South Africa & Apartheid
Unusual Colonial History
Colonialism usually represents a struggle between a
group of colonized resisters and a single group of
colonizers.
• South African colonialism represents a struggle
between two sets of colonizers:
• The Dutch (strictly exclusionary)
• The British (relatively accommodating)
• The Dutch and British are struggling with each
other, but also struggle with the resisters:
the Natives
Arrival of the Dutch
• The Dutch colonized the Cape of Good Hope
in 1652 (the southernmost part of South
Africa).
• The bulk of black people were located
further inland and were quickly conquered.
• The Dutch colonizers saw South Africa as an
African “New World” and saw themselves
as white pioneer settlers and proclaimed
themselves “Afrikaaners”
Arrival of the British
• The British seized the Cape colony in 1806.
• A century of struggle
• Tensions escalated when British started sending
settlers in 1820
• British settlers also saw the country as
permanent home
The Great Trek
• Finally, in 1835 most of the Afrikaners headed
northeast to re-establish communities on their
own terms
• They began battling with the black population
• Afrikaners were well established by 1841, but
still had tension with British
Comparison between British &
Dutch Colonialism
Dutch (Afrikaner):
British:
• Concerned with establishing an
egalitarian democracy amongst
themselves
• Thought they could retain control
over their policies only if they could
exclude non-Afrikaners (esp. blacks)
from citizenship
• Established states in the interior
through conquest, and rejected any
possibility of black inclusion – their
principle was “no equality in the
church or state”
• Not racially inclusive
• BUT open to “extending” the
rights of citizenship (right to
vote) to blacks that were able
to acquire property and a
British education.
• For vast majority of the black
people, British were no
different from Afrikaners,
BUT for the tiny black elite, it
made a world of difference.
• Anglican church wanted to
recruit the colonized
Union of South Africa
• Boer War: British defeated the Afrikaners in a
1899-1902 war & incorporated them into a
policy that became the Union of South Africa in
1910.
• Significant autonomy and representative
institutions granted for whites and qualified
blacks
• Racial discrimination fact of life from day one!
• Land Act of 1913
The Black Elite
• The leaders dressed,
talked and acted like
British gentlemen
• The African National
Congress (ANC) was
formed in 1912 by this
black elite
• This resistance placed
stress on the
conscience of the
British colonizer
African National Congress
• ANC prepared to oppose the Land Act and
turned to the Crown for help
• For 30 years, the Crown did nothing to help
them.
Afrikaner Resentment of the British
• Resented the economic and cultural domination
of the British
• More Afrikaners in the country but the British
were better off
• Afrikaners largely farmers
• South Africa was now British dominion &
Afrikaners did not want to fight for Britain
Afrikaner Resentment of the British
• British mine owners decided to replace largely
Afrikaner white workforce with Blacks (cheap
labor).
• Afrikaners’ status worsened as did their
resentment of British and Blacks
National Party
• Afrikaners decided to organize themselves and
channel their anger through a political party
• The National Party founded in 1913 to promote
Afrikaners in business & politics
• Founders were moderates – wanted to
cooperate with British
• The NP also formed a more militant group:
Broederbond
The Broederbond
• Protestant men only
• By invitation only
-In theory, it existed to promote Afrikaner culture
and Calvinist religion
-In practice, it promoted Afrikaner supremacy
• Party split in 1934 – militant Daniel Malan
became the leader
Rise of the National Party
• Daniel Malan was the 4th
prime minister of South
Africa and stood for
Afrikaner supremacy
• Mobilized popular support
• NP won elections in 1948.
Remained in power until
the shift to multi-racial
democracy n 1994.
The National Party Era
• Democracy for a few!
