Biko (1952 –77). Biko haddropped out of medical school in the late 1960s to formthe Black Consciousness movement, which sought to in-spire a sense of identity, pride, and power among youngAfricans. He was part of a generation of students edu-cated at segregated universities who were unwilling to putup with apartheid and who sought to organize amongyounger, less-educated people in the townships. Hissupporters claim that he was largely responsible for theuprising that swept Soweto in 1976. The next year, he wasarrested, tortured, and killed, which gave the oppositionyet another martyr and more first-hand evidence of thestate’s repression and corruption. It also marked the firsttime that many average Africans came both to doubt thepossibility of a gradual, liberal solution and to realizethat they could have an impact, albeit from outside thesystem.

To see the impact the likes of Biko had, consider the

14 Chapter 20 South Africa

6 Mark Mathabane, Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’sComing of Age in Apartheid South Africa (New York: Plume,1986), 36.

following passage from Mark Mathabane’s autobiogra-phy. In it he describes a conversation with his motherabout his first real awareness of the pass system, whichcame a few weeks after his father had been arrested be-cause his book wasn’t in order.

When will Papa be back?I don’t know. He may be gone for a long,

long time.Why does he get arrested so much?Because his pass is not in order.Why doesn’t he get it fixed?He can’t.Why?You’re too young to know.What’s a pass, Mama?It’s an important book that we black people

must have in order always, and carry with us at alltimes.

I don’t have a pass.You’ll get one when you turn sixteen.Will they take me away, too, Mama? Like they

do Papa?Hush. You’re asking too many questions for

your own good.6

Prior to the mid-1970s, a boy like Mathabane wouldprobably have accepted his family’s predicament as anunavoidable fact of life. For the young urban blacks of hisday, however, obeying the pass laws—along with beingforced to learn Afrikaans, enduring wretched living con-ditions, and the like—were no long acceptable, and theylashed out whenever and however they could.

Black Consciousness lost in the short run, becausethe state was able to put the movement down and resistits demands. It did, however, have a dual impact thatwould make a difference a decade or so later. First, itdemonstrated that opposition was widespread, if poorlyorganized. Second, it left the ANC as the only organiza-tion with legitimacy and a mass base for the oppositionto build on.

In retrospect, the most important groups were theANC and the organizations affiliated with it. As we sawearlier, the ANC abandoned its total commitment tononviolence after it was banned in the aftermath of theSharpeville Massacre. From then on, it officially waged aguerrilla war against the apartheid state. In fact, the ANCwas not much of a fighting force. However, the combina-tion of its underground organization at home, the ap-peals made by its leaders in exile, and the example set by

Mandela and others who were imprisoned for as long asa quarter-century went a long way toward strengtheningopposition to apartheid at home and abroad.

Although it was an illegal organization, the ANC wasstrong enough to have a significant impact in South Af-rica by the 1980s, largely because it was able to operatethrough two other, legal organizations. In 1983 it helpedform the United Democratic Front (UDF), a coalitionthat eventually numbered nearly six hundred organiza-tions and that tried to build a quasi-legal opposition. Al-though the UDF was not able to coordinate and controleverything at the grassroots level, the fact that it wasdominated by the ANC increased support for the bannedand exiled party. Less visible but probably even more im-portant were the legal trade unions, especially the Con-gress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), whichis still affiliated with the ANC and which effectively orga-nized industrial workers after multiracial unions were le-galized in 1985.

Finally, the apartheid state faced growing pressurefrom abroad from both governments and political activ-ists. As soon as the National Party took office, the inter-national antiapartheid movement was launched underthe leadership of an English clergyman, Father TrevorHuddleston, who had worked in South Africa for manyyears. In the 1970s and 1980s, South Africa faced a bar-rage of criticism that led to a series of actions, the impactof which has never fully been measured.

For instance, many American universities divestedthemselves of stock in companies that did business inSouth Africa and that did not oppose apartheid. This ledto the creation of a set of principles by the late ReverendLeon Sullivan that many companies voluntarily adoptedand that gave rise to the broader investor responsibilitymovement that still exists today.

Similarly, most international athletic authorities im-posed boycotts on this sports-crazy country. Indeed,there are some pundits who (half-seriously) argue thatthe inability to see their beloved Springboks play rugbyor cricket did the most to convince the Afrikaners toabandon apartheid.

Although the United Nations imposed an arms em-bargo in 1977, governments were slower to jump on theantiapartheid bandwagon. A number of countries didimpose economic sanctions. However, both the UnitedStates under Ronald Reagan and Great Britain underMargaret Thatcher were by no means among the world’sleaders.

By the same token, the end of the cold war put sig-nificant pressure on the ANC. The Soviet Union had pro-vided it with much of its funding and some of its militarytraining. When this source of support dried up, it put the

Chapter 20 South Africa 15

From all the discussion of protest and repression in thischapter so far, it is tempting to conclude that South

Africa saw a lot of political conflict both during and afterapartheid. This is actually not the case.

In fact, the state was powerful enough to keep the lidon most protests until the Soweto uprising in 1976. Eventhe ANC admits that its attempts to wage a guerrilla warwere largely unsuccessful. There was much more protestbetween the mid-1970s and early 1990s than in other periods in South African history, but less than was found in many other third world countries, especially as far as violent action pitting the state against its opponents wasconcerned.

The same is true today, though for different reasons.Groups on both the far left and far right, which are op-posed to the ANC and multiracial democracy, have littlepopular support. Instead, unlike in most other third worldcountries, there is a broad-based consensus that the newregime should be supported—at least for now.

Conflict in South AfricaANC (and other organizations like the Palestinian Lib-eration Organization) in a financial bind. Further, theevents of the late 1980s and early 1990s were a crushingemotional blow to the South African Communist Partythat led many of its leaders to question their own com-mitment to revolution. In particular, its chair, Joe Slovo,made a remarkable turnaround and became one of theANC’s most avid advocates of negotiation in the early1990s and of reconciliation with the whites during thefirst years of the Mandela presidency before Slovo’s un-timely death in 1995.

It’s important to note that the resistance was notwholly driven by the ANC’s or the Black Consciousnessmovement’s goals, and it used tactics those of us who livein more open societies would hardly find normal and ac-ceptable. In fact, there was a great deal of random vio-lence, including “necklacings” (immobilizing people byputting large tires around them, dousing them in gaso-line, and burning them alive) of young Africans thoughtto be traitors to the cause. ANC factions—includingWinnie Madikizela-Mandela’s (Nelson Mandela’s for-mer wife) “football club”— engaged in these and othersuch activities, many of which were little more than anopportunity to take vengeance on personal rivals ormembers of other ethnic groups. Nonetheless, on bal-ance, there was surprisingly little violence from the re-gime’s opponents, and it is not clear how great a role itplayed in forcing the regime to its knees.

The Way It HappenedThe crackdown following the Sharpeville Massacre tooka heavy toll on the resistance. The ANC, in particular, wasin tough shape. Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, andmost of its other key leaders were in prison on the infa-mous Robben Island. Oliver Tambo, Joe Slovo, and theother leaders who had managed to escape ran the armedstruggle from bases in exile. The armed uprising beganwith an act of sabotage in December 1961 during the an-nual commemoration of the Battle of Blood River. TheANC put sharp limits on Umkhonto we Sizwe, ruling out,for instance, attacks on white civilians. The uprising alsowas not very effective, because virtually every fightersent into the country was caught or killed within forty-eight hours.

The 1970s, however, saw a marked increase in anti-system activity. In part inspired by the U.S. civil rightsand black power movements, Steve Biko and his genera-tion organized first university student unions and thenthe broader Black Consciousness movement. Biko ar-gued that blacks had to organize themselves, startingwith, as he put it, “the realization that the most potent

weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of theoppressed.”

In so doing, they set off cycle after cycle of pro-tests and crackdowns that continued until apartheid col-lapsed. At each stage through the 1980s, the governmentwas able to defeat the protesters in the short run. In thelonger term, however, the repression and the obviousjustice of calls for multiracial democracy served only todeepen opposition at home and abroad.

Surprisingly in retrospect, the government initiallyallowed groups affiliated with the Black Conscious-ness movement to organize openly and legally. Al-though Biko himself was banned in 1973, there werelarge, public protests, such as the one in 1974 in supportof neighboring Mozambique, which had just thrown outits Portuguese colonial rulers. As usual, the leaders werearrested.

The critical turning point on this front came with theuprising in Soweto, which began on 16 June 1976. Highschool students were protesting a new rule that madeAfrikaans the language of instruction in black schools.The police fired on the crowd, killing (by official fig-ures, which are certainly underestimates) twenty-threepeople. More protests broke out around the country inwhich (again, by official figures) nearly six hundred moredied. (See table 20.5.)

