6 6 The single most important international issue confronting black America after the end of the Vietnam War was apartheid. For nearly forty years, the white-minority regime in South Africa had imposed a rigidly authoritarian form of racial oppression on millions of African people. Thousands of South Africans were executed, imprisoned, or exiled. Mass organizations that led the movement against apartheid, such as the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, were banned.
In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan initiated a cordial bilateral policy toward South Africa, termed “constructive engagement.” African Americans, outraged by the Reagan administration’s friendly initiatives toward apartheid, began to mobilize a mass protest movement to pressure U.S. firms to “divest” their holdings from South Africa. Many protest organizations mobilized black opposition to apartheid. One of the coordinators of the anti-apartheid movement in the United States during the 1980s was Randall Robinson, head of TransAfrica, a black American lobbying agency for Africa and the Caribbean.
Robinson (1941– ), born in Richmond Virginia, graduated from Virginia Union University and earned a law degree from Harvard Law School. Robinson has published numerous books whose subjects range from critiques of poverty and crime in America to the demand for black reparations. After his departure from TransAfrica, Robinson continued efforts to address the socioeconomic and political problems of Africa and the Caribbean.
In the first document below, civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson addressed an antiapartheid conference held at the United Nations in 1984. In the second document, political scientist and journalist Clarence Lusane interviewed Robinson in October 1985.
DON’T ADJUST TO APARTHEID
… A great Afro-American, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, long ago called attention to “The African Roots of War,” as he revealed how the policies of plunder and exploitation of the African continent led to war between the European and American Powers who had developed at the Expense of Africa, and who often went to war between themselves over a redivision of the spoils.
Our Africa policy in the United States, our relations and attitudes towards the countries of the African continent, have always been in distinct contrast to our policy and attitudes towards the nation-states of Europe. Europe, in our perception, has historically been seen as a source of immigrants and culture. While Africa is perceived in our country as a source of cheap labor and raw materials to be exploited for the benefit of a privileged class of European settlers.
This stereotype of Africa, as being without culture and civilization, a continent to be subjugated by the advocates of “master race” politics, has led to a kind of Tarzan, Jane, Boy relationship between the United States and Africa. This not only reflects racial chauvinism, but a grossly unreal attitude which underplays the significance of Africa to the world in general and to the United States in particular.
One of the tragedies of our own times that this history of negative attitudes has produced, is the massive starvation and drought in huge areas of the African continent. We live in a scientific age that recognizes that what are viewed as natural disasters are often the by-product of years of neglect and plunder. The hunger and death that stalks wide areas of the African continent today must become the concern of the entire international community because it is a threat to the human family.
Poverty and injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We, in North America, blessed with one of the most fertile and productive agricultural lands in the world, must cease being insensitive to the current suffering in Africa. We must mobilize our abundant resources, through both government and non-governmental organizations, to bring assistance and relief to our brothers and sisters that are in Africa.
It is a measure of the callousness of the present administration in the United States that it would pull 82 million acres of arable land out of production, while 5,000,000 people a year die of starvation in the Third World. This, too, is a dimension of United States Africa policy, when we, who have such abundant capacity to feed the hungry, deny members of the human family access to this relief from hunger and starvation.
This policy of cynicism and callousness has the United States in an official partnership with the racist apartheid regime in South Africa. Corporate greed, in the search for the maximum return on investments, has found in the racist apartheid system, with its brutal denial of human rights, a favorable climate guaranteeing the highest profits in the world. An American government that pretends to be outraged by the human rights situation in Poland is apparently quite satisfied with the brutal denial of human rights in Pretoria.
This is measured in part by the deafening official silence in our country concerning the plight of 8,000,000 Black Africans who have been stripped of their South African citizenship and forcibly removed from the cities of South Africa and relocated into Bantustans, thereby made refugees and aliens in their own country. In the language of the apartheid regime, this is called “separate development” and the United States southern Africa policy which supports this barbarism is called “constructive engagement.”
In the service of this policy, the Reagan administration has given the green light for loans to South Africa from the International Monetary Fund. It has allowed more South African consulates to open in the United States; expanded military ties with the apartheid regime, which includes training the South African Coast Guard; it has encouraged South Africa’s repeated military invasions in Angola by withholding diplomatic recognition to the Angolan People’s Republic; and has generally created a climate of official endorsement that has made the United States South Africa’s number one trading partner.
It must be remembered that the flow of foreign capital into South Africa, from the United States, Britain and other allies, is essential to the apartheid regime’s economic growth, and economic growth in South Africa, as elsewhere, is essential to political stability.
Double Standard
In order to promote the political stability of the apartheid regime, United States policy invariably adopts a double standard in matters of human rights. For example, when a solidarity union in Poland is suppressed and a leader is jailed, our official policy is to implement an economic boycott against Poland in response to this violation of human rights. When the ANC in South Africa and the trade unions affiliated to it are suppressed and abolished, and leaders like Nelson Mandela are jailed, we respond to this violation of human rights by expanding economic, diplomatic and military ties with the regime.
