Despite the Darkness, page 41
With the main organisations striving for non-racial democracy in South Africa banned and their leaders imprisoned or in exile, the 1960s saw a lull in organized opposition to the apartheid government’s implementation of its dream of a ‘Whites Only’ South Africa. The power of the state was legally entrenched via the Terrorism and Suppression of Communism Acts, which, among other things, made it possible for anyone alleged to be an opponent of apartheid to be detained indefinitely without trial. In 1963 the apartheid dream started to become a reality when the Transkei became the first Bantustan ‘homeland’ to be granted ‘self-government’. But the struggle against apartheid began to gather momentum again in the early 1970s with the re-emergence of independent black trade unions, and from January 1973 a series of successful countrywide strikes began to highlight the extent to which the South African economy relies on black labour.
After the Sharpeville massacre, the most significant moment in the struggle came in 1976 when police opened fire on schoolchildren in Soweto who were protesting peacefully against being taught in Afrikaans. The brutality of the police response to the protest sparked an immediate uprising in Soweto that spread to other parts of South Africa over the following weeks and resulted in the deaths of at least 176 people, almost all of whom were shot by the police. Sam Nzima’s iconic photograph of the dying Hector Pieterson being carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo was published around the world and provoked almost universal condemnation of apartheid and the police brutality that enforces it.
The struggle has intensified and taken on different dimensions in the nine years since the Soweto uprising. The formation of the United Democratic Front led to another surge in the number of strikes, boycotts and attacks on symbols of apartheid and people seen as collaborators, most notably black police and urban councillors. In October 1984Thabo Mbeki broadcast an appeal to South Africa’s black youth to make the townships ungovernable, and, in response to the recently declared State of Emergency, Oliver Tambo, the acting President of the ANC during the years of Mandela’s imprisonment, has now reinforced the appeal: ‘To bring about the kind of society that is visualised in the Freedom Charter, we have to break down and destroy the old order. We have to make apartheid unworkable and our country ungovernable.’ The declaration of the State of Emergency provides the best possible evidence that the townships, at least, have been made ungovernable.
Apartheid is being made unworkable, but there is no indication that the government is going to stop trying to make it work any time soon. The cost of opposition carries on growing. Well over 100 political prisoners have been executed in Pretoria Central Prison by now. There have been 60 deaths in detention, the most notorious being that of Steve Biko, the inspirational Black Consciousness leader. Letter bombs, parcel bombs, and car bombs in neighbouring countries – Lesotho, Botswana, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Swaziland – as well as in South Africa, are killing ANC members. Other outspoken opponents of apartheid, like Rick Turner, the University of Natal political scientist and philosopher, are being assassinated. Many black activists are simply disappearing – or being ‘disappeared’. Almost 2000 individuals have been banned: confined to their homes, prohibited from meeting more than one person at a time, and silenced by legislation making it illegal to quote anything they say or to publish anything they have written. Many thousands of books – ranging from Das Kapital to Black Beauty – have been banned.
Apart from assassinations, covert operations or ‘dirty tricks’ extend from poisoning T-shirts sent to activists’ children to fomenting murderous internecine strife between members of the ANC and members of the Zulu-nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party in Natal.
White South Africans are living under a state of siege. This is all too visibly the case where the walled, burglar-guarded and electric-fenced houses in the Whites Only suburbs are concerned. Less immediately obvious is the sense of rejection and international isolation resulting from the range of international boycotts to which the country is being subjected. In 1980 the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution requesting all states ‘to prevent all cultural, academic, sporting and other exchanges with South Africa.’ At the same time the UN appealed to writers, artists, musicians and other personalities to boycott South Africa and urged all academic and cultural institutions ‘to cease any cultural and academic collaboration with South Africa, including the exchange of scientists, students and academic personalities, as well as cooperation on research programmes.’
It is probably the sports boycott that is making the greatest psychological impact on white South Africans, who have always prided themselves on their country’s sporting achievements, particularly in rugby. South Africa was formally expelled from the International Olympic Committee in 1970, and the 1977 Gleneagles Agreement saw all the Commonwealth countries unanimously agreeing to discourage contact and competition between their sportsmen and sporting organisations and teams or individuals from South Africa. But the economic boycott, initiated in 1960, is now beginning to bite. A combination of disinvestment by international companies and institutions and the repayment of foreign loans is resulting in significant capital flight. This has triggered a rapid decline in the South African rand’s exchange rate, making imported goods much more expensive, and an equivalent rise in inflation, which is now between 12% and 15%.
