South Africa’s Long Trek to Deliverance: the Lessons of Apartheid, Transition and Democracy

To stifle protest and intimidate protesters, the Public Safety Act (No. 3) of 1953 established the government’s right to suspend all laws via declaring a state of emergency (which could last for 12 months and then be renewed). Under the state of emergency, any commissioned officer could detain any person without trial for reasons of public safety, and the burden of proving their innocence would fall on the accused. The Criminal Law Amendment Act (No. 8) of 1953 provided for the same and took it to a new level: presumption of guilt for anyone accompanying a person already found guilty of offences committed while protesting. Probably the most extreme of the repressive measures, and part of the later legislation enacted by one-time neo-Nazi detainees and 1960s members of government John Vorster and General van den Bergh, was the General Laws Amendment Act (of 1963). The police were authorized by this legislation to detain people for 90 days without charging them and without allowing them access to a lawyer. No court had the authority to order a person’s release while in detention. There was no limit to the number of times a person could be re-arrested after the passing of the 90-day period (57-58).

The Bantu Authorities Act (No. 68 of 1951) elaborated on the fiction of ‘true’ tribal homes of Africans, i.e. reserves. It was yet another attempt at separating South African citizens and discriminating against the political rights of entire population groups: the government set up ethnic ‘homelands’, each equipped with an administrative body destined to govern a given territory. The African, or Bantu, ethnic governments were headed by tribal chiefs appointed by the central government and subordinated to it in terms of decision-making and budgets. The Natives Representative Council, which was the only instrument of political expression for urban Africans, was abolished. The Act itself did not, however, represent a radical shift in regard to disenfranchisement. Most Africans had been denied their voting rights with the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910. The wealthy minority of Natives had been banished from voting completely in 1936 (Representation of Natives Act, under which Africans could only elect white representatives). Later on, particularly during the period of the so-called grand (or high) apartheid in the 1960s and 1970s, the inhabitants of the tribal reserves, many of whom were moved to the ‘homelands’ forcibly, were to lose even their South African citizenship and were required to have passports in order to be admitted into South Africa (48).¹¹ Section 8 of the Bantu Authorities Act read:

1. 
   The Minister [of Native Affairs] shall cause to be established in respect of every tribal, regional or territorial authority, a treasury…
   
2. 
   Every such treasury shall be under the control of the Minister (Bantu Authorities Act).
   

The tribal headmen were thus made into vassals and many of them were renowned as downright collaborators with the regime. When the whole governmental bureaucratic folly over the homelands (or Bantustans) came crashing down, the National Party had experienced a gradual and costly disillusionment. The concept of native ‘homelands’ referred to the areas established as reserves under the Natives’ Land Act of 1913, under the British colonial rule. These areas represented between 7 and 14 percent of South Africa’s territory and, in most cases, comprised land deemed unsuitable for cultivation by whites. The Nationalist government asserted that the reserves corresponded with traditional African kingdoms, even though they were actually remainders of territory left in African possession after conquests of the 1880s, of which only one (Qwaqwa) had contiguous borders; other ‘homelands’ were scattered pieces of unprofitable land. The basis for the establishment of Bantustans became ethnicity.¹² Initially (1951), Verwoerd ruled out the possibility of granting full independence to those territorial units, but in 1959 it actually came to be the declared policy objective. Such a change of mind was partly inspired by the will to alleviate international pressure regarding political rights of Africans. However, the more down-to-earth reason was the consolidation of white supremacist rule over the greater part of the country. The Bantu Self-Government Act (of 1959) resurrected tribal chiefdoms, equipped them with limited political autonomy and incorporated them into territorial legislatures. This failed attempt at social engineering was hailed into existence as the ‘Grand Apartheid’. The chiefs that refused to cooperate within the new framework were removed and replaced with responsive ones (Clark and Worger 65). In what was believed to be the final phase of the process, the tribal homelands were granted not just self-rule, but independence. The province of Transkei led the way in 1976, followed by Bophuthatswana (1977), Venda (1979) and Ciskei (1981). KwaZulu, led by defiant chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi (leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party), refused to accept its independence. Because the Bantustans were products of apartheid, none of the independent territories received any international recognition. Homelands were in reality rural slums dependent on South Africa and the only element within the Bantustan social hierarchy that had been empowered were the ruling cliques, ripe with corruption and disregard for democratic pluralism.¹³ Once these quasi-colonies gained sovereignty, their inhabitants were deprived of their South African citizenship, losing their civil rights within South Africa and becoming aliens in the land of their birth. Even the 1955 governmental review (by the so-cal. Tomlison Commission) acknowledged that superfluous bureaucracies were formed at great cost to the taxpayer¹⁴ and in many cases, territories had got under a ruthless military autocracy. All in all, Bantustans ended in a costly failure and after the 1994 democratic elections were reincorporated into the provincial map of unified South Africa (Saunders, Southey and Suttie 29-31).

