Africa
Page 50
Labour conditions were especially bad in Swaziland in the period before independence and wages were often lower than those paid to Africans in South Africa. Strikes occurred in several industries during 1962 and particularly on the sugar plantations – the Ubombo Ranches – where working conditions were generally appalling and wages abysmal. In May 1963 the biggest strike in the country’s history took place at the Havelock asbestos mine which then accounted for most of Swaziland’s revenue and foreign exchange earnings. Pre-strike wages on the mine were 3/5d a day and the miners demanded £1. Ninety-five per cent of the workforce, 1,350 men, stopped work and after a week of negotiations the government appointed a one-man commission to look into the miners’ grievances. Meanwhile, disaffection had spread to the capital, Mbabane, where the Democratic Party held a mass meeting of domestic workers and labourers. The meeting demanded that the Resident Commissioner (governor) should institute a general inquiry into Swazi wages, improve ‘intolerable working conditions’, and fix a national minimum wage. At that time domestic servants earned between £2 and £5.10s a month, worked unlimited hours and had to find their own accommodation.
The Havelock strike, which began on 20 May, remained peaceful until 8 June when the police arrested 12 alleged ringleaders. They were almost all members of the Ngwane National Liberation Congress (NNLC), an offshoot of the old Progressive Party. Following the arrests, 2,000 strikers demonstrated against the police who dispersed them with tear gas. On 9 June a mass meeting of 3,000 in the Mbabane township protested against the arrests and also against the country’s new constitution and called for a general strike in Mbabane. This took place on Monday 11 June; it spread and led to a riot in the prison and the escape of 10 prisoners. The government response was to enlist whites as special constables, promise an inquiry, take emergency powers and bring in police reinforcements from Bechuanaland. Britain airlifted a battalion of Gordon Highlanders from Kenya to Swaziland and they were at once used alongside the police to break the Havelock strike. Within a week of their arrival the Times of Swaziland announced, ‘Strikers go back to work – Swaziland returns to normal.’ African leaders protested at Britain’s handling of the strike and Tom Mboya demanded that British troops should quit Kenya, which Britain was then using as a base, ‘to oppose our brothers’. Two years after the Havelock strike comparisons were to be made about the readiness of Britain to rush troops to Swaziland to break a strike and the ‘impossibility’ of sending troops to Rhodesia to prevent treason. One optimistic comment upon the use of British troops suggested, ‘In one probably unforeseen way, their presence has given all three Territories a new insurance against South African aggression. For if British troops can be flown in to break a strike, world opinion would never again accept the arguments that they could not be flown in to meet any South African threat.’23 What Britain was capable of doing and what Britain was prepared to do in Southern Africa were very different things, separated by a vast gulf of economic and racial self-interest.
Britain’s efforts to prepare these three territories for independence were minimal as well as being designed not to upset South African susceptibilities. For example, Britain gave assurances to Dr Verwoerd that the broadcasting stations which were to be established in the three territories prior to independence would not broadcast political material considered to be ‘hostile’ by Verwoerd; would limit their range so as to cover only a minimum of South African territory; and would not compete with the Republic’s Springbok Radio commercial network as an advertising medium.24 Such conditions demonstrated a pusillanimous subservience to South African bullying; they also raised acute issues of neo-colonialism, for what controls would Britain maintain after independence? In general, the British attitude towards these three small vulnerable countries was one of disinterest in their independent futures, parsimony in preparing them for independence and appeasement of South Africa. A senior British official in Basutoland reacted to UN criticisms of British rule in the three territories by saying, ‘We never wanted these territories in the first place. They’ve been nothing but an embarrassment and financial drain on us, and now we’re getting kicked for carrying and protecting them all these years.’25 It would be difficult to find a more revealing comment by a colonial official about Britain’s real attitudes as opposed to its vaunted imperial-colonial mission.
