Africa
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In July 1961 guerrilla raids were launched against administrative and military targets in the north-west of the country, forcing the Portuguese to deploy troops to guard such targets. In August 1961, from Conakry in neighbouring Guinea, Cabral formally announced that the PAIGC was resorting to armed struggle and from that time onwards constant attacks were mounted against such targets, obliging Portugal to send military reinforcements to the territory. As early as 1962 the PAIGC held elections inside the territory in which 52,000 people out of a total population of less than 500,000 voted to back the PAIGC. The movement obtained the backing of the OAU Liberation Committee as well as full support from neighbouring Guinea. In 1963 the Portuguese admitted that the PAIGC had infiltrated 15 per cent of the countryside. In May 1963, with another 10 years of fighting yet to come, the PAIGC shot down its first Portuguese plane. The PAIGC intensified the armed struggle in 1964 when it formed its military wing – Forças Armadas Revolucionárias do Povo (FARP) – while its guerrillas were sent for training to the USSR, China, Cuba, Algeria, Senegal, Ghana and Guinea. On a visit to London in April 1965 Amilcar Cabral claimed that 40 per cent of Guinea was in rebel hands, despite Portuguese denials of success. He quoted the official Portuguese newspaper Diario de Manha which had published articles earlier that year congratulating the Portuguese troops in Guinea because they faced an enemy ‘not to be held in contempt’ and one that had given proofs of its intelligence and spirit of initiative, while concerning local loyalties it had said: ‘It is anyone’s guess how many of the peasants digging in the fields do not at night exchange their hoes for guns, or have a PAIGC badge in their house.’30
The PAIGC was the most accomplished of the Lusophone anti-colonial movements primarily because it performed best on the five necessary criteria: the extent to which the nationalist movement was achieved and maintained; the ability to motivate the rural population politically; the degree to which armed action was profitably subordinated to political objectives; the ability to defend the liberated areas from counter-insurgency campaigns; and the capacity of the nationalists to secure international (especially UN) support.31 It should be recognized, however, that unlike Angola and Mozambique, the PAIGC had a small country and a small, more cohesive population in which to organize and operate.
The year 1968 was a turning point in the war. President Tomas visited Guinea in February and insisted that it would remain one of the ‘sacred portions of national territory’. In May General Antonio de Spinola was made Governor-General. By the end of the year the PAIGC claimed to have killed 1,700 Portuguese soldiers, destroyed 200 military vehicles, 60 boats, 10 aircraft and taken 24 prisoners. In 1969 the PAIGC claimed to control two-thirds of Guinea’s area and 45 per cent of the population. At the time Portugal had an army of about 35,000 troops in the territory together with an additional 3,000 African mercenaries. The PAIGC placed great emphasis upon education and established educational programmes in all the liberated areas. During 1965–66 it had established 127 primary schools, operated by 191 newly trained teachers with 13,361 pupils; in the following year, 1966–67, the numbers were increased to 159 schools with 220 teachers and 14,386 pupils. Eighty per cent of these pupils had completed two years’ schooling; their average age was 12 years. Some 50 young men and women were sent to Europe in 1967 for technical training in a variety of fields. Several printed school books, prepared by the PAIGC staff, were available for use and others were being prepared for publication.32 This was a considerable achievement for the liberation movement of such a small country while engaged in an all-out war.
Portugal’s two island territories, Cape Verde islands and São Tomé and Principe, were not involved in any actual liberation struggle as such. They were too small and in the case of Cape Verde too tightly controlled by the Portuguese while São Tomé was a closed society entirely dependent upon a plantation economy. However, there were close ties between Cape Verde and Guinea and as the war in Guinea intensified, Portuguese repression of nationalist activities in Cape Verde became more ruthless. Even so, the PAIGC enjoyed overwhelming support from the people of the islands to form an independent government with Guinea-Bissau. The PAIGC, for its part, had a twofold policy: to win independence for Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau; and to bring about a federation of the two territories.