The Coloureds were also swept off the common voters’ roll into a separate one, and required to vote white representatives, under the Separate Representation of Voters Act (No. 46 of 1951). The Act was immediately declared invalid by the Supreme Court, because the Parliament did not secure the two-third majority required by the constitution to alter the voting rights. The initiative also faced opposition from white organizations reliant on Coloured supporters, namely the Torch Commando and the United Party, and it sparked the so-called Defiance Campaign of 1952. However, after a series of strikes and protests, and a lengthy trial in court, the act was revalidated in 1956.¹⁵

The doctrine of ‘separate but not equal’ was codified into law, and the principle of unequal allocation of resources found its way into legislation on general facilities, labor and education. The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (No. 49 of 1953) explicitly stated that public amenities like beaches or parks should be separate but need not be of an equivalent quality. Moreover, according to the then Nationalist minister of labour B.J. Schoeman, if the Afrikaner elites let the Natives’ trade unions be recognized, the unions would inevitably be politicized, and, consequently, utilized to wreak havoc on the country, so by allowing it, “we [Afrikaners] would probably be committing race suicide.”¹⁶ Thus, the Native Labour Act (No. 48 of 1953) prohibited Africans from staging strikes and refused to legally recognize African trade unions, which left them without legal representation, even though it did not prohibit the operation of the unions per se. By far the most damaging effect on the African population was exerted by the provisions of the Bantu Education Act (No. 47) of 1953. Inspired by a ministry of education-commissioned report, the act removed state subsidies from mission schools which had till then provided schooling for the majority of African children¹⁷. Again, tellingly, state subsidies for European (white) children amounted to 16 times as much as those for the African. Education of the Bantu was put under the control of the Ministry of Native Affairs, rather than the Ministry of Education. When the funding withered, most mission-run denominational schools (with some exceptions, mostly within the Roman Catholic camp) were closed or sold to the government. The policymakers who drafted the Bantu Education Act regarded it as a key transitional piece of legislation, which was seen as potentially instrumental, in the long term, in putting the African population into the niche of the economy where the politicians saw fit: at the bottom (Clark and Worger 48-51).¹⁸ In the words of the chief legislative designer and then minister of native affairs Hendrik Verwoerd (1954):

By blindly producing pupils trained on a European model, the vain hope was created among Natives that they could occupy posts within the European community despite the country’s policy of ‘apartheid’. […] The school must equip him [the Bantu pupil] to meet the demands which the economic life of South Africa will impose upon him. […] There is no place for him in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour. Within his own community, all doors are open. (qtd. in Clark and Worger 51)

African teacher Ezekiel Mphahlele vented his anger before the officials:

I condemned the textbooks ordered […] for use in African schools: a history book […] meant to glorify white rule; Afrikaans grammar books […] and a literature that teem with non-white characters who are savages or blundering idiots to be despised and laughed at... (52)

The Extension of University Education Act (No. 45) of 1959 banned Africans from studying at white universities and provided for the establishment of separate, government-controlled institutions for higher education of Natives, Coloureds and Indians. In reaction to the publication of the Freedom Charter, a political manifesto backed by a cross-racial coalition of National Party’s opponents, censorship laws (Customs and Excise Act of 1955, Official Secrets Act [No. 16] of 1956) were passed which empowered the Board of Censors to censor books, films, etc. (51, 57).

The ANC, Mandela, and Opposition Politics Generally

February 1920: over 70,000 African workers in 21 mines walk off the job; forced back to work by the army and police; 11 killed. May 1921: 190 followers (including women and children) of religious prophet Mgijima killed by machine-gun equipped policemen in the space of ten minutes. 1921-1922: over 100 people of the Nama group killed by a combination of machine-gunfire and air bombardment. By this time, the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), soon to be renamed the African National Congress (ANC), had already been involved in campaigning against the imposition of pass laws, and the authorization of brute force and legislative oppression was courtesy of the United Nations’ Charter co-drafter Jan Christian Smuts (then prime minister). The SANNC was formed in 1912, was comprised of the educated African elite and strongly influenced by teachings of Booker T. Washington. In its early life – indeed, for almost 50 years – the organization was moderate in tone and practice and honored the rule of law, within the confines of which it operated. It did not seek the end to British colonial rule but an end to discrimination, and it promoted respect and equality for people of all races. In 1918, the Congress petitioned the British king on behalf of the African soldiers who fought for the British Empire in the First World War, unsuccessfully demanding an end to the practice of racialism. It even sent a delegation to the Paris peace conference in Versailles, where they tried to push through the agenda of the self-determination of colonized nations (23-25). Due to its rather aloof legalistic agenda and educated constituency, it lost touch with the ordinary Africans and it was not until the mid-1940s that its transformation into a mass movement began. The shift was largely due to the activities and enthusiasm of the ANC Youth League, formed in 1944 with the involvement of Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela, who subsequently became members of the ANC’s national executive committee. The Youth League inspired the ANC to embark on a Programme of Action (1949), by way of which the organization embraced new methods of struggle, including civil disobedience, boycotts and strikes, in order to challenge the apartheid proposals. The Defiance Campaign starting in April 1952 was a response to the rejection on the part of Prime Minister Malan of the demand to repeal all discriminatory laws. Thousands of Africans partook in the rallies and demonstrations; thousands were arrested.¹⁹ The campaign, however, also brought about a fantastic increase in the ANC’s (paid) membership, which rose to more than 100,000 by the end of 1952 (Saunders, Southey and Suttie 2). The ANC was becoming a real mass movement and the leading member of the so-called Congress Alliance, which included the South African Indian Congress, the white Congress of Democrats and the Coloured People’s Congress, and thus represented a cross-racial anti-apartheid platform. In June 1955, the Alliance organized a Congress of the People near Soweto, where approximately 3,000 delegates from the aforementioned organizations and the multiracial South African Congress of Trade Unions met in order to devise a vision for South Africa other than the one put forward by the NP. The police encircled the meeting and recorded the names and addresses of all the representatives for suspected treason. In 1956, Mandela, Tambo and Sisulu, together with more than 150 leaders, were put on trial for high treason²⁰ (Clark and Worger 56).