At this point, the movement grew in two directions,both of which worked to the ANC’s advantage. First,

16 Chapter 20 South Africa

� TABLE 20.5 Key Events during and after the Transition to Democracy

DATE EVENT

1985 Initial discussions between ANC and government1989 De Klerk replaces Botha1990 Mandela released; ANC ban lifted1992 Whites-only referendum endorses negotiations1994 First elections; Mandela president1996 Growth, Employment, and Rehabilitation Act1998 Truth and Reconciliation Commission report1999 Mbeki president

WE GENERALLY THINK of globalization in terms of how the spread of global markets and cultures has re-inforced the parallel trend toward liberalization.

As we will see in the section on public policy, theseforces are at work in the new South Africa as well. How-ever, it makes more sense to stress how global opposi-tion to apartheid helped bring down the regime in theearly 1990s.

No one knows how to measure the impact of sanc-tions and embargoes. Similarly, no one in the NationalParty elite has been willing to say how much interna-tional pressure contributed to the party’s decision tocapitulate. Nonetheless, as Archbishop Tutu pointedlyasked, if sanctions weren’t having a major impact, whydid the elite oppose them so vociferously?

In short, international pressure had a much moresignificant effect on the National Party government than it has had on the Baath regime in Iraq. This maysay less about the sanctions (which are far more severeand more fully enforced in the Iraqi case) than it doesabout the two regimes. Here, we will see that the Afrika-ners were not willing to jeopardize their economic andcultural gains to retain apartheid and minority rule. Aswe saw in Chapter 14, however, Saddam Hussein andhis colleagues were willing to risk everything to con-tinue ruling in their own unique and repressive style.

Globalization and South Africa

many of the protesters fled the country to join the ANCand the armed struggle. Second, a decade-long “battlefor the townships” began in which blacks stopped payingrent for public housing, attending school, and patroniz-ing white businesses in what came to be known as the“ungovernability campaign.” As noted earlier, in 1983many of the protesters formed the UDF, which came tobe dominated by ANC activists. The state continued tocounterattack, detaining forty thousand people and kill-ing four thousand more from 1979 on.

Meanwhile, pressure from abroad continued tomount. The United Nations suspended South Africa’smembership in the General Assembly in 1974, imposed aglobal arms embargo in 1977, and declared apartheid acrime against humanity in 1984. Demands for corporatedisinvestment and sanctions imposed by individual Eu-ropean and American governments continued to grow.By the early 1980s more than two hundred American cor-porations had pulled out of the country. Although manycritics of apartheid complained that corporations andgovernments did not do enough soon enough, ChaseManhattan Bank led other banks in refusing to extendSouth Africa $24 billion in short-term loans in 1985. Thenext year, the U.S. government passed the Comprehen-sive Anti-Apartheid Act, which, among other things, out-lawed further U.S. investment in South Africa. The EUand most individual European countries followed suit.

Meanwhile, the international reputation of Mandelaand the ANC continued to grow. The regime and its apol-ogists abroad tried to portray the ANC as communistsand terrorists, but few people took those claims as seri-ously as the human rights violations of the governmentitself. Further, the ANC, Tutu, and others were able toconvince more and more people that their cause wasjust, that violence was the only option open to them, andthat they were only attacking the South African state, notthe white population as a whole.

In a bind, the government responded with politicalcarrots and sticks. The 1983– 84 constitutional changeswere designed (but failed) to undercut some of the ANC’s

support, as were later reforms that ended the pass lawsand other “petty apartheid” policies.

The reforms failed to resonate. Some 77 percent ofthe eligible coloureds and 80 percent of the Asians, forexample, boycotted the elections in which members of“their” houses of parliament were elected. Yet moreprotests broke out.

However, the infamous Bureau of State Security alsostepped up the repression, arresting about twenty-fivethousand blacks and killing another two thousand in thelate 1980s alone. It also declared a series of states ofemergency as the security situation continued to deteri-orate. If anything, the National Party government grewmore intolerant and repressive as it became clear thatthe reform efforts were not having the intended effect.

NegotiationsThough no one outside of the leadership of the ANC andthe government knew it at the time, secret negotiationsbegan in 1985. While Mandela was recuperating from

Chapter 20 South Africa 17

minor surgery, he began meeting with the attorney gen-eral. The next year, he was allowed to meet with former(and now, again) Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo,who was heading a visiting delegation from the BritishCommonwealth of Nations.

Gradually, ties between Mandela and his jailers im-proved. One day he was taken for a drive by a warder,who went into a store to buy Mandela a soda and left thekeys in the ignition. Mandela did not even try to escape.His relationship with the men assigned to guard him be-came so close that their chief, James Gregory, actuallyvoted for the ANC in 1994 and was an invited guest at theinauguration.

Meanwhile, the ANC and interlocutors for the gov-ernment began holding informal “track two” meetingsoutside the country. Little formal progress was made, butthe participants on both sides got to know each otherand saw that they actually had a lot in common person-ally, if not politically.

Things had progressed enough by 1989 to put twoimportant items on the agenda. First, Mandela insistedon a meeting with President Botha. Second, Botha con-sidered releasing Mandela, though he refused to do sounless the ANC renounced violence. The meeting did oc-cur, but it accomplished nothing, and Botha and Man-dela refused to budge on the conditions surrounding therelease of the world’s most famous prisoner.

As is so often the case in political life, a historical ac-cident made a huge difference. In January 1989 the in-creasingly intransigent Botha suffered a stroke. Later inthe year, his party convinced him to step down, and hewas replaced by F. W. de Klerk.

De Klerk (1936 –) was not a liberal who wanted togive up Afrikaner power. His uncle had been prime min-ister, and his father was one of the architects of apartheidin the 1950s. De Klerk, himself, rose through the NationalParty ranks, usually by taking positions on its right wing.He came to power ready to make reforms that would di-lute apartheid. He was not, however, prepared to give upAfrikaner control of the state.

Nonetheless, as early as 1986, a number of Afrikanerclergymen began meeting with ANC leaders at theirbases in Angola. The head of the Broederbond circulateda document that called for a negotiated settlement (butnot one person/one vote) as the only approach thatcould ensure the survival of Afrikaner culture. Officials,including some in the security services, then began se-cret, informal, and unusually unauthorized discussionswith the ANC, often brokered by leaders of the biggestSouth African business (the Anglo-American Corpora-tion) and nongovernmental organizations such as theFord Foundation. Some of the most important meetings

took place under the supervision of the ConsolidatedGoldfields Company at its Mells Park country home inEngland, where, ironically, the ANC’s Thabo Mbeki andhis white interlocutor ended their work by watchingMandela’s release from prison on television.

Although the details are still not completely known,this wing of the securocrats apparently convinced deKlerk that a negotiated settlement with some sort ofpower sharing was the only way out. Indeed, one of themost important of them, Niel Barnard, conducted manyof the secret talks with Mandela and played the leadingrole in convincing de Klerk.

Meanwhile, Mandela and the ANC had reached sim-ilar conclusions. In particular, they realized that therecould not be a resolution unless they found a way for theAfrikaners to retain their culture and, even more impor-tantly, their dignity.

Thus, in a series of forty-seven meetings in which henormally spoke Afrikaans, Mandela kept stressing theneed to share power and the fact that blacks and whiteshad one thing in common—they were all Africans. Mean-while, in 1986 the government had moved Mandela off ofRobben Island and into a small, comfortable home bothto make negotiations easier and to send Mandela a signalthat he was being taken seriously. Mandela so appreci-ated his time there that he had a replica of the house builtin his hometown, which was his first retirement home.

Finally, an agreement was reached that led to deKlerk’s shocking speech to the National Assembly in1990. Mandela was released on 11 February. Later thatday, he spoke to a crowd estimated at over one hundredthousand, many of whom had never even seen a pictureof a man who had not been mentioned in the South Afri-can media since his imprisonment twenty-seven yearsearlier.

Formal negotiations began soon afterward but didnot go well. The ANC and the government were polesapart, and, at first, Mandela and de Klerk did not getalong well personally.

Gradually, things began to improve. The Afrikanerseven discovered that they liked the communist Joe Slovo,who seemed more like a grandfather than a guerrilla.Sometimes they found common ground on importantpolitical issues, and other times on seemingly more mun-dane matters, such as everyone’s desire to see South Af-rican sports teams again competing on the internationallevel.

In the end, it took three years for the Conference ona Democratic South Africa (CODESA) to reach an agree-ment. In between, there were walkouts, continued re-pression, and an upsurge of violence, including AmyBiehl’s murder. As popular as Mandela and the ANC were,

18 Chapter 20 South Africa

they faced opposition from Mangosuthu Buthelezi andhis Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) (discussed shortly).

At long last, the parties agreed to an interim consti-tution in 1993. It called for elections in which, for the firsttime, all South African adults could vote. While therebyassuring an ANC victory, it also contained provisionsthat guaranteed cabinet posts to all parties that won atleast 20 percent of the vote.

