Recent fossil finds show that Homo sapiens existed along Africa’s southern coast over fifty thousand years ago. The descendants of these nomadic Stone-Age people – ochre-skinned San hunter-gatherers and Khoikhoi herders – still inhabited the Western Cape when Europeans arrived in the fifteenth century. By the time of the Dutch settlement at the Cape in the mid-seventeenth century, much of the eastern half of the country was occupied by people who had begun crossing the Limpopo around the time of Christ’s birth.
The stage was now set for the complex drama of South Africa’s modern history, which in crude terms was a battle for the control of scarce resources between the various indigenous people, African states and the European colonizers. The twentieth century alone saw the endurance of colonialism, the unification of South Africa and the attempts by the white minority to keep at bay the black population’s demands for civil rights, culminating in the implementation of South Africa’s most notorious social invention – apartheid. Ultimately, multiracialism has been victorious and, despite numerous problems, South Africa’s lively elections are proof that democracy is still alive.
Rock art provides evidence of human culture in the subcontinent dating back nearly 30,000 years and represents Southern Africa’s oldest and most enduring artistic tradition. The artists were hunter-gatherers, sometimes called Bushmen, but more commonly San. The most direct descendants of the late Stone Age, San people have survived in tiny pockets, mostly in Namibia and Botswana, making theirs the longest-spanning culture in the subcontinent. At one time they probably spread throughout sub-Saharan Africa, having pretty well perfected their nomadic lifestyle, which involved an enviable twenty-hour working week spent by the men hunting and the women gathering. This left considerable time for artistic and religious pursuits. People lived in small, loosely connected bands comprising family units and were free to leave and join up with other groups. The concept of private property had little meaning because everything required for survival could be obtained from the environment.
About two thousand years ago, this changed when some groups in present-day northern Botswana laid their hands on fat-tailed sheep and cattle from Northern Africa, thus transforming themselves into herding communities. The introduction of livestock revolutionized social organization, creating the idea of ownership and accumulation. Social divisions developed, and political units became larger and centred around a chief, who had important powers, such as the allocation of pasturage.
These were the first South Africans encountered by Portuguese mariners, who landed along the Cape coast in the fifteenth century. Known as Khoikhoi (meaning “men of men”), they were not ethnically distinct from the San, as many anthropologists once believed, but simply represented a distinct social organization. According to current thinking, it was possible for Khoi who lost their livestock to revert to being San, and for San to lay their hands on animals to become Khoi, giving rise to the collective term “Khoisan”.
Around two thousand years ago, tall, dark-skinned people who practised mixed farming – raising both crops and livestock – crossed the Limpopo River into what is today South Africa. These Bantu-speaking farmers were the ancestors of South Africa’s majority African population, who gradually drifted south to occupy the entire eastern half of the subcontinent as far as the Eastern Cape, where they first encountered Europeans in the sixteenth century.
Apart from having highly developed farming know-how and a far more sedentary life than the Khoisan, the early Bantu speakers were skilled craft workers and knew about mining and smelting metals, including gold, copper and iron, which became an important factor in the extensive network of trade that developed.
In the late fifteenth century, Portuguese mariners led by Bartholomeu Dias first rounded the Cape of Good Hope, but it was another 170 years before any European settlement was established here. In 1652, De Goede Hoop and two other vessels of the Dutch East India Company, trading between the Netherlands and the East Indies, pulled into Table Bay to set up a refreshment station to resupply company ships.
Despite the view of station commander Jan van Riebeeck that the indigenous Khoi were savages “living without conscience”, from the start, the Dutch were dependent on them to provide livestock, which were traded for trinkets. As the settlement developed, Van Riebeeck needed more labour to keep the show going. Much to his annoyance, the bosses back in Amsterdam had forbidden him from enslaving the locals, and refused his request for slaves from elsewhere in the company’s empire.
This kicked off the process of colonization of the lands around the fort, when a number of Dutch men were released in 1657 from their contracts to farm as free burghers on land granted by the company. The idea was that they would sell their produce to the company at a fixed price, thereby overcoming the labour shortage. The move sparked the first of a series of Khoikhoi–Dutch wars. Although the first campaign ended in stalemate, the Khoikhoi were ultimately no match for the Dutch, who had the advantage of superior mobility and firepower in horses and guns.
Meanwhile, in 1658, Van Riebeeck established slavery at the Cape via the back door, when he purloined a shipload of slaves from West Africa. The Dutch East India Company itself became the biggest slaveholder at the Cape and continued importing slaves, mostly from the East Indies, at such a pace that by 1711 there were more slaves than burghers in the colony. With the help of this ready workforce, the embryonic Cape Colony expanded outwards, displacing the Peninsula Khoikhoi, who by 1713 had lost everything. Most of their livestock (nearly fifty thousand head) and most of their land west of the Hottentots Holland Mountains (90km southeast of present-day Cape Town) had been swallowed by the Dutch East India Company. Dispossession and diseases like smallpox, previously unknown in South Africa, decimated their numbers and shattered their social system. By the middle of the eighteenth century, those who remained had been reduced to a condition of miserable servitude to the colonists.