Furthermore, the United States veto is repeatedly used in the United Nations Security Council to frustrate every effort by the international community to effect economic sanctions against South Africa. We, in the United States, must measure human rights by one yardstick and free ourselves of this hypocrisy that increasingly alienates us from the peoples of the world struggling for human dignity and self-determination. Our national view of southern Africa must radically change from seeing it as essentially a piece of geopolitical real estate to be used by the United States for selfish ends, without regard to the aspirations of the people of southern Africa.
This purely geopolitical approach has led to a dangerous situation in which American nuclear technology has been made accessible to the apartheid regime. Now that regime has acquired the technical capability of producing atomic weapons. In this way, our Africa policy, together with that of Israel, has helped to create a situation that is a threat to the sovereignty of every nation on the African continent. The disarmament movement in our country must give far more attention to this particular nuclear threat than it has in the past.
Constructive Engagement
The Reagan administration’s “constructive engagement” policy is a multi-pronged strategy designed to help South Africa gain acceptance and respectability in the West and thereby break out of the isolation it has experienced in the international community since the late 1960s. This support from the United States has emboldened the apartheid regime and encouraged its military aggressions.
This places a particularly heavy burden on the frontline States, who have courageously maintained a principled opposition to apartheid in the face of ever-mounting military and diplomatic pressures upon them to accommodate to South Africa’s wishes. All of us have been inspired by the courageous struggles and sacrifices being made by these newly-emancipated countries, in an effort to overcome generations of economic and cultural deprivation that are the legacy of colonialism. The fruits of these sacrifices are now being threatened by a new form of subjugation coming from the most brutally racist regime on earth.
I need not tell you that we live in perilous times. I need not tell you that the vast majority of humankind wants peace, economic and social justice and the right of self-determination. This very institution was designed and built by the nations of the world, including the United States, to implement these goals. We in the United States have had a very special interest and mission in creating the United Nations.
Our people have come from all corners of the globe, from Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas. Our nation indeed is a mini–United Nations. I want to assure you that as I travel around this country and talk to the people in the towns, cities and factories, they tell me how important it is that we learn to live with the rest of the world especially because we are fast becoming a genuinely interdependent world.
The electronic media brings to our living rooms the wars in El Salvador, Lebanon and Angola. The people of this country know and want a continuing dialogue with the rest of the world and they see the United Nations as a forum where this dialogue can take place. I would like to assure you that the political gimmicks to punish this or that international organization are nothing more than political gimmickry. After all, it is somewhat humorous when a major power like ours begins to punish an international organization devoted to uplifting the small farmers of the world. The real American tradition is to stand by the seashore and wave people to come in and share our bounty and not to wave them goodbye….
STATE OF THE U.S. ANTI-APARTHEID MOVEMENT
The following interview with Randall Robinson of TransAfrica and the Free South Africa movement was conducted for The Black Scholar on October 17, 1985.—Clarence Lusane
SCHOLAR: Approximately one year has passed since the U.S. anti-apartheid movement surged forward. What is your assessment of the major achievement over this period?
ROBINSON: We started the campaign with three major objectives to be pursued in sequence. The first objective was to more broadly educate the American people on South Africa, and to do that through civil disobedience and broad demonstrations that would provoke the kind of press coverage that the issue has gotten in the United States over the last eleven months.
The second objective growing out of that was to begin a dramatic change in American policy toward South Africa. As a result, the Congress and the administration found themselves in a posture of having to account to a newly informed and invigorated American public. The Congress responded with legislation and President Reagan with an inadequate Executive Order that nonetheless repudiated his own policy of constructive engagement, but does little else in moving us significantly towards the kind of sanctions that the situation in South Africa warrants.
The third objective—yet to be realized, and that’s what we have to work on—is that when American policy changes as substantially as it ought to, it begins to influence policy in other Western countries. Then we will have South Africa in a position to do nothing but respond to Western pressure and to negotiate with the real leadership in South Africa. Now, progress toward that objective has been made inasmuch as the unrest in South Africa, coupled with heightening pressure and concern around the world, has produced a hemorrhage of money leaving South Africa both in investment and in bank commitments, and that has caused the South African government an unprecedented kind of concern about the traditional commitment of the West to support the regime.
So we are moving in the right direction and when the Congress comes back, we’re going to push for tougher legislation in the next session of Congress. In the meantime, we have to sustain the campaign with thoughtful projects and sustain it with a pace, understanding that we have to have the resources to go for a long, long period of time. It was with that thought that the demonstrations were launched in the first place.
That kind of planning and that kind of expectation have given us the capacity to have daily demonstrations at the South African Embassy and around the country since November 21 of last year—demonstrations that have resulted in the arrest of almost 5,000 people nationally, and over 3,500 at the embassy in Washington.
