A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  The TRC subpoenaed Botha and de Klerk. Botha refused to comply; everything he did was in defense of South Africa against international communism, and he would never apologize for apartheid: “I’ve said many times that the word apartheid means good neighborliness.”39 Unlike Botha, de Klerk sent two written submissions and accepted his invitation to attend the commission. He gave a half-hearted apology for apartheid but insisted that he had never authorized and had not even been aware of the brutal activities of the police and military units. De Klerk never budged from that position, and the exasperated commissioners were convinced that he was lying.40 Buthelezi also accepted the commission’s invitation, but he used the occasion to denounce the TRC and put all the blame for violence on the ANC. In their report, the commissioners found that Botha and Buthelezi were responsible for gross violations of human rights and that de Klerk was an accessory to such violations.41

  Although white supremacists linked to the former government had been responsible for a vast majority of the violence reported to the TRC, the liberation forces, too, had committed a substantial number of grave abuses—exploding bombs in public places, planting land mines, murdering collaborative councillors and policemen (some by “necklacing”—placing a tire filled with kerosene around the victim’s neck and setting the tire on fire), and torturing and killing suspected spies in the guerrilla camps in Angola. Thabo Mbeki admitted to the commission that some such events had taken place, and he said that the ANC accepted responsibility for attacks carried out by its members; but he insisted that all such actions should be condoned because the ANC had been involved in a just war of liberation, which distinguished them from atrocities committed by the apartheid state. The commission, led by chairman Tutu, would have none of that. When the ANC demanded a blanket amnesty, he threatened to resign if that was granted, and the ANC relented. The TRC endorsed the United Nations resolution that apartheid was a crime against humanity, but it drew a distinction between a “just war” and “just means” and found the ANC guilty of gross violations of human rights. In his introduction to the TRC report, Tutu explained that “a gross violation is a gross violation, whoever commits it and for whatever reason. There is this legal equivalence between all perpetrators. Their political affiliation is irrelevant.” Nevertheless, the committee granted amnesty to thirty-seven ANC politicians, including Mbeki.42

  From the beginning, the TRC was the recipient of much white criticism. Whites denounced the law creating the commission and the anti-apartheid background of most of its members. Then, as African victims poured out accounts of their sufferings, most Whites bitterly opposed the entire process. This grew to a crescendo of hatred in the Afrikaans press after the commission cross-examined de Klerk and granted amnesty to the thirty-seven ANC leaders. When the TRC held hearings in Afrikaner strongholds like Ladybrand in the Orange Free State, residents insulted the commissioners and refused to serve black members in the restaurants or threw them out.43 Moreover, one of the two Afrikaner commissioners resigned, and although the other signed the TRC report, he attached a dissenting minority report.44 Many Africans, too, were outraged that the TRC criticized crimes committed by the liberation forces as severely as apartheid crimes.45

  Before its report was published, the TRC, in accordance with its legal obligations, sent summaries of its findings to two hundred individuals and organizations it had criticized. Their reactions were unanimously hostile. De Klerk demanded changes in the findings against him, and when the TRC refused, he obtained an interdict from the Cape provincial division of the High Court, forcing the commission to remove the passage pending a further court hearing. Mbeki accused the commission of criminalizing the anti-apartheid struggle and applied to the High Court to stop publication, whereupon an outraged Tutu gave a series of press interviews. “We can’t assume,” he said, “that yesterday’s oppressed will not become tomorrow’s oppressors. We have seen it happen all over the world, and we shouldn’t be surprised it if happens here.”46 However, the court threw out the ANC’s application, and three hours later Tutu presented the report to Mandela, who accepted it graciously, “with all its imperfections.” But Mbeki described the report as “wrong and misguided,” the National party called it “flawed and divisive,” and Buthelezi insisted that his hands were clean.47

  The TRC discovered and revealed a great deal of information about the heinous behavior of agents of the apartheid regime, even though the National party tried to thwart it by destroying masses of incriminating documents. The commission also showed that some ANC operatives, too, had committed serious crimes. But the TRC did not advance the cause of racial reconciliation. Indeed, in the short run it had the opposite effect, accentuating the racial divisions in South African society. Nor did the TRC bring justice to the victims of political violence. Many killers and torturers walked free for talking about their crimes, and victims received little compensation from the reparation committee. Notwithstanding the noble efforts of many South Africans, including Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, race continued to be the basic line of division in South African society, with class becoming increasingly significant among blacks.48 The political parties were overwhelmingly racial or ethnic in membership: Africans in the ANC, Zulus in the IFP, Whites and Coloureds in the Democratic party and the National party; and most South Africans still socialized exclusively with members of their own “race,” as they had under colonialism and apartheid. This was largely because of economics—the persisting gulf between the prosperity of most Whites and the abject poverty of most Blacks.

