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

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5 The Population Registration Act of 1950 was finally repealed by the Population Registration Repeal Act No. 114 of 1991 (1950s Legislation. 2009. 18 Apr 2010. ).

6 Of course, ‘disqualified’ meant ‘not a member of the group specified’ for the occupation or ownership of the respective area (Group Areas Act, Section 1, sub-section viii).

7 1950s Legislation. 2009. 18 Apr 2010. .

8 A reference book contained a person’s photograph, address, marital status, employment record, list of taxes paid, influx control endorsements and the rural district of a person’s official residence (Clark and Worger 46).

9 The party, however, dissolved itself before the passage of the act, only to reform in 1953 as an underground organization under the name South African Communist Party (Saunders, Southey and Suttie xxiii).

10 The Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 was repealed in 1991 (1950s Legislation. 2009. 18 Apr 2010. ).

11 1950s Legislation.

12 The Bantustans, or homelands, were (ethnicity in brackets): Transkei (Xhosa), Ciskei (Xhosa), Bophuthatswana (Tswana), Venda (Venda), Gazankulu (Tsonga), Lebowa (North Sotho), Qwaqwa (South Sotho), KwaZulu (Zulu), KaNgwane (Swazi) and KwaNdebele (Ndebele).

13 By 1983, even the official South African estimates acknowledged that around 80 percent of the population in Bantustans were living in dire poverty. Visitors spoke of ‘hive-like [population] density’ and ‘overwhelming sense of abandonment and claustrophobia’ (Clark and Worger 67).

14 For example, the KwaNdebele bus subsidy was higher than its gross domestic product (68).

15 1950s Legislation.

16 1950s Legislation.

17 In 1945, there were 4,360 mission schools that trained approximately 90 percent of African pupils, compared to 230 government-run schools (Clark and Worger 51).

18 1950s Legislation.

19 By December (1952), approximately 8,500 people had been arrested. The Defiance Campaign was the principal inspiration for the enactment of repressive legislation like the aforementioned Public Safety Act (Clark and Worger 55).

20 The trial dragged until 1961 when the remaining persons accused of treason, including Nelson Mandela, were finally acquitted, due to unfounded charges (in Saunders, Southey and Suttie 261).

21 The intention of the author is not to induce prejudice and a knowing grimace on the reader’s part; it is rather to put plainly what is in the document itself, accompanying it with the kind of intellectual reaction that the reader might him/herself experience.

22 Oliver Tambo escaped from the country and became the president of the ANC in exile. A South African version of Alcatraz, Robben Island had served as prison since the Dutch and British colonial times. After being used by the army for some time, around 1961 it became a “hellhole” for political prisoners of the apartheid regime. Today, it is a heritage site popular with tourists (Saunders, Southey and Suttie 221-22).

23 The bottom 40 percent of the population was earning only 6 percent of the national income (Clark and Worger 63).

24 In manufacturing, the South Africa’s most productive sector, African workers earned only 18 percent of the white co-workers’ wages (ibid.).

25 The proliferation of new unions facilitated the creation of large associations, the most important of which was the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU; later to partake in the post-apartheid Tripartite government alongside the ANC and the SACP). COSATU adhered to the ANC’s Freedom Charter and was strongly allied with the UDF (91).

26 Although the ANC played no significant role in the Soweto Uprising, most of the hundreds of young Africans who fled the country as a result of that revolt joined the ANC in exile, and many of them returned to the country as members of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Saunders, Southey and Suttie 3).

27 The South African Defence Force (SADF) invaded Angola shortly in 1975, but pulled back when confronted with the withdrawal of U.S. support and the arrival of Cuban forces. The SADF did, however, occupy a strip of southern Angola from 1981 until it was reciprocally negotiated with the Cubans that the troops would withdraw by 1988 (Saunders, Southey and Suttie 18).

28 Mandela later recalled how Coetsee asked him “whether I envisaged any constitutional guarantees for minorities in a new South Africa… I sensed the government was anxious to overcome the impasse in the country… I saw the beginnings of a compromise.” (Clark and Worger 95)

29 By 1990 only one in ten new entrants to the job market was able to get work (89).

30 “We have not waited until the position of power dominance turned against us,” remarked de Klerk and added that the mistake that a similar regime in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe made was that it “waited too long before engaging in fundamental negotiation” and that South Africa “must not make that mistake” (qtd. in Giliomee 88).

31 In July 1990, Buthelezi transformed the movement into a national political organization, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). Inkatha led a campaign of intimidation against the ANC’s supporters, with a death rate of over 100 people per month in the province of KwaZulu Natal in the early 1990s. The Inkatha continuously undermined its own credibility until relegated to a purely regional seat of power in KwaZulu Natal (Clark and Worger 104).