As we will see in more detail shortly, the ANC wonthose elections in a landslide. To no one’s surprise, Man-dela was chosen president, and de Klerk served as hisfirst deputy president.

In 1996 a permanent constitution was adopted thatdid not retain the minority representation clauses. Atthat point, the National Party left the coalition and deKlerk retired.

Critics are quick to point to South Africa’s difficultiessince Mandela came to power. Crime and violence areboth at an all-time high, and economic growth has beenslow. There is evidence as well that the ANC would like toenhance its power, perhaps at the cost of the popularityand rights of its opponents.

South Africa also faces tremendous burdens grow-ing out of three and a half centuries of white rule. As anyAmerican who has seriously thought about the legacy ofslavery has to acknowledge, the kind of discriminationand abuse suffered by Africans in their own country leftemotional scars that cannot be healed with “mere” ma-jority rule. And the scars aren’t just psychological. Whitesearn, on average, twelve times more than blacks. Overallunemployment has averaged about 30 percent, but ittops 40 percent among blacks. The richest 10 percent ofthe population earns over half of the country’s incomeand controls a much higher percentage of its wealth.

This should not keep us from seeing one of the mostremarkable aspects of the transition. Knowing that itcould not risk alienating the white population, the newgovernment decided to take the country in an unusualdirection. Rather than seeking vengeance and the spoilsof majority rule, it sought reconciliation, nation building,and consensus.

The ANC did benefit from the fact that apartheidand its associated policies had left the country well off byAfrican standards. It had the twenty-seventh largest pop-ulation in the world and, by conventional accountingmethods, was also the twenty-seventh richest country. Itwas far more industrialized than any other African coun-try. Manufacturing accounted for a quarter of its GNP.South Africa also sat atop tremendous mineral resources,including 40 percent of the world’s known gold and morethan half of its diamonds, manganese, and chromium.

In short, on balance, South Africa’s track record

since 1994 has been almost as remarkable as the negoti-ations that liberated Mandela from prison and broughthim to power. The new regime has broad-based supportand has even integrated many whites from the old re-gime (including the security service) into the new bu-reaucracy. The principle of one person/one vote is moresecurely established than anywhere else in Africa or, forthat matter, most of the rest of the third world.

South Africa also had no trouble making the transi-tion from Mandela to his successor as president, ThaboMbeki. Even though Mbeki lacks Mandela’s charismaand has made a number of controversial statements—most notably, claiming that HIV does not cause AIDS—his government continues to function smoothly and en-joy massive popular support.

Political CultureTwo key lessons stand out from the research done ondemocratic political culture. First, a tolerant culture witha strong civil society helps sustain democracy. Second,political cultures change slowly.

What South Africa shows us is that while the firstconclusion may be correct, the second need not be. Thedramatic shifts in barely more than a decade of democ-racy show that the core values of most people in a coun-try can indeed change very quickly and that a govern-ment can help make that happen.

There have been no systematic studies of South Afri-can political culture. However, the available impression-istic evidence plus a recent poll by the South African Ba-rometer project do suggest that the new government isdoing what it can to create a participant and tolerant cul-ture as quickly as possible.

South Africa does not seem to suffer from one of thecultural problems that exists in many other third worldcountries—a lack of a national identity. Indeed, one ofthe reasons it was so hard to find the common groundthat allowed the various communities to do away withapartheid was that each saw itself as patriotic South Afri-cans. Unfortunately, each had a very different concep-tion of what that meant.

The new government has gone out of its way to be as inclusive as possible. The constitution, for example,guarantees people the right to an education in their ownlanguage. More importantly, the post-apartheid govern-ment allowed Afrikaner civil servants and even most se-curity officers to keep their jobs until they retire or resignvoluntarily.

The government has also tried to promote a sense of inclusiveness through symbolic measures that mayprove no less reassuring. Thus, in 1995, Mandela resisted

Chapter 20 South Africa 19

efforts on the part of many ANC activists to ban rugby, asport played almost exclusively by Afrikaners and seen asa bastion of their culture and a symbol of their racism.Instead of acceding to their demands, Mandela went tothe 1995 World Cup final match wearing a copy of theuniform shirt of captain François Pienaar and warmlygreeted the Afrikaner when handing him the winners’trophy. Since then, various sports authorities have mademajor progress in integrating national teams, bringingblacks into the rugby squad (and firing the coach whenhe resisted doing so) and whites into the previously al-most all-black soccer team. Afrikaners I know speak withdelight about taking blacks they have met to rugby gamesand of their own newfound love for soccer once thosevisits were reciprocated. One of the consequences of allthis was FIFA’s awarding of the 2010 World Cup to SouthAfrica, the first time the global sports extravaganza willbe held in Africa.

It isn’t just the government. Even prior to 1990, for-eign governments and private foundations had donatedhundreds of millions of dollars to fund nongovernmentalorganizations trying to end apartheid and build bridgesbetween the communities. Typical of these is the Na-tional Business Initiative (NBI). The NBI was foundedand is still led by Theuns Eloff, a Dutch Reformed Churchminister who had grown disillusioned with apartheid inthe 1980s and began meeting secretly with ANC officialsoutside the country. When, following Mandela’s release,the negotiations bogged down and township violence es-calated, Eloff and his colleagues realized they had to de-velop ways of finding common ground for people fromall racial and ethnic groups. Eloff argued that only ifpeople could find ways to cooperate with rather thanshoot at each other would South Africa make it throughthe transition. No one has done research on how much of an impact organizations like NBI have had. Certainly,none of them were big enough to move the country to-ward a consensus on their own. However, it is also clearthat each helped create a larger “space” in which blacksand whites can interact with each other peacefully andcomfortably. Intriguingly, in 2001, this man who was oncerejected by his own parishioners was named president ofPotcherstroom University for Christian Higher Educa-tion, the most prestigious Dutch Reformed seminary.

The one systematic poll conducted by Africa Barom-eter for the Institute for Democracy in South Africa ech-oes many of these anecdotes and also provides us withsome concerns for the future. The survey reveals a coun-try in which blacks and whites live, think, and vote differ-ently. But it also reveals a society in which all groups aremore optimistic than one might otherwise expect. Whitesare a bit more supportive of core civil liberties including

free speech and a free press, but a majority of both com-munities support both. Both groups cited civil libertiesand freedoms as the most important characteristic of de-mocracy in their opinion. Majorities in both groups en-dorsed multiparty democracy and rejected anything likemilitary rule, although the support was slightly higheramong whites than blacks. Only 12 percent of whites(but, oddly, 11 percent of blacks) wanted to go back tothe apartheid regime. Perhaps most telling of all, 73 per-cent of blacks and 63 percent of whites were convincedthat South Africa would remain a democracy.

To be sure, race and ethnicity remain deeply divisiveissues in South Africa and will be for decades to come.This is easiest to see in the crime and violence that haswracked the country since the transition to democracy.Violent crime has always been a serious problem in thetownships, where the murder rate is probably ten timesthat in the United States.

More important for our purposes is the violencecentered on the “hostels,” where men separated fromtheir families live in the townships. Clashes betweensupporters of the ANC and the IFP resulted in the deathsof well over ten thousand people in the first half of the1990s. This violence reflects the frustrations of a genera-tion that seems destined to live its life in poverty as muchas the ideological differences that have long separatedthe two movements.

On balance, however, no country has made as seri-ous an attempt to bring former adversaries together incooperative and constructive ways. There is no better ev-idence of this than the fact that South Africans are nowcalled on to help calm ethnic tensions in such farawayplaces as the Democratic Republic of the Congo andNorthern Ireland.

If nothing else, South Africa has been able to avoidthe civil wars—almost all of which were rooted in issuesof religion, ethnicity, and/or race—that have engulfedmuch of the third world. If anything, South Africa had a“worse” historical track record than most of those coun-tries. Yet, somehow, it has managed to avoid the carnagethat has devastated countries like Rwanda, where themajority Hutu systematically slaughtered at least 10 per-cent of the country’s population, including virtually allthe minority Tutsi, in a three-month period in 1994.

Although Mandela and his colleagues get much ofthe credit, it is important not to understate the roleplayed by the National Party and the white community ingeneral. Affluent whites could have opposed the regimeor taken their money and fled. Instead, almost all of themhave chosen to stay and to give the new regime at leasttheir grudging support. There are fringe elements in theAfrikaner population that want to restore apartheid and,

20 Chapter 20 South Africa

� Table 20.6 Elections in the New South Africa: Major Parties Only

PARTY 1994 1999 2004

ANC 62.6 66.4 69.7Inkhata 10.5 8.6 7.0NNP 20.4 6.9 1.7Democratic Alliance — — 12.4

failing that, to get an independent homeland for them-selves. However, such groups have minimal influence,and unless the bottom falls out of the economy or thecrime and violence escalate out of control, the regimeseems likely to keep that support.

