by Ernst Roets
Robert told the attackers that he only had R320 ($26) on him and tried to negotiate with them, giving them his bank card and pin and promising not to report it as missing for the next 24 hours. It did not work.
CHAPTER 10
Apartheid and dispossession
In the 19th century, farming was the main industry of the vast majority of people living in South Africa. By the end of the century, the country was divided into two British colonies, the Cape Colony and Natal, and two Boer Republics, the Zuid-Afrikaanche Republiek (ZAR) and the Republiek van die Oranje-Vrijstaat (English: Republic of the Orange Free State).
As a result of the battles of the Ndebele of Mzilikazi, the Ngwane, the Hlubi and the Batlokwa, the area between the Orange and Vaal Rivers was almost deserted by the time the Voortrekkers arrived there in 1836. After their arrival, King Moshweshe of the South Sotho claimed this area as his territory. The Voortrekkers clashed with Moshweshe and Adam Kok of the Griquas in the south-western region of the Orange Free State before the British intervened in 1843 and established three treaty states with Adam Kok, Moshweshwe and Faku of the Pondo to act as buffers between the Cape Colony and the Voortrekkers. However, this policy was reversed in 1848, when the entire area was annexed as a British colony. After further conflict with the Boers, the Orange Free State was recognised as a Boer Republic in 1854. Black people were then prohibited from purchasing or renting land in that area, although the Thaba ’Nchu and Witsieshoek areas were recognised as independent black states with their own governments.1
Other than the Moilwa, whose land (on which they had settled before the Mfecane) was given back to them by the Voortrekkers, other tribes whose land was given back to them included the Matlaba, Kwena and Kgatla.2 In 1846, a purchase agreement was concluded with the Swazi king in terms of which the area between the Olifants and Crocodile Rivers was exchanged for cattle. In 1855, a similar agreement was concluded with regard to the Lydenburg district. In that year, the Swazi king also ceded a strip of land along the north bank of the Pongola River to the ZAR, with the idea that a wedge of European settlers would give the Swazis a measure of protection against Zulu raids.3 Also in 1855, some Boer farmers bought land from the Zulu king, Mpande, between the Buffalo and Blood rivers. This land was incorporated into the ZAR as the districts of Wakkerstroom and Utrecht in 1859. A resolution of 1853 of the National Assembly of the ZAR gave the commandant general and the commandants of each district the responsibility of allocating land to blacks where needed for their occupation. By 1858 it was decreed that white people were not allowed to own land where a black tribe was settled.4
All the black communities were subject to the authority of these four governments.5 When it was proposed that black people should have fewer rights than whites, President Paul Kruger of the ZAR opposed the idea, stating to the Volksraad (English: House of Assembly) that black people should have access to courts and to the executive authority, where they must be able to submit requests and complaints.6 Racist sentiment was, however, also noticeable in the Boer Republics, with De Volkstem newspaper writing, for example, that black people who were found walking on the sidewalks of Johannesburg should be given a hiding.7 It is clear that white people were trying to exclude black people in the interest of their own preservation, writes Giliomee: ‘And where is the line between self-preservation and selfishness?’8
The First Boer War broke out in December 1880, and was won by the Boers after the Battle of Majuba Hill on 27 February 1881.9 After the war, the Convention of Pretoria set up the Location Commission, with the task of identifying reserves for the various black tribes. As far as possible, these reserves had to be allocated where black tribes were already settled. Five hectares per household were set as a guideline.10
Conflict broke out between different Zulu tribes in 1884. The uSuthu faction, led by the lawful successor to the Zulu throne, Dinizulu, turned to the Boers on the ZAR border for assistance in ensuring the survival of the royal lineage. With the assistance of a hundred mounted Boers, Dinizulu was victorious. He then ceded 800 farms comprising 4 000 square miles just below what is today known as Swaziland to the Boers ‘for services rendered.’11 This area became known as the New Republic.12
The Anglo-Boer War broke out in October 1899.13 Despite the great odds against them, the Boers scored several dramatic victories in the field. However, by June 1900 the British had taken control of both the Boer capitals, Bloemfontein and Pretoria.14 The Boers were not prepared to surrender and embarked on a strategy of guerrilla warfare.15 It was during this time that the British initiated a scorched-earth policy, with Boer farms being especially targeted and burned down.16 Women and children were taken to concentration camps and black people were placed in camps separate from their white counterparts.17
The political activist and lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi argues in his acclaimed book The Land is Ours that the circumstances in the camps in which black people were held, were far worse than those in which the Boers wer held. ‘The total losses in the Boer camps amounted to some 26 000 women and children (sources more recent than those quoted by Ngcukaitobi estimate the number of Boer women and children that died in the concentration camps to be 32 000), while the camps for blacks held large numbers of men. By the end of the war, 21 000 black men, women and children had perished in camps established by the British.’18
Although the war was essentially a war between the Boers and the British, black people were severely affected by it. The majority of black people hoped for a British victory and the resulting possibility of qualified voting rights for black people, similar to that in the Cape.19 Black people were involved in the war on both sides, although not to a great extent.20
The war was won by the British by 1902 and British rule was declared over the whole of South Africa. The Boers were shattered economically and psychologically by their loss, that resulted in massive poverty in their community. Black people were also dealt a severe blow, suffering economically as a result of the war. Qualified voting rights were not instituted as had been hoped for. Shortly after the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, the South African Native National Congress was founded in 1912 – a movement that would change its name to the African National Congress (ANC) in 1923.21