White South Africa’s sense of being under siege is being compounded by the increasing frequency with which weapons caches are being discovered and bombs are exploding. Whereas the acts of sabotage that were initiated in the early 1960s were generally targeted at strategic installations rather than at people, now it is clear that people are very much in the line of fire. This was brought home particularly forcefully when a car bomb planted outside the Nedbank Square building in Church Street in Pretoria exploded in May 1983 killing 19 people, including the two MK soldiers who planted it, and injuring around 200 others. The building housed the headquarters of the South African Air Force and could be considered a strategic target, but the bomb went off at 4.30 on a Friday afternoon at the height of the rush hour when the pavements were bound to be crowded and many of those killed or injured would not be associated in any way with the SAAF.
The need to be constantly on the look out for possible bombs adds another layer to the perpetual awareness that the country in under siege from the war being waged on its borders. South African Broadcasting Corporation news bulletins repeat the communist onslaught message with monotonous regularity, and music request programmes like Springbok Radio’s Saturday afternoon ‘Forces Favourites’ with its dedications to the ‘boys on the border’ and injunction to ‘vasbyt’ (‘bite hard’ or hang on) because there are ‘min dae’ (few days left) reinforce the sense of being in a country at war.
As black parents worry about the possibility that their children protesting in the townships will be shot with live ammunition, white parents live with the prospect of their eighteen year old sons being conscripted into the South African Defence Force for two years of military service and having to join those ‘boys on the border.’ Strict censorship ensures that very little actual information gets out about the border war, but it is clear that the death toll – by now well over 500 – is mounting. The Official Secrets Act ensures that the young men who come back from the border don’t talk about their experiences, but some are clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. And now the conflict is getting much closer. As the frustrations of black South Africans living in ungovernable townships boil over, it is no longer only armed insurgents in the bush on the country’s borders that the conscripts have to contend with, it is angry crowds of their black fellow citizens armed with sticks, stones and petrol bombs. For the relatively few young white men who aren’t prepared to take up arms to defend apartheid the options are limited. They can defer their military service by enrolling for a university degree; they can refuse conscription and condemn themselves to a six-year prison sentence; or they can leave their homes and families and go into exile, with no prospect of returning.
Some are leaving, joining the exodus of liberal white South Africans and citizens of other countries who have found it impossible to live with the evils of apartheid – an exodus that started when the Nationalist Party was elected to power in 1948 and has been boosted at intervals since by events such as Sharpeville and Soweto. Other white South African opponents of apartheid choose to stay because it won’t help the struggle if all those who are able to leave the country do so. Those who choose to stay and articulate their opposition know that they face two contradictory risks in doing so.
The first and greater risk is that they will be harassed and subjected to death threats, dirty tricks of one sort or another, detention and torture. Because they are white, the chances are that the death threats, at least, won’t be carried out. If they are stubborn enough, the harassment just makes them more determined to stay. The second, paradoxical, risk is that they will be perceived by anti-apartheid activists outside the country to be racist beneficiaries of apartheid. There can be no gainsaying that, as white people, they are, willy-nilly, beneficiaries of apartheid – as evidenced by the fact that the death threats tend not to be acted on. But the assumption that all white people who haven’t left South Africa must be supporters of the regime does an injustice those who are banned, detained, tortured or harassed because of their opposition to apartheid.
Notes
p.5 State of Emergency: On 25 July 1985, President PW Botha declared a State of Emergency in 36 of the country’s 260 magisterial districts. Although this was lifted in March 1986, by July 1986 a nation-wide State of Emergency had been declared which lasted until June 1990.
p.13 Rick Turner: Dr Richard Turner was a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Natal in Durban. Responding to a knocking on the window of his living-room on 8 January 1978, he was shot and died in the arms of his 13-year old daughter.
p.15 Treason Trial: The Pietermaritzburg Treason Trial, which opened in August 1985 with 16 leaders of the UDF being charged with treason. The government was attempting to prove that the 16 had formed ‘a revolutionary alliance’ and were plotting the violent overthrow of the state by making the country ungovernable through prolonged civil unrest. The state dropped charges against 12 of the accused in December, 1985. The trial of the other four collapsed, and they were released in June 1986.