• Used public resources exclusively for
advancement of Afrikaners
• Packed military and bureaucracy with supporters
• Adopted policy of Apartheid (separateness);
passed laws that completed separation of the
races
Apartheid Legislation
Population Registration Act (1950) defined all
people as one of four racial categories:
Whites: people of European origin with no trace of other
blood in their families
Coloreds: includes people of mixed racial origin but also
descendants of Malaysian and others brought to South
Africa as slaves
Asians (Indians): colonial India
Africans (Blacks): everyone else whose family roots were
on the continent
Apartheid Legislation
• Prohibition of Mixed Marriages (1949) &
Immorality Acts (1950) banned marriage and
sexual relations across racial lines
• Native Laws Amendment Acts (1953) only Blacks
who had been born there could live legally in
urban areas
• Extension of University Education Act (1959)
prohibited Africans from attending the three
major universities
Apartheid Legislation
• Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953): separate, segregated
facilities
• Suppression of Communist Act (1950): allowed state to ban people from
political life
• Pass Laws: required Africans to carry internal passports when outside
their homelands
• Employers used these laws to enforce work discipline
“Separate Nations”
• Hendrik Verwoerd
became Prime Minister
in 1958
• In 1961, South Africa
declared a republic
• Shifted emphasis from
racism to his theory of
“separate nations”
The “Homelands”
• Areas of rural South Africa set aside as
“homelands” for black population
• Supposedly given a degree of self-gov’t
• The NP argued that blacks could enjoy the vote
in their homelands
• Homelands were less than a tenth of South
Africa’s most infertile land and had puppet gov’ts
The “Homelands”
• Divided South Africa into different states:
-Blacks citizens of impoverished “homelands”
-3 million sent to “homelands”
-Rest of country became first world, white majority state
-Forced relocation into urban areas: part of Johannesburg
was flattened; 60,000 residents forced into a new slum,
Soweto
• Chief objective was to deny non-whites the fruits
of white labors: commerce and industry
• “…the white man, therefore, not only has an undoubted stake
and –and a right to- the land which he developed into a modern
industrial state from denuded grassland and empty valleys and
mountains. But – according to all the principles of morality – it
was his, is his, and must remain his.”
-Hendrik Verwoerd
Political Opposition to Apartheid
• In 1940s, the ANC
Youth League
insisted that appeals
to Crown were
implausible
• They offered a
change to mass
demonstration and
civil disobedience
The colours of the ANC flag are black,
green and gold. Black symbolises the
people, green the fertility of the land, and
gold the mineral wealth beneath the soil.
These colours were adopted by the ANC
in 1925.
Nelson Mandela
• Born in 1918
• Studied at all-black Fore
Hare University
• Expelled for participating
in political demonstrations
• Finished his B.A. by
correspondence, earned
law degree in 1942. One
of first Africans to practice
law in S. A.
• Joined ANC and helped
form the Youth League in
1944
Politics of Mass Demonstration (1950s)
• ANC had support but little organization
• Earlier campaigns centered around issues
important to elite
• Held Defiance Campaign
• Police harassment/ignored by government
The Congress of the People (1955)
• ANC held on June 25& 26,
1955
• Adopted the Freedom
Charter, a vision for a united,
non racial and democratic
South Africa
Crowd at Congress of the
People (1955) to adopt
Charter
The Freedom Charter (1955)
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The people shall govern
Equal rights for all groups
Share country’s wealth
Share land
Enjoy equal human rights
Work and security
Equal education and culture
Housing, security and comfort
Peace and friendship
BBC Video on APARTHEID
The Sharpeville Massacre
March 21, 1960
• The regime constantly harassed ANC
• Young ANC leaders came to doubt that
nonviolence was the answer
• Mass demonstration turned into armed
resistance
• A large crowd of South Africans assembled in front of the
Sharpeville police station to protest the “pass laws.”
Tensions escalated: the crowd threw rocks at police and
the police retaliated with gunfire. 60 protesters were
killed, 180 wounded. Some were shot in the back while
trying to flee
Sharpeville Massacre
Politics of Armed Resistance (1960s)
• After the Sharpeville Massacre, te ANC built a
new military wing headed by Nelson Mandela
• They launched a sabatoge campaign
• The regime used violence to ban the ANC and
arrest its leaders
• Nelson Mandela was arrested and spent 27 years
in prison
White Opposition to Apartheid
• Small but vocal: The
Progressive Party
• Helen Suzman was a leader
who spoke out against
discrimination
• Tried to improve conditions
of political prisoners
• White opposition
newspapers denounced
apartheid
South African Students Organization
• Young black activists
moved away from nonracial ideology towards
black consciousness
• Steven Biko founded
SASO in 1969
• Philosophy was black
assertiveness, unity,
and reliance in trying to
end the White rule
“We know that all interracial groups in
South Africa are relationships in which
whites are superior, blacks inferior. So as a
prelude whites must be made to realize
that they are only human, not superior.
Same with blacks. They must be made to
realize that they are also human, not
inferior."
Steven Biko
Cry Freedom
• Film about Steven Biko’s
death
• Based on Donald Woods’s
book, Biko
Cry Freedom
Students will be able to:
• understand how apartheid destroyed families and divided a
nation
• unravel the motives behind apartheid
• articulate how awareness breaks down ignorance and leads to
enlightenment
• show how protest and human sacrifice are for the greater good
• connect the struggle for apartheid to the struggle for civil and
human rights in other nations
Banning Laws
A Banned Person could be/have
• imprisoned without trial
• sent to any other part of the country
• followed and watched by police 24 hours a day
• forbidden to speak in public
• forbidden to travel
• forbidden to be in a room with more than one person at a time (excluding
immediate family)
• forbidden to attend or join any organization
• forbidden to protest or oppose any government policy
• their passport taken away from them
• their home or any other premises searched without a warrant
• their home electronically bugged
Soweto Uprising
• On the morning of June 16, 1976, thousands of students Soweto
gathered at their schools to participate in a student-organized
protest demonstration.
• The cause for the march was student opposition to a decree
issued by the Bantu Education Department that imposed
Afrikaans as the language half the subjects in higher primary
(middle school) and secondary school (high school). Since
members of the ruling National Party spoke Afrikaans, black
students viewed it as the "language of the oppressor." Moreover,
lacking fluency in Afrikaans, African teachers and pupils
experienced first-hand the negative impact of the new policy in
the classroom.
Soweto Uprising
• Policemen stopped the students and tried to turn
them back. At first, the security forces tried
unsuccessfully to disperse the students
with tear gas and warning shots. Then
policemen fired directly into the crowd of
demonstrators. Many students responded
by running for shelter, while others
retaliated by pelting the police with stones.
• That day, two students died from police
gunfire; hundreds more sustained injuries
during the subsequent chaos that engulfed
Soweto. The shootings in Soweto sparked a
massive uprising that soon spread to more
than 100 urban and rural areas throughout
South Africa.
Amy Biehl
• It was supposed to have been one of Amy Biehl's last
days in South Africa. In only three days was scheduled to
return to the United States. An idealistic Stanford
graduate, Amy was completing a 10-month course of
study as a Fullbright exchange scholar at the University
of Western Cape Community Law Center where she had
helped to develop voter registration programs for South
African blacks and women as that nation's first all-race
elections approached in April, 1994. Amy was scheduled
to continue her promising academic career the following
week as a new graduate student at Rutger's University in
New Jersey. Amy never made it back to the United States
alive.
•
On August 25, 1993, while Amy was driving three
black colleagues back to Cape Town's Guguletu
Township, a group of youths pelted her car with stones
and forced it to stop. Dozens of young men then
surrounded the car repeating the militant Pan Africanist
Congress chant, "One settler [white person], one bullet!"
Amy was then pulled from the car, struck in the head
with a brick as she tried to flee, and then beaten and
stabbed in the heart while she lay on the ground. During
the attack, Amy's black friends yelled that she was a
"comrade" and friend of black South Africa to no avail.
Amy was carried back to the car after the attack by her
friends who then drove her to the nearest police station
where she died. Amy was 26 years old at the time of her
murder.
Mass Resistance in 1970s
• In 1976, black school children protested against
discriminatory education policies – police fire on
the children.
• Triggers a violent conflict in Soweto – more than
600 killed
• Steven Biko was arrested for encouraging the
protests – died in police custody on Sept. 12,
1977
• Journalist Donald Woods broke story about Biko’s
execution. Hollywood made a movie Cry
Freedom.
United Democratic Front
• 600 civil society groups
came together in 1983
• Committed to nonracialism as a strategy
• Resisted to the 1983
constitution that offered
colored and Indian
people a role in
parliament but excluded
Blacks
International Community
• South Africa banned from Olympic games in 1960s
• United Nations suspended South African membership in
1974
• U. N. imposed arms embargo in 1977 & declared
apartheid a crime against humanity
• American universities divested themselves of stocks in
companies that did business in South Africa
• Many American corporations pulled out of South Africa
• Banks refused to roll over loans
• In 1985, U. S. Congress passed a bill that outlawed
further investment in South Africa
South African Gov’t Response
• Reshaped the parliament: big chamber for
whites and two smaller chambers for coloreds
and Indians.
• -white supremacy preserved
• Blacks (3/4 of population) got no representation
• Indians and coloreds understood that these
institutions were shams and boycotted elections
• Pass laws lifted
South African Gov’t Response
• NP gov’t grew more repressive
• Crime continued and grew
• Gov’t declared state of emergency
• Political Stalemate:
-gov’t could only rule with force
-Opposition too weak to overthrow gov’t
• Leadership of ANC and NP began secret
negotiations (including with Mandela, even
though he was in prison)
Changes had to be made…
• Fredrik Willem de Klerk came to
power in 1989. In 1990 he
“unbanned” the ANC and other antiapartheid groups
• Nelson Mandela released from
prison in 1990
• In 1991, the Land Acts and
Registration Acts were abolished
• New constitution in 1993
• First non-racial elections held in
1994 with Nelson Mandela being
elected president.
Under Mandela’s rule
• Served 5 year term
• Focused on social issues neglected during
apartheid era: unemployment, housing
shortages, crime
• Reintroduced South Africa to global economy
• Created Truth and Reconciliation Committee
(under Archbishop Desmond Tutu)
• Lack of Political violence under Mandela
Characteristics of
South African Writing
• Plot is LEAST important
• Setting, atmosphere, characterization, and theme are MOST
important
• Very little dialogue between characters
• Most themes are social and political
• The main purposes are to inform and persuade
Themes in South African
Writing
-Reuniting family and nation
-Reconciliation between fathers and sons
-Tensions between urban and rural societies
-Vicious cycle of inequality and justice
-Relationship between Christianity and injustice
South African Literature
• Cry the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton in 1948
• Chinua Achebe, Nigerian author of Things Fall Apart
• Mark Mathabane wrote Kaffir Boy, his autobiography
published in 1986
• Nadine Gordimer, author of “The Train from Rhodesia”,
Crimes of Conscience, Berger’s Daughter, various short
stories
South Africa Today
Demographics and Natural Resources
• Ethnic groups as of 2009
79.3% Black
9.1% White
9.0% Coloured
2.6% Asian[4]
• 11 official languages listed in the Constitution
• 25% unemployment
• Agriculture - products:
corn, wheat, sugarcane, fruits, vegetables; beef, poultry, mutton, wool, dairy
products
• Industries:
mining (world's largest producer of platinum, diamonds, gold, chromium),
automobile assembly, metalworking, machinery, textiles, iron and steel,
chemicals, fertilizer, foodstuffs, commercial ship repair
Johannesburg
Soweto
Cape Town