APARTHEID
The South Africa Act was passed by the British in 1909. This became the first constitution of the new Union in 1910. According to this, all black tribes, excluding the residents of Lesotho and Swaziland, were placed under the control of a central government.22
Meanwhile, the Afrikaners’ so-called Second Great Trek occurred between 1904 and 1951, when people moved from farms to the cities in large numbers. The number of urbanised Afrikaners increased by about a million in the first half of the 20th century.23
However, farming played an important role in the development of the Natives Land Act of 1913. Black people started renting land from private landowners and by the end of the 19th century, about a third to half of the ZAR was occupied in this manner. Black tenants were also working for white farmers, who had provided them with land where they could herd their own cattle. Thirdly, there were cases of sharecropping, where black people provided the ploughs, oxen and seed, and then ploughed, sowed and harvested on white-owned land. A part of their income was subsequently paid to the landowner.24 Many white people started fearing that sharecropping would eventually result in equal voting rights for black people, who were larger in number and would then take over the government. Sharecroppers and future black voters were a threat to the growing number of impoverished white people, writes Giliomee.25
General JBM (Barry) Hertzog served during the Anglo-Boer War. He also was Minister of Justice and Native Affairs, and later became Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa. He quoted black American writers such as William H Thomas, author of The American Negro, in his argument that racial integration would be fatal for both white and black people in South Africa and that the place of ‘developed black people’ was with their own people.26 Hertz
og started developing the idea that South Africa should be divided between white and black, under the banner of ‘separate but equal’. His belief was that white, coloured and black people should all have the right to self-determination in South Africa, each within its own territory, where they would have the right to vote for their own governments.27 Hertzog believed in the fair treatment of black people, write historians Louis Changuion and Bertus Steenkamp. But this ‘fairness’ should be seen within the context of the time.
It did not necessarily mean equal treatment, but that black people had to be protected against exploitation due to their undevelopment and accompanying defencelessness. And here the concept of paternalism is raised that gave cause for the policy of guardianship - to lead black people to self-determination. 28
The Natives Land Act of 1913 declared that white people were not allowed to buy land in designated black areas and vice versa without the approval of the Governor-general.29 Anthea Jeffery, head of policy research at the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), writes that the view that is widely held today that the 1913 Land Act resulted in ‘white settlers expropriating more than 90% of the land’ is untrue, as black people with title deeds retained their landownership until the 1960s, when the National Party (NP) began implementing forced removals to clear the so-called ‘black spots’ (pockets of black-owned land within supposedly white areas that the Natives Land Act had not removed from black ownership).30 ‘In addition,’ writes Jeffery, ‘the 1913 Act restricted, rather than barred, Africans from buying land outside the scheduled areas, for it allowed such purchases to proceed if the state gave its permission.’ Black Africans who managed to obtain the necessary state consent bought more than 3 200 farms and lots outside the scheduled areas between 1913 and 1936.31
The Natives Land Act of 1913 and the Urban Areas Act of 192332 served as a cornerstone for racial segregation in South Africa.33
The notion that black people were dispossessed of their land in large numbers as a result of the Natives Land Act of 1913 is also disproved by the findings of the Beaumont Commission at that time, which found that ‘natives’ (the terminology of the day) owned some 11 million hectares of land, or 9% of the 122 million hectares making up the total land area in South Africa. The commission also found that black people had exclusive occupation of another 4,2 million hectares, bringing the amount of land in African ownership or occupation to 15,2 million hectares, or 12,5% of the total. Unoccupied Crown lands (state land) made up another 12,4% of the country, and urban areas another 1,2%. Farms owned or leased by white people constituted the remaining 74%.34
During a parliamentary debate in 1917, Prime Minister Louis Botha proclaimed that the principles of the 1913 Land Act were proclaimed by the British, stating that the entire principle of territorial separation ‘came out of the heads of these people’.35
The term apartheid was used in Parliament for the first time in 1944.36 The NP proposed apartheid in its 1948 election manifesto as a so-called guarantee for racial harmony. It was stated that territorial separation between white and black people had to be instituted and that native reserves, as they were known at the time, should be developed as a homeland for black people. The NP further argued that the economic development of these areas would have to be promoted and that schools should be provided there.37
In the 1950s, the government cleared up black squatter camps and built about 100 000 houses for black people.38 These houses were fairly small and had relatively few public facilities, writes Giliomee. The idea that black people were in white towns and cities only temporarily influenced city planning and the provision of services and administration. The policy was that black people were in the cities, but not from the cities.39 However, about 90% of black city residents’ houses were built by the government.40
In 1950, Hendrik Verwoerd, the then Minister of Native Affairs, remarked that black people would have to return to their own areas if they had ambitions of full citizenship.41
The prevalence of small apartheid – division of public facilities according to race, complete with signs that proclaimed ‘Whites only’ and ‘Blacks only’ – soon surpassed the notion of grand apartheid (homelands for different peoples), however, and apartheid became known as a system in which white and black people were not allowed to share the same beaches, bars and benches.