Political ParticipationThe key to the “input” side of South African politics liesin the way people participate. During the new state’s firsttwelve years, the emphasis was on the electoral processeven though it had held only three national elections atthe time of this writing.

In most democracies, political parties contest elec-tions in large part on the basis of their positions on the“big issues” confronting the country. This was true ofSouth Africa as well a decade ago when the NationalParty faced white opposition from its left and right thatcriticized it for its position on apartheid. This was evenmore the case for the extraparliamentary opposition forwhich ending apartheid was the key goal.

In the early 2000s the big ideological issues are gone.With the exception of some truly minor parties, everyoneaccepts the fact that South Africa is a multiracial democ-racy with a mixed, but basically capitalist, economy.

Instead, though few admit it publicly, the real debateis over the role of the ANC. For the moment, at least, theANC is the world’s most dominant party in an open polit-ical system. It won 63 percent of the vote in 1994, 66 per-cent five years later, and almost 70 percent of the vote in2004, which is one of the most successful track records ofany party in the democratic world. (See table 20.6.)

The ANC

The ANC (www.anc.org.za) did not begin as a “normal”political party. Like its Indian namesake, its original pur-pose was to end an unjust system of government. Againlike the Indian Congress, it was denied the right to pur-sue that goal at the ballot box.

As we saw in Chapter 12, India’s Congress begancontesting elections in the 1930s and gained valuable ex-perience running local governments prior to indepen-dence. However, unlike the Indian Congress, the ANC

never had that opportunity until literally days before itcame to power.

The ANC, by contrast, operated underground and inexile until 1990. In less than four years, it turned itselffrom a party of armed resistance into one that could runthe new South Africa’s government. In the process, itchanged itself dramatically.

Two of those changes stand out.First, it truly became an electorally driven party. This

is not as remarkable as it might seem at first glance.Though officially banned, the ANC built substantial masssupport during the 1980s largely through its work in thetrade unions and the United Democratic Front (UDF).And, of course, the years of struggle and the symbol of re-sistance provided by Mandela and his fellow prisonerswere a tremendous asset.

Second, the party radically altered its ideology. TheANC committed itself to socialism in the 1950s andforged a long-term alliance with the Communist Party,which remains a part of the ANC to this day. Although ittook great pains to deny government charges that it wasitself communist, the ANC never stepped back from itsbasic, and radical, commitment to a more egalitarian so-ciety—until coming to power, that is.

In 1994 the ANC put economic change at the heart ofits campaign, though it should be pointed out that it wonfor the other reasons mentioned. Since then, however,given the limited funds available and its commitmentnot to overturn white privilege, the ANC has made aneconomic U-turn, as we will see in more detail.

The ANC also entered the democratic era with somevery powerful assets. First and foremost, it was the onlyparty with a track record as a multiracial organization. Italso boasted Mandela, Slovo, and other leaders whosenames, at least, had been known to South Africans formore than a generation. And because of its undergroundorganization and role in the UDF and the unions, it hada large, if not always disciplined, organization.

The ANC turned those assets into a landslide victoryin 1994, winning almost 63 percent of the vote and 252 of the 400 seats under South Africa’s version of propor-tional representation. Despite the economic difficultiesthe country encountered during the decade and the factthat Mandela retired, the ANC actually increased its sup-port slightly in 1999. And it did so again in 2004 when itsurpassed the two-thirds of the vote (and seats) neededto amend the Constitution, something it has not chosento do since that election.

The ANC has its problems. The unions, communists,and others on the left are not happy with its acceptanceof capitalism. Mbeki has managed to alienate manymembers of the burgeoning black elite in the private sec-

Chapter 20 South Africa 21

Nelson Mandela was born in 1918. His father was achief in the Thembu tribe, but he died when Mandela

was quite young, which meant Mandela was raised by evenhigher-status relatives.

He studied at the all-black Fort Hare University butwas expelled in 1940 for participating in demonstrations.He finished his B.A. by correspondence and earned a lawdegree in 1942. He was one of the first blacks to practicelaw in South Africa.

He also joined the ANC and in 1944 helped form itsYouth League, which moved the organization leftward. In 1952 he was elected one of its four deputy presidents.

Mandela was first arrested for treason in 1956 but

was acquitted five years later. In 1964 he would not be as lucky. Sentenced to life in prison for treason, he spenttwenty-seven years in custody, the first eighteen on the infamous Robben Island.

During the negotiations with the apartheid govern-ment and later as president, Mandela succeeded in creatinga democratic South Africa. He was able to combine whatcan only be described as remarkable personal charm witha powerful commitment to equality and an unbending ne-gotiating style to become arguably the most respected world leader of his generation (www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1993/mandela-bio.html).

N E L S O N M A N D E L A

tor. At the same time, however, there are no signs thatdissidents are considering splitting off from the ANC, be-cause that would consign them to the political margins.

The one concern facing the ANC is what it will do if,as expected, Mbeki does not run for a third term. Manycritics argue that the ANC government bases its supporton its track record for defeating apartheid, rather than itsaccomplishments in office. At some point after fifteenyears in power, such claims may affect public opinion.

More importantly, Mbeki’s heir apparent, formerVice President Jacob Zuma was indicted on corruptioncharges in June 2005. If Zuma is not cleared and there-fore cannot run for the presidency, the ANC might havetrouble finding a candidate popular enough to lead theparty to as large a victory in 2009.

Still, there seems to be little chance that the ANC willbe displaced as the dominant political party in South Af-rica for decades to come.

The Inkatha Freedom Party

Among blacks, the most serious opposition to the ANC comes from the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) (www.ifp.org.za). It was formed by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi(1928–) in KwaZulu, one of the tribal homelands createdby the apartheid government. Although the ANC leader-ship wanted to boycott all those organizations, Mandelaand Oliver Tambo had been close to Buthelezi duringtheir student days and understood that he was highlypopular in that part of the country. They therefore ap-proved the creation of the party.

In retrospect, it was not a very wise decision, be-cause the IFP and Buthelezi have been thorns in theANC’s side ever since. In the 1980s, Buthelezi began

informally cooperating with the authorities (it is nowknown that the IFP was partially funded by the securityservices) and was seen by conservatives abroad as amoderate alternative to the ANC.

Buthelezi also has a monstrous ego and resents nothaving been a major player in the negotiations that led tothe 1994 transition. Indeed, he frequently walked out ofthe discussions and only agreed to have the IFP partici-pate in the 1994 elections at the eleventh hour. Nonethe-less, because of the power-sharing provisions for the firstgovernment, Buthelezi became minister for home af-fairs, a post he held until 2004.

Far more important than any positions the IFP takesis the fact that it is a regional and increasingly ethnicallydefined party. It wins next to no support outside of thestate of KwaZulu Natal other than in Zulu enclaves in Jo-hannesburg and other metropolitan areas. And althoughit originally won some white and Asian support in thestate (there are very few coloureds in the eastern half ofthe country), its electorate now seems almost exclusivelyZulu and amounts to only about 5 percent of the totalblack vote.

On balance, the IFP has mostly been a disruptiveforce. Its supporters were largely responsible for the po-litical violence that afflicted the country during the firsthalf of the 1990s. And its support has steadily declinedfrom almost 11 percent in 1994 to less than half that totala decade later.

The White-Based Opposition

At first, the main opposition to the ANC came, not sur-prisingly, from the National Party, which probablychanged more than any other group in South Africa

22 Chapter 20 South Africa

and perished in the process. To the surprise of many, itdid not become the party of white resistance and didfairly well at first in the coloured community. Still, astable 20.6 shows, it won barely 20 percent of the vote in1994, did not even reach half that total in 1999, and dis-appeared from the scene in the most recent election.

The New National Party (NNP) was indeed in manyways a new party. In 1996 de Klerk resigned both from thegovernment and from his position as head of the Na-tional Party so that the party could move smoothly intoopposition. It has also had to endure the defection of itsheir apparent, Roelf Meyer, who formed a new party thattried to counter the National Party’s inability to attractAfrican voters but who later left active political life.

After those setbacks, the NNP worked hard to re-define itself as a multiracial alternative to the ANC. Itpresented itself as more pragmatic and responsible thanthe government, and it proposed to implement changemore gradually. Ironically for the party that created thestrong state economically as well as politically, the NNPclaimed to want less government involvement in theeconomy and in people’s lives.

Its new leader, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, reacted toits 1999 electoral debacle in ways no one could haveimagined a decade earlier. He merged the NNP with theANC. Not surprisingly, some party stalwarts refused to go along with the merger, but the rump party only won1.7 percent of the vote in 2004.

