The Interconnected Socio-Economic Factors of the Collapse of Apartheid in South Africa

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I feel I need to add some important qualifications to a paper that has generated nearly 4,000 hits since posted in January of 2009. In Impact of Economic and Political Sanctions on Apartheid I argued that sanctions played an important part in forcing the National Party to the table and the eventual dismantling of Apartheid. I wrote this paper in April and May of 2007, just months before I went to study in Durban, South Africa for the rest of that year. Since then, I have read even more broadly on South Africa and wrote my senior thesis on South Africa.

The clarifications I must make have to do with the conclusions that some might take away from this article. While, I am pleased that any one would read my writing and take away anything from my arguments, I feel I must refine my argument in the context of the overall scene in South Africa in the 1980s.

First, sanctions were not the cause of the end of apartheid in South Africa. While I make a semi-persuasive argument in my paper, the point of the argument is whether they were effective. I conclude that they did have a discernable impact. At the time I believed my paper was fairly watertight in its conclusions, but further reading and discussions with historians and South Africans have made me question that I perhaps overstated the effects on apartheid played by sanctions by not acknowledging other factors. Here are two important parts that I missed (in the case of the first), or did not understand in its full context (the second) but now believe they are important contributing factors.

1. Rugby. I strongly urge you to read Playing the Enemy by John Carlin. While writing Impact of Economic and Political Sanctions on Apartheid I had no clear understanding of the relationship between South Africans, especially Afrikaners, and rugby. Since Carlin’s book is devoted to the telling of the fall of apartheid through a rugby-lens and how rugby in fact united the nation it can be expected to overemphasize its importance. The importance of the ban on South Africa from international competition is a factor that I knew nothing about and thus fail to mention in my original paper. While I touch on the isolation that South Africans were feeling due to world pressure and the vitriol that was directed at them when they traveled overseas, when rugby is added to this dimension it takes on an entirely new importance. Unless you have lived in South Africa or interacted with South Africans it is difficult to comprehend how sport plays such a large part in their lives. While Americans and Britons can relate in particular instances, the religious zeal that accompanies rugby in South Africa exceeds even the die-hard football supporter in the UK or the gridiron fan in the US. I would specifically point to the Springbok tour of New Zealand in 1981 as perhaps a key turning point in the anti-apartheid movement. One must remember that while the rest of the world had seen and heard about conditions and violence in major media outlets happening in South Africa since the Soweto uprisings in 1976, white South Africans were not seeing these same images for the most part. The state-run broadcasting companies made little mention of events in the townships and when they did there was considerable propaganda and racism in the way they were reported. However, South Africans grew up with this style of journalism since before 1948, and many accepted the news reports as truth. It was when their national rugby team was vilified to such an extent in New Zealand that questions began to emerge about what was actually occurring in their own country. There is an important victim mentality that permeates Afrikaner history, much of it based on racist views of blacks from the treks across South Africa in the 1800s and dealings with the British Empire. For more on this mentality I would suggest reading White Tribe Dreaming by Marq de Villers.

Thus the subsequent loss of any opponent willing to play the Springboks caused an impact on Afrikaners that Westerners cannot fully appreciate (My use of Westerners is in regards to Europeans and Americans, as there is no such term for defining those two groups exclusively I will continue to use Westerners, even though for the most part South Africa is considered a Western nation). Therefore I would conclude that the sports boycott is an understated factor in the fall of apartheid and should be included in any discussion. However, keep in mind that this was the result of a sanctions movement, though I see no evidence that even those executing the actions of banning South African sports teams from international competition could understand or foresee the results. This is an important factor in future sanctions debate. Those activities or ‘luxury’ objects that the West does not value highly in terms of causing pain to the target nation may in fact be of great importance to the target population. (For an examination on the campaign through sports, click here)

2. Economics. I mention briefly how de Klerk “feels that the real factor in change was the economic growth of the country”. I have come to conclude that this is a more effective argument than I originally gave due. One must remember the influence of the mines on the Rand. Though I do not give a history of South Africa, nor of apartheid/segregation, an important factor in the development of the racial laws since the Union of South Africa in 1910 is the need for cheap labor by the mines. This need caused the great labor migration of Southern Africa, as well as causing the development of black townships near industrial centers, and this need played a large part in the pass laws.