When Salazar suffered his stroke in 1968, Marcelo Caetano became Prime Minister in his place and while no major changes of policy were expected, there were several reasons to believe that change could not be long delayed as West Africa pointed out: ‘The PAIGC, FRELIMO and MPLA have pushed the Portuguese regime to the brink of financial and social disaster. The second reason lies in the nature of the regime. This is not so much a political system as a police and administrative structure. Its trouble now lies not simply in the fact that for nearly four decades there have been only the narrowest openings for new talent to make itself felt and heard.’ The third reason was the exit of Salazar; his successor did not possess his iron determination.33 Despite the huge costs in wealth, lives and suffering expended by Portugal during the 1960s in order to hold onto her African possessions, the next decade would see this last of the European African empires collapse.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
South Africa
No other situation on the entire continent excited so much concern, antagonism or condemnation as did the racist policy practised by South Africa at the time that most of the rest of Africa achieved independence. Opposition to apartheid united independent Africa as nothing else did. One of the first resolutions of the OAU after its formation in 1963 called upon all its members not to establish diplomatic or other relations with South Africa until apartheid had been abandoned while condemnations of apartheid became axiomatic at any African conference. Moreover, opposition to apartheid had far deeper significance than merely the condemnation of an obnoxious policy in a particular country. It also affected Africa’s relations with all those white Western countries that were seen either negatively or positively to support the status quo in South Africa. The racist arrogance of apartheid was not only regarded as an insult to all Africa but also as the natural outcome of white imperialism, a view that was to be borne out in the post-independence years by the consistent way in which Britain in particular and the other Western powers more generally shielded South Africa in the United Nations, if necessary by the use of their vetoes, from African attempts to impose sanctions upon it. White support for South Africa from 1960 through to the late 1980s came to be equated with Western regrets at the passing of the European imperial system. Apartheid was akin to a state of mind, not just on the part of the white South Africans who imposed it on their African majority, but also on the part of its external supporters who regretted the passing of white supremacy. For Africans, therefore, only its eradication from the continent would satisfy their sense that at last the imperial age had come to an end. Its ramifications went deep: ‘For South Africa is not a private obsession of Africa and the West. From India to Brazil colour sees in “apartheid” the subjugations of the past and the still subjugated present. South Africa is an expression on the face of the white world in history, and one which even yet the white world does not care to erase.’1
In 1909, when Britain drew up the Act of Union, it became clear that the government at Westminster intended to hand power to the white minority in South Africa without safeguarding the future of the black majority and when an African deputation went to London in the hope of persuading the British government to reject the colour bar in the constitution, it was told by the Colonial Secretary that the question must be settled in South Africa itself. When the House of Commons considered the bill only the Labour Party and about 30 Liberals opposed the colour bar. ‘The rest, although they unanimously regretted it, sent the Act on its way “respectfully and earnestly” begging White South Africa, sooner or later, to modify its provisions.’2 This hypocritically pious ‘respectful and earnest’ request, delivered at the height of Britain’s imperial power, gave a foretaste of the many ways i
n which over the coming years Britain would fail to exert the pressures that it could and ought to have exerted upon South Africa. As so often in its imperial history, Britain was distancing itself by one remove from direct responsibility for the outcome of its imperial policies.
