In southern Africa, meanwhile, the fortress of white power began to crumble. During the 1960s, nationalist movements launched a succession of guerrilla wars to oust the Portuguese from Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, a small west African colony, using neighbouring African territories as bases from which to recruit and train supporters and to gather arms. Guerrilla attacks were confined initially to border areas but steadily spread. The drain of fighting three simultaneous wars sapped Portuguese manpower and morale and led to growing disaffection among the officer corps and army conscripts. In April 1974, the Portuguese military seized power in Lisbon and promptly opened negotiations to withdraw from Africa. In Guinea-Bissau, negotiations were conducted relatively swiftly. By September 1974, Guinea-Bissau was recognised as an independent republic. But the transition to independence in both Mozambique and Angola was marked by confusion and chaos.
In Mozambique, the entire colonial administration fell into disarray. As Portuguese forces withdrew from the field, Frelimo guerrillas poured into areas of central Mozambique unopposed. Frightened by Frelimo’s revolutionary rhetoric and fearing revenge attacks, hundreds of white settlers in rural areas abandoned their homes and fled to the coast. A mass exodus of whites was soon underway. In protracted negotiations with the Portuguese, Frelimo demanded recognition as the ‘sole legitimate representative of the Mozambique people’ and the unconditional transfer of power without prior elections. The outcome was that in September 1974 Portugal agreed to hand over power exclusively to Frelimo after a nine-month transition period. The white exodus gathered pace. By the time that Mozambique gained its independence in June 1975, the country had lost not only most of its administrators and officials, but also managers, technicians, artisans and shopkeepers. In all some, 200,000 whites fled Mozambique, abandoning farms, factories and homes.
Undaunted by the crippling loss of skilled manpower, Frelimo’s leader Samora Machel embarked on a programme of revolutionary action intended to transform Mozambique into a Marxist-Leninist state. In a series of decrees, Frelimo nationalised plantations and businesses; introduced central economic planning; and ordered collective agricultural production. With similar fervour, Machel sought to root out ‘traditional’ customs and land practices and to eliminate the influence of chiefs and headmen. The Catholic Church and its adherents were another target. Frelimo ordered an end to public religious festivals, took over church property and terminated church involvement in education and marriage. Traditional religions were also denounced. The consequences were disastrous. Machel’s policies provoked widespread discontent that eventually helped fuel fifteen years of civil war.
The transition in Angola was even more turbulent. Three rival nationalist factions fought among themselves to gain power, transforming a colonial war into a civil war, causing the flight of almost the entire white population and drawing the Soviet Union and the United States into a perilous Cold War confrontation by proxy. What was at stake was control of Angola’s oilfields and diamond mines.
All three factions relied for support from different ethnic groups. The home base of Holden Roberto’s FNLA was Bakongo territory in northern Angola. Agostinho Neto’s MPLA was rooted in Kimbundu areas around the capital, Luanda. Jonas Savimbi’s Unita movement gained a following among the Ovimbundu in the central highland districts of Huambo and Bié. All three factions were weak and disorganised. They made no serious effort to reach a negotiated settlement but instead looked to foreign sponsors to give them supremacy.
In the interim, the Portuguese attempted to organise a coalition government to prepare the way for elections and independence in November 1975. But shortly after it was set up in January 1975, the coalition collapsed amid heavy fighting in Luanda. Supplied by weapons from the Soviet Union, the MPLA drove the FNLA and Unita out of Luanda and gained tentative control of other urban areas. A mass exodus of 300,000 whites followed, causing the collapse of government services and the economy. As independence day approached, the United States and South Africa threw their weight behind the FNLA and Unita in a concerted effort to prevent the MPLA from taking power in Luanda. South African forces invaded from South-West Africa, aiming to link up with the FNLA in an assault on the capital. What saved the MPLA from defeat was massive intervention by the Soviet Union and the arrival of thousands of Cuban troops. An intermittent civil war continued for the next twenty-seven years.
The collapse of Portugal’s African empire presented new dangers for the white rulers of Rhodesia. Small bands of nationalist guerrillas had been infiltrating across the northern border from bases in Zambia and Mozambique’s Tete province since 1972, but the government’s counter-insurgency measures had been largely successful in containing them. To help shore up Rhodesia’s defences, South Africa had dispatched large numbers of combat police to the area, regarding the Zambezi River rather than the Limpopo as its own front line. But the end of Portuguese rule meant that Rhodesia’s entire eastern border, some 760 miles long, was now vulnerable to infiltration by guerrilla groups operating freely from bases in Mozambique.
From 1976, guerrilla warfare steadily spread like a plague across rural areas. Thousands of Zanu guerrillas crossed from Mozambique, attacking white homesteads, robbing stores, planting landmines and subverting the local population. Zapu guerrillas opened a new front in western Rhodesia, along the borders with Zambia and Botswana. Main roads and railways came under attack. White farmers bore the brunt, living daily with the risk of ambush, barricaded at night in fortified homes. A growing number of whites emigrated, rather than face military service.