In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-firstcentury, the leading and predominantly white opposi-tion to the ANC comes from a new coalition/party, theDemocratic Alliance. It has multiple roots, includingboth white progressives who opposed apartheid and dis-sident members of the NNP who left the party when itmerged with the ANC.

It is hard to tell exactly where the alliance stands on most substantive issues (www.dp.org.za) other thanits firm support for human rights and democratic prin-ciples. More important than its stance on social and eco-nomic problems is the fact that it is fast becoming theparty whites are most likely to support. Its leadership isbiracial. But if it is going to become a viable opposition tothe ANC, it must find a way for its electorate to becomemore like its leadership.

The New StateAs we saw in the section on the negotiations, the ANCwon its most important demand—a democracy basedon the votes of all South Africans. It did make conces-sions that granted minority representation in the cabi-net for the first few years. Otherwise, the basic consti-

tutional provisions are quite similar to those in other democracies (www.polity.org.za/govdocs/constitution/saconst.html).

Rights and Freedoms

In part because it is new and in part because of South Africa’s troubled history, the constitution enumeratesmore rights and guarantees than most. For instance,people are guaranteed the right to an education in theirown language, and women have the right to an abortion.Overall, people’s rights (including whites) are most se-curely guaranteed than at any point in South African his-tory. The only even vaguely controversial limits are a banon hate speech and the ANC’s acceptance of employers’right to lock out workers.

President and Parliament

The constitution calls for a traditional parliamentary system in which the executive is responsible to the lower house of a bicameral parliament (www.parliament.gov.za). Thus, the key to South African politics is the 400-member National Assembly. Its members are electedunder a complicated system of proportional represen-tation in which a party must get slightly over 2 percent of the vote either nationally or in one of the nine prov-inces to gain seats. In 2004, only three parties passed thatthreshold nationally. Nine others won at least 2 per-cent of the vote in at least one province and thus quali-fied, but these parties won only forty-three seats in to-tal and are not a factor in the National Assembly’s dailyproceedings.

The National Assembly elects the president, who isreally the equivalent of the prime minister in most par-liamentary systems. In other words, the president ap-points the rest of the cabinet and, more importantly, issubject to votes of confidence that can remove him orher from office. Given the size of the ANC’s majority, it isall but unimaginable that any president will lose a vote ofconfidence in the foreseeable future.

The National Assembly must pass all legislation, andit initiates all bills dealing with money. It can also amendthe constitution with a two-thirds vote. Although theANC surpassed the two-thirds threshold in 2004, it hasshown no sign of wanting to change the constitution andcreate a de facto one-party state as many critics feared.

The National Council of Provinces is indirectlyelected by the nine provincial legislatures. It has ninetymembers (ten from each province) who also serve five-year terms. Like most upper houses, it has limited budg-etary powers and no control over the executive. Its pri-mary responsibilities revolve around the protection ofminority cultural interests. The president chooses up to

Chapter 20 South Africa 23

twenty-seven members of a cabinet and a deputy presi-dent. Under the interim constitution, all parties that wonat least 20 percent of the vote had to be included in thecabinet, which had two deputy presidents (initially deKlerk and Mbeki). Those provisions for minority repre-sentation disappeared when the permanent constitutionwent into effect in early 1997 and the National Party re-signed from the government. There is also now only asingle deputy president.

The Rest of the State

The nine provinces were also granted considerable au-tonomy, especially over education and cultural affairs.More important in the long run, perhaps, is the fact thatthe ANC won control in only seven of them in the 1994elections (losing KwaZulu Natal to the IFP and the West-ern Cape to the National Party), which means that cred-ible opposition to the ANC could be built on the pro-vincial level. However, by 2004, the ANC had won controlof those two states making the creation of a regionallybased opposition as difficult as a national one.

For the first time, South Africa also has an indepen-dent judiciary. Judges at all levels are appointed by thenonpartisan Judicial Services Bureau. Like many coun-tries, South Africa’s judiciary has two wings. The Appel-late Division of the Supreme Court deals with appeals of nonconstitutional matters, which are referred to theConstitutional Court. It has ten judges. Six are appointedby the president on the basis of recommendations by the Judicial Services Bureau; the other four come fromthe Supreme Court and are chosen by the president and the chief justice. It is too early to tell how effectivethe courts will be, but they certainly are more indepen-dent than their apartheid-era predecessors. To cite butone prominent example, the courts forced the govern-ment to revise the draft 1996 constitution to, amongother things, make it harder to revise when civil libertieswere at stake.

The most surprising, and perhaps most encourag-ing, trend for the long term is the ANC’s decision not topurge the bureaucracy. It would have been understand-able if the new government had gotten rid of everyonewho helped make and implement apartheid public pol-icy. Instead, reflecting their desire for reconciliation, theANC decided to retain most incumbent civil servants.Critics have accused the ANC of filling new state posi-tions with their own members. In fact, one cannot helpbut be struck by the other side of the coin—the numberof Afrikaners who remain in positions of responsibility.This is true even in such sensitive areas as law enforce-ment and education, where only people who committedthe worst offenses have been fired.

Toward a One-Party State?

Critics are also worried that South Africa will turn into asingle-party state, much like other nations in Africa. Thisis especially true of those analysts who stress the ANC’sown authoritarian elements, not to mention its links withthe Communist Party.

There is also widespread concern about the party’sorganization and its impact on the day-to-day function-ing of the government. Although we cannot provide pre-cise details, there is rampant corruption in most govern-ment agencies, including education, where standardshave fallen since 1994. Also, many blacks who occupymiddle-level and even high-level positions are seen asgrossly incompetent, lacking the skills and intellectualbackground needed to do their jobs effectively. It couldnot be otherwise in a country that denied blacks morethan the most rudimentary education until a decade ago.

However, there are equally compelling reasons tobelieve that the ANC will not abuse its power. Indeed,virtually everything in its record since the negotiationsbegan in the late 1980s suggests that it is an unusual po-litical movement, one that is truly committed to democ-racy and reconciliation. For example, it willingly agreed

Thabo Mbeki became the second president of dem-ocratic South Africa following the 1999 election

(www.info.gov.za/leaders/president /index.htm).Mbeki was born in 1942. His father was an active

communist who was arrested with and spent time in prison with Mandela. Mbeki escaped from South Africa in 1962 and moved to the United Kingdom. The ANC paidfor him to study economics at the University of Sussex.

As a young man, he was quite leftist, having studied at the Lenin School in Moscow and served on the SACP politburo.

In office, he has been more authoritarian than Man-dela was and has spoken less about the need for reconcili-ation. However, he has not wavered from the ANC’s deci-sion to sustain its democracy and move toward a moreopen economy.

T H A B O M B E K I

24 Chapter 20 South Africa

to proportional representation that would grant smallerparties a voice in the National Assembly even though the old first-past-the-post system would have given it amuch larger number of seats. Similarly, it allowed the IFPto take power in KwaZulu Natal in 1994 and 1999 eventhough there was considerable evidence that Buthelezi’sparty won only through fraud and intimidation.

Public PolicyMandela’s government came to power amid great ex-pectations, but it also had to contend with even greaterpressures. It faced a tremendous psychological chal-lenge in bringing together a society that had been di-vided and riddled with hatred for so long. Materially, ithad to deal with the massive economic gap betweenblacks and whites at a time when the economy had beenshrinking for at least a decade, largely as a result of inter-national sanctions and disinvestment.

Therefore, it makes sense to focus here on the twopolicy areas in which the new government has done themost to meet these challenges. As should be clear fromthe discussion so far in this chapter, we should not ex-pect the government to have been able to meet either ofthem fully in eleven years. Nonetheless, it has takensome important first steps.

Truth and Reconciliation

As we have already seen, the new government did not set out to take revenge on the whites. Instead, it has takenits rhetorical commitment to a multiracial South Africaseriously.

Central to these efforts has been the work of theTruth and Reconciliation Commission. Fifteen othernew regimes around the world have set up truth com-missions to ferret out human rights abuses in the pastand, if possible, to punish the guilty. These commissionsare part of a broader movement for restorative justicethat is causing quite a stir in legal circles these days (www.restorativejustice.org). Traditionally, new states havesought to punish the perpetrators of crimes against thepeople by seeking retribution and even vengeance. In re-storative justice, in contrast, the emphasis is on literallyrestoring the situation of the victims before the crime oc-curred, at least to the degree that this is possible. Evenmore importantly, there is a different overarching goalthat has rarely been found in legal thinking until re-cently—to begin recovering from the social damage thatthe crimes created so that the community can achieveinternal peace.

South Africa sought to go farther than most of thesebodies. To be sure, the commission did all it could to

document the crimes against humanity that occurredbetween the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, when massivehuman rights abuses began, and the transition to de-mocracy thirty-four years later. However, it was a truthand reconciliation commission whose more importantgoal was to use the truth about apartheid as an importantfirst step in healing the wounds it created in South Afri-can society.

