The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  The National Party government reacted forcefully to signs of opposition. Claiming that much of the dissent was caused by the activities of communists, it introduced legislation called the Suppression of Communism Act which gave it powers to suppress not only the small, multiracial Communist Party but other opponents it deemed to be troublesome. The Act was the first weapon in an arsenal of security measures acquired by the government that would eventually give it totalitarian control. So wide was the Act’s definition of communism that it could be used to silence anyone who opposed government policy simply by ‘naming’ them. The government was empowered to place them under house arrest, to restrict their movements, to prohibit them from attending public or even social gatherings and to proscribe their writing and speeches.

  Undaunted by the threat of government repression, the ANC helped organise a ‘Defiance Campaign’ in 1952, asking volunteers to deliberately court arrest and imprisonment by contravening selected apartheid laws such as breaking curfew regulations or using railway coaches and waiting rooms marked for white use only. The campaign quickly caught the public imagination, transforming the ANC from a small activist group into a mass movement. In five months more than 8,000 people went to prison for periods of one to three months. The government reacted by introducing emergency powers to crush opposition, making virtually any form of protest illegal. For years to come, political activists were harassed by police raids, surveillance, banning orders, restrictions, arrests and banishments.

  Though government repression exacted a heavy toll, the ANC persevered. In conjunction with Indian activists and a group of radical whites, many of them members of the underground Communist Party, it drew up a ‘Freedom Charter’ in 1955 advocating a multiracial society. ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white,’ the charter declared. It demanded the right of all citizens to vote, to hold office and to be equal before the law.

  The government deemed the charter to be part of a conspiracy to ‘overthrow the existing State by revolutionary methods’ and hauled 156 activists, including almost all senior ANC officials as well as prominent white radicals, before the courts on charges of high treason. Their trial dragged on for four years, sapping the energy of the movement and its leaders, ending in the acquittal of all accused.

  The juggernaut of apartheid meanwhile rolled on relentlessly. In 1958, the National Party chose as prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, a Dutch-born ideological fanatic with ambitions to take separate development far beyond the previous Nationalist strategy of white baaskap. Verwoerd believed he had found the ultimate solution for South Africa: total territorial separation between white and black. His master plan involved dividing up the African population into separate ethnic groups or ‘nations’ and giving them control of their own homelands where they would enjoy full social and political rights – ‘separate freedoms’ – under a system of government suited to their own tribal background. All blacks would become citizens of the new homelands, including blacks resident in ‘white’ areas, regardless of how many generations had lived there. Divided into separate ethnic groups, the blacks would be inhibited from acting as a single community against outnumbered whites. Because each ‘national’ group was a minority of the whole, no one ‘nation’ could claim rights on the basis of numerical strength. Thus the demands for majority rule by African nationalists were irrelevant, and whites would be guaranteed supremacy in their own area for ever more. Unveiling his strategy in 1959, Verwoerd announced that henceforth South Africa would become a ‘multinational’ state with separate homelands for eight black ‘nations’.

  The white population hailed Verwoerd’s ‘new vision’, confident that it would secure their long-term future. But less than a year later South Africa was shaken to the core by a sudden upheaval. Its origins lay in a split within the ANC between the multiracial camp which had championed the Freedom Charter and an ‘Africanist’ group which believed in ‘Africa for the Africans’. The Africanists were aggrieved in particular by the clause in the Freedom Charter affirming that South Africa belonged to ‘all who lived in it, black and white’. In the Africanist view, the only true ‘owners’ of South Africa were Africans. Others had merely ‘stolen’ the country. In 1959, the Africanists formed a rival group, the Pan-Africanist Congress, demanding ‘government of the Africans, by the Africans, for the Africans’. Competing for support with the ANC, they announced a campaign of mass protest against the hated pass law system. On 21 March 1960, police in Sharpeville opened fire on a crowd of PAC demonstrators, killing 69 and wounding 186. Most of the casualties were shot in the back as they fled from the gunfire.

  The Sharpeville massacre provoked a storm of African protest – marches, demonstrations, strikes and violence. Many whites feared that South Africa might be on the verge of revolution. An outburst of international condemnation added to the sense of crisis. Western attitudes towards South Africa, hitherto ambivalent, became markedly more hostile. Foreign investors deserted in droves. But rather than offer concessions, Verwoerd ordered a massive crackdown. Using emergency powers, the government banned the ANC and the PAC and detained thousands of anti-apartheid activists. Within a few weeks, the backbone of African resistance was broken.

  Despite being driven underground, ANC activists made one further attempt at mass action, organising support for a three-day strike in 1961, hoping it would shake the government’s resolve. The key figure in the campaign was Nelson Mandela. Abandoning his legal practice and forsaking all chance of a family life, he became an underground leader, touring the country in disguise. The strike response, however, did not match Mandela’s expectations and on the second day he called it off.