Like the Khoikhoi, impoverished white people living at the fringes of colonial society had limited options. Many just packed up their wagons and rolled out into the interior, where they lived by the gun, either hunting game or taking cattle from the Khoi by force. Beyond the control of the Dutch East India Company, these nomadic trekboers began to assume a pastoral niche previously occupied by the Khoi. By the turn of the nineteenth century, trekboers had penetrated well into the Eastern Cape, pushing back the Khoi and San in the process.
As their lives became disrupted and living by traditional means became impossible, the Khoisan began to prey on the cattle and sheep of the trekboers. The trekboers responded by hunting down the San as vermin, killing the men and often taking women and children as slaves. After the British occupation of the Cape in 1795, the trekboer migration from the Cape accelerated.
While in the west of the country trekboers were migrating from the Cape Colony, in the east equally significant movements were under way. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, descendants of the first Bantu-speakers to penetrate into South Africa had been swelling their numbers and had expanded right across the eastern half of the country.
Nowhere was this more marked than in KwaZulu-Natal, where, prompted by pressures on grazing land, chiefdoms survived by subduing and absorbing their neighbours. By the early nineteenth century, two chiefdoms, the Ndwandwe and the Mthethwa, dominated eastern South Africa around the Tugela River. During the late 1810s a major confrontation between them ended in the defeat of the Mthethwa. Out of their ruins emerged the Zulus, who were to become one of the most powerful polities in Southern Africa. Around 1816, Shaka assumed the chieftaincy of the Zulus, whose fighting tactics he quickly transformed.
By 1820, the Zulus had become the dominant regional power and by the middle of the century had established a centralized military state with a forty-thousand-strong standing army. One of the strengths of the system lay in its ability to absorb the survivors of conflict, who became members of the expanding Zulu state. Throughout the 1820s, Shaka sent his armies to invade neighbouring territory. But in 1828 he was stabbed to death by two of his half-brothers, one of whom, Dingane, succeeded him. Dingane continued with his brother’s ruthless but devastatingly successful policies and tactics.
The rise of the Zulu state reverberated across Southern Africa and led to the creation of a series of centralized Nguni states as well as paving the way for Boer expansion into the interior. In a movement of forced migrations known as the mfecane, or difaqane, huge areas of the country were laid waste and people across eastern South Africa were driven off their lands. They attempted to survive either in small groups or by banding together to form larger political organizations.
To the north of the Zulu kingdom another Nguni group with strong cultural and linguistic affinities with the Zulus came together under Sobhuza I and his son Mswati II, after whom their new state Swaziland took its name. In North West Province, a few hundred Zulus under Mzilikazi were displaced by Shaka and relocated to Matabeleland, now southwestern Zimbabwe, where they re-established themselves as the Matabele kingdom. In the Drakensberg, on the west flank of KwaZulu-Natal, Moshoeshoe I used diplomacy and cunning to establish the territory that became the modern state of Lesotho.
Back in the Cape, many Afrikaners were becoming fed up with British rule. Their principal grievance was the way in which the colonial authorities were tampering with labour relations and destroying what they saw as a divine distinction between blacks and whites. In 1828 a proclamation gave Khoi residents and free blacks equality with whites before the law. The abolition of slavery in 1834 was the last straw.
Fifteen thousand Afrikaners (one out of ten living in the colony) left the Cape to escape the meddlesome British. When they arrived in the eastern half of the country, they were delighted to find vast tracts of apparently unoccupied land. In fact, they were merely stumbling into the eye of the mfecane storm – areas that had been temporarily cleared either by war parties or by fearful refugees hiding out to escape detection. As they fanned out further they encountered the Nguni states and a series of battles followed. By the middle of the nineteenth century, descendants of the Dutch had consolidated control and established the two Boer states of the South African Republic, aka the Transvaal (now Gauteng, Mpumalanga, North West Province and Limpopo) and the Orange Free State (now Free State). Britain recognized the independence of both of these states in the 1850s.
In the 1850s Britain wasn’t too concerned about the interior of South Africa. Its strategic position aside, South Africa was a chaotic backwater at the butt-end of the empire. Things changed in the 1860s, with the discovery of diamonds (the world’s largest deposit) around modern-day Kimberley, and even more significantly in the 1880s, with the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand (now Gauteng). Together, these finds were the catalyst that transformed South Africa from a down-at-heel rural society into an urbanized industrial one. In the process great fortunes were made by capitalists like Cecil Rhodes, traditional African society was crushed and the independence of the Boer republics ended.
Despite the benefits it brought, the discovery of gold was also one of the principal causes of the Anglo-Boer War (more often referred to locally as the South African War, in recognition of the fact that South Africans of all colours took part). Gold-mining had shifted the economic centre of South Africa from the British-controlled Cape to the South African Republic, while at the same time Britain’s European rival, Germany, was beginning to make political and economic inroads in the Boer republics. Britain feared losing its strategic Cape naval base, but perhaps even more important were questions of international finance and the substantial British investment in the mines. London was at the heart of world trade and was eager to see a flourishing gold-mining industry in South Africa, but the Boers seemed rather sluggish about modernizing their infrastructure to assist the exploitation of the mines.
