by Guy Arnold
Challenges to South Africa’s labour practices were constantly emerging at this time. Vorster told employers that they might take steps to improve the productive use of non-white labour, and he told the TUC that he wanted to see greater collective bargaining for black workers, provided it developed in an orderly way. Vorster, carefully, was changing his approach to black-white labour relations in reaction to growing realities that could not be ignored. The TUC report was issued on 15 December 1973. It made four principal recommendations: Continuation of opposition to British investment in South Africa, unless British firms show ‘in a practical way’ that they are encouraging and recognizing genuinely independent trade unions for African workers; that the TUC’s General Council should discourage the emigration of white workers to South Africa; that the ICFTU and TUC should establish a ‘focal point’ in South Africa, to plan and assist ‘on a massive scale’ the organization of Africans into unions and that funds be raised to employ full-time black organizers; that these two bodies should mobilize international support for African trade union organizations and a sum of £100,000 be collected. Other reforms advocated included: provision of universal free education; introduction of the rate for the job; provision of trade training opportunities on a massive scale. The South African Star headlined ‘TUC Report Stuns South Africa’ and described its recommendations as ‘potentially explosive’ and said they would be likely to be regarded as an interference in South Africa’s internal affairs. The Star asked: ‘Does it mean to help promote exclusively African unions or to promote African rights within non-racial unions?’22 The reaction of Anglo American was to say it did not believe black trade unions were necessary in South Africa. A spokesman for the group said a survey showed that 97 per cent of black workers at three representative mines ‘were aware they could air their grievances through the works committees’. According to the Labour correspondent of the South African Star, 1973 marked ‘the emergence of the hitherto silent majority – the country’s millions of African, Coloured and Asian workers’. Strikes in Natal won wage increases for at least 150,000 workers and many more got higher pay because of employers’ heightened awareness or to prevent strikes. ‘Employers and unions were forced to reassess their attitudes to black workers, particularly on the question of representation.’23 The average wages for black workers in gold- and coal-mines were 50 per cent higher as of 1 January 1974 than a year earlier while Africans in Durban were being trained as crane operators for the first time and given more scope in the car assembly industry. Early in 1974 the British House of Commons Sub-Committee to study wages and conditions in British companies in South Africa published its report, having received submissions from 141 companies. It urged companies to adopt a ‘code of conduct’ for the improvement of African conditions and urged the British Embassy in South Africa and the Department of Trade and Industry to abandon their ‘fairly passive role’ and keep a close watch on companies’ employment practices. The committee listed 63 companies that were paying minimum wages below the PDL.
Thus, 1973 was a turning point in perceptions of the South African economy and the impact upon it of apartheid. The Church of England Board for Social Responsibility, for example, produced two memoranda on investment in South Africa, the second of which commented that the evidence of the preceding nine months had greatly strengthened the view that shareholder action was a viable policy: keep investments in South Africa and use them as levers for change. Turmoil in the labour market and clear indications that black labour would no longer accept its servile role in the South African economy had a marked effect upon investment flows. South Africa had always depended upon inward investment as a crucial ingredient in its development. By the latter years of the decade it began to see a real change in the readiness of external business to put its money into a country that no longer seemed as secure as apartheid had kept it for so many years. ‘For the first time ever, the first quarter of 1977 saw a net outflow of long-term capital. The estimated outflow for the whole of 1977 was R1,000 million (cf. a net inflow of R1,900 million in 1975) in a staggering turnabout of almost R3,000 million.’24 Such figures gave the South African ruling establishment real pause to think.
DIALOGUE AND DÉTENTE
No other country on the African continent was so closely monitored from outside as was South Africa. There were a number of reasons for this scrutiny. It was potentially and actually the most powerful country on the continent; it was the repository of major Western investments and an important trading partner, especially for Britain; its policy of apartheid made it the focus of deep antagonism for black Africa in particular and the world community more generally; moreover, at a time when the Cold War was at its height, South African intransigence and Western reluctance to exert upon it the pressures that it might have employed gave ample scope to the USSR to support guerrilla movements and win propaganda victories against the West. The question, then, was whether change, which almost everyone except the most myopic saw to be inevitable, could come about peacefully or violently. Could white South Africa save itself by coming to terms with its black majority before catastrophe engulfed the whole of Southern Africa? Vorster, ruthless racist though he might be, saw that at the very least he must try to come to an accommodation with independent black Africa and so, at the beginning of the decade, he embarked upon his ‘outward-looking policy’, seeking to establish a dialogue with Black Africa.