The Act of Union was seen by Africans as an act uniting white South Africans against black. The African organizations scattered through the four provinces were shocked by the British Government’s abuse of trust in surrendering all power to a white minority government which, as a fundamental principle, opposed the extension of democratic rights to the non-white majority. But their people remained divided into many separate tribes, thinking tribally, and most of them, illiterate.3
Having got the colour bar entrenched in the constitution, the whites went on to demand more rights to ensure that South Africa would be a ‘white man’s’ country; what they sought next was absolute control over the land, and since land was the only security the African had, its seizure on behalf of the white minority meant that the African majority had neither political nor economic security. Under the terms of the Native Land Bill the million whites would have access to more than 90 per cent of the country while the four million Africans would be restricted to only 7.3 per cent of the country and freehold ownership or leasehold was only possible in the reserves. As Gen. Smuts was to claim in a speech at the Savoy Hotel in London in 1917, ‘It has been our ideal to make it [South Africa] a white man’s country.’ In 1945, by which time he had become South Africa’s only major international figure, the friend of Churchill, the supporter of the worldwide British Commonwealth and Empire, and part architect of the United Nations Charter, Field Marshal Smuts revealed himself to be as racist as any Afrikaner of the looming National Party (NP) when he said: ‘There are certain things about which all South Africans are agreed, all parties and all sections, except those who are quite mad. The first is that it is a fixed policy to maintain white supremacy in South Africa.’4
Following its election victory in 1948, the National Party began to consolidate its power and institute comprehensive apartheid and for the next three decades it had the overwhelming support of the majority of the Afrikaner people while by the election of 1966 it also began to win substantial support from the English-speaking whites who were attracted by the government’s determination to maintain control in the face of increasing black unrest and foreign criticism. Although the NP worked hard to achieve external acceptance, it was also shrewd enough to see that the more the policy of apartheid led to South Africa’s isolation in the world so the more its ‘embattled’ white community would draw together in support of the government. The new government lost no time in appointing its Afrikaner supporters to senior as well as junior positions in all state institutions – the civil service, the army, the police and state corporations. South Africa’s mineral wealth and economic potential also worked in the government’s favour for external capitalist interests were quick to seek an accommodation with the new Afrikaner regime. Two issues were vital to both sides: economic expansion; and gaining the political and financial confidence of the West. Further, from the outset of its long period of political control, the National government grasped the importance of elevating Communism to the status of its number one enemy and threat so as to appeal to the West as an ally in the Cold War which at that time had only just got under way. In 1950 it passed the Suppression of Communism Act which effectively gave the government power to designate as a Communist anyone who tried to bring about social or political change, allowing the Minister of Justice to ‘name’ any whom he thought Communist and to ban them from participating in meetings or organizations.
J. G. Strijdom, who succeeded Daniel Malan as Prime Minister in 1954, said, ‘Either the white man dominates or the black man takes over… The only way the European can maintain supremacy is by domination… And the only way they can maintain domination is by withholding the vote from the non-Europeans. If it were not for that, we would not be here in parliament today.’ The policy could not be clearer. On 20 June 1957, Strijdom said: ‘If the white man is to retain the effective political control in his hands by means of legislation, then it means that the white man must remain the master… We say that the white man must retain his supremacy.’5 The previous day the leader of the United Party, Sir de Villiers Graaf, had said: ‘When we get into power again there will also be discrimination.’ He might make the language sound less aggressive; he meant the same thing. The introduction of apartheid – that is, the legalized separation of the races – from 1948 onwards was not so much a new policy, for by then racial segregation had become ingrained in the South African system, but, rather, the formal entrenchment of the system to ensure the continuation of white political and economic control over all aspects of South African life. The NP, which won the 1948 election under Dr Daniel Malan, was to enjoy uninterrupted political power until the 1990s. There were several clearly defined periods in the apartheid era: first (1948–61), the establishment of what became known as classical or grand apartheid, ending with the Sharpeville massacre of March 1960 and South Africa’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth in 1961; second (1961–76), the period of growing isolation as Africa to the north became independent; and third (1976–94), sparked off by the Soweto uprising of 1976, the period of increasingly embattled ‘holding on’ until an accommodation with the black majority became inevitable. The attitudes of the White leaders, quoted above, for all their arrogance, were based as much upon fear as upon certainty and were in marked contrast to the 1955 Freedom Charter which became the basic policy statement of the African National Congress (ANC): ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.’