While I could elaborate on each of these items, it is clear that the mines had a major impact in the creation of apartheid. Apartheid was in fact a great success from the mining industry’s point of view as it helped spur a massive development of industry and capital that was unique on the continent during that period.

However, it was this need for labor that had a major impact on the destruction of apartheid. Apartheid had been built to sustain a large pool of uneducated and unskilled workers. This was originally due in part to the demand by poor whites who worked at the bottom end of the mining industry as managers and supervisors, and these laws allowed them to keep their jobs. The mining companies were not always terribly happy with this arrangement, as they always wanted to employ the cheapest labor. But strikes by white workers in the early part of the 20th century, plus the involvement of Afrikaner and English politicians, who wanted to keep their constituents happy (or court new ones), led to the instituting of a colour bar that would permeate through all of South African industry.

Up until the 1980s the mining industry was still hugely profitable and through High Apartheid had a steady stream of black, unskilled labor and thus continued to fuel the South African economy. As a plus, blacks had never gained suffrage and thus had no recognized political organization to apply pressure on the mines on their behalf such as the white workers did in the early 1900s. As a result, mining conditions were still harsh and there were many avoidable deaths of miners. The labor pool allowed for the mines to overlook these safety hazards, plus the steady stream of workers from outside of South Africa meant that there were plenty of unskilled workers who saw it as their best opportunity for upliftment. By 1980s many black South Africans avoided working in the mines the best they could as they had already suffered through mine labor for three generations by then.

However, by the 1980s, despite the pool of labor, the mines were experiencing a labor shortage. It was a shortage of skilled labor. By the 1980s mining had become such a complex operation that more skilled labor was needed. This was not the primary concern however. As mining became more complex due to the depth of the mining, the extraction of minerals became more expensive. By this time period, white skilled workers had a secure ally in power in the form of the National Party, but were seen as a cause of driving mining prices up. The mines wished to supplement white skilled workers, with cheaper black skilled labor. However, the colour bar was a hindrance in this goal, as was the National Party. Costs of mining were rising even though the price of gold was floating on the world markets by the 1980s (the fixed rate of gold was a massively important factor in the need for cheap labor in the 1890s and 1900s. I would argue that had the price of gold floated during the gold rush on the Witwatersrand, apartheid would never have had such a economic incentive and thus would not have been institutionalized in South Africa as it did). Thus the mines began to pressure the National Party to revise some of the apartheid legislation in order to educate and promote black workers in order to fill the labor shortage that existed in order to replace more expensive white workers. Remember that education standards were very low for non-whites because they were seen by the state as simple tools for manual labor. The need was arising for a more educated black workforce, which the education system of South Africa was not providing, to the detriment of the economy as a whole. Economic growth in South Africa was stagnating as a result. This was partly due to the disinvestment and divestment movements, but I believe had South Africa implemented some of these reforms desired by the mines, the affects by those movements would have been negligible.

These are not unquestioned issues, but ones that receive little if any mention by Mandela or any other ANC member. And why would it receive any attention? The ANC was not under pressure from the Mining industry in the 1980s. The ANC likely knew little, if any, of the desire of the mines to revise apartheid legislation to allow more commercial freedoms for non-whites. De Klerk on the other hand would have felt this financial pressure immensely, and as he says, was part of his reasoning to begin negotiations with the ANC. This process of ‘liberalization of apartheid’ would obviously not have appeased the African National Congress or the worldwide anti-apartheid movement. But had it been implemented there would have been an eventual end to white-only rule. And I find it likely that De Klerk saw this writing on the wall, which is why he made the decisions he did. He chose to implement the changes himself so he could dictate and control the process. As we know now, he did not gain this hoped-for power in the process, but it was his best chance at having a seat at the table (though it did seem to temporarily pay off, as he was a Vice-President in the post-1994 government). However, of the options of liberalizing apartheid laws or a bloody civil war, De Klerk obviously made the right call in attempting to find a middle ground. Mandela as a result was all too happy to accept this, as it clearly gave him more power in dealing with the National Party since both sides knew black rule would eventually come to pass, how bloody this process was to be now completely up to Nelson Mandela.