32 The most widely publicized events from this period took place in the Boipatong township, where Inkatha supporters killed 46 people in June 1992, and in Bisho (the capital of Ciskei), where the troops of chief Gqoza in September of the same year opened fire on ANC marchers, killing 29. The ANC accused the government of not taking any action to prevent those massacres. For Mandela, this was the final impulse for the decision to pull out of the Codesa negotiations (Clark and Worger 106).

33 When the apartheid government restricted the United Democratic Front in 1988, the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM) emerged as an even broader, but also looser, resistance front to apartheid, made up of UDF, African National Congress and COSATU supporters. The government could not ban it, since the MDM had no permanent structure (Saunders, Southey and Suttie 168).

34 The argument advanced was that through modernization, the US industrial society absorbed a range of minority communities – especially migrants from the Deep South – who failed to adjust to the capitalist urban life. Without an inbred Protestant ethic, these abject communities became the beneficiaries of liberal-driven welfarism, which only exacerbated their poverty and dependence. There was no mention of the effects of continuing institutional racism, the flight of urban manufacturing employment, banks’ widespread discrimination against inner-city home-buyers of all races (‘red-lining’), pervasive unethical practices of estate agents (‘block-busting’) and other debilitating effects stemming from structural economic crises. All of these were lessons South Africa would soon learn at first-hand. It was impossible not to tease Tucker here, who was at that moment initiating red-lining (defined in Butler [2004: 80] as banks’ delimiting of entire areas as unsuitable for loan finance) in inner-city Johannesburg, ensuring its rapid metamorphosis from urban symbol of the desegregated New South Africa into the South Bronx. (Bond 60-61)

35 HSRC was a parastatal based in Pretoria once specializing in apartheid social engineering.

36 The decision to grant the Reserve Bank formal independence was finally made during a 1995 parliamentary debate over the final draft of the constitution (76).

37 NEM’s projections actually missed the mark by 50 and more percent. The Normative Economic Model promised 4.5 percent GDP growth, 3 percent employment growth, only 5 percent inflation and private investment of 15.3 percent of GDP within five years. In 1992, GDP growth was –2 percent, employment growth was also –2 percent and inflation was 14 percent (Bond 77).

38 Importantly, this intention was complemented by the following: ‘Our objective is to use resources more efficiently and not to increase the tax burden’ (Election Manifesto).

39 It is noteworthy to point out here that according to Section 25 of the constitutional Bill of Rights and the Restitution of Land Rights Act (No. 22 of 1994), “a person or community dispossessed of property rights after 19 June 1913 (here the text refers to the racially-based legislation known as the Natives’ Land Act No. 27 of 1913) as a result of racially discriminatory laws or practices is entitled […] either to restitution of that property or to equitable redress.” As de Beer comments, each land claim is unique and calls for scrutiny of relevant documentation and that in this field, the ethnographic methodology of anthropology has proven to be indispensable (de Beer 26-27).

40 Born in Lithuania, Slovo (1926-1995) grew up in Johannesburg where he became a lawyer and member of the Communist Party of South Africa. He married Ruth First in 1949 (the political activist in exile whose assassination by a letter bomb made the worldwide headlines in 1983) and helped draft the Freedom Charter of 1955. (Slovo was a white man, which fact enraged Afrikaners all the more.) He was also one of the founders of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the ANC, and after fleeing South Africa (before the Rivonia trial), he became the mastermind behind some of MK's main operations while based in Maputo, Mozambique. In exile, he emerged as the organization's main theoretician. He rose to become general secretary of the South African Communist Party in 1986 and commander of MK in 1987. Although in his work, Has Socialism Failed? (1989), he admitted the errors of Stalinism, he continued to believe in the socialism’s achievability. He returned to South Africa in 1990 and became a key figure in the negotiating process. He adopted a pragmatic position and the “sunset clauses” he advocated led the ANC to accept a model of power sharing with the National Party (Saunders, Southey and Suttie 99, 231).

41 Armaments Corporation of South Africa – arms manufacturing and sales company.

42 Electricity Supply Commission (the acronym is a combination of both English and Afrikaans, with ‘k’ coming from the Afrikaans word ‘kommissie’), one of the world’s largest electricity producers.

43 Township residents had many rightful reasons to ignore paying the monthly service and/or rental charges, of which mass unemployment and poverty were the plainest and recurrent. The legacy of discrimination and oppression by local apartheid administrations was another, as well as a history of politically motivated boycotts. If cut off, water and electricity was usually reconnected illegally. Consequently, many municipal authorities did not even bother to post the township residents their bills (billing rates in large townships usually remained below 50 percent). Africans historically subsidized white towns because blacks worked and bought goods in white areas, in effect supplementing residential rates collected by white town councils. This basically justified the demand for cross-subsidies from the rich to the poor, so that the flow of funding could finally be reversed (Bond 103).

