Apartheid

This is an Afrikaans word meaning “apartness” that came to signify the juridical-based, racially defined neo-fascist socio-political order that was formally implemented in South Africa by the Afrikaner segment of the white polity following its accession to power in 1948 when their party, the National Party, won the all-white national elections and in which the concept of “whiteness” was foundational. It had its roots in the colonial era at a time when the European settler struggle to dispossess aboriginal Africans of both their land and labor, in the context of the globally determined emerging capitalist order, overrode all else.

It is important to point out that apartheid had three dimensions to it: a racist ideology; discriminatory political-economic practice (white versus black); and ethnicism in which the Afrikaners sought to gain ascendance over the English segment of the white polity for both economic and cultural reasons.[1] The specific guiding principles of the agenda of this new apartheid government that took over in 1948 are summarized best in a sentence or two by Kallaway (2002: 13): “They were keen to promote the interests of Afrikaner politics against English domination of economic, social and cultural life, against big business and its control by ‘alien forces of Anglo-Jewish capitalism,’ and against ‘black encroachment’ on ‘white interests.’ They were for the promotion of Afrikaner business and culture and the ‘salvation of ‘poor whites.’’’ In other words, and it is important to stress this, apartheid was at once an economic project and a political project—the two were intimately and dialectically related—that sought to promote Afrikaner supremacy in the first instance and white supremacy in the second.

Apartheid was never meant to wish black people away, on the contrary it needed black people, but only as sources of cheap labor (and to this end it meant dominating and controlling them on the basis of that classic “separate-but-equal” ruse first perfected in the United States following the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson 163 U.S. 537 [1896]). Ergo, to say that apartheid was a modernized form of serfdom is not to engage in cheap theatrical polemics, but to describe it as it really was designed (and came) to be. Building on existing racist legislation (such as the 1907 Education Act No. 25, and the 1913 Natives Land Act) and centuries old customary Jim Crow practices, various National Party-led governments systematically erected and perfected a highly oppressive, neo-fascist, racially segregated, super-exploitative, sociopolitical economic order that came to be called apartheid.[2]

Initially, the system (which it must also be pointed out to those unfamiliar with the demography of South Africa was underwritten by the political rule of a minority, with the majority completely excluded from almost any form of political participation) would rest on a base of three socially constructed races: Africans, Coloreds, and whites; but later, a fourth would be added: Indians (Asians). A little later, the system would be modified to fragment the African majority into its smaller ethnic components fictively rooted geographically in separate rural labor reservations (which would be first called Bantustans and later dignified with the label “homelands”) carved out of the measly 13% of land that had been allocated to Africans by the 1913 Native Land Act and its subsequent modification. (In other words, apartheid was also a form of colonialism—internal colonialism.)

It is important to point out that the rise and longevity of apartheid as an ideology was also to a significant extent, due to the fact that the ideology while seemingly at odds with the needs of capital, in reality suited the capitalist order quite well—that is until the accumulated weight of contradictions it spawned would grow to become a serious liability by the 1980s—in that it served to “purchase” the loyalty of white labor (with its electoral power to legitimate capitalist enterprise) in the inherent class struggle between labor and capital by subjectifying the objective at both levels: at the racial level of the white polity as a whole (through the concept of whiteness), and at the specific ethnic level of Afrikanerdom (through the concept of “Afrikanerism,” for want of a better word). At the same time, needless to say, it facilitated the super exploitation of land and labor that belonged to others, namely the aboriginal African majority.

To those familiar with U.S. history, it would not be farfetched to draw parallels (leaving aside the obvious reversal of the black/white population ratios) with the Jim Crow era of the U.S. South in which Jim Crow was aimed at securing political/economic domination over both, in the first instance, blacks, and in the second instance, white northerners, as well as with what came to be called the "Southern Strategy."[3] The first formal organized resistance to apartheid was launched by the African National Congress (ANC),[4] following, initially, in the footsteps of the nonviolent resistance mounted by Mahatma Gandhi some decades earlier when he was in South Africa.