People have often referred to this process between the ANC and the National Party as a miracle. As a Westerner it can be hard to completely understand why South Africans feel this way about the transition to majority rule, indeed, what’s such a big deal about establishing one man-one vote in the year 1994? The United States started to get its act together back in the 1860s (though only completed the task in the 1960s), so why is South Africa such a darling of the world? It is only when one considers all of the numerous factors that came to a head in the late 1980s, that one can realize how unlikely such an occurance of a perfect storm of dynamics was from the perspective of citizens of South Africa in the dark days of the mid-1980s. The fall of the Soviet Union, the ‘Total Onslaught’ that resulted from the loss of all white-ruled nations in Southern Africa, the costs of domestic-made military hardware, the mental siege fatigue of the white population, the negative impact apartheid was having on the mining industry, the debts that began to mount on the South African Treasury, the sports boycott, the arms embargo, the international anti-apartheid movement, and the once-in-a-generation figure of Nelson Mandela who taught reconciliation. Each one of these pieces of the puzzle could easily fill a 10-page thesis paper. Each piece could be argued persuasively that it was the important factor.

It is now my opinion, from an additional three years of learning and research in and about South Africa, that not one of these many issues could be said to be the cause of the fall of apartheid. I have heard many people and many organizations point to one or two as the main causes. However, I can argue for and against each of these ten issues persuasively enough that I could show you that they had little impact or tremendous impact. Each factor has attachments to another that creates a web of interconnected issues that all came together in a stirring point in history. It is important to recognize the many facets of this story and realize that South Africa is indeed a special case in terms of sanctions, majority rule negotiations, and reconciliation. To draw direct conclusions from South Africa and apply them to other countries would be difficult because of its unique condition and exceptional leaders. It is best to conclude and thus agree with the locals on this major point:  The New South Africa is its own miracle.

Nondumiso Gasa speaks at TransAfrica on Zimbabwe

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Nondumiso Gasa visisted the Washington DC office of the TransAfrica Forum on 10 March to brief on her struggle to attract attention to the humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe. Gasa, chair of South Africa’s Commission for Gender Equality, is part of the campaign Save Zimbabwe Now and recently completed a 21-day hunger strike in attempts to cause the international community to help the Zimbabwean refugees that are flowing into South Africa as well as those still inside Zimbabwe. 

In her briefing she touched on her experiences of meeting with refugees at the South African border town of Musina. She said that she has seen the crisis evolve along typical migration routes, where in the past the men of Zimbabwe had left for work in South Africa’s mines, then followed by the women as domestic servants, but that now unaccompanied minors ranging from 8 to 17 years old are crossing the border in hopes of finding employment, and more importantly food, in Pretoria or Johannesburg. 

The Save Zimbabwe Now  campaign has criticized numerous actors in the region, from Mugabe to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to the South African government. In that regard Save Zimbabwe NOW has produced a film titled “The Shame of Musina”. It documents the struggle that Zimbabwean refugees have had in South Africa where they must live in the open air show ground of the town. They are not permitted to leave, as the police has established a non-official policy of arresting anyone that goes beyond the ‘border’ that extends 100 yards into the town. This in turn prohibits anyone to seek help from the local police. The impact of this policy is most intensely felt by the women of the refugee ‘camp’ as they are unable to report rapes to the authorities. The film showed how women must endure multiple rapes on their path out of Zimbabwe and also after arriving in South Africa. Gasa said that intergenerational rape is common, and the practicing of ‘mattress’ rapes (where the man must lie underneath his wife while she is raped) is prevelant in Musina. 

Gasa discussed how rape in Zimbabwe has become a political weapon, one that she says SADC has no stand on. She described how child soldiers are initiated through the raping of family members. The closer the family member is to the child, the more ‘brave’ the child is considered. This leads Gasa to call women’s bodies battlefields in this crisis. She also makes the point that the events transpiring in Zimbabwe are not unique to the country and follow much the same path of other crises on the continent such as the Congo and Darfur when it comes to child soldiers, rape, internal displacement, and government killings. The use of appropriation of aid and supplies by the government, specifically ZANU-PF, for political purposes is an issue that must be addressed as well according to Gasa. She believes a special agency that is not under the government is needed to ensure that aid can be distributed. She cites the cholera tablets that were diverted to specific communities as the most recent of government abuses of aid. 