Malawi under its idiosyncratic ruler Hastings Banda was the only Black African country to enter into diplomatic relations with South Africa, which it had done as early as 1967, and this was seen as a major breakthrough in Pretoria. But the question soon arose: if other black states were to follow Malawi’s example, how many black diplomats, enjoying a kind of honorary white status, would South Africa be prepared to accept? Certainly, 1970 was an encouraging year for dialogue. Apart from Malawi, the Malagasy Republic signed a loan agreement with South Africa for R4.5 million for development, especially tourism. The Foreign Minister of Mauritius, Caetan Duval, also favoured close relations with the Republic. Then a more important breakthrough was achieved in West Africa. The prestigious Francophone leader, President Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire, favoured dialogue with South Africa and quipped that the only invasion of that country he supported would be one by African diplomats. President Kofi Busia of Ghana also came out in favour of dialogue. On the other hand, Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya and Uganda opposed dialogue and Somalia’s President Siad Barre appealed to French-speaking African leaders to withdraw any offer to hold talks with South Africa. The South African Star said that South Africa’s over-enthusiastic welcome of the Côte d’Ivoire proposal for dialogue had seriously compromised any chance of success. The Portuguese view that the proposals from Abidjan were a firm reply to the stand taken by Zambia’s President Kaunda had also done the Abidjan initiative harm. Other Francophone states were more cautious. Leopold Senghor of Senegal and Haile Selassie of Ethiopia were opposed to the move.25
In April 1971 a major row between Vorster and Kaunda was conducted by published correspondence, with Vorster suggesting that Kaunda had been trying secretly to do a deal with South Africa and Kaunda denying it. In the end Kaunda published all the correspondence that had taken place, and this bore out his, rather than Vorster’s, version of events. The general view in the South African press was that Vorster had tried too hard to discredit Kaunda whom he saw as the chief obstacle to South African dialogue with other African states. An excellent appraisal of Vorster’s dialogue efforts and problems was made at the time by the journalist Derek Ingram and is worth quoting at length.26
Vorster is now switching to a strategy that aims at isolating the hard core of countries which oppose the ideas of a dialogue with South Africa. For more than three years Zambia has been the Number One target for conversion. The country occupies the key geographical position in the centre of Southern Africa, lying between Portuguese Angola to the west and Portuguese Mozambique to the east. Apart from Zambia the whole of this area,
which includes Rhodesia, Malawi and Botswana, lies within what can be regarded as a White sphere of influence… In Angola and Mozambique the Portuguese were trying to hold the line firm.
Malawi had adopted a friendly posture towards Pretoria. But the line was broken by Zambia, and Zambia in turn was giving aid and comfort to Botswana (the two have a common frontier point South Africa disputes), which borders half of South Africa. ‘Pacification’ of Zambia would reap a double dividend. Botswana, under President Sir Seretse Khama, by no means pursues a soft line towards South Africa. Sir Seretse is a close friend of Dr Kaunda and is sustained by the fact that his country neighbours Zambia. If Zambia took a more dove-like line Botswana would be isolated and forced to do likewise.
In his article Ingram pointed out that Vorster ‘gave the impression that President Kaunda had been trying to do a deal with South Africa, whereas all the evidence is that it was South Africa that had been trying to do a deal with Zambia. In fact, Vorster himself stated that Dr Verwoerd had initiated the contacts two years earlier – in 1966’.
Vorster put in a lot of time and effort to woo Kaunda and his uncharacteristic move in revealing private correspondence to Parliament appears to have been made because he realized that he had come to the end of the road with Kaunda.
Angry at this failure, Vorster had dubbed Kaunda a ‘double-dealer’.