Created in June 1995, the commission was chairedby Archbishop Tutu, unquestionably the most power-ful moral voice in the country after Mandela, and some-one who had long been pleading for reconciliation across racial lines (www.info.gov.za/leaders/president/index.htm). Its mandate allowed the Commission togrant amnesty to people whose crimes were political innature, who confessed fully and publicly to the commis-sion, and who expressed remorse for their actions. Theassumption underlying its work, then, was that learn-ing the truth and beginning to build bridges across com-munal lines was far more valuable than prosecutingwrongdoers.

In the three years between its formation and thepublication of its report in late 1998, the commissionheld hearings around the country in which victims andperpetrators alike told their stories, much like the Biehlsdid. The results were mind numbing, because manypeople were hearing systematic accounts of the atroci-ties of apartheid for the first time. They also witnessedthe remarkable spectacle of many people who commit-ted the crimes confessing to them in public before theworld’s television cameras.

When all was said and done, the country proba-bly learned as much as it could have—and could havewanted to—about what happened. Although the secu-rity services destroyed thousands of documents in theearly 1990s, the public still saw abundant evidence of aculture in which the authorities thought it was perfectlyacceptable to torture and kill its opponents. After wadingthrough the evidence of 20,000 witnesses (much of whichis published in the 3,500-page report), the commissionminced no words about apartheid, which it concludedwas a crime against humanity.

The country learned that the cabinet and, almostcertainly, F. W. de Klerk knew of a shadowy “third force”of vigilantes who terrorized blacks on the orders of thesecurity services. P. W. Botha, in particular, was singledout for having fostered a climate in which torture and ex-ecutions were tolerated, if not encouraged. For his part,Botha refused to appear before the commission and cur-rently faces contempt charges, though few believe thatthe former president, now in his eighties, will actually goto jail.

Chapter 20 South Africa 25

The commission not only tried to uncover the old re-gime’s sins, but also conducted hearings into the ANC’sexcesses. Among other things, it was judged to have sum-marily executed suspected state infiltrators and killedmore civilians than security officers in the undergroundstruggle waged by its military wing.

Most notable here was the testimony of the presi-dent’s former wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, whohad long been a controversial figure within the ANC. Onthe one hand, she had stood by her husband during hisyears in prison and had served as a powerful symbol andorganizer for the ANC within South Africa. On the otherhand, she and her entourage were implicated in much ofthe violence in the townships and were accused of mur-dering opponents.

In September 1998, she appeared before the com-mission to answer charges that she was involved in eighteen human rights abuses, including eight murders.Although she ducked the specifics of the charges, she ac-knowledged her involvement and guilt, and like manyothers who appeared before the commission, expressedremorse for her actions. The commission, however, stillfound that the Mandela United Football Club that sheheaded was a “pure vigilante unit.”

When the report was handed over to President Man-dela on 28 October 1998, it was already controversial. At Mbeki’s urging, the ANC had gone to court to try toblock its publication because of the judgments in itabout the resistance, which also includes the IFP and thePan-African Congress.

The report and its primary author were adamant. Al-though the overwhelming majority of the crimes werecommitted by the white authorities, and the ANC and therest of the resistance occupied the moral high ground,the insurgents used “unjust means” toward “just ends”on numerous occasions. As Tutu himself put it, “Atroci-ties were committed on all sides. I have struggled againsta tyranny. I did not do that in order to substitute another.That is who I am.”

By the time the report was released, the committeeon amnesties had dealt with most of the applications be-fore it. To the surprise of many, as of January 2001, it hadgranted amnesty to only 849 of the 7,112 people who ap-plied. It rejected over 5,000 applicants because the ac-tions were not linked to a justifiable and clear politicalcause. Individuals who were not granted amnesty aresubject to criminal prosecution, though as of this writingall the evidence suggests that there will not be many.

The commission’s primary task was to establish thetruth and then use it as a starting point toward reconcili-ation. As Tutu saw it, that first step was a hard one, be-cause it required bringing the horrors of South Africa’s

7 From the text of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’sreport. www.doj.gov.za/trc. Accessed 10 July 2005.

past into the open, but it was also a necessary one. Againin his words from the report,

Reconciliation is not about being cosy; it is notabout pretending that things were other than theywere. Reconciliation based on falsehood, on not fac-ing up to reality, is not reconciliation at all.

We believe we have provided enough of thetruth about our past for there to be a consensusabout it. We should accept that truth has emergedeven though it has initially alienated people fromone another. The truth can be, and often is, divisive.However, it is only on the basis of truth that truereconciliation can take place. True reconciliation is not easy; it is not cheap.7

Finally—and most importantly for the long run—the commission made a series of recommendations forthe far longer “healing” process of reconciliation. Thepresident should call a national summit on reconcilia-tion. Funds should be made available to help compen-sate victims. As the report also acknowledged, this willtake a long time, noting that it took decades to beginclosing the wounds left by the Boer War among whiteSouth Africans.

The Economy

The end of apartheid alone would do nothing about thefact that over half the blacks—but only 2 percent of allwhites—lived in poverty, earning less than the equiva-lent of $300 a month. A third did not have access to safedrinking water; only 20 percent had electricity in theirhomes. To make matters even worse, economic condi-tions deteriorated during the first few years of the 1990sbefore the transition to majority rule.

Given its traditional commitment to socialism, aswell as these appalling conditions, no one was surprisedwhen the new government announced its Reconstruc-tion and Development Program (RDP) in 1994. It placed“the basic needs of the people”—jobs, housing, electric-ity, telecommunications, health care, and a safe environ-ment—ahead of economic growth.

With the lifting of sanctions and the goodwill gener-ated by the transition, the economy turned around,growing by an average of 3 percent per year in 1994 and1995. By 1996, however, the government realized that itsstrategy was not going to work.

If it kept its commitment to not reduce the livingconditions of whites by, say, drastically raising taxes, thecurrent growth rate would not come close to funding the jobs and services it had planned. In fact, the best es-

26 Chapter 20 South Africa

South Africa has one of the highest HIV/AIDS rates in the world. Indeed, its only “competitors” are its regional

neighbors.No one knows exactly what the HIV infection rate is

given the shortcomings of South Africa’s health care systemin general. However, the best estimate is that one-third ofall people under 30 are HIV positive. And given the cost ofmedication even after recent price reductions and the intro-duction of generics, for most of them it is a death sentence.

One can present statistics galore. However, one recentcompilation suggests how tragic the situation is. MostSouth Africans spend more time at funerals than gettingtheir hair cut or enjoying the country’s beloved barbeques.In any given month, twice as many South Africans go to afuneral than to a wedding.

Six hundred South Africans die of an HIV/AIDS relatedillness each day.

HIV/AIDS in South Africa

timate was that at this rate of growth unemploymentwould actually increase by 5 percent by 2000. And oneworst-case scenario held that less than 10 percent of theyoung people entering the workforce each year wouldfind a job.

In short, the government reached a reluctant deci-sion. It had to adopt an economic strategy that would getthe growth rate up to the 6 –7 percent per year range.This, in turn, would require adopting the kind of struc-tural adjustment policy we saw in India and Mexico.(See Chapters 12 and 16.)

This, of course, produced one of those odd ironiesthat are so common in political life. It was the right-wingNational Party government that introduced import sub-stitution, a policy normally associated with the left. Andit was the radical ANC that turned its back on massivestate intervention and adopted the kinds of hands-offpolicies advocated by the most conservative, market-ori-ented economists.

This new policy was laid out in a 1996 plan by Fi-nance Minister Trevor Manuel known as the Growth,Employment, and Redistribution Program (GEAR). Itwas put together by the government in consultation withinternational financial agencies and leading experts fromthe South African academic and business communities.

GEAR’s goal was to maximize growth by increasingforeign investment, which requires giving businessesconsiderable freedom to chart their own course. Pri-orities included developing industries to manufacturegoods that can be sold at competitive prices on the global

market, creating an environment with low inflation andstable exchange rates to encourage investment, mak-ing public services more efficient, improving the infra-structure, and adding to labor market flexibility. To ac-complish this, tariffs and other “demand side” measureswere scaled back, and the state offered the private sectorincentives to become more productive and profitable.Government spending was cut so that the budget deficitdropped to 3 percent by 2000. The government alsocalled for negotiations leading to a national plan to keepwage and price increases below the rate of growth in pro-ductivity. And, much like Tony Blair’s Labour govern-ment in Britain (see Chapter 4), the South African gov-ernment thought that much could be accomplishedthrough cooperative “partnerships” between the publicand private sectors in which the latter plowed back someof its profits in the form of both investment and commu-nity-oriented projects. Thus, in the automobile industry,the government and the major foreign automakers withoperations in South Africa have been cooperating tolower production costs so that cars produced there canfind a market elsewhere in Africa.