In going on a 21-day hunger strike, which she continued the relay fast after Kumi Naidoo completed his hunger strike, Gasa wanted to highlight the use of a women’s body as a battlefield for this current conflict. She wanted to encourage others to not be passive about this conflict and to learn how to resist through their bodies. On her sixth day she had alarmingly low levels of iron and was forced to hospital where she was administered an intravenous drip for 8 hours. She said of this experience that it showed her that she “had no control over her body” and that she was “not brave at all”. However, she said of her time lying in hospital that it gave her “clarity of thought and conviction” to finish her fast. 

She said that in living in South Africa for the past few years, many believed that South Africa was working towards a solution with Thabo Mbeki’s Quiet Diplomacy. On her visit to Musina and viewing the conditions of life there, Gasa subsequently saw that “we are in [a] much different problem” . She believes that the unitary government that was forced upon Zimbabwe by SADC, which led to the current unitary government between Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF and Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC, has only legitimized ZANU-PF and what she calls the Mugabe ‘phenomenon’. Gasa however believes that once “government…uses military on its own country it loses its legitimacy”. She says that the presence of the military that currently hangs over Prime Minister Tsvangirai restricts any real change he can implement.

Turning to the solutions that Save Zimbabwe Now and Gasa believe are needed, she said that Save Zimbabwe Now is asking for others to pledge their solidarity and create a “people to people struggle”. She believes more discussion in churches or other forums are necessary to creating a movement where the more voices that exsit the more likely they will achieve their goals. Save Zimbabwe Now calls on the US to join in the struggle, through donations, fasting, and most importantly a political advocacy movement in which the goal of restoring human dignity to the people of Zimbabwe can be acheived.

Gasa asks for Obama to send a special envoy to SADC and to weigh the different options through multilateral discussion on whether or not to lift sanctions. To this end Gasa believes that if donor money is allowed to flood in, the government and Mugabe will be able to ignore the people of Zimbabwe and their vote. Gasa does not have much faith in SADC in terms of delivering wide spread aid as she believes they do not have the capability to distribute a humanitarian package from themselves. She believes the fact that most of these nations are themselves cash-strapped and their cozy relations with the ZANU-PF region will result in wasted aid money. 

In closing, Gasa gave a warning that seemed to stress her belief that the time to act is now. She says that she expects no action to come down from the ANC government in Pretoria as public discontent with the refugees is growing. She said in Johanessburg, the security forces routinely raid the churches where refugees stay when the police “want to have some fun or make some money”. Gasa points to the Democractic Alliance ousting the ANC from the ward in Musina where the refugees stay. Gasa says the DA ran their platform on a xenophobic message in the area because of the refugees. 

In the end, Ms. Gasa did provide a first hand account of the suffering that the people of Zimbabwe endure when they enter South Africa, and she rightly criticized many of the organizations that have been tasked to solve this issue. However, her prescriptions for change were vague, especially when she answered a question from the audience about what the US should do by saying that American’s should pledge solidarity with the Zimbabwean people. This perhaps gives an insight into this complex issue that even the people on the ground who are interacting with these many  different actors do not have a clear plan for solving the problem. Their hope that by attracting more attention will bring an end to the suffering is a difficult task, but as seen with the conflict in Darfur and many others on the continent, more media attention is never the final answer to the conflicts that are troubling Africa.

South African President to Dissolve Parliament? Call New Elections?

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A report by Stratfor, tucked away nicely on their members-only page, is titled South Africa: President To Dissolve Parliament – Report. Such a course of action would seem prudent if viewed from a political perspective. While this year’s regulary schedule general election were to be held sometime between April and June, this recent possible action by South African president, Kgalema Motlanthe, could signal the African National Congress’s (ANC) growing concern over the upstart breakaway party, the Congress of the People (COPE). 

ANC may well claim that since the dismissal of Thabo Mbeki from head of state, Motlanthe has been in a care-taking role and that with the current worldwide finicial crisis, it is more appropriate to get a new government seated sooner, rather than later. Motlanthe has certainly kept the ball rolling on certain ANC projects, one of which was the dismantling of the Scorpions, but he has not undertaken any other major endevors as he has no political capital of his own. The looming shadow of Jacob Zuma must also be inhibiting Motlanthe during his Presidency. (To See a Review of his first 100 Days in office, see his interview with the M&G) This claim that a legitimate government is needed to handle the financial crisis would seem to make good sense, as a new government would be able to react to the crisis and use their newly earned political capital to implement their plans.