Rhodesia’s war forced South Africa to alter its own strategy. Hitherto, the South African government had regarded Rhodesia, along with Portuguese Angola and Mozambique, as an essential part of the buffer zone separating South Africa from black Africa. But the withdrawal of the Portuguese meant that Rhodesia was no longer considered so important as a front-line defence, for the winds of change had reached South Africa’s own frontier. The South Africans calculated that white rule in Rhodesia, without an open-ended military and financial commitment on their part, was ultimately doomed and that their interests would be better served by having a stable black government there, heavily dependent on South African goodwill, rather than an unstable white one under siege.
In blunt talks in Pretoria in 1976, Rhodesia’s recalcitrant leader, Ian Smith, was given no option but to accept the idea of black majority rule. Making clear his disdain for the whole process, Smith entered into protracted negotiations with a moderate nationalist faction led by Bishop Abel Muzorewa aiming to reach an ‘internal’ settlement which would leave the whites largely in control. Although Muzorewa won elections in 1979, the guerrilla war spread ever further. When Smith finally left the stage as prime minister on the last day of white rule on 31 May 1979, fourteen years after proclaiming Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence, his legacy was a state unrecognised by the international community, subjected to trade boycotts, ravaged by civil war and facing a perilous future.
As the war intensified, Britain set up a conference in London hoping that negotiations between the main protagonists – Joshua Nkomo’s Zapu, Robert Mugabe’s Zanu and Muzorewa’s government – might find a way through the impasse. Nkomo and Muzorewa were ready to accept a deal paving the way for another round of elections, but Mugabe held out to the last. Alone among the nationalist leaders, Mugabe wanted a military victory and was planning a new phase of urban warfare. Only an ultimatum from Mozambique’s Samora Machel forced him to sign.
The London agreement, reached in December 1979, involved Britain sending out to Rhodesia a small team of officials to hold the ring between an assortment of armies in the hope that a ceasefire would last long enough for elections to be held. With the return from exile of Nkomo and Mugabe, the election campaign was fought with ferocious intent. All sides were judged guilty of using intimidation and violence but Mugabe’s Zanu-PF was singled out as the main culprit. ‘The word intimidation is mild,’ roared Nkomo. ‘People are being terrorised. It is terror. There is fear in people’s eyes.’ The election results in March 1980, however, gave Mugabe such an overwhelming victory that arguments over the effect of violence became largely irrelevant.
Much to the surprise of the white community, Mugabe used his election victory as an occasion to pledge his support for reconciliation. ‘If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend and ally with the same national interest, loyalty, rights and duties as myself,’ he said. ‘It could never be a correct justification that because the whites oppressed us yesterday when they had the power, the blacks must oppress them today because they have power. An evil remains an evil whether practised by white against black or black against white.’ He called for a new vision and a new spirit.
Zimbabwe, it seemed, was on the threshold of an era of great promise, born out of civil war, but bursting with new ambition. Mugabe’s fine words, however, did not apply to his Zapu rivals. From the outset, Mugabe’s ambition was to establish a one-party state, using whatever means were necessary. Within weeks of independence in April 1980, his ministers began to talk openly about the need to ‘crush’ Zapu. In October, he signed an agreement with North Korea, a brutal communist dictatorship, for assistance in training a new army brigade – 5 Brigade – with the specific remit to deal with internal dissidents. Mugabe’s drive for a one-party state culminated in a campaign of terror and murder unleashed by 5 Brigade against the civilian population in Zapu strongholds in Matabeleland. Villagers were executed en masse; blockades were enforced to ensure mass starvation; thousands of men, women and children were taken to interrogation centres notorious as places of brutality and torture. The death toll reached as many as 20,000 people. After five years of persecution, Nkomo capitulated, signing a ‘unity accord’.
In South Africa, after a decade of silence, a new generation of black activists took up the cause of anti-apartheid resistance. They came from the ranks of the student population, finding inspiration not from the concept of multiracial struggle that the African National Congress had championed but from a sense of the need for black assertiveness more in line with the Africanist tradition of black politics. Black consciousness groups in South Africa gained a dramatic boost in confidence when Portuguese rule in Angola and Mozambique collapsed in 1974, paving the way for black liberation movements to take control. Student activists took the lead, focusing their protests on the government’s system of ‘Bantu’ education which had produced a legacy of inferior schooling, poorly trained teachers, overcrowded classrooms and inadequate equipment. New government regulations requiring instruction in Afrikaans ignited further protests. In June 1976, student demonstrators marching through Soweto, a black suburb on the outskirts of Johannesburg, were met by armed police who opened fire, killing a thirteen-year-old schoolboy and provoking a student uprising that lasted for six months.