In any case, a number of Britons had for some time seen the unification of South Africa as the key to securing British interests in the subcontinent. To this end, under a wafer-thin pretext, Britain had declared war and subdued the last of the independent African kingdoms by means of the Zulu War of 1879. This secured KwaZulu-Natal, bringing all the coastal territories of South Africa under British control. To control the entire subcontinent south of the Limpopo, Britain needed to bring the two Boer republics under the Union flag.
During the closing years of the nineteenth century, Britain demanded that the South African Republic grant voting rights to British miners living there – a demand that, if met, would have meant the end of Boer political control over their own state, since they were outnumbered by the foreigners. The Boers turned down the request and war broke out in October 1899. The British command believed they were looking at a walkover: in the words of Lord Kitchener, a “teatime war” that would get the troops home by Christmas.
In fact, the campaign turned into Britain’s most expensive since the Napoleonic Wars. During the early stages, the Boers took the imperial power by surprise and penetrated into British-controlled KwaZulu-Natal and the Northern Cape, inflicting a series of humiliating defeats. By June, a reinforced British army was pushing the Boers back, but the Boers fought on for another two years. Lord Kitchener responded with a scorched-earth policy that left the countryside a wasteland and thousands of women and children homeless. To house them, the British invented the concentration camps, in which 26,370 Boer women and children died. For some Afrikaners, this episode remains a source of bitterness against the British even today. Less widely publicized were the African concentration camps which took 14,000 lives. By 1902, the Boers were demoralized, and in May the Afrikaner republics surrendered their independence in exchange for British promises of reconstruction. By the end of the so-called teatime war, Britain had committed nearly half a million men to the field and lost 22,000 of them. Of the 88,000 Boers who fought, 7000 died in combat. With the two Boer republics and the two British colonies under imperial control, the way was clear for the federation of the Union of South Africa in 1910.
Between the conclusion of the Anglo-Boer War and the unification of South Africa, the mines suffered a shortage of unskilled labour. Most Africans still lived by agriculture: to counter this, the government took measures to compel them to supply their labour to the mines. One method was the imposition of taxes that had to be paid in coin, thus forcing Africans from subsistence farming and into the cash economy. Responding to one such tax, in 1906 a group of Zulus refused to pay. The authorities declared martial law and dealt mercilessly with the protesters, burning their homes and seizing their possessions. This provoked a full-blown rebellion led by Chief Bambatha, which was ruthlessly put down, at a cost of four thousand rebel lives. Armed resistance by Africans was thus ended for over half a century. After the defeat of the Bambatha Rebellion, the number of African men from Zululand working in the Gauteng mines shot up by sixty percent. By 1909, eighty percent of adult males in the territory were away from home, working as migrant labourers. Migrant labour, with its shattering effects on family life, became one of the foundations of South Africa’s economic and social system, and a basic cornerstone of apartheid.
In a parallel development, large numbers of Afrikaners were forced to leave rural areas in the early part of the twentieth century. This was partly a result of the war, but also of overcrowding, drought and pestilence. Many Afrikaners joined the ranks of a swelling poor white working class whose members often felt despised by the English-speaking capitalists who commanded the economy, and threatened by lower-paid Africans competing for their jobs.
In 1918 a group of Afrikaners formed the Broederbond (“the brotherhood”), a secret society to promote the interest of Afrikaners. It aimed to uplift impoverished members of the volk (“people”) and to develop a sense of pride in their language, religion and culture. The Broederbond would come to dominate every aspect of the way the country was run for half a century.
During the early twentieth century, a number of young Afrikaner intellectuals travelled to Europe, where they were inspired by fascism. It was around this time that Afrikaner intellectuals began using the term apartheid (pronounced “apart-hate”). Among those kicking their heels in Germany in the 1920s and 30s were Nico Diederichs, who became a minister of finance under the Afrikaner Nationalist Party; Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, apartheid’s leading theorist and prime minister from 1958 to 1966; and Piet Meyer, controller of the state broadcasting service, who named his son Izan (“Nazi” spelled backwards – he later claimed this was sheer coincidence).
In 1939, the Broederbond introduced a scheme that, in the space of a decade, launched ten thousand Afrikaner businesses, some of which are still among the leading players in South Africa’s economy.
In the late nineteenth century, white Afrikaans-speakers, fighting for an identity, sought to create a “racially pure” culture by driving a wedge between themselves and coloured Afrikaans-speakers. They reinvented Afrikaans as a “white man’s language”, eradicating the supposed stigma of its coloured ties by substituting Dutch words for those with Asian or African roots. In 1925, the dialect of Afrikaans spoken by upper-crust white people became an official language alongside English, and the dialects spoken by coloured people were treated as inferior deviations from correct usage.
For Afrikaner nationalists this wasn’t enough, and after the introduction of apartheid in 1948, they attempted to codify perceived racial differences. Under the Population Registration Act, all South Africans were classified as white, coloured or African. These classifications became fundamental to what kind of life you could expect. There are numerous cases of families in which one sibling was classified coloured with limited rights and another white with the right to live in comfortable white areas, enjoy superior job opportunities, and be able to send their children to better schools and universities.
