A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  That memorandum led to increased official contacts with white South African officials, pro—South African U.N. votes, and the appointment of an ambassador to South Africa who showed minimal concern for the lot of black South Africans and was reported to have gone hunting on Robben Island with political prisoners as beaters.84

  The Carter administration (1977—81) tilted in the opposite direction. It considered South Africa to be a liability to the Western alliance rather than an ally. It believed that the future lay with black nationalists and that the United States had an interest in coming to terms with them. Vice-President Walter Mondale would even tell Prime Minister John Vorster that America supported the principle of majority rule with universal suffrage—the ANC formula—one person, one vote.

  CHAPTER 7

  Apartheid in Crisis, 1978-1989

  By 1978, the apartheid state was in trouble. South Africa’s economic boom of the 1960s and early 1970s had been followed by a sharp recession. The administration of the complex network of apartheid laws was proving to be extremely costly. Inflation was running at over 10 percent. The increase in the gross domestic product was scarcely keeping up with the increase in the population, and many white people were becoming poorer. There was also a shortage of the skilled labor needed to run private industry and the bureaucracy. That shortage was accentuated by the fact that in 1977, for the first time, there was a net white emigration from South Africa—largely of professionals and men and women with much-needed managerial and industrial experience. Moreover, the black population was increasing at a far greater rate than the white population and demographers were forecasting a rapid decline in the white proportion of the total population of South Africa. It had already dropped from its peak of 21 percent to 16 percent and was expected to fall to 10 percent early in the twenty-first century.1

  In other respects, too, the illusions of the Verwoerd era were shattered. The “decolonization” process, which Verwoerd had intended to assuage foreign criticism and provide Africans with the means to “develop along their own lines in their own areas,” had failed on both counts. No foreign government recognized the independence of the Transkei or Bophuthatswana, which the government had declared to be independent states in 1976 and 1977, and the economic integration of the entire country was not arrested. The client rulers of the Homelands were becoming an embarrassment. Utterly dependent on Pretoria for subsidies and protection, most of them were corrupt, inefficient, and authoritarian. Their territories were decaying and their inhabitants were struggling to survive by sending family members out to work in the white cities and on the white farms. As workers and consumers, black people were developing economic and political muscle in the heart of “white” South Africa, and their children had come to loathe the regime and its institutions. Young Indians and Coloureds as well as Africans regarded the regime as illegitimate. They were not deferential toward Whites; they were defiant.2

  The South African government also faced a transformed world order. Instead of being at the southern end of a continent controlled by Europeans, in a world dominated by Europeans and North Americans, South Africa had become an isolated anomaly. Except for Rhodesia and Namibia, its neighbors were no longer European colonies but black states. The white minority in Rhodesia was losing its war against African guerrillas. The United Nations had declared South Africa’s control of Namibia illegal and in 1978 devised a program to liberate that territory.3

  In 1977 the United Nations had passed a mandatory embargo on the sale of arms to South Africa. By 1978 the civil rights movement had made significant gains in the United States and racist opinions were no longer acceptable in American politics. Racial discrimination had been eliminated from American law and, to a considerable extent, from American practice, and black American activists were beginning to espouse the cause of black South Africans.4

  Indeed, whereas the structure of South African society had been compatible with the structure of the societies in tropical Africa, the Caribbean, much of Asia, and the United States before World War II, that was no longer the case. Since 1948, systematic racism had become the bedrock of South Africa’s law and practice. The ways had parted between South Africa and the rest of the world.5

  In those circumstances, Afrikaners were divided as to what should be done. Afrikaner solidarity, which had been the key to the electoral successes of the National party in the 1960s, was collapsing. Ironically, economic success was eroding the Afrikaner nationalist movement. Whereas in the previous decade the overwhelming majority of Afrikaners had placed ethnic above class interests, by the late 1970s Afrikaner class divisions had become more marked and more potent. Eighty-eight percent of Afrikaners were urban, 70 percent of those in white-collar jobs. Prosperous professionals, businesspeople, and absentee landowners had replaced the old rural and cultural elites in control of the National party and the Broederbond. They talked about reforming apartheid by making carefully crafted changes to appease foreign and domestic critics and at the same time to strengthen white supremacy by creating further divisions among the subject peoples. But they were encountering opposition from Afrikaners on both flanks.6

  On the right, Afrikaner urban workers and marginal farmers who relied on apartheid’s defenses against black competition and the numerous bureaucrats who lived by administering the apartheid laws feared the consequences of extending effective political rights to Blacks. They were determined to preserve the Verwoerdian system with the utmost rigor. On the left, some Afrikaner clergy and intellectuals—the very class that had produced the apartheid ideology in the first place—and several Afrikaner business leaders were beginning to realize that apartheid was both immoral and inexpedient and were starting to strive for substantial changes.