Freedom Charter

The principal document finalized and ratified at the Congress of the People, and internalized most profoundly by the ANC, was the Freedom Charter. It called for a South Africa where no particular group would enjoy special privileges, and equality and non-racialism would rule. From today’s perspective, all its provisions seem matter-of-course, but at the time of drafting, it presented standpoints that were by no means universally accepted. It called for democratic rule (‘The people shall govern!’), criminalization of discrimination based on race, color or sex (‘All national groups shall have equal rights!’), and demanded opening of the police and army ranks to people of all colors, abolition of apartheid legislation and other discriminatory laws, and human rights for all. Some of the Charter’s proclamations were controversial by today’s standards and have been interpreted as leaning toward socialism and nationalization. Under the proclamation ‘The people shall share in the country’s wealth!’, it read: The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole. Particularly in the postcommunist corner of the world, of which the Czech Republic is a part, ‘restoration to the ownership of the people’ unmistakably comes across as nationalization. The land reform, suggested by the passage that says “all the land shall be re-divided among those who work it,” in turn sounds like expropriation.²¹ And some degree of nationalization it arguably was that the authors of the Freedom Charter had in mind while drafting the document. The aim here is not to decisively unmask whether the political programme put forward by the Freedom Charter ought to be categorized as communist, socialist, or social democratic. Elements of the policy proposals included in the Charter have throughout the political history found their way to pronouncements of proponents from all those camps. Consider the section on ‘work and security’: “The state shall recognize the right and duty of all to work (emphasis added); equal pay for equal work; and a forty-hour working week and a national minimum wage.” Or: “Adult illiteracy shall be ended by a mass state education plan, and education shall be free, compulsory, universal and equal” (Freedom Charter). The last section on ‘houses, security and comfort’ probably goes the furthest in regard to the so-called third-generation, socioeconomic rights, declaring that “all people shall have the right to […] be decently housed; […] Rent and prices shall be lowered, food plentiful and no one shall go hungry; […] Free medical care and hospitalization shall be provided for all.” And one of the last proclamations, which even in the light of post-apartheid development can be considered highly idealistic, reads: “Fenced locations and ghettos shall be abolished” (Freedom Charter).

Allied in Bans, Violence and Underground

Forming of multiracial alliances had its opponents within the ANC. These so-called ‘Africanists’ argued that cooperation with whites and Indians threatened to distract the movement and make it compromise the interests of Africans. They were, however, forced out of the ANC (1958) and consequently formed their own organization, the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). Their credo was ‘Africa for Africans’ and although whites could be included in their definition of Africans, most of them were regarded as settlers without legitimate claim to the land in their possession. Led by Robert Sobukwe and Potlako Leballo, they endorsed militant forms of protest and propagated socialism (social democracy), anti-imperialism, identification with other struggles of Africans throughout the continent and the eventual goal of forming a United States of Africa. In March 1960, the PAC commenced a campaign against pass laws. On March 21, a crowd of African demonstrators gathered outside a police station in Sharpeville (a black township in Vereeniging, south of Johannesburg) to challenge the police to arrest them, since they did not carry their passes. The policemen panicked and opened fire, causing 69 deaths and wounding another 186 protesters – most of them shot in the back. The Sharpeville Massacre resulted in a number of developments. The massive march of 30,000 Africans on the Houses of Parliament in Cape Town predictably elicited a reaction – the Verwoerd government declared a state of emergency and arrested about 18,000(!) protesters. The apartheid regime survived the legitimacy crisis and made the 1960s a period of harsher repression and renewed determination. One of the Nationalist government’s first steps was to ban the ANC and PAC in 1961, so the two organizations were forced into underground. Each formed its own armed wing. The PAC operated what was called the Azanian People’s Liberation Army and its leadership set up its exile headquarters in Tanzania. For a while, it collaborated with the Lesotho Liberation Army. But unlike the ANC, it failed to muster much international support and achieved little before the 1990s. PAC’s militant wing Poqo (‘Pure’) engaged in terrorist activity aimed chiefly at assassinating collaborators with the government from the ranks of African tribal chiefs. The exiled leaders of the ANC were located in Zambia. The militant wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe – ‘Spear of the Nation’ (abbr. MK), sabotaged places like police outposts and power plants but tried to avoid deaths (Saunders, Southey and Suttie 200, 228; Clark and Worger 57-58).

The shift toward armed struggle had by then been completed. The change of mind, however, occurred much earlier. Adherence to nonviolence in the vein of Gandhi was no longer valid. As early as 1953, Nelson Mandela had come to believe that “violence was the only weapon that would destroy apartheid and we must be prepared in the near future to use that weapon,” adding that “nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon” (Mandela qtd. in Clark and Worger 56). When Mandela and others decided to engage in armed struggle, they were working closely with the SACP (South African Communist Party, already banned for some time), members of which served on the Umkhonto we Sizwe’s executive and helped coordinate the ANC’s military strategies. Indeed, analyzing the ANC and not mentioning the SACP becomes almost impossible, as the organizations have worked closely together and their memberships have since, and to this day, been significantly overlapping (Saunders, Southey and Suttie 234).

In 1963, seventeen Umkhonto we Sizwe leaders including Walter Sisulu were arrested on a farm at Rivonia near Johannesburg. Together with Nelson Mandela, who was already imprisoned, they were tried for sabotage and high treason, facing a possibility of the death penalty. Instead, in the so-called Rivonia Trial of 1964, Mandela and seven others were sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island.²² Most of them were kept in jail until the late 1980s. In his famous speech before being deported to the island, Mandela expressed his willingness to die for democracy and while in jail, retained a strong moral influential upon the movement (Clark and Worger 58; Saunders, Southey and Suttie 221).