  The failure of the strike convinced Mandela that there was nothing further to be gained from continuing with protest action and that the only alternative available was to resort to violence. Years of demonstrations, boycotts, strikes and civil disobedience had achieved little other than government reprisals. Mandela believed that a limited campaign of sabotage would scare off foreign investors, disrupt trade and cause sufficient damage to force the white electorate and the government to change course. Supported by revolutionary enthusiasts in the underground Communist Party, Mandela set up an armed wing called Umkhonto we Sizwe, meaning Spear of the Nation, launching the first attacks in December 1961.

  Mandela’s venture into armed struggle was a forlorn enterprise from the outset. None of the conspirators had any experience of sabotage or guerrilla action. Three weeks after the start of the campaign, Mandela left South Africa to seek support from African states. He returned in July 1962 but, careless about his personal security, he survived in the field for no more than two weeks. Other conspirators were soon rounded up. To deal with sabotage attacks, the security police were given virtually unlimited powers of arrest and detention. Scores of suspects vanished into prison, subjected to prolonged interrogation, solitary confinement, physical assaults and torture. With information obtained from detainees and informers, the police identified farm buildings on the outskirts of Johannesburg as Umkhonto’s headquarters. When they raided it in July 1963, they captured not only a group of leading conspirators but a mass of incriminating documents relating to arms production, guerrilla recruitment and training and contacts with the Soviet bloc and China. In June 1964 Mandela and eight of his colleagues were sentenced to life imprisonment.

  In terms of the objectives that Mandela had set, the sabotage campaign was a total failure. The impact on the economy was negligible. Foreign investors, far from being frightened away during the 1960s, became more deeply involved. The government, instead of changing course, was spurred into taking ever more repressive countermeasures, obliterating fundamental civil rights on the grounds that it was dealing with a communist-inspired conspiracy to overthrow the state. The white electorate reacted in staunch support of the government, not in opposition to it. All that was proved, ultimately, was that a collection of amateur revolutionaries were no match for the might of the South African state. Revo
lutionary enthusiasts spoke of ‘an heroic failure’. But it was more a fatal miscalculation about the nature of white power. The cost of this miscalculation was huge. With the nationalist movement destroyed, a silence descended for more than a decade.

  Rhodesia’s white rulers faced similar nationalist agitation and dealt with it in a similar manner. Nationalist opposition grew during the 1950s, fuelled by grievances over poverty and frustration in towns, overcrowding in rural ‘reserves’, and government land policies which over a period of thirty years drove more than half a million Africans from land designated to be in ‘white’ areas. When launching the first major nationalist organisation in 1957, the African National Congress, nationalist leaders expressed comparatively modest ambitions: they called for the abolition of discriminatory laws, reform of land allocation and an extension of the franchise. Although the franchise was non-racial, the qualifications for a vote, based on income, were so high at the time that, of an electorate of 52,000, only 560 were African. The government deemed the ANC to be a subversive organisation in 1959 and banned it.

  A new organisation, the National Democratic Party, was launched the following year, with more radical objectives, including a demand for political power. When the British government convened a constitutional conference in Salisbury in 1961, a NDP delegation led by Joshua Nkomo, a trade union official, was invited to attend. The purpose of the conference was to settle on a new constitution that reconciled white demands for independence under white minority rule with African demands for political progress. It was a crucial opportunity for the nationalists to advance their cause. But their performance was inept and indecisive. While the Rhodesian government obtained an agreement from Britain to withdraw virtually all its reserve powers, making Rhodesia, in effect, a semi-independent state, the nationalists won fifteen out of sixty-five seats, based on a complex franchise that would have delayed majority rule for at least several decades, guaranteeing white rule for the foreseeable future.

  The nationalists soon fell into disarray, resorting to reckless violence to try to prevent the new constitution being put into effect. Other than violence they offered no coherent plan. The Rhodesian government responded by banning the NDP and then its successor, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu). In 1963 the nationalist movement split into two irreconcilable camps, Zapu and Zanu (Zimbabwe African National Union). As each group tried to assert itself, their rivalry developed into internecine warfare.

  The threat that African ferment posed to white rule produced a growing backlash. In elections in December 1962, the Rhodesian Front, a disparate collection of right-wing factions, promising to deal ruthlessly with the nationalist menace and to entrench white control permanently, swept to victory. Once in power, the Rhodesian Front became obsessed with the need for independence. Year after year it pressed its case with Westminster. The British government was willing to grant independence to Rhodesia under white-minority rule but wanted constitutional concessions to ensure that African political progress was not impeded once it was set free from Britain. The Rhodesian Front leader, Ian Smith, saw no reason to make such concessions. In the meantime, as nationalist violence continued, Smith ordered the detention of leading nationalists including Zapu’s Joshua Nkomo and Zanu’s Robert Mugabe and hundreds of other activists, citing the need for law and order.

  After three fruitless years of negotiations, Smith declared unilateral independence on 11 November 1965. He portrayed his act of defiance in grandiose terms: ‘We have struck a blow for the preservation of justice, civilisation and Christianity.’ But in his pursuit of white supremacy, Smith had set Rhodesia on a perilous course.