44 A tough question, often posed by Bond’s township sources, was: Why should anyone pay to live in a township?

45 No small part of the reason for the popular dissatisfaction with the pace of transition was the played by the defective piece of legislation entitled Local Government Transition Act, stitched hastily during the final hours of the 1993 constitutional talks (104).

46 Those were C. Heymans and N. Vink of the Development Bank of Southern Africa and R. Bloch of the Urban Foundation (272).

47 This was already reported to be a problem, since large construction companies began replacing union workers with rural women, paying them only R7 per day, calling such practice ‘public works projects’ (ibid.).

48 “The concept of willing buyer-willing seller principle means a completely voluntary transaction between a buyer and a seller. In this regard, the principle accurately denotes the lack of compulsion on landowners. However, [...] it is clear that the willing buyers are [...] landless as well as resourceless. As such, they depend on the State to enter the market place through the Government’s grant system to purchase the land… [T]he willing buyer-willing seller principle offers no guarantees to [the] landless that they will acquire the land they want, or indeed any land at all. [...] The so-called willing sellers have a veto power. The willing sellers as private land owners have not only the choice not to sell to the willing buyers, but they are free to sell to the highest bidder or buyer of their choice. Thus, the land owners can actively avoid offering their land for sale for land reform purposes, say on racist grounds.” (“Toward the Framework for the Review of the Willing Buyer-Willing Seller Principle (Third Draft Discussion Document”, 4).

49 Later on, the Orange Free State would become for some of the Afrikaners what KwaZulu-Natal was for the Inkatha – a territorial base from where they could periodically vent their desire for autonomy.

50 “Consociationalism as explicit power-sharing between ethnic groups had been wisely diluted in the transitional period […] to power-sharing among political parties as implicit representatives of ethnic groups,” Adam comments (Adam 359).

51 The South African legislature has been described by some commentators as a ‘rubber stamp’ for its relatively weak role in policy criticism (Butler 95).

52 Those are the six large urban areas of Cape Town, Port Elizabeth (Nelson Mandela Unicity), Durban, Johannesburg, East Rand and Pretoria (Butler 101).

53 Floor-crossing legislation was specifically designed to enable members of opposition parties to join the ANC during their term in office while retaining their mandate.

54 The primary tripartite forum created to facilitate corporatist arrangements was the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac).

55 Workers pay lower rates and the upper and middle classes pay higher rates.

56 Foreign companies were consequently able to borrow locally much more easily and local institutional investors were granted more expansion of their international portfolios through exporting funds to foreign stock markets (Bond 79).

57 The largest investment projects of the 1990s were Columbus, Alusaf, Coega and Iscor (80).

58 Incentives were nonetheless provided for the automotive and refining industry (Makgetla 267).

59 Another ‘shift’ was the stagnation in the construction sector. While construction was relied upon in the RDP to be a major well of jobs, with diminishing state investment came about a rapid, 30% decline in employment (between 1998 and 2002; Makgetla 274).

60 Education has been the largest single item in the state budget, partly also thanks to the recognition that poor, inadequate education perpetuates inequality and poverty. The fragmented and deliberately constrained (in terms of skills) education of Africans known from apartheid has been replaced and in 2004, school attendance for children between 7 and 15 years of age was estimated at 94 percent, teachers’ wage discrimination was eliminated and also spending per pupil was balanced (Butler 81-82).

61 In the old revolutionary theory, the NDR was the precursory stage before socialism would be attained. The worldwide collapse of economies of the Soviet type, and the orchestrated ideological assault against socialism afterwards, made the ANC progressively emphasize their nationalist character and quietly abandon socialism (as opposed to social justice) as the ultimate goal (Southall Black Capitalism 314).

62 Section 9 of the BEE Act defines a ‘black-owned’ company as one that is 50.1% economically owned by black people. ‘Black-empowered’ are those firms that are 21.5% black-owned, plus have black non-executive directors. The Act also recognizes ‘black woman-owned’ enterprise – one that has 21.5% managerial and equity positions staffed by women (342).

63 For example, Eskom succeeded in making some of the largest companies in the world sell equity to BEE companies, in order to remain its suppliers (352).

64 In the construction sector, more than 90 percent of business owners claimed that their BEE status significantly affected their gaining of new clients. The percentage was lower, but still about 70 percent, for the retail and service industries (349).