The System That Did Not Deliver. Black Consciousness, Soweto Uprising, Security State and the 1983 Constitution

With no intention to allocate more land to the Africans, the National Party government, especially Prime Minister Verwoerd, advocated a massive campaign of social engineering, Grand Apartheid, with the goal of complete removal of Africans from white areas. Ignoring the fact that the reserves could not support even those Africans (about 50 percent of the total) already resident in them and the lack of economic infrastructure and viability, the government staunchly progressed to grant the homelands independence. Despite the brutally repressive nature of the apartheid regime, or perhaps thanks to it, foreign investors had confidence in the state’s stability and investment security and, thus, capital flowed into South Africa unabatedly during the 1960s. The economic boom did not, however, benefit everyone, as South Africa had by the early 1980s enjoyed the most inequitable distribution of income in the world.²³ The standard of living of the white community, higher than in most of the western countries, relied on the unashamed exploitation of the majority of the country’s population – through keeping the wages extremely low²⁴, the annual company profits normally averaged around 25 percent (compared to, for example, 6.5 percent in the UK). In addition to this exploitation, the innovation planned by the government now was the creation of independent Bantustans, so that the state of South Africa could rid itself of the responsibility for the well-being of Natives altogether and afford to treat them as disposable temporary workforce. To ensure that no African stayed in white areas without serving white economic interests, African workers were under the Bantu Labour Regulations Act of 1968 given six weeks to find a job if they lost one. If unable to find work, they would be bussed to their homeland (Clark and Worger 59, 61, 63, 70).

When the economic recession accompanied by inflation and loss of jobs hit in the early 1970s, a dramatic intensification of labor unrest followed. After a series of (illegal) strikes brought about a wage increase for the brickworkers in Durban, other waves across a range of industries followed and spread to other locations. Under surveillance and with no legal representation, African workers devised for themselves new organizing methods and deliberately chose not to have any apparent leaders and bodies, so the organizers could not be readily identified and harassed. The government, pressured by both labor and employers, initiated some legislative changes: the Bantu Relations Regulation Amendment Act of 1973 for the first time guaranteed Africans legal rights in wage negotiations, although it did not yet legalize nationwide unions. It was an important signal codifying the government’s recognition of the fact that the economy could not operate without the cooperation of African workers. Connected to the eruption of student demonstrations in the late 1970s was the intense fear of the politicization of the workforce which kept close ties with most of the student political groups. In 1979 and 1981, respectively, the Industrial Conciliation Amendment Act and Labour Relations Amendment Act were passed, which legalized the formation of trade unions by Africans and, not least, allowed trade unions to have a mixed racial membership, resulting in a massive growth in African trade unionism in the 1980s²⁵ (72-73).

Before long, the Bantu education system nearing 20 years in operation bore its fruit. Throughout the 1960s, the enrolment in African schools rose rapidly while the funding steadily declined. Product of inferior education in overcrowded schools that were to prepare them to become compliant servants of the white power structure, the frustrated students found an outstanding organizer and theoretician in Stephen Biko, who founded the South African Students’ Organization (SASO) under the banner of Black Consciousness (which soon acquired a life of its own as a full-fledged movement and philosophy). Strongly influenced by the Afro-American Black Power movement, Biko advocated a psychological remake of blacks (which group he defined inclusively, comprising all racial groups that were denied their civil rights), a “strong grassroots build-up of black consciousness such that blacks can learn to assert themselves…” (74). After organizing strikes on university campuses, leading to mass arrests, SASO was banned on all African campuses and Biko was charged with inciting terrorism. One of the best known student demonstrations that turned into the famous Soweto Uprising of 1976 started when the ministry of Bantu Education tried to impose a long neglected provision of the Bantu Education Act that guaranteed Afrikaans equality with English as a medium of instruction. In addition to practical obstacles like the shortage of teachers and textbooks, Afrikaans was despised as the oppressor’s language by the students, and they started boycotting classes. On June 16, 1976, the police threw teargas and shot at the protesting schoolchildren. The various groupings of students joined by outraged Soweto residents retaliated by attacking and burning down administrative buildings of the government.²⁶ In fact, it was the first time since the Defiance Campaign of 1952 that the students’ parents began to be thoroughly politically engaged (76-77).

In September 1977, Stephen Biko died in prison because of massive head injuries inflicted during police interrogations. His death stirred national and international protest since his cause was widely publicized, but deaths in jails across South Africa were by no means exceptional. Following the Soweto Uprising, some 21 Africans reportedly died while in custody. Where the opponents could not be silenced by imprisonment and intimidation, they were frequently killed. In the period from 1979 to 1983, the Nationalist government – via its agents, the police and the army – was responsible for 30 to 40 assassinations, of which the letter-bomb killing of the prominent activist Ruth First was the most widely publicized. Meanwhile, the state moved to consolidate its security apparatus under the ‘Total Strategy’ banner (1977), establishing the National Security Management System and making security its top priority. The South African state also carried out military raids and clandestine operations in Angola²⁷, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Zambia (81-82).

In yet another move designed to pacify the opponents, Prime Minister P.W. Botha commissioned drafting of a new constitution. At the same time that this faux reformist initiative was pursued, the repressive measures were applied with ever increasing brutality, at home and abroad alike. Botha engaged in low-intensity warfare and assassinations, using besides the ordinary armed forces also mercenary warriors who were paid bounties by the number of dead guerillas they delivered. Still, they helped anything but prevent resistance. The ANC and PAC guerillas infiltrated into the country and struck at symbolic targets. Most impressive of the bomb attacks occurred at government installations in Koeberg (nuclear power station) in 1982 and in Pretoria (South African Air Force headquarters) in 1983. The 1983 constitution itself provided for separate parliamentary bodies for whites, Asians and Coloureds, while Africans’ national representation was again ostentatiously ignored, since they were legally represented by the homeland administrations. The reason why this new deal was a farce rested in the very little change it effected. Although it created three racially determined parliamentary assemblies, laws concerning all racial groups could only be enacted in a joint session where whites would always enjoy a majority of 178 votes against the 130 votes of the combined Asian and Coloured assemblies. In addition, the state president could dissolve the parliament at any time and choose to govern through an executive council instead. The so-called United Democratic Front (UDF), established in 1983 as an umbrella organization for the opponents of the reform and apartheid in general, was a stepchild of the constitutional charade (Clark and Worger 84-85, 89).