On 16 August 1971 President Banda of Malawi arrived in South Africa to be greeted with full military honours. His programme included a state banquet hosted by State President Fouché and dinner with the Prime Minister at the President Hotel in Johannesburg. Over four days Banda visited all the Bantustan leaders, the Chairman of the Coloured Persons Representative Council and the South African Indian Council. Outside Soweto’s administration offices Banda said to several thousand cheering Africans, mostly schoolchildren: ‘I do not like this system of apartheid, but I prefer to talk. If I isolate South Africa, if I boycott South Africa, I isolate you, my people, my children.’27 His visit was the high point of the dialogue initiative; in the years that followed, Malawi would become increasingly isolated in relation to the unfolding events in Southern Africa. One of the early dialogue breakthroughs had been with the Malagasy Republic but following the coup of June 1972 that brought the military to power in Antananarivo, the new Foreign Minister, Didier Ratsiraka, broke all relations with South Africa. Reactions in South Africa to this event were conflicting. The Sunday Tribune said, ‘Now that the Prime Minister seems to be joining the right wing retreat into darkness, not even the best disposed of Black states could afford to keep company with South Africa – as Malagasy has now made clear.’ On the other hand, Die Hoofstad attacked the ‘cynical unpatriotic jubilation in the English press’ at this set back to the government’s outward-looking policy.
With the collapse of dialogue Vorster turned to détente with the front-line states that, whether they wanted it or not, were steadily becoming involved in a widening conflict across the whole region. At the heart of the détente exercise was the problem of what to do about Smith’s Rhodesia. In 1970 Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State under President Nixon, had favoured maintaining the political balance in Southern Africa in support of the whites. The collapse of Portuguese power in Southern Africa altered the situation irrevocably while Soviet/Cuban intervention in Angola in 1975 altered the position still further. As a result, Western policies in Southern Africa were in ruins. Kissinger needed to implement a new policy and essentially this was to sacrifice Smith’s Rhodesia to buy time for South Africa; and to counterbalance the successful Soviet/Cuban intervention in Angola by demonstrating a new Western concern for black aspirations in the region. In a speech to his constituency on 6 November 1974, foreshadowing the détente exercise he was about to launch, Vorster appealed to political commentators to give South Africa a chance. If they did, he said, they would be surprised where South Africa would stand in about six to 12 months. Earlier that year, the spark to set off policy changes throughout Southern Africa came in the form of the 25 April Revolution in Lisbon, which overthrew the Caetano ‘dictatorship’. As a result the premise upon which South Africa had operated ever since Sharpeville – that there was a cordon sanitaire consisting of Angola, Rhodesia and Mozambique between itself and Black Africa – had disappeared. The Portuguese withdrawal from Angola brought an independent black-ruled state to the borders of Namibia, South Africa’s illegally held colony where it was already waging a war in the border region of Ovamboland that would now escalate. The Portuguese withdrawal from Mozambique meant Rhodesia’s flank had been turned and instead of Smith having a friendly Portugal on his eastern border, that ally had been replaced by a FRELIMO government that would, as it at once did, assist his guerrilla opponents. As a consequence an exposed Rhodesia became overnight a liability rather than an asset for South Africa.
Détente would provide a way out for both South Africa and the front-line states since both sides wanted a peaceful solution. Such a solution could only be obtained at a price and for South Africa the price was the betrayal of Smith’s Rhodesia. Détente, then, was an exercise designed to persuade Smith that UDI could no longer be sustained and that he had to come to terms with majority rule. Smith was not prepared to play. South Africa withdrew its police and troops from Rhodesia and Vorster went all out to achieve good relations with Mozambique, not least because South Africa needed the ocean outlet provided by Maputo. Pragmatically, FRELIMO accepted this South African policy as it could not afford to close Beira to Rhodesia as well as Maputo to South Africa. After it became clear that Smith would not abandon UDI to suit South Africa’s new strategy, Vorster in turn abandoned his support for Rhodesia and gave up his attempt to achieve détente with the front-line states since they still insisted, as they had to, that détente must also presuppose the abandonment of apartheid. Vorster then turned to his third alternative: using South Africa’s military power to install pro, or at least neutral, governments in its black neighbours. The result was the South African military incursion into Angola.28
Vorster was immediately statesmanlike in his approach to Mozambique: like Smith before him, he wanted to secure his eastern flank. ‘A Black government in Mozambique holds no fears for us whatever,’ he said. He would not support the abortive white counter-revolution in Maputo and in response to the economic and other chaos in Mozambique during the transitional period said: ‘I don’t like it. Unrest in any part of the world gives cause for concern, especially in a neighbouring country. Whoever takes over in Mozambique has a tough task ahead of him. It will require exceptional leadership. They have my sympathy and I wish them well.’29 In an important speech to the South African Senate on 23 October to which the diplomatic corps had been invited, Vorster said: ‘Southern Africa is at the crossroads and should choose now between peace and escalating violence.’ The cost of confrontation, he said, would be ‘high – too high for Southern Africa to pay’. Of Rhodesia he said, ‘It is in the interests of all parties to find a solution,’ although Smith could have been excused for suggesting Vorster meant in South Africa’s interests. He was more ambivalent about Namibia: ‘South Africa would not withdraw suddenly.’ At no time in all the détente negotiations over 1974/75, until he abandoned the exercise for intervention in Angola, did Vorster in any way contemplate ending apartheid. Similarly, the African states had no intention of abandoning the ‘unfinished African revolution’ – that is, the achievement of majority rule in the south and the end of racial discrimination.