With the demise of apartheid, the make-up of residential areas is slowly (very slowly) shifting – and so is the thinking on ethnic terminology. Some people now reject the term “coloured” because of its apartheid associations, and refuse any racial definitions; others proudly embrace the term as a means of acknowledging their distinct culture, with its slave, East Indies and Khoikhoi roots.
Despite having relied on African cooperation for their victory in the South African War and having hinted at enhanced rights for black people after the war, the British excluded them from the cosy federal deal between themselves and the Afrikaners. It wasn’t long, in fact, before the white Union government began eroding African rights. In response, a group of middle-class mission-educated Africans formed the South African Native National Congress (later to become the ANC) in 1912 to campaign for universal suffrage. In 1914, the leaders went to London to protest against the 1913 Natives’ Land Act, which confined the black majority to less than ten percent of the land. The trip failed and the Land Act became the foundation for apartheid some 35 years later.
Through the early half of the twentieth century, the ANC remained conservative, unwilling to engage in active protest. In response, a number of alternative mass organizations arose, among them the Industrial and Commercial Union, an African trade union founded in 1919, which at its peak in 1928 had gathered an impressive 150,000 members. But in the 1930s it ran out of steam. The first political movement in the country not organized along ethnic lines was the South African Communist Party, founded in 1921 with a multiracial executive. While it never gained widespread membership itself, it became an important force inside the ANC.
Throughout the 1930s, the ANC plodded on with speeches, petitions and pleas, which proved completely fruitless.
In 1944, a hotheaded young student named Nelson Mandela with friends Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu and Anton Lembede formed the ANC Youth League. The League’s founding manifesto criticized the ANC leadership for being “gentlemen with clean hands”. The 1945 annual conference of the ANC adopted a document called “Africans’ Claims in South Africa”, which reflected an emerging politicization. The document demanded universal franchise and an end to the colour bar, which reserved most skilled jobs for white people.
In 1946 the African Mineworkers’ Union launched one of the biggest strikes in the country’s history in protest against falling living standards. Virtually the entire Gauteng gold-mining region came to a standstill as one hundred thousand workers downed tools. Prime Minister Jan Smuts sent in police who forced the workers back down the shafts at gunpoint.
The following year Nelson Mandela took his first step into public life when he was elected general secretary of the ANC.
For years, the white government had been hinting at easing up on segregation, and even Smuts himself, no soft liberal, had reckoned that it would have to end at some point. The relentless influx of Africans into the urban areas was breaking the stereotype of them as rural tribespeople. The government appointed the Fagan Commission to look into the question of the pass laws, which controlled the movement of Africans and sought to keep them out of the white cities unless they had a job.
When the Fagan Commission reported its findings in 1948, it concluded that “the trend to urbanization is irreversible and the pass laws should be eased”. While some blacks may have felt heartened by this whiff of reform, this was the last thing many whites wanted to hear. Afrikaner farmers were alarmed by the idea of a labour shortage caused by Africans leaving the rural areas for better prospects in the cities, while white workers feared the prospect of losing jobs to lower-paid African workers.
Against this background of black aspiration and white fears, the Smuts government called a general election. The opposition National Party, which promoted Afrikaner nationalism, campaigned on a swart gevaar or “black peril” ticket, playing on white insecurity and fear. With an eye on the vote of Afrikaner workers and farmers, they promised to reverse the tide of Africans into the cities and to send them all back to the reserves. For white business they made the conflicting promise to bring black workers into the cities as a cheap and plentiful supply of labour.
On Friday May 28, 1948, South Africa awoke to a National Party victory at the polls. Party leader D.F. Malan told a group of ecstatic supporters: “For the first time, South Africa is our own. May God grant that it always remains our own. It is to us that millions of semi-barbarous blacks look for guidance, justice and the Christian way of life.”
Meanwhile, the ANC was driven by its own power struggle. Fed up with the ineffectiveness of the old guard, the Youth League staged a coup, voted in its own leadership with Nelson Mandela on the executive and adopted the League’s radical Programme of Action, with an arsenal of tactics that Mandela explained would include “the new weapons of boycott, strike, civil disobedience and non-cooperation”.
During the 1950s, the National Party began putting in place a barrage of laws that would eventually constitute the structure of apartheid. Some early onslaughts on black civil rights included the Bantu Authorities Act, which set up puppet authorities to govern Africans in the reserves; the Population Registration Act, which classified every South African at birth as “white, native or coloured”; the Group Areas Act, which divided South Africa into ethnically distinct areas; and the Suppression of Communism Act, which made any anti-apartheid opposition (Communist or not) a criminal offence.
The ANC responded in 1952 with the Defiance Campaign, aimed at achieving full civil rights for blacks. During the campaign, eight thousand volunteers deliberately broke the apartheid laws and were jailed. The campaign rolled on through 1952 until the police provoked violence in November by firing on a prayer meeting in East London. A riot followed in which two white people were killed, thus appearing to discredit claims that the campaign was non-violent. The government used this pretext to swoop on the homes of the ANC leadership, resulting in the detention and then banning of over one hundred ANC organizers. Bannings restricted a person’s movement and political activities: a banned person was prohibited from seeing more than one person at a time or talking to any other banned person; prohibited from entering certain buildings; kept under surveillance; required to report regularly to the police; and could not be quoted or published.