Authentic Broad-Based Opposition: United Democratic Front

The United Democratic Front brought together a coalition of civic and student associations, youth congresses, trade unions, women groups, church groups, sports clubs and the like. Its emergence was facilitated by the proliferation of community organizations from the 1970s onward. Most of these were mobilized locally around single issues and in relative isolation from each other. They were thus unable to relate their struggles to the wider opposition. Only with the formation of the UDF could the isolated struggles be brought together and directed against the whole of the apartheid regime. The inaugural meeting in the summer of 1983 brought together 565 organizations with a total membership of 1.65 million (Madlingozi 82-83). Although they shared a common enemy, they had diverse backgrounds and political agendas. Thus, the opposition originating from the UDF was shaped more by pragmatic consensus-seeking than by ideology. The minimum that its constituent parts agreed on was a commitment to the creation of a non-racial society. Gradually, the UDF shifted from merely channeling opposition to (the fake constitutional) reform to the coordination of resistance in general. In 1987, the UDF asserted for itself a key role in the struggle for liberation. Continuous repression perpetrated by the state apparatus resulted in greater centralization of decision making. As a part of that process, the organization was in 1987 ‘seized’ by the ANC, which fact was symbolized by its adoption of the Freedom Charter. Instituting it as the official political program had devastating consequences for ideological and organizational plurality which had until then been the mainstay of the UDF. The genuine grassroots movement had progressively been demobilized and swallowed up by the hegemonic ANC. The replacement of many particularistic struggles by grandiose ideas was an instrumental factor in the demise of numerous UDF affiliates (84-85, 93).

‘Make the country ungovernable!’ Such was the call of the community-based activism propelled by the ANC. In addition to stepped up bombings and attacks, the elections to the newly created parliamentary assemblies in 1984 were boycotted by two-thirds of the eligible Indian and Coloured voters. In the beginning of 1985, Prime Minister Botha, shaken by the continuing unrest, rhetorically offered to release Mandela from jail on condition that he rejected violence as a tool, which Mandela declined. The terror campaigns thus continued on both sides. Instructed by the State Security Council’s directives calling for ‘removal’ of riot leaders, police shootings at gatherings brought the death toll to more than 500 killings in 1985, a fivefold increase when compared to the previous year. For the first time in 25 years, a state of emergency was proclaimed in July 1985. Botha carried on both parallel initiatives: an attempted dialogue – when he allowed a group of Commonwealth statesmen and his own minister of justice Coetsee to meet with Mandela in 1986²⁸ – and a simultaneous campaign of commando raids on insurgent bases in neighboring countries. Meanwhile, the focus of the international community centered upon the images of township police brutality. The pariah status started to seriously harm the economy. In 1984-85, almost one hundred U.S. companies pulled out of South Africa (Clark and Worger 86, 90, 94). International banks, led by Chase Manhattan, Barclays and Citibank, were by this time denying South Africa any new loans. This process culminated in 1986 when, overriding President Reagan’s veto, the U.S. Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act which effectively cemented the sanctions (of which the financial sanctions were the most harmful) imposed on the apartheid regime throughout the industrialized West. The Act banned all new investments and bank loans alongside selected South African imports and blocked air links between South Africa and the United States. By this time, no prominent Afrikaner academic was willing to publicly defend apartheid any longer and the Dutch Reformed Church, the old ally of the ruling clique, distanced itself from the state (Giliomee 90; Clark and Worger 95-96).


3. Transition

The Path to Negotiations

It was undeniable that the Nationalist government was under growing pressure. It is less certain, however, that the reform embarked upon by Prime Minister Frederik W. de Klerk was inevitable. After all, it was generally believed that white supremacy was in no immediate danger. South Africa circumvented the trade sanctions and as new markets outside the Western bloc opened up in the second half of the 1980s, its exports increased. However, the environment for local business had deteriorated and investor confidence had not recovered since the Soweto Uprising in 1976. The sanctions worked together with internal pressures to create a pervasive sense of business pessimism. The government could not expect to solve grave problems like the unemployment among Africans without political stability conducive to investments.²⁹ During the 1980s, gross fixed investment shrank from 26 to 16 percent of GDP at the same time that government consumer spending was steadily rising. Because of the low investment level, the economy could not grow (Giliomee 89). Thus, when the decisions on the part of Frederik de Klerk’s government were announced in late 1989 to unban the ANC and release Mandela from prison, the opinions naturally varied whether it was an elite initiative or more of an elite response. Enough evidence could be collected to support both views. One version had it that the state was slowly being transformed into a more inclusive entity from the beginning of the 1970s, since the period of economic growth (especially in the 1960s) created labor shortages which triggered some clumsy labor reform. A quite different view saw the process as a response to black struggles which together with the later economic stagnation necessitated political negotiations with the liberation movement. However, Giliomee claims that there is no convincing evidence that the situation at the end of the 1980s simply gave the apartheid regime no other option but to embark on liberalization; the coercive organization (security forces and bureaucracy) remained effective and coherent, and in harmony with the state apparatus and the dominant class (85). De Klerk opposed the freedom of action that his predecessor Botha had given to the security forces fighting the liberation movements’ armed militants. Importantly, the army and police leadership readily accepted the new cabinet’s preference for a different approach to political matters. Although de Klerk’s initiative in late 1989 to open negotiations with the ANC took everyone by surprise, the prerogative of the government to embark on major policy changes in order to protect their ethnic constituency’s interests was not challenged and the shift was then propagated by the supporting network of Afrikaner organizations as an informed, rational decision (84–86).