Although government repression succeeded in keeping the lid on anti-apartheid protest at home, South Africa’s white rulers faced new external dangers. Since the departure of the Portuguese, Mozambique and Angola had been ruled by Marxist governments friendly to the Soviet Union and willing to provide sanctuaries and training facilities to the exiled African National Congress. One consequence of the Soweto revolt was that it led to an exodus of some 14,000 black youths, providing the ANC with an army of eager recruits. From 1977, ANC guerrillas infiltrated across South Africa’s borders, beginning a low-level sabotage campaign. The advent of black nationalist rule in Zimbabwe in 1980 completed South Africa’s encirclement to the north by hostile governments.
A hardline prime minister, P.W. Botha, elected to lead the National Party in 1978, set out to confront both external and internal threats by constructing a massive security apparatus, licensing security officials to take whatever action they deemed necessary at home and abroad. Secret units were soon involved in bombing, arson, kidnapping and assassination. From bases in the Transvaal, South African military intelligence trained, armed and directed a Mozambique rebel group, Renamo, sending it across the border to destroy bridges, railways, agricultural projects and schools.
Simultaneously, Botha sought to modernise apartheid, to rid it of its more impractical encumbrances, to make it function more effectively. He encouraged moves to scrap petty-apartheid rules used to enforce segregation in public places such as post offices and park benches. He suggested that laws banning interracial marriage and sex should no longer be regarded as ‘holy cows’. African workers were permitted to join registered trade unions. Most job reservation regulations were scrapped. In piecemeal fashion, Botha also endorsed plans to improve conditions in black urban areas. After thirty years of harsh legislation designed to drive out the black population from ‘white’ areas, the government finally recognised their right to live there permanently, according them property rights. But while allowing reforms to the fringes of apartheid, Botha remained as determined as ever to enforce white domination, its central purpose.
A new phase of anti-apartheid resistance began in the early 1980s. It involved a wide range of community associations, church groups, trade unions and student bodies. Local campaigns over such issues as housing conditions and educational standards grew into ambitions for national action. In 1983, a coalition of more than 300 organisations formed a United Democratic Front that cut across lines of class and colour and set as its goal a united, democratic South Africa. Activists launched a vociferous campaign for the release of Nelson Mandela, who had languished in prison on Robben Island since 1964, a largely forgotten figure. The campaign to ‘Free Mandela’ caught the public imagination, attracting support not only from a host of black organisations but from white university students and liberal politicians and gaining ground around the world. Botha dismissed out of hand any notion of releasing him, but in prison Mandela now became a potent symbol of opposition to the government.
In 1984, a cycle of violence began that continued intermittently for nearly ten years. At the forefront were groups of black youths – ‘comrades’, as they came to be known – determined to destroy ‘the system’ and ready to defy armed police and soldiers in the dusty and decrepit streets of black townships with stones, catapults and petrol bombs. They enforced consumer boycotts, organised rent strikes, attacked government buildings and hunted down ‘collaborators’ – township councillors, local policemen and others deemed to support ‘the system’. Their trademark became the ‘necklace’ method of killing – a tyre filled with petrol thrown over a victim and set on fire. Students joined the fray, forsaking their classrooms once more. But the townships’ revolt this time was not solely a ‘children’s war’, as it had been in 1976; it was part of a popular movement involving entire communities – parents, teachers, workers, churchmen and women.
The government responded with brutal repression, incarcerating thousands of activists in prison, licensing vigilante groups to retaliate and letting loose police death squads. But repression had only a temporary effect. Moreover, the daily spectacle of violent protest and government reprisals, shown on television screens around the world, provoked a chorus of international condemnation. Taking fright, foreign investors began unloading their South African shares. American banks decided to stop rolling over loans, starting a chain reaction that pitched South Africa into a severe financial crisis. However much Botha relied on repression to protect white power, it left South Africa without a viable political strategy, only the prospect of more violence.
From the confines of prison, Mandela made several approaches to the government, seeking to open a dialogue that might break the fearful deadlock gripping South Africa. Despite strong misgivings among fellow ANC inmates, Mandela entered into a series of secret discussions with senior officials in 1988, proposing a meeting with Botha as a preliminary step to see if there was scope for negotiations. In July 1989, Mandela was taken in secret to meet Botha at his official residence in Cape Town. Their conversation amounted to little more than a polite discourse on South African history and culture, lasting for half an hour. Six weeks later, after months of friction with his cabinet colleagues, Botha resigned. Nevertheless, a crucial breakthrough had been made: in their encounters with Mandela, government officials had been impressed by his grasp of the central issues that preoccupied whites and found him to be a leader of considerable stature with whom the white establishment could do business.