The most far-reaching event of the decade was the Congress of the People, held near Johannesburg in 1955. At a mass meeting of three thousand delegates, four organizations, representing Africans, coloureds, whites and Indians, formed a strategic partnership called the Congress Alliance. ANC leader Chief Albert Luthuli explained that “for the first time in the history of our multiracial nation its people will meet as equals, irrespective of race, colour and creed, to formulate a freedom charter for all the people of our country”. Adopted at the Congress of the People, the Freedom Charter became the principal document defining ANC policy.
The government rounded up 156 opposition leaders and charged them with treason. Evidence at the Treason Trial was based on the Freedom Charter, described as a “blueprint for violent Communist revolution”. Although all the defendants were acquitted, the four-year trial disrupted the ANC and splits began to emerge. In 1958 a group of Africanists led by the charismatic Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe broke away from the ANC to form the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), arguing that cooperation with white activists was not in the interests of black liberation.
• The people shall govern.
• All national groups shall have equal rights.
• The people shall share the nation’s wealth.
• The land shall be shared by those who work it.
• All shall be equal before the law.
• All shall enjoy equal human rights.
• There shall be work and security for all.
• The doors of learning and culture shall be opened.
• There shall be houses, security and comfort.
• There shall be peace and friendship.
On March 21, 1960, Sobukwe and thousands of followers presented themselves without passes to police stations across Gauteng and the Western Cape. At Sharpeville police station, south of Johannesburg, the police opened fire, killing 69 and injuring nearly 200. Most were shot in the back.
Demonstrations swept the country on March 27. The next day Africans staged a total stay-away from work and thousands joined a public pass-burning demonstration. The day after that, the government declared a state of emergency, rounded up 22,000 people and banned the ANC and PAC. White South Africa panicked as the value of the rand slipped and shares slid. Some feared an imminent and bloody revolution.
Later that month, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd was shot in the head by a half-crazed white farmer. Many hoped that, if he died, apartheid would be ditched. But Dr Verwoerd survived, his appetite for apartheid stronger than ever. More than anyone, Verwoerd made apartheid his own and formulated the system of Bantustans – notionally independent statelets in which Africans were to exercise their political rights away from the white areas. The aim was to dismantle the black majority into several separate “tribal” minorities, none of which on its own could outnumber whites.
In 1961 Nelson Mandela called for a national convention “to determine a non-racial democratic constitution”. Instead, Verwoerd appointed one-time neo-Nazi John Vorster as justice minister. A trained lawyer, Vorster eagerly set about passing repressive legislation that circumvented the rule of law.
Nelson Mandela saw the writing on the wall. “The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit,” he told the BBC, before going underground as commander in chief of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation, aka MK), the newly formed armed wing of the ANC. The organization was dedicated to economic and symbolic acts of sabotage and was under strict orders not to kill or injure people. In August 1962 Mandela was captured, tried and with nine other ANC leaders he was handed a life sentence.
With the leadership of the liberation movement behind bars, the 1960s was the decade in which everything seemed to be going the white government’s way. Resistance was stifled, the state grew more powerful, and for white South Africans, businessmen and foreign investors life seemed perfect. For black South Africans, poverty deepened – a state of affairs enforced by apartheid legislation and repressive measures that included bannings, detentions without trial, house arrests and murders of political prisoners.
The ANC was impotent, and resistance by its armed wing MK was virtually nonexistent. But as South Africa swung into the 1970s, the uneasy peace began to fray, prompted at first by deteriorating black living standards, which reawakened industrial action. Trade unions came to fill the vacuum left by the ANC.
The Soweto uprising of June 16, 1976, signalled the transfer of protest from the workplace to the townships, as black youths took to the streets in protest against the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in their schools. The protest spread across the country and by the following February, 575 people (nearly a quarter of them children) had been killed in the rolling series of revolts that followed.
The government relied increasingly on armed police to impose order. Even this was unable to stop the mushrooming of new liberation organizations, many of them part of the broadly based Black Consciousness Movement. As the unrest rumbled on into 1977, the government responded by banning all the new black organizations and detaining their leadership. In September 1977, Steve Biko (one of the detained) became the 46th political prisoner to die in police custody.
The banned organizations were rapidly replaced by new movements and the government never again successfully put the lid on opposition. By the late 1970s business was complaining that apartheid wasn’t working any more, and even the government was having its doubts. The growth of the black population was outstripping that of the white; from a peak of 21 percent of the population in 1910, white people now made up only 16 percent. This proportion was set to fall to 10 percent by the end of the century. The sums just didn’t add up.
It was becoming clear that the deployment of the police couldn’t solve South Africa’s problems, and in 1978 defence minister Pieter Willem (P.W.) Botha became prime minister in a palace coup. Botha adopted a two-handed strategy, of reform accompanied by unprecedented repression. He devised his so-called Total Strategy, which aimed to draw every facet of white society into the fight against the opponents of apartheid. This included military training programmes in white schools, propaganda campaigns, the extension of conscription, and political reforms aimed at co-opting Indians and coloured people.