  In 1978, the National party itself was tainted by scandal. It was revealed that members of the government had misappropriated public funds intended for secret propaganda purposes. The taint extended to senior cabinet ministers and even to Prime Minister John Vorster, who had succeeded Verwoerd in 1966. On September 28, Vorster resigned and the parliamentary members of the party elected Pieter Willem Botha as their leader and hence as Vorster’s successor.7

  Botha, who was born in 1916, was intelligent, determined, hot-tempered, and domineering. A politician through and through, he was a National party organizer at the age of twenty, a member of the Sauer commission that provided the party with its racial agenda in 1946, and a member of Parliament for George, an eastern Cape constituency, since the Nationalist triumph in 1948. As minister of defense since 1966, he had built the South African army into the most formidable military machine in Africa. He claimed that the international community was waging a “total onslaught” against South Africa and gave the military a major say in the government. The State Security Council, which had been created in 1972, had rarely met under Vorster. Under Botha, it became more powerful than the cabinet. Botha chaired the council, which included the minister of defense (Gen. Magnus Malan, the former head of the Defence Force), five other cabinet officers, and the heads of the Defence Force, the police, and the intelligence services.8

  Reforming Apartheid

  The policy of the Botha administration was a complex attempt to adapt to changing circumstances without sacrificing Afrikaner power. It included efforts to neutralize South Africa’s neighbors, to scrap apartheid symbols and practices that were not essential to the maintenance of white supremacy, to draw English-speaking citizens into the party, to win the cooperation of big business, to intensify the ethnic and class cleavages among the subject peoples, and to suppress domestic dissidents.

  The government’s domestic reforms resulted from investigations made by special commissions of inquiry and by the President’s Council—a sixty-one-member body appointed by the president with a large white majority and a few Coloureds and Indians but no Africans. The first significant change concerned labor relations and was a response both to the rash of industrial strikes that had occurred since 1973 and to the need of manufacturing in
dustry for settled and compliant labor. By 1979, there were twenty-seven—illegal—democratically organized African trade unions, with African working-class leaders and significant support from key white activists. A commission chaired by Professor N. Wiehahn recommended that African workers be brought under control by legislation. Job reservation should be abolished, alj trade unions (including African) should register, and each union should be free to prescribe membership qualifications as it saw fit. During 1979, Parliament passed the proposed legislation. Unions were to apply for registration, and all registered unions were to have access to the industrial court and the right to strike after a thirty-day notification period. In the same year, Parliament passed further legislation as a result of the recommendations of a commission chaired by Dr. P. J. Riekert, making it a criminal offense, subject to a large fine, for employers to hire Africans who did not possess residential rights in the cities.9

  By 1986, African trade unions had a dues-paying membership of over a million, spread between two national federations: the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the Council of Unions of South Africa-Azanian Confederation of Trade Unions (CUSA-AZACTU), which was imbued with a black consciousness philosophy. Besides their demands for wage increases, which met with considerable success, these unions gave Africans experience in democratic organization and became sources of worker power. The government’s intention to control the African trade unions by legalizing them had backfired. By 1986, both federations were politically militant. African unions had become a central force in the struggle for power in South Africa.10

  The next major change was constitutional. Following prolonged debates in the President’s Council and the all-white Parliament, and a two-to-one majority in a referendum of white voters, a new constitution came into force in 1984. The new Parliament consisted of three uniracial chambers: a House of Assembly, comprising 178 white people elected by Whites; a House of Representatives of 85 Coloureds elected by Coloureds; and a House of Delegates of 45 Indians elected by Indians. Accordingly, when joint sessions were held Whites held a distinct majority. A multiracial cabinet drawn from the three chambers became responsible for “general affairs,” such as taxation, foreign affairs, defense, state security, law and order, commerce and industry, and African affairs. Uniracial ministers’ councils became responsible for “own affairs,” such as education, health, and local government. The State President, elected by a college of 50 White, 25 Coloured, and 13 Indian members of Parliament, appointed the members of the cabinet and the ministers’ councils. He could dissolve Parliament at any time. He was empowered to decide which were “general” and which were “own” affairs, and he was responsible for “the control and administration of black [that is, African] affairs.”11

  For the first time, the Nationalist government had addressed the question of power by including Blacks in the political process. But the new constitution was inadequate on three counts. First, the primary official groupings of South Africans continued to be racial. Second, Whites continued to be dominant under the new constitution, since they could always outvote the Coloureds and Indians on important questions. Third, the Africans—75 percent of the population of South Africa (including the Homelands)—had no say in the new dispensation. The other significant feature of the new constitution was that it introduced a strong presidential system in place of the previous Westminster model of cabinet government.

  Duly elected state president, P. W. Botha appointed a cabinet in which members of his National party were in charge of all the departments responsible for “general affairs.” The cabinet included one Coloured and one Indian member, but neither had a departmental portfolio. This cumbersome arrangement did not succeed in winning the hearts or minds of most Coloured and Indian people, who showed their discontent by refraining from participating. Only 61 percent of the Coloured adults and 57 percent of the Indian adults bothered to register, and only 30 percent of registered Coloureds and 20 percent of registered Indians voted in the election.12 The new constitution, moreover, accentuated the alienation of the African population from the regime, and it compounded the costs and the confusion of government by adding still more departments of education, health, and welfare to those already existing in South Africa and its ten Homelands.