The National Party’s next leader, F.W. de Klerk, was as determined to protect white domination as Botha had been but sought a more pragmatic approach. On taking office as president in 1989, he initiated a reassessment of South Africa’s prospects. Forty years of National Party rule had left the white population both powerful and prosperous; the Afrikaner community, in particular, had fared well, fulfilling its long-held ambition to acquire wealth, skills and economic strength. The government’s ability to defend the apartheid system was still formidable. It possessed the means for totalitarian control and frequently used them.
Moreover, the external threats facing South Africa had diminished. The Soviet Union, on the brink of demise, had made clear its intention to disentangle itself from African conflicts. A deal involving the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola was concluded in December 1988 and paved the way for South-West Africa (Namibia) to proceed with an orderly transition to independence, bringing to an end a guerrilla war against South African rule there. Soviet assistance to Mozambique was also scaled back. In 1989, the Frelimo government in Mozambique, exhausted by years of economic failure and civil war, abandoned its commitment to a Marxist-Leninist state and pronounced itself in favour of multi-party democracy. In addition, the collapse of socialist governments in Eastern Europe in 1989 had deprived the ANC of one of its main sources of military, logistical and financial support.
De Klerk was quick to recognise the importance of these strategic openings. His close advisers argued that they provided an opportunity for the government to seize the initiative. If whites were to preserve their power and privileges, then fundamental change was needed. While the government faced no immediate difficulty, the longer political reform was delayed, the weaker its position would become. Without reform, the cycle of black opposition would intensify. The fate of neighbouring Rhodesia, where Ian Smith had turned down one favourable deal after another, only to find himself embroiled in a seven-year guerrilla war and negotiating a belated settlement that led to the advent of a Marxist government, provided a potent example. ‘When the opportunity was there for real constructive negotiation, it was not grasped,’ de Klerk concluded. ‘We must not make that mistake.’
The mood of much of the white population favoured change. A new generation of white South Africans disliked being treated as pariahs by the rest of the world, subjected to sports boycotts, travel bans and trade sanctions. Businessmen wanted a more stable political system that would assist economic growth. Economic prosperity was becoming more important to white South Africa than racial division. On his journeys abroad, de Klerk was readily assured by Western governments of support if he changed course. From one capital to the next, the advice he received was the same: lift the ban on the ANC, release Mandela and other prisoners and start talks.
When deciding what action to take, de Klerk assumed that because the government enjoyed such a preponderance of power, it would be able to set the terms of negotiations. He also believed there was a good chance that, if set free, the ANC, poorly organised and ill-prepared for peace, would fall into disarray, leaving the government to forge ahead with a new alliance of conservative black organisations.
Despite signs of a right-wing backlash and deep misgivings among the security establishment, de Klerk took the plunge. On 2 February 1990, he announced the government would lift the ban on the ANC, release Mandela and prepare the way for a democratic constitution based on a universal franchise.
Freed after twenty-seven years, Mandela walked through the gates of Victor Verster prison on 11 February, hand-in-hand with his wife Winnie, towards a waiting crowd of supporters and the ranks of the world’s media. While the outside world had expected Mandela to dwell on the suffering he and his colleagues had endured in prison, he himself was more interested in explaining what they had learned there, the understanding they had gained, the strength of their commitment to democracy which had sustained them. Not once did he express bitterness towards the white community, only against the system they imposed. The example he set had profound importance. For, if after twenty-seven years in prison, Mandela could emerge insisting on the need for reconciliation, it undermined the demands of those seeking revenge and retribution. The generosity of spirit he showed had a deep impact on his white adversaries, earning him measures of trust that ultimately laid the foundations for a political settlement.
The route to a political settlement, however, was marked by years of tortuous negotiations and prolonged bouts of violence. On many occasions it seemed the whole exercise was doomed. An internal war broke out between the ANC and Inkatha, a Zulu nationalist movement, erupting first in Zululand, then spreading to the Witwatersrand, South Africa’s industrial heartland. Elements within the security establishment supported Inkatha, seeking to thwart any prospect of the ANC gaining power. Massacres by one side or the other became commonplace. All sides used death squads. White right-wing paramilitary organisations pursued their own vigilante action in a bid to provoke a racial conflagration.
Yet after four years of turmoil, as the fever of violence abated, South Africans in their millions made their way peacefully to the polls, black and white citizens alike determined to make the election a success. Over four days of voting in April 1994, long queues formed outside polling stations, circling around city blocks and winding back along dirt roads and across fields. Many arriving in the early morning were still there late in the day, but remained patient. As they returned home, having voted, many blacks spoke of how their dignity had been restored. Many whites too felt a sense of their own liberation. Indeed, the feelings of relief that the curse of apartheid had finally been lifted were as strong among the white community which had imposed it as among the blacks who had suffered under it.
On the day of his inauguration as president, 19 May 1994, Nelson Mandela promised South Africa a new covenant. ‘We enter into a covenant that we shall build a society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity – a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.’