THE RISE OF THE ANC
In the late 1970s, the ANC had started to gain momentum as a champion of the struggle for the emancipation of black people. The ANC had established its own military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), for this purpose and had received substantial backing from the Soviet Union and other communist countries at the time.42 Its goal was to execute a national democratic revolution (NDR) in South Africa. The aim of the NDR was to overthrow the colonial state, achieve control over all government institutions, nationalise key industries and execute radical transformation of landownership.43
In June 1985 the leadership of the ANC convened a national consultative conference in Kabwe, Zambia. The aim was to assess the gains it had achieved in its fight for liberation and to raise the struggle to new heights.44 Among other things the conference resolved for the distinction between hard (military) and soft (civilian) targets to fall away in ANC military operations. Shortly thereafter, several members of the Afrikaner families of Van Eck and De Nysschen were killed in a landmine attack on a farm in Messina.45 Siphiwe Nyanda, former commander of MK explained the ANC’s decision to target farmers as follows:
We had to take decisions like the one we took about farmers. Technically people could say those farmers are just farmers and these farmers were defending themselves but we began to identify why we said why we should regard them as targets. Also there might be soft targets because I mean they are farmers and they have wives and children staying with them on those farms and they might be with their families when they tread on those land mines we wanted to plant on their farms but we thought since they are assisting and abating the system and trying to help the Apartheid regime to survive that they will become legitimate targets.46
A lesser known, but properly-researched and documented fact, is the use of torture by ANC leaders in several of the organisation’s camps abroad. Upon discovering this fact and studying the methods of torture executed in the ANC’s torture camps, I was shocked to find that many of these methods are still used in farm murders today. Three reports on the activities at these camps, released in the early 1990s, indicated that prisoners had been subject to beatings and various methods of torture.47 These methods of torture included:
Dripping of melted plastic on prisoners’ naked bodies and genitalia.
Whipping of prisoners while they were tied to immovable objects such as trees.
Beating of prisoners with blunt objects and whipping them with electric cables on the soles of their feet to avoid marks. Prisoners were whipped with sticks from coffee trees.
Trampling on prisoners with military boots.
Ordering prisoners to strip naked, followed by beating of their naked bodies.
Some prisoners were ordered to inflate their cheeks and were then slapped hard, sometimes with the soles of sandals, on their inflated cheeks. This resulted in the bursting of their eardrums. This method was called the ukumpompa (English: pumping).48
Although some of the survivors went public about the atrocities that occurred in the ANC’s camps, little is known about the leaders who were behind these tortures. In 1992, the human rights group Amnesty International (AI) requested the ANC to come forward with the names of its leaders who had been involved in or aware of these atrocities. The human rights advocacy group stated that in the absence of a full disclosure, the ANC can never be regarded as an accountable government. Although the ANC acknowledged that members had been imprisoned, tortured and executed, it did not heed Amnesty International’s call. What is known, however, is that in 1991, ANC president Nelson Mandela ordered a commission of inquiry into abuses within the ANC in exile. Mandela’s proposal was met with fierce opposition
in the ANC’s National Executive Committee. Mandela’s instruction was adamantly opposed by three members in particular, namely Joe Nhlanlha, Chris Hani, and Jacob Zuma. 49
Nhlanlha was the head of the ANC’s Department of Intelligence and Security from 1987, and thus head of Security while Quatro, one of the most notorious ANC torture camps, was in operation.
At the time Hani was the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party and former Deputy Commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe, while Zuma was a leading member of the ANC and of the South African Communist Party in exile as well as the head of Intelligence within the ANC and Umkhonto we Sizwe.
Notwithstanding the political violence that took hold in South Africa’s black townships, international pressure and economic challenges facing the white minority government, there were two political developments in particular that finally convinced the NP to initiate a process of negotiations with the ANC for a new South Africa in 1990. In the first place, the NP’s political competitors on both sides started to gain ground. The more liberal Progressive Federal Party (PFP) under Frederik van Zyl Slabbert began to meet with the ANC in exile, while the support of the Conservative Party (CP) (at that time the official opposition) was gaining ground voters at the expense of the NP.50