Chief Albert Lutuli best personified the non-violent approach to political change that the ANC had pursued from its inception in 1912 through to the beginning of the 1960s. In 1952 he had been elected President-General of the ANC and on 22 October 1961, after a lifetime of counselling non-violence in the face of violent oppression, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1960. A reluctant government, after considerable international pressure, allowed him to go to Oslo to receive his honour but Die Transvaaler described the award as ‘an inexplicable, pathological phenomenon’, while Die Burger, the Cape Nationalist daily, considered the award a ‘remarkably immature, poorly considered, and essentially un-Western decision’. The term ‘un-Western’ used here went to the heart of white South African fears; the recognition that a black South African merited such an award for his stand against white racism was intolerable. Chief Lutuli said: ‘Who will deny that 30 years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately and modestly at a closed and barred door? What have been the fruits of moderation? The past 30 years have seen the greatest number of laws restricting our rights and progress, until today we have reached a stage where we have almost no rights at all.’6
Lutuli might be moderate but the grand architect of high apartheid, Prime Minister Verwoerd, was not. After his election as Prime Minister he said, ‘I believe that the will of God was revealed in the ballot.’ Asked by a Nationalist newspaper whether he ever felt the strain of his responsibilities, Verwoerd replied: ‘No, I do not have the nagging doubt of even wondering whether, perhaps, I am wrong.’7 On his memorable visit to South Africa in 1960, Harold Macmillan had found Verwoerd an extremely narrow-focused, totally obdurate man, ‘Consistent to his principles, Verwoerd refused to have a single African servant in the house (Groote Schuur)’ and as Macmillan noted in his diary, to Verwoerd apartheid ‘was more than a political philosophy, it was a religion; a religion based on the Old Testament rather than on the New… he had all the force of argument of some of the great Calvinist leaders of our Scottish kirk. He was certainly as convinced as John Knox himself that he alone could be right, and that there was no question or argument but merely a statement of his will…’8 As Verwoerd justified the implementation of apartheid in every sphere
of South African life, allotting the Africans to their appointed Bantustans or homelands, it became clear that the divided South Africa which he was creating was piling up impossible problems for the future that, if maintained, must tear the country apart.
The turning point or divide between the old South Africa in which the Africans, against increasing odds, had striven for change by argument and a new bleaker, more brutal South Africa in which repression and violence would become the norm came over the years 1960–61. Following the Sharpeville massacre (see above, Introduction) the ANC and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) were banned; both organizations then turned to more violent methods of protest with the formation of their two militant wings – Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) and Poqo (Blacks Only) of the ANC and PAC respectively – that were created to use sabotage against white property. South Africa’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth in 1961 marked the beginning of the country’s increasing international isolation. In 1963 17 Umkhonto and ANC leaders were arrested and put on trial, including Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu. Mandela and the others were charged with treason (he had previously been charged with the same offence in 1956 and after a trial which had dragged on for years been acquitted in March 1961). Subsequently, he had organized a massive stay-at-home protest at the decision that year to turn South Africa into a republic. After several months in detention he had gone into hiding to become known as the ‘Black Pimpernel’ as he worked to organize the ANC. He left South Africa illegally in August 1962 and addressed a conference of African nationalist leaders in Addis Ababa. He then went on a brief visit to London. On his return to South Africa he was arrested and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. Meanwhile, the ANC conspirators, in astonishingly amateur style, met at Lilliesleaf farm, Rivonia, and the security services had no difficulty following their movements and, when the time came, arresting them along with much written evidence. Mandela and Sisulu were the leading defendants with seven other ANC and Communist leaders in what became known as the Rivonia treason trial. The charges of sabotage were not disputed but the defendants denied the intent of armed rebellion. The inept prosecution by the prosecuting lawyer Yugar allowed Mandela to turn the occasion into one of a statement of black ideals and in the process he obtained world attention. The Rivonia trial of 1964 was a landmark in South Africa’s story and Mandela’s condemnation of the apartheid system became an historic judgement of an indefensible creed. On 20 April 1964 he gave a four-and-a-half-hour speech in which he enumerated simply and clearly what Africans wanted: to be paid a living wage, to live where they obtained work, to own land where they worked, for men to have their wives and children to live with them. ‘We want a just share in the whole of South Africa; we want security and a stake in society. Above all we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent.’ In an historic peroration, Mandela concluded: