by Guy Arnold
Throughout these talks and political manoeuvres the SWAPO guerrillas had steadily escalated the war. Early in the 1970s the South African military had begun to take over from the police in combating SWAPO. In 1974 SADF strength in Namibia was 15,000 men; by 1976 it had risen to 45,000 and by 1980 to 80,000. These figures included mercenaries, members of UNITA, ‘Bantustan’ units and SWA territorials. The cost for South Africa over this period rose commensurately. South Africa’s military strategy in Namibia was conditioned by the struggle waged by PLAN, the military wing of SWAPO. The war intensified dramatically, following Angolan independence in 1975. As a result PLAN combatants were able to extend their activities by crossing the Angolan-Namibian border to operate over a 1,000-mile area of northern Namibia and establish SWAPO bases and refugee camps in Angola. The South African aim was to separate SWAPO from the local Namibian population and so prevent civilian assistance being given to the liberation movement. Like the Portuguese in Mozambique, in the mid-1970s the South Africans launched a programme of forced removals in the north of Namibia and these population removals were carried out by the army. A one-kilometre strip was cleared along the Namibia–Angola border to create a free-fire zone. The clearance was accompanied by the wholesale destruction of villages and crops. In 1976, for example, the UN Commissioner for Namibia estimated that South African troops had uprooted 40–50,000 villagers over a three-month period. Then came the Soweto uprising in South Africa. ‘As news of the Soweto uprising in South Africa during the summer of 1976 reached Namibia, black students throughout the territory were inspired by these events. They boycotted examinations held under the terms of the Bantu Education Act. Leaflets attacking Bantu Education as the “instrument of the homelands policy” were circulated.’17 SWAPO leaders in Namibia were frequently arrested as the war escalated. Over March/April 1978, virtually the entire leadership of SWAPO was arrested following the assassination of the Herero Chief Clemens Kapuuo, and in April 1979 over 50 top SWAPO officials were arrested and detained under proclamation AG21, prior to the announcement that a tribally based national assembly was to be established. A prominent American church leader who visited Namibia in 1979 said: ‘The evidence of South African Army brutality among all segments of the population is so overwhelming, pervasive and capable of documentation that it makes a mockery of the South African government’s claim to be “responding to the request of the Ovambo people for protection”.’
South Africa had launched a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign in 1975 and by 1977 the campaign was well under way. Articles in the South African press, especially Paratus, the journal of the SADF, described the success of the programme: soldiers assisting the people of Caprivi, educating in schools, training black farmers, teaching blind children; operating government computers and running essential services in Ovamboland. It was a propaganda picture that did not convince. ‘The South African Administrator General explained the motives for this activity at a press conference in May 1979. Counter-insurgency consisted of 80 per cent winning support from the people and 20 per cent winning the war against SWAPO, he said. In keeping with this philosophy, South African teachers, doctors, farmers and tradesmen were assisting the SADF. From Katima Mulilo in the east to Ruacana in the west there were teams of national servicemen at work.’18 While this ‘hearts and minds’ programme was being carried out an area along the border was cleared of 20,000 people and the Ovambo, Kavango and Caprivi districts became security areas. South African policy inside Namibia was to cripple SWAPO by mass arrests, detentions without trial and bannings, and the widespread use of torture was reported and confirmed. The introduction of compulsory military service in 1980 led to a mass exodus of Namibians into Angola where by September 1981 an estimated 73,000 Namibians, or nearly six per cent of the population (which then stood at 1,212,000), had fled into exile. ‘From the evidence of suffering inflicted on the Namibian population, it is abundantly clear that the withdrawal of South Africa’s troops and administration, and the holding of United Nations-supervised elections, are the only way to achieve the goal desired by most Namibians.’19
CHAPTER TWENTY - THREE
South Africa: The Critical Decade
Sixteen years were to pass between Sharpeville and the next landmark event, the eruption of violence in the black townships, which burst in Soweto (south-west townships) outside Johannesburg in June 1976. The violence spread across the country to involve Indians and Coloureds as well as Africans and presented the government with its most serious crisis in two decades. During the 1960s and early 1970s the apartheid state seemed omnipotent: Mandela and Robert Sobukwe were in prison; other leaders such as Oliver Tambo were in exile; and neither armed struggle nor peaceful political protest appeared able to make any significant headway. When the architect of the Bantustan policy, Prime Minister Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, was assassinated in September 1966, he was succeeded by J. B. Vorster, an equally ruthless if more pragmatic exponent of White supremacy. White liberal opposition was at best ineffective and at worst supine while those Western powers with stakes in the Republic of South Africa that would have provided the leverage to force change – Britain, the United States and the European Community – did not wish to take any actions that would seriously jeopardize their investments and profits. As a result, these years were filled with hypocrisies: annual condemnations of apartheid accompanied by code language that signified no change but business – and profits – as usual. But South Africa’s apparently all-powerful white state structure was based upon brittle foundations and by the mid-1970s faced growing African challenges from within and without. By 1974 all but a handful of African colonies had achieved independence and the barrier consisting of white-controlled Angola, Mozambique and Rhodesia, which guarded South Africa from direct contact with independent black Africa to the north, was about to collapse.
The overthrow of the Caetano government in Lisbon and the rapid agreement by Portugal thereafter to withdraw from Angola and Mozambique in 1975 not only altered the entire political outlook for the region but also gave an immense boost to black aspirations inside the Republic. The continent’s black revolutions were at last succeeding on South Africa’s doorstep.
In 1969 a highly articulate black student, Steve Biko, led a breakaway from the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), which was multiracial, to form the more radical all-black South African Students Organization (SASO) and went on to form the Black Consciousness Movement and set up the Black People’s Convention (BPC). Since the Black Consciousness Movement apparently fitted in with its race separation theories the government at first allowed it considerable leeway. Then came the Soweto uprising. The protest began with school children in Soweto who opposed the introduction of Afrikaans as a language of instruction in the schools; Afrikaans was seen as the language of the oppressors. The main riots erupted on 16 June 1976 and lasted for three weeks. Soweto had become a sprawling city of a million blacks that was difficult to control at the best of times; in 1976 it became a battleground between rioters and police. The riots spread to other townships on the Rand, to Pretoria, Natal and the Cape and drew in Indian and Coloured youths as well as blacks. The riots were a spontaneous outburst against a system that dehumanized the black majority. They continued to break out to the end of the year and many black youths fled the country to join the ranks of the ANC or PAC in exile. The year of Soweto was another South African turning point, admitted to be so even by conservative whites.
South Africa now became increasingly politically volatile. It had taken 16 years from the events of Sharpeville to Soweto, but would take only eight years before major violence swept the country again in 1984. The government reaction to Soweto was the usual clampdown by the security forces and in October 1976 18 black movements including the Black Consciousness Movement were banned and 50 of their leaders arrested and detained. Even so, the government was forced to make concessions: electricity was extended to the townships and the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in the schools was drop
ped. The Soweto uprising marked the emergence of a black generation that had become deeply radicalized and was ready to turn to violence rather than just accept the dictation of the white minority. Altogether, the unrest lasted for a year and the final death count was in the region of 500.
The events of 1976 turned out to be the beginning of a process rather than a one-off explosion of violence; from this time onwards permanent, smouldering antagonism was likely to erupt at any time. A new generation of radicalized black youths was to become the focus of the new explosion, which occurred in 1984. Between these two events (of 1976 and 1984), however, the government continued to implement its apartheid policies and though it improved conditions for Asians and Coloureds and began to relax what was quaintly described as ‘petty apartheid’, the process of forcing the population into the homelands continued unabated. Four homelands became ‘independent’ over the five years after Soweto: Transkei (1976), Bophutatswana (1977), Venda (1979) and Ciskei (1981), although the international community resolutely refused to recognize their independent status. Finally, in 1978, the ruling National Party was rocked by the Muldergate scandal that forced Connie Mulder, the powerful political figure that many thought would succeed Vorster, to retire from politics altogether and ended Vorster’s career as well. P. W. Botha, who had served as Minister of Defence through the 1970s, became Prime Minister in September 1978.
