Embedded Files
Many of the readings and resources I have put together for these activities comes from an excellent teaching guide prepared for Facing the Truth documentary about the TRC in South Africa narrated by Bill Moyers.
South African History, Myth, and Memory
Questions: Look back into the reading to answer the following questions in complete and thoughtful sentences.
1. Who were the Boers? How did they come to be in South Africa?
2. What was the Great Trek? Why did it happen?
3. What happened on Dingaan Day (1893)?
Critical Thinking Questions: These questions require a bit more though and reflection and answers should be long enough to satisfy the question.
4. How did the belief of being a “covenanted people” affect the way many Afrikaners viewed themselves and others? (Consider the way they defined citizenship)
5. Why do you think the ANC chose Dingaan’s Day for their first act of sabotage? What point were they trying to make?
6. How have the events described in this reading shaped the identity of white and black South Africans? Think about how your own history shapes your sense of who you are?
Dividing Humankind
This reading is important for talking about race and constructions and perceptions of race in informing policy decisions. Students can complete the reading on their own, in groups or as a whole class reading. Questions can also be used as discussion questions.
Questions:
1. Sociologist Orlando Patterson has pointed out that “nearly all social scientists, except for those on the fringes, reject the view that racial differences have any objective or scientific foundation.” If race is a social invention, a myth, why is it so central to the way many people see themselves and others?
2. Martha Minow, a professor of law, writes, “When we identify one thing as unlike the others, we are dividing the world; we use our language to exclude, to distinguish—to discriminate.” How do her comments apply to the use of “racial” categories in every- day life? How do those categories affect the way we see ourselves? The way others view us?
3. During apartheid, hundreds of people officially changed their race each year by apply- ing to a special government agency. In 1985, a government official reported:
702 Colored people turned white.
19 whites became Colored. One Indian became white.
Three Chinese became white.
50 Indians became Colored.
43 Coloreds became Indians.
21 Indians became Malay.
30 Malays went Indian.
249 blacks became Colored.
20 Coloreds became black.
Two blacks became “other Asians.”
One black was classified Griqua.
11 Coloreds became Chinese.
Three Coloreds went Malay.
One Chinese became Colored.
Eight Malays became Colored.
Three blacks were classed as Malay.
No blacks became white and no whites became black.
4. Why would the government have a procedure for changing one’s race? How does that procedure confirm Shirlee Haizlip’s research into “racial classifications”?
Violence and Apartheid
Should violence be used to protest discriminatory government policies?
Opening Activity: Begin the class by asking students whether or not the ANC should use violence to fight apartheid. They should explain their answer, trying to come up with three supporting reasons.
Review Vocabulary:
Trade Sanctions - taxes and trade barriers used to pressure other countries
Reconciliation - a process of restoring friendly relations
Bantustan - (also known as black African homeland) was a territory set aside for black inhabitants of South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia), as part of the policy of apartheid.
Questions: Answer the following questions in complete and thoughtful sentences based on the reading above.
What strategies were used by other countries to persuade South Africa to change? Would you consider this proper methods of foreign intervention?
What forms of resistance were used within Africa to protest the Apartheid laws? Were they effective?
According to Archbishop Tutu, what is the relationship between apartheid and violence? To what extent does “violence beget violence”?
In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela recalls a heated debate within the ANC over armed resistance. Mandela writes of the stand he took in that debate:
I said it was wrong and immoral to subject our people to armed attacks by the state without offering them some kind of alternative. I mentioned again that people on their own had taken up arms. Violence would begin whether we initiated it or not. Would it not be better to guide this violence ourselves, according to principles where we save lives by attacking symbols of oppression, and not people? If we did not take the lead now, we would soon be latecomers and followers to a movement we did not control.
Is it possible to “guide” violence? To keep it under control? What other alternatives did the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups have to an armed struggle in 1961?
Final task: After completing the opening activity and the reading, group students into groups of 3. Have each group come up with a statement in favor or against using violence to fight apartheid in SA using evidence from the text and class discussion.