And we have every capacity to sustain and build on this kind of long-term process of pressure application so that we are now beginning to reap fruit in the middle of the country, since there is divestment legislation virtually under consideration at every level of government, even in cities and towns and states that previously had never even considered South Africa to be a major issue. So, this issue has now reached every university; it has become an issue in supermarkets selling goods and in winestores selling wines imported from South Africa. It has become an issue that really has permeated the entire American society.
SCHOLAR: What have been the main problems and outstanding weaknesses of the campaign?
ROBINSON: The problems are that the administration, along with the South Africans, is attempting to counterattack by the use of the coarsest tactics, characterizing leadership as Marxist; further, instead of frontally attempting to defend apartheid, they are attacking the countries that South Africa would want to destabilize—Angola, Mozambique—and the whole issue of American-Soviet containment in the region is being raised in a way that would have the American public believe unrelated to the South Africa issue.
But it is very much related and is a part of South Africa’s strategy, taken with right-wing conservatives here in the United States, to weaken the anti-apartheid movement by mustering support for Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA in Angola and the MNR in Mozambique, thereby buying South Africa time in Namibia, buying their resources at home to be used in their repression at home. If America will materially support Savimbi and others like him, it is really joining the South African conspiracy to destabilize the region and to cement apartheid at home.
So I think that the counterattack is being waged in that way because they’ve had diminishing success in their efforts to defend the domestic application of apartheid in South Africa itself.
SCHOLAR: As you note, Botha and Reagan are attempting to buy time, but what are their real options over the next couple of years since the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa doesn’t seem to be abating at all?
ROBINSON: First of all, I think this upsurge has to be distinguished from Sharpeville or even from Soweto. Since 1982, we’ve seen an unprecedented increase in resistance to apartheid that is broad and deep all across South Africa. The government’s State of Emergency has done nothing to diminish the black commitment to destroy the apartheid system altogether. Nothing short of one person, one vote in a unitary state will be favorably received by the black majority and the black leaders in South Africa. So the South African government now finds the ball in its court; it must decide how to respond.
Our job here is to make certain that the United States, in its private and public sectors, no longer gives encouragement to whites to try to tough it out. So, we have our work cut out for us in making sure that America is removed as a major component of the underpinnings of that system and for white intransigence in general.
SCHOLAR: How do you see the role of the Free South Africa Movement over the next year and what are some of your plans?
ROBINSON: Right now we are working on a Freedom Letter Campaign. We are sending a letter from the American people to Bishop Desmond Tutu signed by a million Americans saying that we stand with black South Africans in their struggle for justice. We are going to try to take that letter to Bishop Tutu in Soweto and deliver it personally in December with as many as want to go in the delegation to do that.
This is part of a continuing, consciousness-raising campaign that leads us into next year where we will seek passage in the Congress of stronger legislation; reintroduction of Ronald Dellums’ bill calling for disinvestment of American investment so that we will ask for tougher sanctions.
We will also take our campaign to the private sector by giving Americans a better sense of the extent to which American corporations are pivotally involved in the repression of 22 million black South Africans, hopefully mustering enough pressure on those corporations to accelerate their departure from South Africa. All of this will be a part of the 1986 FSAM campaign.
SCHOLAR: What is your assessment on how soon change will come in South Africa and is there any possibility for peaceful change?
ROBINSON: It’s hard to put a timetable on social change as a general rule since it’s difficult to forecast with any accuracy. The thing of which one is certain is that change is inevitable and that it will come in the foreseeable future, whether that is five years, or ten years, or fifteen years, one can’t say. It could be within the next few months.
You have variables that come together in combination to make the force for change simply irresistible and have a lot to do with the continued development of urban military capacity on the part of the African National Congress, the continued growth and political strength of black labor unions in South Africa; the continued deepening of consciousness and activity of young people throughout South Africa, all coupled with increased pressure from without.
When these come together in a kind of requisite chemistry; then you will see South Africa fundamentally changed. One can’t say with any preciseness when that will happen. I’m confident having said that that we will see change in the foreseeable future. We are closer to it now than we have ever been.
Sources: (1) Jesse L. Jackson, “Don’t Adjust to Apartheid,” with permission from Black Scholar 16, no. 6 (November/December 1984), pp. 39–43; and (2) Clarence Lusane, “State of the U.S. Anti-Apartheid Movement: An Interview with Randall Robinson,” with permission from Black Scholar 17, no. 6 (November/December 1985), pp. 40–42.
Kevin Danaher, “South Africa, U.S. Policy, and the Anti-Apartheid Movement,” Review of Radical Political Economics 11, no. 3 (1997), pp. 42–59.
Janice Love, The U.S. Anti-Apartheid Movement: Local Activism in Global Politics (New York: Praeger, 1995).