Oddly enough, another possible reason for the early election might be a new possibility for South Africans abroad to vote overseas. While not all inclusive, the government may want to speed up an election, so that word of mouth of the new provision has not spread sufficiently in time for an overseas vote to be significant. As most of the overseas vote would most likely favor the DA or possibly COPE, the ANC is not exactly advertising this new ability to vote abroad.  

The ANC must also be worrying about any growing influence that COPE is gathering in former ANC territory. It would be rational to believe that the longer COPE has to prepare for the elections and to publicize their platform, the more successive they will be in the election. Whether this plays out in this fashion is still to be seen, but its a fair bet that the 2009 South African election may well be the most exciting since 1994. The smaller parties are sensing the division in the ANC may mean more votes for their platforms, but I believe the actual number of electorate defections will be less than is hyped in the media. In any case, voter participation may rise for the first time in South Africa’s post-apartheid era.

Which ever reason is given by President Motlanthe to call for elections before the normal timetable, there must be a period of 60-65 days between when an election is called and when the actual voting day is established. COPE has claimed that a date of March 25th has been set, denied by Motlanthe, but in reality will one or two months make a difference to COPE’s success at the voting booth? They might argue yes, but in reality I believe that those who were ready to cast a non-ANC vote have already made up their mind about COPE. Those rural people who COPE may try to target for conversion from ANC stalwarts cannot be converted in months, rather years.

While 2009 sees the first formidable splinter group of the ANC pose a challenge to the ANC, no real power change will happen this year. It may be 2014, or beyond, before a COPE, or a COPE-DA alliance, could seriously threaten the stranglehold the ANC possesses over the South African electorate.

Calls for Action in Zimbabwe – Will Anyone Actually Give a Realistic Plan of Action?

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Today’s Washington Post Opinion page featured a piece appropriately named as it was penned by two physicians, In Zimbabwe, a Cancer Called Mugabe, which like many governments and other advocay groups called on the help to be made available to Zimbabweans. Unfortunately, they don’t go into spcifics about what kind of ‘help’ should be given other than that under the wide ‘humanitarian’ banner, nor do they even give any guidance to Barack Obama for what he should actually DO.

This seems to be the theme of most op-ed articles, opinion pieces, and major world instituions who have been calling for ‘change’. Everyone seems to agree that Mugabe must step down (1, 2, 3), but since Mugabe could obviously care little for world sanctions or condemnations (much less any empathy for the citizens of his country), how do these writes and politicians actually envision Mugabe being removed from power? Certainly no military action is considered by Western nations, and it is even more ridiculous to assume it will come from any African Union member at this point. Freezing of his monetary resources, along with the rest of his ‘cronies’ seems to have done little to result in change.

The world does not seem to recognize that they are dealing with a stubborn, old, and proud African man. Do leaders and journalists think that simply writing about his rule and his iron-fisted ways will bring about real change to the regime? If they do not, then why bring any attention to the situation at all? Is it a good topic to fill up the the ‘holier than thou’ part of the newspaper? Saying, look at us, we’re looking out for our fellow citizens of the world by writing about their blights, but don’t ask us to actually implement, much less create a feasible plan of action. 

The Zimbabwean currency lost is value some time ago (I actually have Zim dollars that are expired), the opposition party is being ruthlessly beaten and jailed by the ruling party seemingly attempting a MLK-approach to Mugabe’s rule, and citizens of the neighboring countries have called on their governments to act, but have seen only half-hearted plans for a unitary government, a sole organizer for regional meetings on the topics and rebukes of ZANU-PF from no one of note other Botswana.

Though calls for Mugabe to step down have grown steadily from African leaders, no one seems to ever say ‘or else’. They all call on him to end the suffering of his people. HIS people? Does any one think that Mugabe actually sympathizes with the rural people of Zimbabwe? He cares about keeping his inner cirlce happy, and he has done that to such a degree that all he has to do is set them loose on the farms, and they’re perfectly content with his rule.

How does change come to Zimbabwe, real change, real development, and the return of simple government services? Next week, The African File will present a 5-piece plan of action to bring about actual change, that will not just yell ‘do something’, but will say ‘do this‘.