Botswana and Lesotho came to independence in 1966, Swaziland in 1968 and all three had to learn the precarious task of living next door to the apartheid giant: Botswana had borders with South Africa, Namibia and Rhodesia and a tiny ferry crossing over the Zambezi to Zambia; Lesotho was entirely surrounded by South Africa; Swaziland was three-quarters surrounded by South Africa and shared its fourth border with Portuguese Mozambique. Their independent prospects hardly appeared encouraging. South Africa had achieved one significant breakthrough with black Africa when Malawi agreed to exchange diplomats with the Republic and was prepared to accept substantial aid as well (see chapter 11 above). But Banda, who found himself at odds with the rest of independent Africa as a result of this initiative, represented a one-off achievement for Pretoria’s ‘outward looking’ policy that would not be repeated. When the three High Commission Territories came to independence they did not, as Pretoria had hoped, follow Malawi’s lead even though their geographical position made them semi-prisoners of the Republic. One aspect of this breakthrough had not been foreseen: Malawi’s diplomats had to be treated as other diplomats (in effect as honorary whites) and use hotels and other facilities normally reserved for whites only. It was plain that if such concessions were to be made to more foreign blacks they would eventually also have to be made to South African blacks as well.
By the late 1960s, despite the shock of Sharpeville and leaving the Commonwealth at the beginning of the decade, South Africa’s position appeared invulnerable. It had become a principal target for Western investment and was able to shrug off African condemnations of its policies as unimportant, the angry bleating of regimes most of which seemed unable to cope with their own problems. Furthermore, the informal organization of South Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal (SAPRO) to resist black advance added to Pretoria’s sense of security. Rhodesia and Portugal provided a cordon sanitaire between the Republic and independent Africa to the north, though this alliance would have collapsed by 1975. In any case, defence and security had become central considerations of the government. The South African defence budget had risen from £18 million in 1958–59 to £60 million in 1962–63 and to £115 million in 1965–66. Its security forces were as much concerned with maintaining internal control on behalf of the white minority as they were in facing an external threat though there were unmistakable signs that an external threat was beginning to develop. The security forces steadily tightened their grip on the country and were given ever more draconian powers, so that their right to detain suspects for 12 days eventually became the right to do so indefinitely.
Twenty years after the victory of the NP under Malan in 1948 South Africa did some stocktaking. The government itself was all-powerful, white opposition had dwindled while black opposition was underground, imprisoned or exiled. The Johannesburg Stock Market was enjoying a boom and Western countries were competing to increase their share in South Africa’s trade and investment. It was legitimate to ask, despite condemnations from without, whether apartheid might not in fact succeed. Prime Minister Vorster appeared to believe this when he claimed: ‘The day will come when people will visit South Africa, not only for its wildlife and scenery; but to see how it is that people of different colours live in peace in one geographical area.’ Alongside this calculated optimism, P. W. Botha, the Minister of Defence, warned in November 1968: ‘All South Africans were in the front line… we must realize once and for all that we will live in danger for many years to come, and we must realize that not only our soldiers, but all our people must be prepared to fight for all we hold dear.’ Writing in the generally sympathetic London Daily Telegraph, Frank Taylor said: ‘After 20 years of apartheid the prosp
ect of a self-supporting, politically independent Transkei (to name but one) is as remote as ever. The hard fact is that the ratio of Africans to whites outside the homelands – that is in the urban centres of “white” South Africa – is rising every year instead of falling.’26 The policy of creating industries on the Bantustan borders so that labour did not need to leave its homeland was not working. As Dr J. Adendorf, the General Manager of the Bantu Investment Corporation – the strategic government agency to foster development in the Bantustans – said of Bantustan progress, ‘At the present rate of development the Bantu homelands will never be in a position to absorb the increases in Bantu population and assure decent living standards.’ He, if anyone, was in a position to know and, as always, the real concern was how to offload the growing black population from white South Africa. The answer was plain enough: it could not be done.