Despite this, the 1980s saw the growing use of sabotage against the apartheid state. Botha began contemplating reform and moved Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison in Tokai, Cape Town. But he also poured ever-increasing numbers of troops into African townships to stop unrest, while intimidating neighbouring countries. Between 1981 and 1983, the army launched operations into every one of the country’s black-ruled neighbours, Angola, Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Lesotho.
In 1983 Botha came up with another scheme to shore up apartheid: the so-called New Constitution in which coloured people and Indians would be granted the vote for their own racially segregated – and powerless – chambers. For Africans, apartheid was to continue as usual.
Around the same time, 15,000 anti-apartheid delegates met at Mitchell’s Plain in Cape Town to form the United Democratic Front (UDF), a multiracial umbrella for 575 opposition organizations. The UDF became a proxy for the ANC as two years of strikes, protest and boycotts followed.
Towards the end of the decade, the world watched as apartheid troops and police were regularly shown on TV beating up and shooting unarmed Africans. The Commonwealth condemned the apartheid government, the United States and Australia severed air links and the US Congress passed legislation promoting disinvestment. An increasingly desperate Botha offered to release Mandela “if he renounces violence”.
Mandela replied: “I am surprised by the conditions the government wants to impose. I am not a violent man. It was only when all other forms of resistance were no longer open to us that we turned to armed struggle. Let Botha … renounce violence.”
As events unfolded, a subtle shift became palpable: Botha was the prisoner and Mandela held the keys. While black resistance wasn’t abating, Botha was now also facing a white right-wing backlash. The ultra-right Conservative Party was winning electoral support and the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement, aka AWB) was darkly muttering about civil war.
In 1986, Botha declared yet another state of emergency accompanied by assassinations, mass arrests, detentions, treason trials and torture. Alarmed by the violence engulfing the country, a group of South African businessmen, mostly Afrikaners, flew to Senegal in 1987 to meet an ANC delegation headed by Thabo Mbeki. A joint statement pressed for unequivocal support for a negotiated settlement.
In 1988 Mandela was rushed to Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town, suffering from tuberculosis. Although he was better by October, the government announced that he wouldn’t be returning to Pollsmoor Prison. Instead he was moved to a prison warder’s cottage at Victor Verster (now Drakenstein) Prison just outside Paarl. Outside the prison walls, Botha’s policies had collapsed and the army top brass were telling him that there could be no decisive military victory over the anti-apartheid opposition – and that South Africa’s undeclared war in Angola was bleeding the treasury dry.
At the beginning of 1989, Mandela wrote to Botha from Victor Verster calling for negotiations. The intransigent Botha found himself with little room to manoeuvre. When he suffered a stroke, his party colleagues moved swiftly to oust him and replaced him with Frederik Willem (F.W.) De Klerk.
De Klerk made it clear that he was opposed to majority rule. But he inherited a massive pile of problems that could no longer be ignored: the economy was in trouble and the cost of maintaining apartheid prohibitive; the illegal influx of Africans from the country to the city had become unstoppable; blacks hadn’t been taken in by Botha’s constitutional reforms, and even South Africa’s friends were losing patience. In September 1989, US President George Bush (the elder) told De Klerk that if there wasn’t progress on releasing Mandela within six months, he would extend US sanctions.
De Klerk gambled on his ability to outmanoeuvre the opposition. In February 1990, he announced the unbanning of the ANC, the PAC, the Communist Party and 33 other organizations, as well as the release of Mandela. On Sunday February 11, at around 4pm, Mandela stepped out of Victor Verster Prison and was driven to City Hall in Cape Town, from where he spoke publicly for the first time in three decades. That May, Mandela and De Klerk signed an agreement in which the government undertook to repeal repressive laws and release political prisoners, while the ANC agreed to suspend the armed struggle. As events moved towards full-blown negotiations it became clear that De Klerk still clung to race-based notions for a settlement: “Majority rule is not suitable for South Africa,” he said, “because it will lead to the domination of minorities.”
The negotiating process, from 1990 to 1994, was fragile, and at many points a descent into chaos looked likely. Obstacles included violence linked to a sinister element in the apartheid security forces who were working behind the scenes to destabilize the ANC; threats of civil war from heavily armed right-wingers; and a low-key war of attrition in KwaZulu-Natal between Zulu nationalists of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and ANC supporters, which had already claimed three thousand lives between 1987 and 1990.
In April 1993 it looked as if it would all fall apart with the assassination of Chris Hani, the most popular ANC leader after Mandela. Hani’s slaying by a right-wing gunman touched deep fears among all South Africans. A descent into civil war loomed, and for three consecutive nights the nation watched as Mandela appeared on prime-time television appealing for calm. This marked the decisive turning point as it became obvious that only the ANC president could stave off chaos, while De Klerk kept his head down. Pushing his strategic advantage, Mandela called for the immediate setting of an election date. Shortly afterwards the date for elections was set for April 27, 1994.