The 1970s, then, witnessed the steady erosion of South Africa’s options. At the beginning of the decade the apartheid state seemed invulnerable. Namibia was its colony. The Portuguese had their armies in both Angola and Mozambique while in Rhodesia Smith was successfully defying Britain. These three territories formed a cordon sanitaire between South Africa and independent Africa, leaving Pretoria ‘free’ to pursue its apartheid policy and impose it on Namibia as well. The three former High Commission Territories – Bechuanaland, Basutoland and Swaziland – had by 1970 each achieved independence as, respectively, Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland and though the development of its mineral wealth and its ferry crossing over the Zambezi to Zambia at Kazungula gave Botswana a measure of freedom to act, it was still greatly dependent upon South Africa for trade, and subject to heavy pressures if it attempted too hard to act on its own. Lesotho and Swaziland were virtual captives of South Africa. By 1980 much had changed. Angola and Mozambique were independent and the cordon of states separating South Africa from the rest of the continent had collapsed; Vorster’s policies – dialogue, détente, military intervention in Angola – had each failed; and both the economy and the politics of South Africa had become subject to external pressures that had been unthinkable in 1970. When black African states issued the Lusaka Manifesto in 1969 a key passage stated: ‘Our objectives in Southern Africa stem from our commitment to the principle of human equality. We are not hostile to the Administrations of these States because they are manned and controlled by White people. We are hostile to them because they are systems of minority control, which exist as a result of, and in the pursuance of, doctrines of human inequality. What we are working for is the right of self-determination for the people of those territories.’ In 1969 the white racists of South Africa could dismiss such sentiments as black pipedreams; by 1980 they began to take on an aspect of reality for South Africa itself.
BRITAIN AND THE SALE OF ARMS TO SOUTH AFRICA
The return to power in June 1970 of a Conservative government in Britain under Edward Heath was greeted with relief in Pretoria since his party was generally far more favourable to the South African white minority than had been Labour under Harold Wilson. Within days of coming to power, Heath’s Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, announced that Britain would resume the sale of arms to South Africa that had been stopped, if reluctantly, by the Wilson government. Heath justified the resumption of arms sales to South Africa when he addressed the Lord Mayor’s Banquet on 16 November 1970. After ritually condemning apartheid, he said:
But the abhorrence of apartheid is a moral attitude, not a policy, and it is certainly not a categorical imperative against any contact with South Africa and the South Africans. There are some who believe that apartheid in South Africa will be brought to an end only by the use of force. This is emphatically not the view of Her Majesty’s Ministers. A racial war in Southern Africa, whatever its eventual outcome, would be catastrophic in its consequences for Africa. Nor do we believe that isolation of South Africa would help bring to an end her apartheid policies. It would do exactly the opposite. We believe, with deep conviction, that the moderate and liberal forces within South Africa that are working against apartheid will be best assisted by the maintenance of economic, social and cultural contacts between the rest of the world and South Africa.
In Washington that December, however, Heath found the Nixon administration against the resumption of arms sales to South Africa. A US National Security Council study favoured an unconditional embargo. The study found three flaws in the British argument: the type of arms requested by South Africa under the existing Simonstown Agreement – patrol aircraft, fighter aircraft and naval patrol craft – would make no impression upon any Russian naval presence; the Soviet threat was in the north of the Indian Ocean, far from South African influence; and arms sales to South Africa would act as a powerful stimulus for increased Russian penetration of Black Africa.1 Heath was due to attend his first Commonwealth heads of government meeting to be held in Singapore in January 1971 and the Commonwealth countries, especially Tanzania and Zambia, hoped that Britain would not make a decision until they had had the chance to influence Heath. The Singapore Conference from 14 to 22 January witnessed a confrontation between Britain’s Heath and other Commonwealth leaders, especially Presidents Kaunda, Nyerere and Obote, about the British decision to sell arms to South Africa upon which Heath appeared to be determined. The Conference established an eight-nation study group to examine the security of maritime trade routes in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean. However, the group had not yet met when Britain announced that it would allow the sale of seven Wasp helicopters to South Africa. In the debate that followed in the House of Commons, former Labour ministers denied that there was any obligation under the Simonstown Agreement to sell arms to South Africa. The sale of these helicopters in fact was as much a political gesture of solidarity as an arms transaction of real significance. When Labour was returned to power in 1974 it announced that it would maintain an arms embargo against South Africa. Meanwhile, the South African role in Western defence and the relevance of the Simonstown naval base or South African relations with NATO were increasingly questioned. For its part, South Africa speeded up its drive to become independent of Britain for its arms and decided in principle to build its own ships, according to its Defence Minister P. W. Botha.