By 1968 white South Africa was increasingly aware of the growing guerrilla threat on its borders. In 1966 SWAPO, led by Sam Nujoma, launched its war against South African occupation of Namibia. In 1967 a joint ANC/ZAPU guerrilla group made a foray into Rhodesia from Zambia. Vorster warned of the Communist menace and said that in time an army would be created for a full-scale attack upon South Africa. In July of 1968 SWAPO claimed some victories for its guerrillas in the Caprivi Strip; at first the SWAPO claims were denied by the South African government but later it admitted that considerable activity had taken place. The country was becoming steadily more militarized and in May had published a Bill to create a R100 million Armaments Development and Production Corporation (ARMSCOR) as a state enterprise. By this time the South African arms industry was sufficiently advanced that an arms embargo could only have an impact upon the upper end of the arms business for South Africa was not yet able to produce such sophisticated weapons as submarines or aircraft. The increasingly close military-arms tie-up between South Africa and France was well developed by 1968. General André Beaufré, a leading French military intellectual, greatly pleased his South African audience when he wrote in the South Africa Foundation’s publication Perspectives of April 1968: ‘In the sense that Europe is a projection of Asia, so is South Africa the European Cape of the African continent. The common fate of these two projections throughout their history has been to remain different from the continental mass, Asia or Africa, and to maintain an individual civilization.’ Inadvertently, perhaps, the General had touched upon the white’s most acute dilemma: were they Africans or were they Europeans?
A split occurred in the ranks of the National Party at this time with the emergence of the so-called Verkramptes, hard-line members of the party who would not contemplate any concessions to the black majority. Dr Albert Hertzog and Dr Andries Treurnicht emerged as the leaders of this group, to form the Herstigte Nasionale Party (HNP). They were determined to keep the NP on its strict apartheid lines. Opponents of apartheid briefly hoped to see a major breach develop in the monolithic ruling party but this was not to be. P. W. Botha, the Minister of Defence, rallying to the support of the Prime Minister, said in April: ‘The security of the Black man depends on the White man, and as long as the country is led by John Vorster the safety of the White man in South Africa is guaranteed.’ Further, Vorster, in an effort to prevent the split in Afrikaner ranks widening, included Treurnicht in his cabinet, a decision that helped cause the events of 16 June 1976 (the Soweto uprising) since Treurnicht was the architect of the ruling that ‘Afrikaans was the medium of instruction in black schools’ that sparked the explosion.
On the whole, the ruling NP could feel reasonably secure at the end of the decade. It is true that another cloud had arisen on its horizon: sport. The government’s refusal to allow the Coloured cricketer Basil D’Oliveira to tour South Africa with the MCC led to the cancellation of the tour in 1969 and the British Minister of Sport, David Howell, had followed this up by saying he did not think Springbok cricket teams should come to Britain in 1970: ‘I have no time for any sport based on racial considerations.’ Sport would develop into a more important issue during the 1970s. At the end of the decade, always emphasizing its value to Western defence, the South African government floated the idea of a South Atlantic Treaty Organization (SATO) and NATO joining in a Greater Atlantic Treaty Organization. Pretoria made approaches to Argentina and Brazil as possible SATO partners. Defence would become of greater importance during the 1970s.
The Decade in Retrospect
The first overriding concern of all African leaders during the 1960s was to get the Europeans – the colonialists – out of Africa. The entrenched nature of European colonialism was more than simply a physical presence on the continent, it was also a state of mind, as exemplified by the Portuguese belief that the primary function of Africans was to work for the Europeans and that only by so doing could they aspire to become civilized. By holding on so grimly to their African colonies the Portuguese in fact served notice that they needed their colonies and that, of course, was the basis of all colonialism – exploitation. When the British conceded independence to India they did not, as has sometimes been implied, see this as the beginning of total world decolonization; instead, they turned to Africa as an alternative lifeline, a number of imperial fiefs to be properly developed for the first time, to serve British interests. The British did not know what wealth Africa might produce because up to that time they had broadly neglected the continent in favour of other regions of their Empire. Harold Macmillan put his finger on the African problem in 1960 when he said, ‘Africans are not the problem in Africa, it is the Europeans.’ The Africans, above all, needed to throw off the humiliation that imperialism had imposed on them.
