A Short History of Apartheid

Dana has recently finished reading 

A Human Being Died That Night by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela.  The back of the book provides a short history of apartheid. Impressed with the overview, Dana thoughtfully typed up the summary to share with her family and co-educators.  She has also generously agreed to share it with all who are following our blog.

------------------------------------------------------

The Union of South Africa (whose founding could be seen as a form of reconciliation following the Anglo-Boer War between the Boers, or Dutch, and the British), established in 1910, institutionalized the total exclusion of blacks from participation in political life. Political equality for blacks, declared the powers that be, was not merely undesirable; it was “an absurdity.” Membership in parliament was limited to white males. Blacks in the Cape had the franchise, but by 1936, under an act that established separate representation for blacks, black Africans were removed from the voters’ rolls and were allowed only three white representatives in parliament. By the time apartheid came into existence in 1948, processes aimed at removing blacks not just from constitutional politics but from citizenship itself had begun.

The foundation for apartheid were laid in the policies outlined by a commission set up in 1905 by the British High Commissioner in South Africa, Sir Alfred Milner. Asked to come up with strategies to deal with the “Native question,” the commission proposed segregation between black and white, and the creation of “locations” for blacks on the fringes of cities and towns. Noel Mostert, in his “epic” of South Africa’s past and the shadow it cast on the future, reports that the recommendations of the commission echoed the British high Commissioner’s own views that “you only have to sacrifice the ‘nigger’ absolutely, and the game is easy.”

The “sacrifice” of black people was codified into law as apartheid after the electoral victory of the National Party in 1948. The National Party (NP) drew its membership from Afrikaners and had a strong basis in Afrikaner nationalism. The party enjoyed a significant majority in parliament, which grew even larger in the 1970s and 1980s, that is, during the period when anti-apartheid opposition was at its peak. The NP’s bedrock goal was racial, cultural, and political purity, that is to say, a society based on apartheid – literally, separateness. The effect of apartheid was not only to legalize all forms of discrimination against blacks – forced removals, demolition of homes, life in “locations” ad in arid Bantustans (Group Areas Act, 1950); economic exclusion through reserving jobs for whites; inferior education (Bantu Education Act, 1953); pass laws and racial classification (Population Restriction Act, 1950); and laws that enforced total separation of blacks and whites in public and in private (Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, 1949) – but also to disenfranchise blacks and reduce them to second-class citizens.

The African National Congress was founded in 1912 to campaign for non-racial democracy and human rights, which black people were denied in the colonial era. The ANC was revived and popularized as a people’s liberation movement in the 1940s with the formation of the ANC Youth League, led by Walter Sisulu. The Freedom Charter, which was adopted in 1955, became the ANC’s blueprint for a vision of a South Africa that “belonged to all who live in it – black and white.” For decades the ANC used peaceful forms of protest. But then came the event that shocked the world, on March 21,1960, when several thousand unarmed black people gathered in the Vereeniging township of Sharpeville and marched to the police station to protest the hated pass laws and the police opened fire on the crowd – an incident that came to be known as the Sharpeville Massacre. Countrywide protests erupted, and a number of civil suits against the government followed. The government responded by declaring a state of emergency and banning all anti-apartheid organizations, and then passed laws, effective retrospectively, exoneration police from responsibility in acts committed against those involved in the peaceful march. Thus began a pattern of laws that served to silence anti-apartheid opposition while empowering the police to commit acts of violence. In the same year the government banned the Pan-African Congress and the ANC.

Thousands of people were arrested. Through its sting of repressive legislation, the government rendered every conceivable act of opposition an act of treason and strengthened its police and security structures. The Bureau of State Security (BOSS), a security branch that was given immense power and the extraordinary task of “protecting the country,” was established. Arrests and detention of members of political organizations continued throughout the 1960s. In 1963, Justice Minister B. J. Vorster appointed as head of BOSS General Hendrik van den Bergh, who was later to tell a commission, “I have enough men to commit murder if I tell then, ‘kill’!” One suspects that this became the mantra of the South African security force over the years. One of the most notorious government initiatives at the time was the recruitment of black and white collaborators, who frequently infiltrated the liberation movements at home and abroad. This strengthened the security department’s network, leading to the identification, capture, and sometimes assassination of black and white anti-apartheid political activists. The government’s informers created terror, suspicion, and divisiveness within the movement. This led to internal investigations that often resulted in the torture and murder of suspects.