Critics properly pointed out that GEAR marked amajor shift in ANC policy toward capitalism, if not theoutright abandonment of socialism. However, it doesnot represent as marked a shift toward the all-but-exclusively profit orientation that most structural adjust-ment programs include.

The emphasis is on investments that provide long-term employment, empower Africans, and redress theinequities between rich and poor. Typical here is theSeptember 1998 announcement that the Philadelphia-based Kearsarge investment firm would funnel millionsof dollars to the African Harvest Asset Managementgroup as part of a program aimed at, in its words, “em-powering communities” in South Africa. Funds weremade available to companies that either were black-owned or had a deep commitment to affirmative action.It is part of the larger “Reinvest in South Africa” appeal tosocially responsible funds that had pulled out of thecountry as part of the investor responsibility movementin the 1970s and 1980s to return.

Unfortunately, foreign investment has not reachedthe level the government had hoped for, which has lim-ited its ability to reach its ambitious economic goals.Reasons range from potential investors’ concerns aboutprofitability to the high crime rate.

The government has not turned its back on its egali-tarian goals. It plans to use the revenues from economicgrowth to fund both infrastructure projects that benefiteveryone and the kinds of programs initially laid out inthe RDP. It has committed itself to free basic health care

Chapter 20 South Africa 27

for pregnant women and infants and to a program ofland reform that will turn over about five million acres ofland to the poor. It is hoped, too, that the decentraliza-tion provisions in the new constitution will lead theprovinces and municipalities to launch labor-intensiveprojects of their own. However, it is also clear to every-one that the state will play a lesser role in determininghow that growth occurs and that progress will comemore slowly than most in the old antiapartheid coali-tion would have liked.

The government has also announced a series of Spe-cial Development Initiatives. The goal is to channel in-vestment capital to and offer “tax holidays” for targetedindustries and communities. The hope is that thesefunds will stimulate the development of key manufactur-ing sectors, such as aluminum, that could lead to exportopportunities. As with most of the government’s invest-ment strategies, the funds will be mainly directed towardblack-owned firms in underdeveloped regions. The bestknown of these involves the Maputo Development Cor-ridor, a devastated region that straddles the border be-tween South Africa and Mozambique. Funds have beenprovided to build transportation and telecommunica-tions networks to facilitate such activities as tourism andthe export of crops and manufactured goods in the shortrun. It is assumed, as well, that once these infrastructuralprojects are finished the region could also provide atrade link for Swaziland and Botswana. Along similarlines, the government is considering the creation of nineChinese-like industrial development zones adjacent toits major ports and international airports. The best de-veloped is Coega near the Eastern Cape city of Port Eliz-abeth. The joint public-private partnership is designedto turn the area into a world-class seaport and createspin-off investments in such fields as zinc refining, fertil-izer manufacturing, and petrochemicals in one of thecountry’s poorest regions.

South Africa is also the one country covered in thisbook to have seriously experimented with microcreditstrategies. First developed by Muhammad Yunus and theGrameen Bank in Bangladesh (see Chapter 12), micro-credit involves making small loans to help poor peopleform small businesses. One of its goals is to help give theultrapoor incentives and skills to pull themselves andtheir families out of poverty. In the South African case,the government’s hope is that microcredit can also cre-ate more black-owned businesses and, in time, reduceincome and wealth differentials.

The best known is the Small Enterprise Foundation,which operates in the Northern Province, where up totwo-thirds of the population is unemployed. By late 1997this organization had made almost 19,000 loans that av-

eraged about $700 each. Well over 90 percent of the loanswent to women for dressmaking, hawking, and “spaza,”or small grocery stores operated from either a shack orsomeone’s home. Borrowers are organized into smallgroups of five or six who meet every other week to makeloan repayments and discuss their progress. A similar or-ganization operating near Cape Town gives its borrowersa “township MBA,” or basic business training, before aloan is issued. Borrowers from the Small EnterpriseFoundation typically employ the equivalent of 2.5 full-time workers. The poorest families are able to use themoney made in the business to afford three meals a day,not one. More affluent families are able to send theirchildren to school, add electricity to their homes, andpurchase other “luxuries.” Studies of microcredit opera-tions in South Africa and elsewhere have also found thatthey afford women an unprecedented degree of inde-pendence and can be a lifeline for those who have suf-fered spousal abuse. Profits from the program are, inturn, reinvested in the form of new loans that furthercontribute to the community’s development.

There is also reason to believe that the economy as awhole could boom as a result of these and other GEARstrategies, given the industrial and financial foundationcreated under colonial and National Party rule. South Af-rica is already far more advanced than all the other coun-tries in Africa and accounts for 40 percent of all eco-nomic activity on the continent. It has a significantindustrial base and, by African standards, a relativelywell-trained workforce. There is already, as well, a sub-stantial regional trade network involving South Africaand its neighbors. Therefore, it is the logical place for for-eign investors to place their money, at least for the south-ern third of the continent.

Overall, however, economic performance has fallenfar short of the government’s hopes when it adoptedGEAR. The most charitable accounting method put the2000 growth rate at about 3 percent, or about half of whatis needed to reach its goal of creating 400,000 jobs a year.The effects of this slower growth are being felt through-out the society. Fewer homes are getting electricity, im-provement to the educational system for blacks has beendelayed, and, perhaps most chillingly of all, the best esti-mate is that one South African in eight is infected withHIV. Even with the creation of the Global AIDS TrustFund, the odds are that at least 90 percent of thesepeople will die. And the repercussions of the epidemicwill ripple through the entire economy. The beleagueredhealth care system simply cannot handle as many as fivemillion people. And because HIV infection is particularlypronounced among young people, many companies as-sume that they have to hire two or three people in order

28 Chapter 20 South Africa

SOUTH AFRICA has not gone as far with liberalizationas either Mexico or India have. However, the pressuresto do so have been growing ever since the governmentannounced its GEAR program of structural adjustment.

Ironically, the government is reluctant to sell off thestate-owned enterprises in large part because whites,who have benefited from subsidized prices, could see asignificant erosion in their standard of living. Nonethe-less, the same international pressures that led the ANCto open up the private sector to more outside invest-ment are building, and the government may eventuallydecide to sell off all or some of the nationalized andparastatal industries.

No one knows for sure when or how that will hap-pen, but it is already anticipated on all the websites thegovernment has created to help convince foreigners toinvest in the country.

Liberalization in South Africa

to be reasonably certain that one of them will survivelong enough to establish a career.

The government does have one trump card it canplay to bring in a short-term infusion of cash. It could selloff state-owned companies that were created by the Na-tional Party government, which, some observers esti-mate, are worth about half of the total capital stock in thecountry. As of this writing, the government had notmoved rapidly in this direction, but there are signs that itmay do so in the years to come.

The left wing of the ANC, which includes the com-munists and the unions, is not happy with this shift. Ofparticular concern here is the Congress of South AfricanTrade Unions (COSATU), which, of course, had been a vi-tal cog in the struggle against apartheid. It representsabout 17 percent of the employed workforce, and itsmembers tend to be noticeably better off than the Afri-can population as a whole. Not surprisingly, COSATUleaders (who are also ANC leaders) are reluctant to en-dorse policies that would both slow the redistribution ofthe wealth and hurt their own members’ standard of liv-ing. Thus, according to COSATU president (and SACPcentral committee member) Sam Shilowa, “GEAR is aneo-liberal plan which poses serious difficulties for theworking class and the country as a whole. Something hasgone terribly wrong that such a document could be . . . onthe table.”

So far, COSATU has complained, but that’s all. Theleadership realizes that it has no alternative to the ANCand is willing, for the moment at least, to run the risk that

GEAR and related policies will pay off at some point inthe not-so-distant future. It is important, too, to under-score here how closely tied COSATU, the communists,and the ANC are. There are, for example, about fiftyCOSATU members who became ANC MPs. The initialMbeki cabinet had seven full and one deputy ministersfrom the SACP. In 2001, SACP national chair CharlesNqakula was named deputy foreign minister. Any opensplit over GEAR would thus cost the two organizationsdearly.

The question, however, is what will happen if theydon’t produce the growth. Mandela and the rest of theANC successfully guided the country through the firststage of its transition—getting the multiracial democracyoff the ground. It remains to be seen if it will be able to dothe same for the second—sparking enough economicgrowth to meet basic human needs quickly enough tosatisfy its own constituents, let alone the global financialcommunity.

Feedback

There is no area in which change is more evidentthan in South Africa’s mass media. Under apart-heid, almost all newspapers were aimed at a white

readership; those that were not were subjected to cen-sorship and were owned by conservative white con-glomerates. Similarly, the South African BroadcastingCommission (SABC) had a monopoly on television andradio broadcasts, and was little more than a propagandamouthpiece for the regime.