Sharpeville
On March 21, 1960 anti-apartheid demonstrators gathered to protest thepass laws. Sixty-seven protesters were killed by security forces at Sharpeville, a
black township south of Johannesburg. Following the massacre, the South African government banned the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress. This event is often seen asthe beginning of the resistance movement that fought for civil rights in South Africa. Just after the massacre at Sharpeville, Dennis Brutus, a black South African poet, reflected on its meaning: Questions:
1. What is the meaning of Sharpeville for Brutus?
2. In what sense was the massacre at Sharpeville “classic”?
3. What is it that “the world whispers” and “apartheid declares with snarling guns”?
4. What does Brutus want readers to remember?
5. How is his understanding of the massacre similar to your own?
Democracy and Apartheid
Have students read the selected texts in Democracy and Apartheid and answer the following questions:
1. How did Mandela become politically active?
2. What principles were conveyed in the Atlantic Charter of 1941?
3. What were some of the goals of the National Party?
4. What happened when the ANC and other groups tried to come together to organize and draft a Freedom Charter?
5. What were some of the key ideas of the Freedom Charter?
6. How did the South African Government try to put down dissent?
7. How did the ban affect Mandela?
8. Who offered to release Mandela and what were his conditions?
9. What was the tone of Mandela’s response to the offer of release?
After this reading ask students read MLK's reflection on South African and Resistance and then read an excerpt from Nelson Mandel on democracy.
In a 1964 speech, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stated:
In our struggle for freedom and justice in the U.S., which has also been so long and arduous, we feel a powerful sense of identification with those in the far more deadly struggle for freedom in South Africa. We know how Africans there, and their friends of other races, strove for half a century to win their freedom by non-violent methods, and we know how this non-violence was met by increasing violence from the state, increasing repression, culminating in the shootings of Sharpeville and what has happened since. . . . Even in Mississippi we can organize to register Negro voters, we can speak to the press, we can in short organize people in non-violent action. But in South Africa even the mildest form of non-violent resistance meets with years of punishment, and leaders over many years have been silenced and imprisoned.
Questions:
1. What similarities does King see between the civil rights movements in South Africa and the United States?
2. What difference does he stress?
3. How important was that difference to the ANC’s decision to turn to violence in 1961?
Mandela on Democracy
Mandela learned about democracy in English missionary schools and universities, but his earliest lessons were in the court of the regent of the Thembu people. He writes in his autobiography:
Everyone who wanted to speak, did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer. People spoke without interruption and the meetings lasted for many hours. The foundation of self-government was that all men were free to voice their opinions and equal in their value as citizens. (Women, I am afraid, were deemed second-class citizens.) . . .
The meetings would continue until some kind of consensus was reached. They ended in unanimity or not at all. Unanimity might be an agreement to disagree, to wait for a more propitious time to propose a solution. Democracy meant all men were to be heard, and a decision was taken together as a people. Majority rule was a foreign notion. A minority was not to be crushed by the majority.
Questions:
1. How did the democracy Mandela experienced as a child shape the attitudes and values revealed in this reading?
2. How is it like your own view of democracy?
3. What differences seem most striking?
Pop Quiz on South Africa’s TRC
Word Bank:
Amnesty, Africa National Congress (ANC), Archbishop Desmond Tutu,
Compromise, F. W. de Klerk, Nationalist Party (NP), Nelson Mandela,
Political, P.W. Botha, Ubuntu
Directions: Use the following words to complete the sentences below.
1. Nelson Mandela was a part of the _____________________, while F.W. de Klerk and P.W. Botha were members of the ______________________.
2. A person who would tell their story and prove that the crime the committed was out of a ___________________ motive would be granted ____________________ and would be exempt from future prosecution.
3. _______________________ chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions.
4. The TRC was a _____________________ between those who wanted blanket amnesty and those who wanted criminal trials.
5. The South African concept of ___________________ expresses the essence of humanity and its interconnectedness.
6. The most egregious apartheid violations, according to reporter Max Dupree, happened while ________________________ was president of South Africa.
7. __________________ chose to testify at the Truth Commissions while his predecessor refused.
8. ______________________was the first president to be elected in South Africa after Apartheid.
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