Besides the fact that the National Party’s predominance within the white politics was threatened when it lost support to both left-wing and right-wing opposition in the 1989 general elections, one of the crucial factors in the demise of the white minority rule that Giliomee emphasizes was the long-term weakening of the white demographic base. The tipping point came around the year 1960; until then, there had always been sufficient numbers of whites to man all the skilled (and most of the semiskilled) jobs in the industries and the top and medium-level positions in the civil service, army and police. The period between 1960 and 1985 saw the proportion of whites to the total population decrease from 20 to 15 percent. The shortage of manpower was caused by the increase in personnel that the apartheid machinery required to operate – apartheid bureaucracies had by the mid-1970s reached their own limits and there were plainly not enough white people to staff the top and medium ranks of both the private and the public sectors. At the same time that the apartheid state came up against its limitations, it was faced with a better educated, more discontented and radicalized urban black population in the 1980s than it was the case in the preceding decades. Having gone through an experience as a party leader in Transvaal and a member of a governmental committee on Africans’ political rights, and twenty years younger and more attuned to the outside world, de Klerk became convinced that coercion was not the solution, and so did elements within the Afrikaner cultural elite. He also realized that Afrikaners (and whites in South Africa in general) had a better chance of striking a favorable bargain at that time than if they waited ten more years.³⁰ (86-88)

Another development that helped draw both sides of the South African conflict to the negotiating table was one of tremendous impact upon the international arena: the severe crisis and subsequent demise of the Soviet Union and a wave of democratization throughout the former Eastern bloc. The apartheid regime saw the external environment spectacularly improve in the last months of 1989. As late as September 1989, de Klerk issued instructions to his brother not to negotiate with the ANC. Should the ANC have remained firmly supported by the Soviet Union, de Klerk would not have agreed to talks with the liberation movement. The chances to contain the ANC – a legalized ANC without Soviet backing – suddenly and greatly improved (or so the government believed). With the socialist sphere of influence crumbling, the ANC was confronted with evidence testifying against central planning and the large-scale nationalization which the movement had long favored. Moreover, due to the successful conclusion of the New York Accords of 1988 regarding the independence of Namibia and withdrawal of Cubans from Angola, the ANC had to remove its camps from Angola, its last safe haven in the region. As the then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Africa succinctly commented: “[T]he government and the opposition had check-mated each other. Neither could move unilaterally: the black resistance had no hope of forcing the government to capitulate, but the government could no longer hope to regain the legitimacy it lost in the 1980s.” (91-92)

As Samuel Huntington observed, while it is usually the regime that seizes the initiative in the process of liberalization, such liberalizers tend to see liberalization as a way of defusing opposition without fully democratizing (93). Definitely, de Klerk did not envisage an electoral system that could reduce the National Party to a perpetual minority. Nelson Mandela understood this and while still in prison, he suggested the formula for a settlement, based on meeting two demands: the demand of blacks for majority rule and the demand of whites for protection from domination by blacks. The situation was not an easy one for de Klerk’s government, because when polled, white elites expressed their acceptance of the negotiating process provided that it was not exclusively about the transfer of power. At the same time, it became clear after the legalization of the ANC on February 2, 1990, that the liberation movement could count on more than 60 percent of the seats under both a constituency-based and conventional proportional representation electoral system. As in other divided societies, elections in South Africa would effectively turn out an ethnic census. In such circumstances, the very democracy strived for was at risk, as one of its main ingredients would be missing – namely that of the possibility of alternating governments and shifting parliamentarian majorities. And, indeed, the ANC was not itself a liberal-democratic political party, but a liberation movement not dissimilar to those in Zimbabwe or Ghana, where the transitions resulted in one-party systems, not democracies (92-93).

The Anatomy of Settlement

It seemed to many that the legalization of the liberation movement and Mandela’s release in February 1990 provided a moment of uncertainty about the political and economic course for the future. Few doubted that a radical reorganization of the stagnant economy was imminent, but what forces would set the parameters in the crucial years of the early 1990s was an open question. Notwithstanding the loss of support for the economic dirigisme of the Soviet type, Mandela let his sentiment be known when, shortly before being released from prison, he reiterated the ANC’s adherence to the Freedom Charter and declared any change to the long-standing proposals for the nationalization of monopoly industries and banks ‘inconceivable’, which statement was immediately decried in the business press (Bond Elite Transition 15-16).

De Klerk expressed his regret about apartheid but he nevertheless claimed backward legitimacy: in other words, the white government in power kept trying to make the opposition concede that regime capitulation was not achievable and that democratization actually legitimized the authoritarian rule because it incubated the new democratic order. By carefully sequencing the process, de Klerk managed to sell the transition to the white electorate as a fail-safe procedure: a year had passed since the legalization of the liberation organizations before he repealed the core apartheid laws (Population Registration Act, Group Areas Act); then he waited for another year before he proposed a temporary elected body to navigate the country to the negotiations and had it approved in a whites-only referendum. Some cadres within the ANC, especially the exile leadership, expected the transition to take a form of a regime breakdown and entertained this alternative even after the talks with the de Klerk government commenced. However, unlike in other authoritarian regimes, the National Party in South Africa retained the support of the white community and the military and police forces did not defect, but remained united behind the government. Not least, the ANC did not muster much support within the white community either (by 1993, it remained below 5 percent). Although the government could not be overthrown, it also could not act unilaterally and any prolongation of the conflict would be costly and increasingly harmful (Giliomee 94-95). In addition to the violence now being perpetrated by ultra-right white supremacists like the AWB (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging – African Resistance Movement) and the Inkatha movement of Gatsha Buthelezi³¹ intent on undermining the position of the ANC (often with covert funding from the state), the formal talks initiated in December 1991 did not go all too well. The all-party forum, Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa), catalyzed a clash of interests that resulted in the withdrawal of the ANC from the negotiations, after which it embarked on a campaign of mass mobilization, further crippling the economy and inciting violent reactions, particularly in the homelands, where the ANC aimed to oust the remaining authorities.³² The mobilization campaign did not bear fruit in terms of bringing the ANC closer to seizing power. Once again unable to resolve the situation on their own, Mandela and de Klerk returned to the negotiating table in the second half of 1992. This time, however, the talks were secret and bilateral – between the government and the ANC (96-97).