The election passed peacefully. At the age of 76, Nelson Mandela, along with millions of his fellow citizens, voted for the first time in his life in a national election. On May 2, De Klerk conceded defeat after an ANC landslide, in which they took 62.7 percent of the vote. Of the remaining significant parties, the National Party fared best with 20.4 percent, followed by the Inkatha Freedom Party with 10.5 percent. The ANC was dominant in all of the provinces apart from Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. One of the disappointments for the ANC was its inability to appeal broadly to non-Africans.
For the ANC, the real struggle was only beginning. It inherited a country of 38 million people. Of these it was estimated that six million were unemployed, nine million were destitute, ten million had no access to running water, and twenty million had no electricity. Among black adults, sixty percent were illiterate and fewer than fifty percent of black children under 14 went to school. Infant mortality ran at eighty deaths per thousand among Africans, compared with just seven among white children.
Few people in recorded history have been the subject of such high expectations; still fewer have matched them; Mandela has exceeded them. We knew of his fortitude before he left jail; we have since experienced his extraordinary reserves of goodwill, his sense of fun and the depth of his maturity. As others’ prisoner, he very nearly decided the date of his own release; as president, he has wisely chosen the moment of his going. Any other nation would consider itself privileged to have his equal as its leader. His last full year in power provides us with an occasion again to consider his achievement in bringing and holding our fractious land together.
Mail & Guardian, December 24, 1998
South Africa’s first five years of democracy are inextricably linked to the towering figure of Nelson Mandela. On the one hand, he had to temper the impatience of a black majority that, having finally achieved civil rights, found it hard to understand why economic advancement wasn’t following quickly. And on the other, he had to mollify many fearful white citizens. The achievements of the government, however, were more uneven than those of its leader.
The overriding theme of the Mandela presidency was that of reconciliation. Perhaps the highlight of this policy was in May and June 1995, when the rugby union World Cup was staged in South Africa. The Springboks, for many years international pariahs due to their whites-only membership, won, watched by Mandela, sporting Springbok colours – events portrayed in Clint Eastwood’s 2009 film Invictus (based on a book by John Carlin).
The most significant sideshow of the period was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up to examine gross human rights abuses in South Africa between 1960 and 1993.
The New Constitution, approved in May 1996, ensured that South Africa would remain a parliamentary democracy with an executive president. One of the most progressive constitutions in the world, it incorporated an extensive bill of rights.
Despite the victory of liberal democratic principles, South Africa still displayed a singular lack of the trappings associated with civil society. Crime, sensationalized daily in the media, continued to dog the country. In the closing stages of the ANC’s first five years, the police were reporting an average of 52 murders a day, a rape every half hour (including a frightening rise in child rape), and one car theft every nine minutes.
As you type, you don’t know you are crying until you feel and see the tears on your hands.
Chief typist of the transcripts of the TRC hearings as told to Archbishop Tutu
By the time South Africa achieved democracy in 1994, it was internationally accepted that apartheid was, in the words of a UN resolution, “a crime against humanity”, and that atrocities had been committed in its name. But no one could have imagined how systematic and horrific these atrocities had been. This emerged at the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), set up to investigate gross abuses of human rights under apartheid. Under the chairmanship of Nobel Peace laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the commission examined acts committed between March 1960, the date of the Sharpeville massacre, and May 10, 1994, the day of Mandela’s inauguration as president.
Evidence was heard from victims and perpetrators under a provision that amnesty would be given in exchange for “full disclosure of all the relevant facts”. Unsurprisingly, the commission found that “the South African government was the primary perpetrator of gross human rights abuses in South Africa”. It confirmed that from the 1970s to the 1990s the state had been involved in criminal activities including “extra-judicial killings of political opponents”. Among the violations it listed were torture, abduction, sexual abuse, incursions across South Africa’s borders to kill opponents in exile, and the deployment of hit squads. It also found that the ANC (and a number of other organizations, including the PAC and IFP) was guilty of human-rights violations.
There was considerable criticism of the TRC from all quarters. Many felt that justice would have been better served by a Nuremberg-style trial of those guilty of gross violations, but Tutu argued that this would have been impossible in South Africa, given that neither side had won a military victory.
In 1999 Thabo Mbeki succeeded Mandela as president of South Africa. A hopeful media dubbed Mbeki “Mr Delivery”, believing that this clever, well-educated technocrat would confront poverty and build schools, hospitals and houses – and at the same time create badly needed jobs. Mbeki’s business-friendly policies produced healthy economic growth, expanded the black middle class and created a small coterie of mega-rich black entrepreneurs. But it did little for the poor fifty percent of the population, and the gulf of inequality became wider than ever.
The poor also bore the brunt of Mbeki’s misguided policies on AIDS. Holding the view that there was no link between HIV and AIDS, he blocked the provision of anti-retrovirals in state hospitals, causing over 330,000 deaths and the birth of 35,000 HIV-infected babies.
And like the virus, corruption seemed to be infecting society, the most far-reaching example being the arms deal, in which the ANC government bought military equipment that South Africa’s own defence force deemed unsuitable and too expensive. Newspapers alleged that the defence minister at the time was bribed and that a massive donation was paid to the ANC.