  The Portuguese territories of Angola and Mozambique remained as firmly in the grip of Salazar’s dictatorship as ever. To Salazar Portugal’s colonies in Africa were as inalienable a part of the Portuguese nation as metropolitan Portugal. Portugal, he told the National Assembly in Lisbon in 1960, had been in Africa for four hundred years; whatever other European powers chose to do about their colonies, Portugal had no intention of abandoning its destiny to ‘the so-called “winds of history”’. Any sign of political opposition, among whites as well as blacks, was quickly snuffed out by his secret police. By 1960, most clandestine nationalist groups formed in the 1950s had been driven underground or into exile.

  Despite Salazar’s repressive regime, both Angola and Mozambique began to prosper during the 1950s. In Angola, the discovery of oilfields, the expansion of mining and the buoyant coffee industry produced boom conditions. By 1960, Luanda, the capital of Angola, had become the third largest city in the Portuguese domain after Lisbon and Oporto, and the white population of Angola had risen to 200,000, the largest white community in tropical Africa. The tranquillity that Portuguese Africa appeared to enjoy convinced Salazar that Portugal, alone among Europe’s colonial powers, possessed a unique talent for establishing successful multiracial communities.

  An explosion of violence in northern Angola in 1961 consequently caught the Portuguese by surprise. Roving bands of Africans armed with machetes, home-made muskets and other crude weapons attacked isolated European settlements and plantations, killing several hundred whites and massacring African migrant workers. The uprising was in part the work of nationalist agitators based in neighbouring Congo. But it was also fuelled by strong grievances about the loss of African land and by harsh treatment meted out by Portuguese settlers and traders to the local population.

  Salazar ordered outright repression, but he also authorised the first major reforms to colonial policy for more than sixty years. Decrees were issued abolishing all forms of compulsory labour and prohibiting the illegal expropriation of land. Equal rights were accorded to ‘civilised’ and ‘non-civilised’ citizens of the empire. But otherwise Salazar still refused to contemplate any political reforms or to relax his grip over political activity.

  Thus across Africa, a new frontier was drawn, dividing the black north from the white south. The white south was thought to possess sufficient economic and military strength to withstand any challenge likely to arise. Yet there too the winds of change were eventually to be felt. And little more than a decade later the frontier had to be redrawn.

  PART XVI

  Africa at Independence

  65

  THE FIRST DANCE OF FREEDOM

  Africa entered the independence era on a surge of optimism and goodwill. Riding a crest of popularity and prestige, African leaders pressed forward with ambitious development plans. The economic circumstances they inherited were propitious. Independence came in the middle of an economic boom. World prices for African commodities – cash crops like cocoa and coffee and mineral products like copper – reached new levels in the post-war era, stimulating further growth. Good rains throughout the 1950s brought bumper harvests. Public debt was low; foreign currency reserves in many cases were comparatively high. The treasure chest of minerals that Africa was known to possess – gold, diamonds, oil, gas, uranium, bauxite, copper – suggested a prosperous future.

  On the global stage, African states excited the attention of the world’s rival power blocs. At a time when the Cold War was at one of its peaks, the position that each newly independent state adopted in its relations with the West or the East was viewed as a matter of crucial importance. The Eastern bloc embarked on major campaigns to gain influence; Western governments sought a new partnership, offering grants, cheap loans and technical expertise. Africa was considered to be too valuable a prize to lose.

  Popular expectations about the advent of independence soared to new heights. The lavish promises made by African politicians during their campaigns to wrest power from colonial governments, about providing education, housing, medical care, employment and land for all, aroused a mood of euphoria. ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom,’ Nkrumah had told his followers, ‘and all else will follow.’

  When examined in the cold light of day, however, the scale of difficulties and dangers facing Africa was daunting. Africa was a continent to
o deeply affected by mass poverty, illiteracy, disease and drought to allow for easy solutions to its development. Most of its population – more than three-quarters – was engaged in subsistence agriculture without access either to basic education or health services. Although modern medicine had tamed epidemic diseases such as smallpox and yellow fever, endemic diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) took a heavy toll; the tsetse fly, causing sleeping sickness among humans and cattle alike, prevented some 10 million square kilometres of potentially productive land being utilised effectively for livestock and mixed agriculture; locust swarms regularly devastated crops. Bilharzia (schistosomiasis) and river blindness (onchocerciasis) were common hazards. Death rates for children were the highest in the world; life expectancy, at thirty-nine years on average, was the lowest in the world.

  The shortage of skilled manpower was acute. Most African societies were predominantly illiterate and innumerate. Only 16 per cent of the adult population was literate. In black Africa in the late 1950s, at the beginning of the independence era, the entire region containing a population of about 200 million produced only 8,000 secondary school graduates, and nearly half of those came from two countries, Ghana and Nigeria. Few new states had more than two hundred students in university training. In Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) only thirty-five Africans had gained higher education by 1959; in Nyasaland (Malawi) the figure was twenty-eight. In 1961, the year of Tanganyika’s independence, every senior civil servant in Dar es Salaam, every provincial commissioner and fifty-five out of fifty-seven district commissioners were still British expatriates. In former French colonies, there were no universities at all. At primary level, only about a third of the student-age population attended school.