The End of Apartheid

Apartheid officially ended in 1994, following decades of anti-apartheid struggle, coupled with major transformative changes at the global level ushered in by the collapse of the Cold War, in which the following events, listed here as a timeline, standout as important historical signposts:

1952, June: launch of a passive resistance campaign, called the Campaign of Defiance Against Unjust Laws (Defiance Campaign), by the ANC and the South African Indian Congress, together with other allies, in which several thousand are arrested. The Campaign would mark the inauguration of the first “decade of anti-apartheid rebellion.”

1955, June 26: A loose but determined coalition of various anti-apartheid organizations known as the Congress Alliance, issue the Freedom Charter (roughly based on the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights), calling for a multi-racial democracy in South Africa, at a public gathering dubbed the “Congress of the People.” (The alliance comprised the African National Congress, the South African Indian Congress, the South African Colored People’s Organization, the South African Congress of Democrats and the South African Congress of Trade Unions, and informally the South African Communist Party—although declared illegal by the apartheid state in 1950, it continued to remain active unofficially through some of its former members.) Meeting in Kliptown on the outskirts of Johannesburg, some 3000 delegates adopted the Charter on June 26, 1955 (Shortly thereafter, the apartheid police moved in and broke up the meeting, which had been scheduled to last three days.)

1956: Nelson Mandela is arrested on December 5, with more than 150 others, for allegedly plotting to use violence to overthrow the apartheid government. They are charged with high treason (which carried the death penalty). The trial, which came to be known as the Treason Trial, lasts for over four years; however, he and 28 others are eventually acquitted on March 29, 1961.

1957, January 7: Commencement of the Alexandra Bus Boycott (also known as the Johannesburg Bus Boycott) in opposition to an increase in bus fares by Afro-South African commuters. The boycott, which to a large extent was spontaneously organized (though there was some ANC involvement), lasted for about three months despite the great hardship borne by the commuters—some walked up to distances of twenty or so miles per day.

1959, April: The formation of an ultra-nationalist organization known as the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) that would serve as an unsuccessful rival to the ANC.

1960, March 21: a peaceful protest organized by the PAC over pass laws; culminates in the infamous Sharpeville Massacre of the protestors by the police; over sixty are killed (many shot in the back while fleeing) and thousands are arrested. To add insult to injury, a few days later, on March 30, the apartheid government declares a state of emergency, arresting thousands; and shortly thereafter, on April 7, declares the A.N.C. and the P.A.C. illegal organizations not permitted to operate in South Africa in any way or form. They have no choice but to go into exile; it would turn out to be a nearly three-decade long politically impotent wanderings, for the most part, in the wilderness of exile.

1961, June: the ANC forms its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation); meanwhile the PAC likewise forms its own military wing, calling it Poqo.

1962: Mandela secretly leaves South Africa to seek military training and financial support. Among the countries he would visit include Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Morocco. In both Ethiopia and in Morocco he receives some very rudimentary military training (in Ethiopia his trainers are agents of the Israeli intelligence [Mossad] and in Morocco officers of the guerilla group fighting the French colonial authorities for the independence of Algeria, the Front de Libération Nationale [FLN]). As it turns out, he never gets the chance to put into practice whatever he may have learned—from the perspective of an armed liberation struggle.

1963: On July 11, while Mandela is serving a five-year sentence for, among other charges, going abroad illegally (he had been picked up on August 5, 1962, following his return, and upon conviction sentenced on November 7), the police raid the secret headquarters of Umkonto We Sizwe—the Lilliesleaf Farm—located on the outskirts of an affluent suburb of Johannesburg called Rivonia. (Interestingly, the raid involved a tip from a U.S. Central Intelligence [CIA] infiltrator, according to Gerard Ludi, an apartheid government intelligence official. He would later claim in a BBC documentary, Nelson Mandela: Accused #1 (2004), that the CIA was forced to provide the intelligence it had on Mandela’s movements to the government because it had arrested one of its spies—inadvertently—in Durban. The CIA used its intelligence as a bargaining chip to obtain the release of its operative.) The raid unearthed a small cache of arms and other ordnance, together with incriminating documents. A year later, in June, the accused (that included besides Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, and Dennis Goldberg) are found guilty of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment.