Today, the SABC still has a near monopoly on radioand television broadcasting, but even its critics acknowl-edge that it is more open to dissenting viewpoints than itwas prior to 1994. The same holds for about thirty dailynewspapers with a general circulation, all but three ofwhich are published in English. Some, like the Sowetan,are explicitly aimed at the African population. Most arestill white-owned, but, like television and radio, are farmore liberal than they used to be.

Conclusion: South Africa in Peril or a Role Model?

South Africa is a rarity for comparative politics, be-cause so much of the news from there has beengood over the past decade. Whatever your ideolog-

ical position, it is hard not to acknowledge that end-ing apartheid so peacefully not only removed one of thegreatest human rights violations of our time but also

Chapter 20 South Africa 29

moved the country toward a more just and egalitarian fu-ture. The joy and optimism that came with the transitionto majority rule are reflected in the titles of the two mostpopular books on South Africa in the 1990s, Anatomy of aMiracle and Tomorrow Is Another Country.

The accomplishments of the three ANC govern-ments so far have indeed been impressive. The transitionhas occurred with minimal strife and bloodshed. Planshave been laid for a new economy that can build on thelegacy of the apartheid years to create a regional hub for the southern third of the continent. Some importantfirst steps have been taken to ease the burden of cen-turies of racism and racial antagonism. Things have pro-gressed so far that South Africa is now looked upon as arole model for other divided societies seeking to makethe transition toward a more democratic and inclusivegovernment.

This chapter shares that sense of optimism and re-flects the remarkable, unexpected, and unprecedentedchanges that have taken place there since the late 1980s. Its democracy remains fragile as it enters the post-Mandela era. It could well become even more frag-ile when—and if—a credible alternative to the ANCemerges. And the economic future is even more uncer-tain. No one knows if the strategy laid out in the GEAR re-port will reach its stated goals, let alone provide a morejust and equal society.

If nothing else, one thing is clear. South Africa dem-onstrates for the early twenty-first century what the col-lapse of communism did for the 1980s—that nothing ispermanent and nothing should be taken for granted inpolitical life today.

Key TermsConcepts

Critical Thinking Exercises1 Much has changed since this chapter was finished in

summer 2005. Does the analysis of South African poli-tics presented here still make sense? Why (not)?

2 Public opinion pollsters routinely ask questions about whether people think their country is head-ing in the “right direction” or is on the “wrong track.”If you were asked such a question about South Af-rica, how would you answer? Why did you reach thisconclusion?

3 How did South Africa’s experience with imperialismhelp produce apartheid in the first place?

4 What was apartheid? Why was it so important to theAfrikaners?

5 Why was the National Party able to stay in power and sustain apartheid for so long? Why did it finallycollapse?

6 What is a hurting stalemate? How did it contribute tothe collapse of apartheid in South Africa?

7 Why is the ANC as powerful as it is? Is that strengthlikely to continue?

8 How would you explain why South Africa has pro-duced two of the most respected leaders of our time—Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu?

9 Do you think South Africa is democratic? Is its democ-ratization likely to continue? Why do you reach thisconclusion?

10 Why do you think the transition from Mandela toMbeki went so smoothly?

Useful WebsitesSouth Africa Online is the best general portal for informa-tion about the country and has an extensive set of politicallinks. Woyaa (voted one of the top fifty websites in Africa

AfrikanerapartheidBoershurting stalemateimport substitution

microcreditPass Lawrestorative justicesecurocratstructural adjustment

PeopleBiehl, AmyBiko, SteveDe Klerk, F. W.Madikizela-Mandela,

WinnieMalan, Daniel

Mandela, NelsonMbeki, ThaboSlovo, JoeSuzman, HelenTutu, DesmondVerwoerd, Hendrik

AcronymsANCCODESA

GEARIFP

NNPCUDF

Organizations, Places, and EventsAfrican National CongressBlack Consciousness

movementBlood River, Battle ofBroederbondConference on a Demo-

cratic South AfricaCongress of South African

Trade UnionsDemocratic AllianceFreedom CharterGreat TrekGrowth, Employment, and

Redistribution Act

HomelandsInkatha Freedom PartyNational AssemblyNational PartyNew National PartySharpeville MassacreSouth African Communist

PartySowetoState Security CouncilTruth and Reconciliation

CommissionUmkhonto we SizweUnited Democratic Front

30 Chapter 20 South Africa

by UNESCO) has the most extensive set of links to officialSouth African organizations.

www.southafrica.co.za

www.woyaa.com

IDASA is a nonprofit institute that works on democracy inAfrica in general and South Africa in particular. It also hassponsored and publicized some of the best polls since theend of apartheid.

www.idasa.org.za

The South African government now has an excellent web-site that links users to the entire system.

www.info.gov.za

The World History Archives has an excellent compilation ofdocuments on South Africa under apartheid.

www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/37a/index-a.html

Finally, Aardvark is a search engine that includes onlySouth African sites.

www.aardvark.co.za

InfoTrac College Edition SourcesBerkeley, Bill. “The New South Africa: Violence Works.”Gibson, Nigel. “Transition from Apartheid.”Klotz, Audie. “Transforming a Pariah State.”Ndungune, Mnongonkulu. “Truth, Blame, and Amnesty.”Nevin, Tom. “Will the ANC Go for the High Road?”Ramphele, Mamphela. “Citizenship Challenges for South

Africa’s Young Democracy.”Seidman, Gay W. “Blurred Lines: Nonviolence in South

Africa.”Southall, Roger. “The Centralization and Fragmentation of

South Africa’s Dominant Party.”Thompson, Leonard. “Mbeki’s Uphill Challenge.”

Further ReadingBoraine, Alex. A Country Unmasked. New York: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 2001. A less impassioned but more de-tailed account of the events and the commission’s rea-sons for acting as it did, by Tutu’s deputy on the Truthand Reconciliation Commission.

Faure, Murray, and Jan-Erik Lane. South Africa: DesigningNew Political Institutions. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage,1996. An anthology on the basic institutions—howthey were created and how they are supposed towork—in the new South Africa.

Lodge, Tom. Politics in South Africa. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2003. The best single volumeproviding an overview of the South African politicalsystem.

Marais, Hein. South Africa: Limits to Change: The PoliticalEconomy of Transformation. Cape Town: University ofCape Town Press, 1998. The most accessible book onthe new South African economy. Although Marais isskeptical about the changes described in this chapter,his account is fair and balanced.

Marks, Susan Collin. Watching the Wind. Washington, D.C.:U.S. Institute of Peace, 2000. A participant observer ac-count by one of the world’s leading experts in conflictresolution. Also my boss.

Mathabane, Mark. Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a BlackYouth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa. NewYork: Penguin Books, 1986. A must-read for anyonewho wants to learn about what apartheid was likeviewed through the eyes of a bright young man whogot out.

Meredith, Martin. Nelson Mandela: A Biography. New York:Penguin Books, 1997. A massive, readable, and not uncritical biography of perhaps the most widely re-spected politician in the world today.

O’Meara, Dan. Forty Lost Years: The Apartheid State and thePolitics of the National Party, 1948–94. Athens: OhioUniversity Press, 1996. An empirically and theoreti-cally sound analysis by a South African Marxist cur-rently teaching in Canada.

Slovo, Gillian. Every Little Thing. London: Faber & Faber,1997. Half an autobiography and half an account ofher relationship with her famous parents, Joe Slovoand Ruth First, also a leader of the SACP, who was as-sassinated by the security services in Angola. GillianSlovo also writes novels, many of which deal with thestruggle to end apartheid and her troubled relation-ship with her father.

Sparks, Allister. The Mind of South Africa. New York: Bal-lantine Books, 1990. A powerful exploration of the cul-ture and attitudes of white South Africa through thelate 1980s. The title, by the way, is borrowed from W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South about segregationin the United States.

———. Tomorrow Is Another Country: The Inside Story ofSouth Africa’s Negotiated Revolution. London: ArrowBooks, 1997. One of the two best descriptions of thetransition.

———. Beyond the Miracle: Inside the New South Africa.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Yet an-other insightful book by one of the best Western jour-nalists working on South Africa.

Chapter 20 South Africa 31

Thompson, Leonard. A History of South Africa, 3rd. ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. Thebest single-volume history of South Africa; takes read-ers up to the transition to democratic rule.

Tutu, Desmond. No Future without Forgiveness. New York:Doubleday, 1999. An impassioned presentation of thecommission’s work.

Waldmeier, Patti. Anatomy of a Miracle. New York: PenguinBooks, 1997. A somewhat more detailed and moreeconomic analysis of the transition than the book by Sparks. Not surprising, given that the author wasthe South African correspondent for the FinancialTimes.


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