While money was squandered on arms, a raft of social problems festered. At the beginning of 2007, eight years after Mbeki assumed power, eight million people were living in shacks, millions had no water-borne sewerage and unemployment was running at forty percent. Disquiet at the slow pace of change was growing, and protests erupted on the streets of the townships. In 2005 alone, there were six thousand protests, and at the end of 2007 Mbeki was unseated by his party.
His replacement was the controversial former deputy president, Jacob Zuma, who was facing charges of bribery, fraud, racketeering, money laundering and tax evasion. A supreme populist, he portrayed himself as the people’s president fighting off a conspiracy by an Mbeki-led elite. Miraculously, just two weeks before the April 2009 elections, top-secret recordings surfaced, purporting to prove that former president Mbeki had interfered in the Zuma case and charges against Zuma were dropped.
As expected, the Zuma-led ANC won by a landslide, while the Democratic Alliance (DA), the official opposition, increased its proportion of the vote. Support for the two main parties split down broadly racial lines, with the ANC getting most of its support from Africans and the DA from white and coloured voters. Given the ANC’s overwhelming dominance of South African politics, it perhaps comes as no surprise that South Africa’s most significant post-Mandela politics has taken place away from parliament – inside the ANC itself or on the streets.
For a brief period during 2010, South Africans united in a fever of vuvuzela-blowing euphoria, during the highly successful staging of the Fifa World Cup. But there was a return to politics as usual once the visitors had left and the country had returned to work – or not, as in the case of a million public-sector workers who staged a three-week strike in August over pay increases and housing allowances. Trade union leader Zwelinzima Vavi attacked the ANC for leading South Africa on the path to becoming “a predator state” in which an “elite of political hyenas increasingly controls the state as a vehicle for accumulation”. These have turned out to be prescient words, following revelations of “state capture” by the Guptas, a powerful trio of Indian brothers with a high level of influence over Zuma.
Vavi’s views represented the feelings of millions of South Africa’s poor and dispossessed, who, nearly two decades after winning democracy, were still waiting for its economic fruits to be delivered. During Zuma’s first two years of tenure, frustration with the ruling party accelerated. There were twice as many service-delivery protests in just 2009 and 2010 than there had been in the previous five Mbeki years.
By 2011, forty percent of South Africa’s municipalities had been hit by popular street protests and there were attacks on Zuma from inside his own party. ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, who had helped replace Mbeki with Zuma, now viciously attacked the president as being “worse than Mbeki”, leading to Malema’s expulsion from the ANC and his formation of a new populist party the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).
Meanwhile, dissatisfaction festered in the platinum mines, with workers staging a wildcat strike at the Marikana mine in 2012. In an echo of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, one of apartheid’s darkest hours, police fired on and killed 44 strikers at Marikana and wounded many more. Most of those killed in the Marikana Massacre were shot in the back – just as they had been at Sharpeville – delivering massive political capital to Julius Malema, who made a point of appearing at Marikana and proffering his support to the miners following the bloodshed. Malema traded on his working-class credentials all the way to the 2014 general election.
While mineworkers were dying in the cause of decent living conditions and millions of citizens were struggling to make ends meet, President Zuma was using taxpayers’ money – over R200m of it – to refurbish his private residence at Nkandla in rural KwaZulu-Natal. With Nelson Mandela’s death on 5 December 2013, the nation – and the world – mourned, not just because it had lost one of the country’s greatest statesmen, but also because his passing symbolized the passing of an idealistic era that had promised a new dawn for South Africa. When President Zuma took the podium during the ten-day state memorial service, he was booed by sections of the crowd, in reaction to the dark clouds of corruption hanging over him.
These clouds proved to have a silver lining, however, when South Africa’s political system demonstrated an encouraging robustness. The Nkandla scandal was widely reported by the independent media, and, perhaps more importantly, it was referred to the office of the Public Protector, a constitutional watchdog that protects citizens against abuses of state power. Despite official attempts to derail her investigations, the fiercely courageous Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, delivered a measured report in 2014, in which she found, among other things, serious flaws in the tendering process for the upgrade of Zuma’s home and numerous violations of the government’s ethics code. She ordered Zuma to pay back millions of rands.
Strangely, the Nkandla scandal did little to dent the ANC’s performance in the 2014 general election. Despite losing some support, much of it to Julius Malema’s EFF which won 25 seats, the ANC still managed to win the poll by a very healthy 62 percent majority. Nonetheless, many in the party realize that the ANC needs to be more responsive to the country’s workers and the disenchanted dispossessed, and less tainted by allegations of corruption, if it is to maintain its support. Zuma is increasingly perceived as a liability to his party and the country, and as a leader who is trampling on the principles championed by Mandela, but the wily 75-year-old may well cling to power until the end of his term in 2019.
The local elections of 2016 were worrying for the ANC, with the party losing Johannesburg, Pretoria and Port Elizabeth to the DA. The following year, Zuma fired the well-respected finance minister, Pravhin Gordhan, prompting discontent in the ANC ranks and nationwide demonstrations as two credit rating agencies downgraded South Africa to “junk” status. Consequently, the ANC will likely see their support drop again in the 2019 general election. A DA government is less likely, however, as its image of being a white party persists – despite having a black leader, the Soweto-raised Mmusi Maimane.