The Europeans might respond to the pressures of a new world order by decolonizing their African empires, yet despite sometimes grandiose claims that they had always intended to prepare their African subjects for independence, they at once demonstrated an extraordinary cynicism towards the weak new states that emerged from their empires, and never more so than in the Congo (K) as that benighted country descended into chaos. Those states that attempted to follow genuinely radical paths were not only opposed by the West but undermined as well until their experiments in true independence collapsed. On the other hand, states that were content to accept Western tutelage, such as Gabon, were protected when the need arose, as was President M’ba by the French. The West never envisaged truly independent African states going their own ways; rather, it sought dependent client states to be manipulated according to its strategic and economic requirements. The result was to be decades of support for tyrants such as Mobutu, leaders who were happy to act as Western agents as long as they themselves were maintained in power. The Cold War, then at its height, provided the West with the excuses it needed to justify its conduct in supporting unsavoury regimes. But that was only part of the equation; the colonial powers may have conceded political control but they had no intention of relinquishing their economic stranglehold upon the continent. Furthermore, the combination of independence and the Cold War made it possible for powerful new actors to enter the African scene – the United States, the USSR, China and the newly formed European Community. Africa had, as it thought, shaken off the shackles of imperialism only to find it faced even more formidable players who regarded the African continent as a chessboard for their international confrontations. Prior to independence African nationalists faced the one enemy in the form of the imperial power. After independence they faced two sets of enemies: the old imperial powers, determined to safeguard their economic and other interests; and the new Cold War warriors who were prepared to subvert Africa in any way that suited their policies. There were plenty of catastrophes – the Congo disaster and the Nigerian civil war providing the most striking examples – but there was also the confrontation with white racialism in Rhodesia, the Portuguese territories and, above all, South Africa, racialism that was to be enormously prolonged by Western support provided through a fog of hypocrisy.
Against this background of international interventions the new states of
Africa sought to create a semblance of continental unity: they built up a number of regional economic unions, none of which were to be very effective since they each assumed a level of intra-national co-operation that did not exist, and then established the Organisation of African Unity, which survived over the coming decades only because it aspired no higher than to meet the lowest common denominator of mutual interest without demanding any sacrifices of newly achieved power that none of the emergent leadership would have been prepared to make anyway. The failure to achieve unity should not have surprised anyone. Instead, each new state embarked upon parallel searches for internal political stability on the one hand and economic development with external aid on the other.
The search for political stability followed a familiar path: the rejection, or part rejection, of inherited political systems, the creation of one-party state structures, the need to balance tribal and sectoral pressures for a share of political – and therefore patronage – power, and the further need to come to terms with military participation in government. As the one-party state became the norm in Africa so the coup replaced the election while varying degrees of oppression, including the curtailment of human rights, the reduction of most meaningful forms of democracy and limitations upon free speech, including the press, also became the norm in too many of the new states.
Every new state sought rapid economic progress as the only way to satisfy the expectations of the people as a whole and development, development strategies, five-year plans, aid, loans and grants, and technical assistance added a new dimension, not to say vocabulary, to government activities. Impossible targets were set and huge debts were incurred while a new breed of ‘neo-colonialists’ in the form of aid experts, United Nations agencies, World Bank teams, non-government organizations and a bewildering variety of would-be advisers descended upon Africa to manage an economic renaissance that had been beyond both the capacity and intention of the former colonial powers. These new advisers and aid donors established the parameters of development to be followed and began to create a system of aid dependence that would last to the end of the century while African leaders who were fully alive to the dangers of the aid trap were nonetheless prepared to fall into it provided such dependence also helped maintain them in power. Small economies – and almost all those of Africa fell into this category – need both protection and government assistance if they are to thrive but, as always, the large dominates the small, and the external advisers and donors began to insist, exerting pressures that would become irresistible over the years, that Africa should open its small weak markets to the exports of the big strong producers, a tactic designed to keep Africa as the source of raw materials rather than manufactured products.