The pressures upon the Heath government not to sell arms to South Africa were a foretaste of a wider range of pressures to be exerted upon South Africa during the decade that would come from many quarters. Typical of them was a resolution of the UN General Assembly (by 91 votes to 22 with 19 abstentions) to suspend South Africa from the UN for the rest of the 1974 Assembly. When this was put to the vote in the Security Council on 30 October it received 10 votes in favour, three against (Britain, France and the United States, and they vetoed the resolution) and two abstentions. The debate in the Security Council had been conducted since 18 October and the South African representative to the UN, Mr R. F. ‘Pik’ Botha, had argued unconvincingly that discrimination should not be equated with racialism. Duma Nokwe of the ANC told the Security Council that there was no meeting point between South Africa and the rest of the world as long as apartheid existed, and that South West Africa (Namibia) was being subjected to the same racist policies as the Republic. The government of South Africa, he said, was a ‘racist military regime, which did not represent the majority of the people’. Ivor Richard for Britain said his country totally condemned apartheid but did not believe expulsion would remedy the situation: ‘The objective is not to purge the United Nations. The object is
to persuade the South African Government to change its policies.’ South African reactions to Botha’s performance at the UN were scathing: ‘If Botha thinks he can get away with bluffing the UN that discrimination based on the principle of different ethnic groups is not the same thing as discrimination based on race and colour, he might just as well pack his diplomatic bag…’2 In reaction, the South African government withheld its annual subscription.
POLITICS
As external pressures mounted upon South Africa so internally did its harsh repression excite growing anger. One of the great scandals of the apartheid era was the ethnic cleansing that took the form of mass removals. By 1974 not less than 2,884,000 people had been affected by the population removals that were part of official policy and were carried out under various apartheid laws. At a very different level white South Africans found their precious sporting fixtures were coming under threat. The South African anti-apartheid activist, Peter Hain, had already organized Britain’s ‘Stop the 70’ campaign against the visiting South African cricketers; in 1971 he visited Australia during the early part of the Springbok rugby tour of that country to urge opposition. Sports boycotts were to become an increasingly successful feature of anti-apartheid activities during the 1970s and, for example, on 19 April 1973, the New Zealand Prime Minister, Norman Kirk, announced that the South African rugby tour of New Zealand had been cancelled. He said the tour would have divided the people of New Zealand and that a third of the police would have been required to control a single game. Students became an increasingly irritating factor for the Pretoria government. Thus in February 1973 Vorster announced that eight leading members of NUSAS had been banned under the Suppression of Communism Act, following an interim report from the Parliamentary Committee investigating the organization’s activities. Such banning of an ever-wider range of dissenters was by then a routine aspect of South African life. Robert Sobukwe, the former president of the banned Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), was prevented from leaving South Africa by the Minister of Justice, who refused to relax a banning order confining him to the Kimberley district. Sobukwe had been sentenced to five years in prison for leading anti-pass demonstrations in 1960 and sent to Robben Island. Legislation was subsequently passed to enable the government to keep him in detention on the island after his sentence was completed. He had finally been released in 1970 but restricted to the Kimberley district. There was also at this time growing conflict between some of the churches and the state. A case that received great publicity centred upon the Dean of Johannesburg, the Very Rev. Gonville ffrench-Beytagh, who was arrested on 20 January 1971 and detained for questioning. He was accused of safeguarding publications on behalf of the banned ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP). Colin Winter, the Bishop of Damaraland in Namibia, preached against imprisonment without trial. On 25 February the government carried out widespread raids on church offices in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban and Port Elizabeth. Grants made by the World Council of Churches (WCC) to guerrilla groups were central to this growing church–state conflict. Writing in The Times, John Sackur recalled how the Dutch Reformed Church had, on the orders of Dr Verwoerd, broken with the WCC in 1961. Vorster had made similar demands to other churches in 1970 though he did not get the same response. The extreme step of arresting the Dean of Johannesburg on political charges made plain Vorster’s determination to take a tough line with the churches.