  The Economy

  Besides reconciliation, the Mandela government had two major goals: to create growth and to improve the quality of life for the majority of the citizens—the victims of apartheid. Both goals were desirable; moreover, if successful they would support each other. Economic growth would generate the means to pay for programs to improve the lives of the poor, and a population provided with better living conditions would create unprecedented wealth. Nevertheless, if both goals were pursued simultaneously from the beginning of the new regime, they would not be compatible. In order to promote growth, the government needed to attract massive infusions of foreign investments and postpone spending substantial resources on welfare. That would be a difficult and risky policy. It would involve opening South Africa to the global market and exposing South African industry to foreign competition. This would oblige industry to stand firm against demands for higher wages, to slim the workforce, and to make greater use of high technology; and this, in turn, would increase the already vast numbers of the unemployed. If the Mandela government, however, had concentrated on improving the living conditions of the masses, it would have rapidly exhausted its financial resources and neglected the structural reforms that were essential for growth.49

  Understandably, the Mandela government tried to do both things at once. During the run-up to the 1994 election, the ANC issued a Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP), which became the official policy of the government of national unity. Government and the private sector were to cooperate in creating jobs through public works; three hundred thousand houses were to be built each year; all South Africans were to have access to clean water, sanitation, and electricity; health, education, and welfare services were to be improved; and 30 percent of the land was to be redistributed to Blacks. This ambitious program aroused great expectations that could not possibly be fulfilled.50 The government also tried to make the economy grow rapidly. For this purpose, since there seemed to be no rational alternative in the globalizing post-Cold War world, the ANC pursued capitalist policies—even though it had been imbued by its Soviet sponsors with a belief in a command economy, and the South African Communist party was still an integral part of the ANC. The government began to open South Africa to the world economy, reducing trade tariffs and easing currency convertibility for foreign residents and companies. The international community was delighted and welcomed South Africa back into the fold. The government also enhanced its esteem by
dismantling the nuclear weapons that its predecessor had secretly created. The United Nations restored the credentials that South Africa lost in 1992: the Security Council and the United States and other countries lifted their sanctions, South Africa rejoined the British Commonwealth, which it had left in 1961, and South African rugby and cricket teams went on international tours again.51

  Mandela launched a campaign to attract investment capital from foreign businesses, governments, and international agencies. He devoted much time and energy to this cause. He traveled repeatedly to Europe and the United States, where he was feted as a hero. In October 1994, he addressed the United Nations General Assembly and both houses of Congress. “We cannot rest,” he told the United Nations, “while millions of our people suffer the pain and indignity of poverty in all its forms. The success of South Africa’s democracy depends on our ability to change the material conditions of life of our people so that they not only have the vote, but bread and work as well.”52

  The response was considerable but far short of what South Africans hoped for. Between 1995 and 1997, the principal sources of direct foreign investment in South Africa were the United States and, surprisingly, Malaysia, followed by Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan.53 But most government contributors offered grants to South Africa for specific projects, and private investors remained cautious, deterred by South Africa’s culture of violence; its burst of strikes; its unionized, highly paid, unskilled labor force; and lingering doubts about the government’s long-term commitment to capitalism. Investors typically bought shares in long-established companies, reacquired control of subsidiaries from which they had withdrawn in the era of sanctions, and arranged to market goods that had been manufactured in their own countries; but they did not invest much capital in new enterprises or create many new jobs. Moreover, some of the funds promised by foreign governments for development were not claimed for many months—through bureaucratic bungling.54

  By 1996, it was evident that the economy was not growing at a rate sufficient to fund the RDP program. After the declines in 1990-93, the gross domestic product per head grew by only 0.6 percent in 1994, 1.2 percent in 1995, and 1.0 percent in 1996, when it was still far below the 1981 level. In 1996, gold production fell to its lowest level in forty years, the rand declined by 21 percent against the U.S. dollar, and unemployment reached a shocking level. According to the Central Statistical Service, in 1995 29 percent of those aged fifteen and above were unemployed, another 12 percent were employed in the informal sector, and only 59 percent had jobs in the formal sector. This burden fell heavily on those who lacked skills and were not white: 3 7 percent of Africans aged fifteen and above, 22 percent of Coloureds, and 15 percent of Asians were unemployed; but only 6 percent of Whites were unemployed, an excellent level in industrial societies.55 At the other end of the labor market, there was a serious dearth of skills and a consequential decline in efficiency in both the private and the public sectors. In 1994 and 1995, South Africa sustained a net loss of more than 1,700 people in professional occupations, and further losses occurred throughout the Mandela presidency, while many Africans were appointed to jobs for which they did not have appropriate education or training.56 This combination of massive black unemployment and the unskilling of the labor force was the great economic challenge confronting South Africa. Meanwhile, the RDP was falling far short of its targets.