Crucial to the new situation in Southern Africa would be Western policy reappraisals, hence the Kissinger mission to ‘resolve’ the Rhodesia question, accompanied by a greater readiness in the West, if not to mount pressures upon South Africa, at least to be less ready actually to support its position. Until 1974 the image of South Africa had been that of a stable white-ruled country, largely invulnerable to external pressures for change. This image was now greatly weakened: at home the homeland leaders were becoming increasingly outspoken and defiant as were stu
dents and Coloured leaders; abroad, the collapse of Portugal’s African Empire revealed South Africa suddenly to be far more vulnerable to outside pressures. There was now a real chance that it would be isolated and that former Western friends would become less accommodating. This was borne out in 1975 when France placed an arms embargo on South Africa. White political figures began to throw doubts on the permanency of apartheid. Theo Gerdener, a former Minister of Interior who had become the leader of the Democratic Party, said, ‘No white minority in Southern Africa could any longer remain standing on its own… I have warned that whites who believe that white supremacy can be maintained for ever must think again.’
In the retrospect of history the claims of a Communist (Soviet) threat appear less startling than at the time; in particular, the role of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger needs to be re-examined in order to separate what he claimed at the time from what actually appears to have happened. Thus, the Soviet Union only reluctantly backed Cuban intervention in Angola and tried to put limits upon it. The US official version of events depicted the war in Angola as a major new challenge to US power by an expansionist Moscow, newly confident following the US defeat in Vietnam. In his memoirs Kissinger wrote: ‘My assessment was if the Soviet Union can interfere 8,000 miles from home in an undisputed way and control Zaïre’s and Zambia’s access to the sea, then the Southern countries must conclude that the US has abdicated in Southern Africa.’ In fact the real picture was substantially different. Castro had already sent military advisers, earlier in 1975, to assist the MPLA. He decided to send troops to Angola on 4 November in response to the South African invasion that was already under way. At the time Washington claimed that South Africa had invaded in order to prevent a Cuban takeover of the country. In fact the US knew South Africa’s covert invasion plans in advance and co-operated militarily with its forces, contrary to Kissinger’s testimony to Congress and what he later said in his memoirs. Castro decided to send troops to Angola without informing the Soviet Union and deployed them at his own expense from November 1975 to January 1976 and only then did Moscow agree to arrange for a maximum of 10 flights to help Cuba. In the end Cuba deployed 30,000 troops in Angola and effectively defeated the ‘secret’ invasion by South Africa when its column reached the outskirts of Luanda. Cuban intervention was also credited with the MPLA’s victory over the two factions backed by the US and China, UNITA under Jonas Savimbi and the FNLA under Holden Roberto. Cuba, in fact, proved a headache for Moscow, which under Brezhnev did not want ‘adventurism’. The MPLA leader, Agostinho Neto, complained in 1975 of Moscow’s lacklustre support for he hoped the war in Angola would become ‘a vital issue in the fight against imperialism’. A National Security Council meeting of 27 June 1975 under the US Secretary of Defence, James Schlesinger, suggested that Washington ‘encourage the disintegration of Angola’, implying that Washington’s main interest in the nation was Cabinda, the oil-rich enclave surrounded by territory of the Congo and Zaïre. At that meeting Kissinger indicated that the CIA’s oversight committee had authorized actions for both money and arms. Robert Hultslander was the CIA chief of station in Luanda from July to November 1975, when the US evacuated its mission. He said that US officers on the ground believed that the MPLA was the ‘best qualified movement to govern Angola’. His assessment lost him his foreign service career ‘when he refused to bend his reporting to Kissinger’s policy’. He said: ‘Instead of working with the moderate elements in Angola, which I believe we could have found within the MPLA, we supported the radical, tribal “anti-Soviet right”.’30 Such revelations cast a new light on the events of that time.