The ANC alongside elements of the SACP and COSATU were subsequently drawn into extensive ‘scenario planning’ exercises. In the end, the leading organizations boasting to represent the interests of the poor and disenfranchised were ready to jettison the progressive, redistributive ambitions of the masses of Africans in favor of their new-found affection for neoliberal macroeconomic recipes. According to Patrick Bond, this blatant divorce from the decade-old positions is retraceable to intellectual defection by ANC leaders (Bond Elite Transition 54).

The early 1990s presented a challenge for South Africa’s elites, in that they were required to comprehend each other’s philosophy and goals, and to make concessions – mainly rhetorical – in order to build mutual trust. Gradually, a kind of ‘coerced harmony’ was imposed across the society. Scenario planning became commonplace for precisely this reason. As described by liberal scholars Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley, “all these were useful exercises in opening the apartheid mind. […] Political scenarios can challenge frozen mental maps and stimulate alternative, innovative [...] policies for coping with apartheid’s fallout” (qtd. in Bond 56). According to Nedcor/Old Mutual’s Robert Tucker, the scenario methodology employed in the corporations initially enabled “senior managers to consider and evaluate the scenario analysis, ... identifying the major uncertainties, and then structuring the findings into alternative paths of evolution” (56). Curiously enough, what was initially a corporate survival strategy evolved into a social contract conceptualization, whence social myths could be more readily disseminated. Beginning in late 1990, successive waves of scenario plans were typically brought to the public attention by rumors and leaks in the business press, referencing a broad array of elites of the New South Africa who eagerly reviewed the scenario results. Before long, scenario planning projects sponsored by industrial giants like Anglo American and Old Mutual were complemented by similar blueprints emanating from the Center-Left. Rapidly however, they degenerated into stylized presentations devoid of serious analysis and serving the interests of their sponsors (57).

Till Scenarios Do Us Unite

Starting in mid-1990, Robert Tucker of Nedcor/Old Mutual used a R1.7 million budget on scenario brainstorms by a collection of eminent political thinkers and economists, including several from the ranks of the Democratic Movement.³³ Tucker managed to sprinkle an otherwise orthodox pro-capital framework (partly determined by taking the views of Nedbank executives as a springboard), with a few progressive leftist ingredients and present the final, if eclectic scenario proposal to groups as diverse as the government, the ANC's national executive and Department of Economic Planning, COSATU, or Anglo American. In Prospects for Successful Transition (published in 1993), Tucker’s planners called for “a black/white coalition government which would achieve considerable redistribution through high and sustained growth in a market-oriented economy, and which would respect the macro-balances so essential to sound economic growth” (59). And when in the early 1990s township violence and crises in the manufacturing, agricultural and mining industries erupted, they effectively buried prospects for a truly social democratic transition. The promoted solution was to come up with a compact between progressive leaders and the establishment, leaving the wider society out, to be engaged gradually. Tucker’s heavy-handed treatment of racial integration, an integral part of any real social compact, ventured very close to a typically neoconservative, blame-the-victim critical viewpoint.³⁴ Nonetheless, Tucker sold this line of thinking to several serious Democratic Movement analysts. His was also a bombastic proposal for an unparalleled housing programme, projecting to build 200,000 low-cost houses serviced with electricity per year. There was a catch to it, however, which rested in the demand to get the government out of the housing business (read ‘sound macro-balances’), i.e. to rid the market of state-subsidized housing, ignoring the fact that the removal of subsidies meant instant financial inaccessibility for the vast majority of blacks. One more fallacy: the assumption that production of labor-intensive goods for local markets was unviable – an assumption taken for granted without sufficient proof, complemented by no hint as to which manufacturing sectors were best suited for export (Bond 60-62).

In slight contrast to Tucker’s Prospects, the Platform for Investment was devoid of pretense to any genuine social contract and was credited chiefly to an Afrikaner insurance conglomerate Sanlam, with involvement from the Human Sciences Research Council.³⁵ Instead, it concentrated on elite bargaining between the National Party and the ANC and predicted it a bright if turbulent future due to international oversight and the inability of any one faction to eliminate the others. The outcome of the negotiations, according to the document, would be a power-sharing pact, or ‘forced marriage’, in Platform’s metaphorical wording, either in the form of strife-stricken ‘separate bedrooms’ or characterized by cooperativeness (‘separate beds’), with the progressive elements from the ANC out of that bed. The ties to the labor movement would loosen once the ANC entered the interim government and through the National Economic Forum and consultations with the World Bank, the threat of disruptive redistributionist policies could be put out. The Platform, Bond concludes, hushed the business with what it wanted to hear (63-64).