  In response to these problems, Mandela abolished the RDP ministry in March 1996, and three months later the government adopted a new policy, labeled Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR), which focused on growth rather than on trying, at the same time, to make major, immediate improvements to the lives of the poor, GEAR, as Jesmond Blu-menfeld explains, contained “the conventional world-wide policy wisdom of the 1980s and 1990s: improved macroeconomic balance, increased openness to international flows of goods and capital, and greater liberalization of markets.” It committed the government to new investment incentives, further tariff reductions, a drastic decrease in public sector employment, and budgetary reforms; and it set targets for 2000, including a GDP annual growth rate of 6 percent and the creation of 1.3 million new formal sector jobs.57

  Those expectations, too, were not fulfilled. The government was not able to apply the new policy effectively, due to a lack of administrative skills and also because it could not overcome trade union protection of the high level of unskilled and semi-skilled wages. The result was that investors preferred capital-intensive projects in South Africa or placed their capital elsewhere. Furthermore, the global financial crisis that started in Southeast Asia had serious spillover effects in South Africa; there was a general decline in investment in countries like South Africa, and Malaysia, which had invested heavily in South Africa before the crisis, ceased to do so. The annual growth rate of the GDP actually declined from 3.2 percent in 1996, to 1.9 percent in 1997, to near zero in 1998; and early in 1999 the economy was in recession again. The dollar value of the rand dropped by 17 percent in 1998; unemployment continued to increase; public services continued to deteriorate; more professional people emigrated; and Anglo American and South African breweries transferred their headquarters to London.58 According to the World Competitiveness Yearbook of the Swiss Institute for Management Development, South Africa ranked forty-second out of forty-seven countries—behind Brazil, Thailand, the Philippines, and the People’s Republic of China. In 1999, the Harvard Institute for International Development placed South Africa forty-seventh out of fifty-nine countries—last in terms of labor practices, such as firing and hiring of workers, labor relations, and work ethic.59

  GEAR meant that the interests of big business coincided with state policy, but it caused strains in the relationship between the ANC and its political allies—the South African Communist party (SACP), which supplied a substantial proportion of the ANC leadership, and COSATU, the trade union federation that had been the strongest element in the anti-apartheid movement. Under GEAR the government was, indeed, closer to big business than to its allies. Both COSATU and the SACP criticized GEAR from the outset. COSATU threatened to terminate its alliance with the ANC and form a separate party pledged to support labor and eradicate poverty; but there was no sign of a COSATU or SACP secession. The affiliates of COSATU amounted to only 1.5 million members, and the SACP claimed a membership of just 75,000. Both organizations needed the ANC more than the ANC needed them; and their leaders knew where their bread was buttered. Consequently, both allies supported the ANC in the 1999 election.60 As American political scientist Thomas Koelble stated, “The ANC glue, the solidarity against racism, colonialism, and apartheid, and Mandela’s charisma, is likely to work against breakaway parties” for years to come.61

  The Quality of Life of the Majority of the People

  It was inevitable that no quick fix could alleviate the sufferings of the victims of apartheid. The government did receive kudos from Africans for symbolic changes. These began shortly before the 1994 election, when the Transitional Executive Council, expressing the result of negotiations among the major parties, unveiled a new South African flag that replaced the British and Boer symbols in favor of a colorful geometrical design. In May 1995, the government approved a new national anthem, which began with the Nguni and Sotho versions of the popular ANC hymn “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” (God Bless Africa), continued with the opening lines of the Afrikaans anthem “Die Stem van Suid Afrika” (The Voice of South Africa), and ended with an English except from “The Call of South Africa.” The government also began the process of renaming places; for example, the province that included Pretoria and Johannesburg was named Gauteng. The government also introduced new public holidays.62

  Improving the material conditions of the victims of apartheid was another matter. As a result of the disappointing performance of the economy, there was never enough money for South Africans to achieve the goals set out in the Reconstruction and Development Program and GEAR. The Mandela government managed to increase the annual budgetary allocations f
or welfare services and some progress was made. Least successful was the RDP’S lavish promise to return land to the more than one million Africans who had been forcibly removed. Of 63,000 claims for restitution, by June 1999 only 231 had been granted, and another 215 households had shared ten million rand as compensation.63 After a slow start, the RDP commitment to provide a million state-subsidized houses was within reach. By March 1999, 747,717 had been built, amounting to 75 percent of the target, but many of them were very rudimentary buildings.64 Likewise, by late 1997, 82 percent of urban households and 32 percent of rural households had electricity, but 41 percent of all South African households still had no electricity; and 3.5 million people were supplied with water between 1994 and 1999, which still left 12 million people without piped water in their homes.65 There was also a substantial increase in the supply of telephones.66 Even so, according to the government’s 1998 Report on Social and Economic Development in South Africa, about 19 million people (just under half of the population) lived below the official poverty line of 353 rand (U.S. $60) per month; 72 percent of the poor lived in rural areas; and although poverty was not confined to one racial group, it was concentrated among Africans, of whom 61 percent were poor.67 But there was a significant development in the class structure of South Africa. Under apartheid the black middle class was very small and politically impotent, but during the Mandela presidency, as a result of the transfer of political power, there was a rapid growth of a new, prosperous, black elite, composed largely of Africans. ANC and IFP politicians dominated the central and regional executives and legislatures and were appointed to senior posts in the bureaucracy. Blacks, especially Africans, also benefited from affirmative action in the business world. Virtually any African, Indian, or Coloured adult who had managed to acquire a decent education was assured of a well-paid job, to such an extent that universities had great difficulty recruiting black faculty members.