1963: Pursuant to the U.N. General Assembly Resolution 1761 of November 6, 1962, the United Nations establishes the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid—a body that, initially, is not welcomed by most Western nations (including the United States)—with E. S. Reddy of India as its principal secretary. In January 1976 the status of the committee would be elevated when it becomes the United Nations Center Against Apartheid (with E. S. Reddy as its director).

1973, January 9: black industrial workers begin a series of spontaneous strikes, even in the absence of unionization, in Durban and environs that would come to have important deleterious political repercussions down the road for apartheid—they would be a prelude to the second “decade of anti-apartheid rebellion.”

1976, June 6: launch of the primary and high school student-led Soweto Uprising begins in which many kids are shot to death (and many more jailed and tortured) by a rampaging and rioting police. Inaugurating the second “decade of anti-apartheid rebellion,” the uprising would mark the beginning of the end of nearly three hundred years of white minority rule.

1977, July 1: formation of the U.S. African American lobbying group TransAfrica Forum, under the leadership of lawyer and activist Randall Robinson, that would come to play a critical role in the U.S. anti-apartheid movement, especially in the 1980s.

1983: On August 20, the first mass coalition of anti-apartheid forces since the 1950s, the United Democratic Front (UDF) is launched in South Africa.

1984, November 22: the Free South Africa Movement is founded by U.S. African American leaders Mary Francis Berry, Walter Fauntroy, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Randall Robinson in Washington, D. C.

1986, October: the United States Congress passes the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA), despite a presidential veto by Reagan. (The Act would constitute a significant body blow to the South African state—especially at the psychological level).

1989, July: P. W. Botha (president of apartheid South Africa) has a brief face-to-face meeting with Nelson Mandela, while the latter is still in prison. (By this point, secret talks between Mandela and the apartheid government on the political future of South Africa had already been under way.)

1990: On February 11, Nelson Mandela is released from prison after nearly three decades of incarceration. (His release was preceded, a few days earlier, on February 2, by an announcement by F. W. de Klerk (president of apartheid South Africa) in parliament the termination of the proscription of over thirty organizations, including the ANC, the PAC, and the SACP.

1990: Passage of the Discriminatory Legislation Regarding Public Amenities Repeal Act (Act No. 100 of 1990) that effectively begins the process of ending apartheid.

1991: Passage of the Abolition of Racially Based Land Measures Act (Act No. 108 of 1991) that repealed provisions of such legislation as the 1913 Native Land Act. With this legislation, and other similar legislation, such as the Population Registration Repeal Act (Act No. 114 of 1991), the apartheid system is virtually abolished.

1991, December 20: the official negotiations for a new and democratic constitutional order in South Africa begins, called the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa), involving about nineteen political parties, as well as representatives from the United Nations and other international organizations as observers.

1993, November 18: the interim constitution that has come out of the Codesa talks, which calls for the institution of a transitional Government of National Unity, for a five-year period, is ratified by almost all political parties involved, the lone holdout is the PAC.

1994, April 26–29­­: the first democratic nationwide inclusive general elections ever held in the history of South Africa take place. The ANC, now headed by Nelson Mandela, wins the elections.

1994, May 10: Nelson Mandela, as the first president of apartheid-free South Africa, delivers his inaugural address at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. It includes the memorable phrase “Rainbow Nation,” echoing U.S. African American Jesse Jackson’s call for a “Rainbow Coalition” (after an organization of the same name he helped found in 1984) in his own 1988 bid for the U.S. presidency. Apartheid, as a formal system of racial oppression, is now dead.