  The government also made a fresh effort to deal with the problem of African urbanization. By the early 1980s, it recognized that some Africans, referred to as “urban insiders,” were legally entitled to live permanently in the metropolitan areas, but it was still trying to apply the pass laws to prevent Africans domiciled in the Homelands from coming to the cities except as migrant workers on temporary contracts. In 1984, for example, officials arrested 23 8,894 Africans for pass law offenses. Even so, they were unable to stem the tide. The reason was obvious. The Homelands could not sustain their populations. For their inhabitants, it was a matter of survival. As one African worker said, “The countryside is pushing you into the cities to survive; the cities are pushing you in the countryside to die.”13

  In 1986, accepting this reality, the government repealed no fewer than thirty-four legislative enactments that had constituted the pass laws. It announced a policy of “orderly urbanization.” It still hoped—vainly, as it proved—that orderly urbanization would be promoted by the Natives Land Act (1913) and the Group Areas Act (1950) and its amendments, which confined Africans to specific zones in towns, by the lack of housing and other amenities in those zones and by the ceiling on urban employment. The concession applied, moreover, only to Africans who were South African citizens. Citizens of the “independent Homelands,” which by then included Venda and the Ciskei, as well as the Transkei and Bophuthatswana, were regarded as aliens in South Africa, and employers were not to hire them without special official permission.14

  The government had also come to realize that the geographical framework of the Verwoerd era did not correspond with economic realities. It planned to create new institutions, cutting across the Homeland boundaries, by dividing South Africa into four metropolitan regions (the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging triangle, Port Elizabeth, Durban-Pinetown, and Cape Town) and four development regions centered on such cities as Bloemfontein. The regional institutions would parallel the institutions at the national level, except that Africans were to be included. Each region was to have a multiracial Regional Services Council for general affairs and uniracial councils for own affairs. The government also replaced the provincial councils with executive committees responsible for general affairs. Although Africans were to be included in these new bodies, however, the councils would be undemocratic: their members would be appointed by the government or indirectly elected.15

  By June 1986, the government had also eliminated some segregation laws. It had repealed the bans on multiracial political parties and interracial sex and marriage. It had stopped reserving by law particular categories of jobs for white workers. It had opened up the business centers in the cities to black traders. It had desegregated some classes of hotels, restaurants, trains, buses, and public facilities and had permitted sports contests to take place between teams of different races. It was also turning a blind eye to black occupation of apartments and houses in parts of Johannesburg and Cape Town that were zoned under the Group Areas Act for exclusive white occupation. Year after year, the government had also increased the funds for black education. During the early 1980s, moreover, industry had raised the level of black wages (although by 1986 black real wages had stabilized as a result of inflation). From time to time, government spokespeople had also made a number of reassuring statements for African consumption. On one occasion, Botha himself said that South Africa had outgrown apartheid and that Africans would be incorporated into the decision-making process at the national level.16

  The reform process had distinct limits. School education remained strictly segregated, and in 1986 the government was still spending more than seven times as much to educate a white child as to educate an African child,17 and similar disparities
remained in health and welfare services. Although some black people in the townships were well-to-do, the vast majority of Blacks were poor, and several million (3.5 million by one estimate) were unemployed and destitute. The Land Act and the Group Areas Act still excluded Africans from land ownership outside the Homelands and the African townships. Moreover, in spite of assurances to the contrary, the government was continuing to remove African communities from their homes. It was also destroying squatter camps that Africans had formed on the outskirts of Cape Town and Port Elizabeth.18 The army as well as the police was being used to control the townships. Thousands of people were being detained in solitary confinement, without being brought to trial and without the knowledge of their families, friends, or lawyers. In addition, in spite of much vague official talk about including Africans in national decision-making, President Botha and his colleagues were adamant about retaining the racial structure of government institutions and rejected any suggestion that Africans should participate equally with Whites.

  Domestic Resistance, 1978-1986

  Whereas in 1960 and 1961 the government had successfully reimposed its version of law and order for the next decade and more by arresting dissidents and banning their organizations, similar actions in 1976 and 1977 failed to have the same effect. Black resistance soon became more formidable than before. After the Soweto uprising, a protest culture pervaded the black population of South Africa. Students and workers, children and adults, men and women, the educated and the uneducated became involved in efforts to liberate the country from apartheid. Poets, novelists, dramatists, photographers, and painters conveyed the resistance message to vast audiences. A new journal, Staffrider, published much of their work. Children scrawled antiapartheid graffiti on walls. Crowds wore the ANC colors and sang ANC songs at funerals. Indeed, with relatively few exceptions, the government failed to drive wedges between urban “insiders” and “outsiders,” or between middle-class and proletarian Blacks, or between Africans and Coloureds and Asians; nor did it deter an increasing number of young Whites from identifying with the resistance.19