After the Sharpeville massacre, both the PAC, which had organized the Sharpeville anti-pass law protest, and the ANC concluded that the actions of the apartheid regime called for an end to forty-eight years of peaceful protest. Force had to be answered with force. Nelson Mandela announced the establishment of Umkonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation, MK for short), an armed wing of the ANC with Mandela at its commander in chief, to carry out acts of sabotage. The early phase of the armed struggle as described by Joe Slovo, was “controlled violence” directed against government installations. A police raid on the MK’s secret headquarters on Rivonia farm in Johannesburg on July 11,1963, and a lengthy trial that ended the following year on June 12, led to life sentences for Mandela, Sisulu, Kathrada, Goldberg, and four other leaders of Umkonto we Sizwe.

In 1963 parliament passed legislation that enabled the police to detain people for a maximum of ninety dates without trial. State repression spun out of control; hundreds of thousands of apartheid’s opponents were detained while thousands were severely tortured and often died in detention, particularly in the mid to late 1970s. When the state security police were not able to convict political activists in the courts, they used covert methods of killing, or simply killed overtly and claimed they were rooting out ANC terrorists. More discriminatory laws were passed following the June 1976 police massacre in Soweto of more than five hundred students involved in a peaceful demonstration against the “Bantu Education” laws, and especially against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in black schools. The end of the 1970s saw another wave of bannings of political organizations alighted to the black consciousness movement, and an exodus of young people who sought a home in one of the two political organizations in exile, the ANC and PAC, swelling the ranks of the armed wing of the liberation movement.

           

In 1977 P. W. Botha, who was then the prime minister, launched his notorious “Total Strategy,” although it wasn’t until 1983 that Botha’s plan was implemented. Total Strategy was designed to counter what Botha termed the black liberation movement’s “total onslaught” by preserving apartheid and ensuring the continuation of white supremacist policies. It was a plan coordinated at the highest level, which would have political, economic, military, and psychological components.

           

In 1983 Botha took the first step – the establishment of a new parliament that allowed for power sharing among whites, “coloureds,” and Indians but excluded blacks from participation in government. For blacks, the government created a separate system of black “councilors” who were given formal authority, but little real power or support, to manage the affairs of their urban areas. In the view of many blacks in the communities they were supposed to govern, the councilors had no mandate as leaders.

           

In the concerted effort that ensued to dismantle this separatist arrangement, the anti-apartheid struggle launched the United Democratic Front (UDF), a coming together of more than five hundred political organizations charged with a national campaign for redressing local grievances. One of the main vehicles of protest the UDF introduced was consumer boycotts of white-owned stores and other businesses. A common theme of the boycotts, often effective on one level, was the ruthless disciplinary measures that blacks who broke ranks or those suspected as police collaborators could expect. Extremely violent methods of dispensing so-called necklace killings – emerged. Blacks killing other blacks powerfully served one of the functions of the Total Strategy, which was to destabilize the liberation movement.

           

The maintenance of “law and order,” which apartheid South Africa’s security forces always claimed was their goal, became increasingly blurred under Total Strategy implementation by corrupt state activities, including outright murder. Concrete results against opponents of the state were expected regardless of how they were achieved. “The crucial thing was to get the job done,” de Kock had said in one of our interviews, explaining the core principles of Total Strategy. “The question of whether what we did was legal or not did not come into the picture. How we did it was not important. The results were.”

           

But under the guise of going after the ANC, the police and army killed many more ordinary unarmed black citizens than liberation movement fighters. Beginning in 1983, a consensus began to form in the ANC that unless the resistance to the regime of terror shifted into a higher gear, the cause might never prevail. More and more liberation fighters of the ANC were infiltrating the country, and Umkonto we Sizwe stepped up its bombing campaigns in South Africa.

           

State-orchestrated violence escalated during the 1980s, when covert operations units were established in the security police and defense departments, which ran a network of police informants (black and white), murder squads, and scientists skilled in the art of biological warfare. South Africa saw an increase in widespread torture by security police, the disappearance of political activists, mass killings, and the mysterious deaths of detainees and others, which usually occurred under direct instruction from, or with the full knowledge of, police generals. Most of the police “investigations” of these incidents were simply cover-up operations. At the same time, the police were given immense powers and immunity, with many laws on the books that protected them from prosecution for the human rights abuses they committed.

           

By the end of the 1980s, President F. W. de Klerk and his colleagues were driven to the realization that the days of apartheid were over; it was time to introduce a more inclusive citizenship in the statute books. On February 11, 1990, he released Nelson Mandela from prison. A widely representative commission, the Congress for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), was established to negotiate what amounted to a transfer of power to the majority, which resulted in the election of Nelson Mandela and the AND as the ruling party in April 1994. A major concern of CODESA was how to deal with the past in a way that would break the cycles of violence, bring about social cohesion, and restore peace. The result was the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.