In the end, the labor movement did not bring out much resistance itself. COSATU-affiliated scholars were invoking a substitution of the existing ‘Fordist’ economy based on mass production by a ‘post-Fordist’ era characterized by an emphasis on specialization and innovation. COSATU researchers, who were known to be fond of Tucker’s Prospects, were joined by Raphael Kaplinsky of Sussex University in drafting the Industrial Strategy Project (ISP). Curiously, even though the sole item giving South Africa a comparative advantage in international markets identified by Kaplinsky in his earlier writings were swimming pool filtration systems, he and his fellow researchers kept pushing the export-led growth agenda through, preoccupied with competitiveness. This commitment they shared with the World Bank whose proposals brimmed with the language of ‘outward orientation’ and export-led growth. Not that the ISP team was unaware of South Africa’s condition – Kaplinsky: ‘It may seem crazy for a post-apartheid state to target the export sector in the face of the economy’s present problems in meeting basic needs’ (66). Put bluntly, it was not easy to unravel how outward orientation served labor interests. The effects of such thinking manifested themselves in the general readiness of labor representatives to acquiesce to the will of neoliberal institutions. When during the 1993 National Economic Forum talks on GATT, an ISP and COSATU representative Alec Erwin agreed to a bulk 25 percent lowering of protective tariffs for the motor industry, the deal was not publicized and the tens of thousands of affected workers, whose interests he represented, did not get to know until a year later when it took effect. The unwelcome ‘news’ came out amid the first national auto workers’ strike organized by the National Union of Metalworkers (abbr. Numsa) which had just been forced to call it off. Unfortunately, any serious debate within the COSATU, during most of 1993 and early 1994, on the desirability of either the path of the semi-peripheral Fordist producer or that of the restructured export-oriented post-Fordism, was missing. The feasibility of a different scenario – regional economic self-reliance, if you will – was largely not delved into (67).

The myriad of initiatives coming from different academic/industrial circles might seem a little confusing – yet what most of the scenarios boiled down to was a clear attempt at defamation of everything that smelled of Keynesianism. One is prone to forget that ideology did not disappear with the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Underway in South Africa’s business headquarters, political forums and academia was in fact an ideological colonization of the public domain by the sole remaining ideology legitimized by its triumph in the Cold War struggle and wound around a specific strand of economic thinking known as neoliberalism.

‘Growth through redistribution’, the fundamental tenet of the Democratic Movement, was increasingly under attack. Two other notable scenario exercises that aimed to get it out of the way were the Mont Fleur scenarios sponsored by the University of Western Cape and the ‘Professional Economists Panel’ summoned by Nedcor/Old Mutual. These, Bond remarks, were explicitly designed to promote a social democratic compromise. Mont Fleur’s team included two influential ANC figures Trevor Manuel and Tito Mboweni and predicted that a good government which observes macroeconomic constraints will lead to real income increases across the social strata. Basing calculations on an expected rise in formal employment proved futile. More important than the obviously favored Flamingo scenario – that which takes off slowly and flies high – was discrediting the Icarus who headed toward crash landing after aiming too high, trying to cater to vast working-class expectations. In the disapproval of Icarus the populist, Mont Fleur and Nedcor/Old Mutual were united. Unlike Tucker’s Prospects, Nedcor-sponsored Professional Economists Panel undertook virtually no formal research and in between free-market mantras even recommended transferring the housing maintenance costs to the townships’ needy inhabitants, insulating Reserve Bank officials from the threat of removal from office by popular demand, and introducing export processing zones, renowned for facilitating poverty and gender superexploitation (70-72).

Then again, the scenario planning game was, according to Bond, by no means meant to challenge South Africa’s elites. It aimed to deradicalize the politicians of the Democratic Movement in order to incorporate them into the elite while shutting dissidents out. By mid to late 1993, this task was almost accomplished, which was evident in the largely absent contestation over important economic policy issues from the ANC and COSATU, thus giving way to neoliberal forces. One of the last battles was waged by ANC-affiliated Merg (MacroEconomic Research Group), a bastion of leftist economists, against the incorporation of the formal independence of the Reserve Bank into the Interim Constitution. The group’s report (Making Democracy Work published in November 1993) stated: “The fact that Reserve Bank independence removes it from direct control by elected bodies is one reason some of its South African advocates support independence” (75). Tito Mboweni of the ANC Department of Economic Planning was swift to belittle the report. And although the ANC’s National Executive Committee would think otherwise and demand that the Reserve Bank be subjected to parliamentary scrutiny,³⁶ the defection of the Department of Economic Planning under Trevor Manuel to the neoliberal camp had become unambiguous (74-76).

The Finance Department representatives provided their own handbook entitled Normative Economic Model (1993), which promised to reverse capital flight via a homegrown structural adjustment program entailing export processing zones, export subsidies and removal of import surcharges. Together with a similar forecast by the IMF, NEM’s projections were scrutinized and publicly rejected by the Stellenbosch Bureau of Economic Research as unachievable fantasies. According to the Stellenbosch economists, NEM’s 3.6 percent GDP growth rate projected for the 1990s (alongside the 3.2 percent predicted by the IMF in its own model) was over-optimistic by a factor of 70 percent. ³⁷ If that was not enough, the Normative Economic Model’s later reincarnation as GEAR was even more optimistic (78).

The RDP: the Untested Cure-All

Before the forces clinging to the free market as a universal remedy mustered enough audacity to push through an unashamedly pro-big business program like GEAR, there was a time in South Africa when the long-oppressed African electorate was being courted with promises of reconstruction and redistribution. Not surprisingly (for a would-be democracy), the time was before the first universal free elections (with an over 90 percent turnout of eligible voters) in the country’s history in April 1994. Given the country’s ethnic make-up, it was no wonder that the elections turned out a sort of ethnic referendum (see Tables 1 and 2).

Table 1. Population by racial group (1996)
Race (self-attributed)	% of population
African White Coloured Indian/Asian	76.7 10.9 8.9 2.6