p.33 Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP): The Inkatha Freedom Party, originally the Inkatha National Cultural Liberation Movement, was founded by Gatsha Mangosuthu Buthelezi in Natal in 1975. Buthelezi became chief minister of the quasi-independent Bantustan ‘homeland’ of KwaZulu in 1976. The IFP broke its original ties with the ANC in 1979 on the grounds that it opposed violent resistance to apartheid, but during the 1980s and 1990s engaged in internecine warfare with the ANC, fomented by the South African state, which cost thousands of lives.
p.65 Mau Mau: The colonial name for the Kenya Land and Freedom Army which was involved in an uprising against British colonial rule in Kenya between 1952 and 1956. Mau Mau was mythologized in colonial race consciousness among whites in southern Africa as the apogee of barbarism.
p.77 Amandla – Awethu: A Xhosa (and Zulu) political rallying call and response, meaning ‘power’ and ‘is ours’ respectively, which was a hallmark of resistance to apartheid.
p.83 Progressive Federal Party: A constitutionalist white political party, opposed both to the apartheid of the Nationalist Party and to armed resistance to apartheid.
p.144 Black Sash: A South African white women’s protest organization founded in 1955 to give visibility to non-violent resistance to apartheid legislation. The organization’s main activities consisted, firstly, of silent protest stands where members wore black sashes symbolic of the death of civil liberties and protest at unjust laws and, secondly, of advice centres where the victims of apartheid legislation could obtain free legal advice.
p.171 Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK): The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa is the largest of the descendants of the Dutch Reformed Church to which the original Dutch settlers of the Cape belonged. Theologically it holds the Bible as the authoritative word of God. During the apartheid era its theologians managed to mine the authoritative Word of God for justifications for apartheid.
p.218 Immorality Act: In fact two acts of the Parliament of South Africa, dating from 1927 and 1957, which prohibited, amongst other things, sexual relations between white people and people of other races.
p.278 Ruth First: An academic who was a prominent member of the ANC and the South African Communist Party and one of the 156 defendants in the 1956-61 Treason trial. She was assassinated in August 1982 by a South African Police parcel bomb sent to her at the University of Mozambique.
p.292 Thabo Mbeki: Post-apartheid South Africa’s second President, from June 1999 to September 2008. Mbeki went into exile in UK in 1962 where he initially registered for a degree in Economics at the University of Sussex in Brighton and in 1966 graduated with a Masters in Economics and Development.
p.297 Oliver Tambo: With Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, was one of the founding members of the ANC Youth League in 1943. Tambo spent 30 years in exile, much of the time as President of the ANC, before returning to South Africa in 1990.
p.352 Stellenbosch: The University of Stellenbosch was the premier South African Afrikaans-medium university. All South Africa’s Prime Ministers between 1919 and 1978 had a connection with Stellenbosch as Chancellor, Professor or student – including the four main architects of apartheid: Malan, Strijdom, Verwoerd and Vorster.
p.353 Go: Go, literally meaning ‘encircling game’, is a board game of simple rules but potentially limitless complexity whose origins can be traced back to ancient China. The two players alternately place black and white ‘stones’ on the vacant intersections (‘points’) of a board with a 19x19 grid of lines. The objective of the game is to have surrounded a larger total area of the board with one’s stones than one’s opponent has by the end of the game.
A basic principle of Go is that stones must have at least one ‘liberty’ to remain on the board. A liberty is an open point next to a stone. An enclosed liberty is called an ‘eye’, and a group of stones with at least two separate eyes is said to be unconditionally ‘alive’. Such groups cannot be captured, even if surrounded. ‘Dead’ stones, by contrast, are stones that are surrounded and in groups that have only one eye (or no eyes at all) and thus cannot resist being captured. A player may not commit ‘suicide’ by placing a stone such that it or its group immediately has no liberties, unless doing so immediately deprives an enemy group of its final liberty. (Wikipedia, to which I am indebted for this brief summary and the diagram below – Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unporte licence – provides a good account of Go.)
Example:
White cannot play at A because that point has no liberties. To put a white stone on that point would be to commit suicide. The two white stones in the corner are effectively dead as each has only one liberty which can be removed by the playing of a black stone at A. The black group has two liberties but, as things stand, no eyes. However white cannot kill the black group by putting stones on black’s two remaining liberties because black can at any time play a stone on point A and remove the two white stones. That will give black the two eyes essential for life and leave black’s group unassailably alive.
p.359 P.W. Botha’s Rubicon speech: A widely anticipated and much heralded speech broadcast live to a world-wide audience by P.W.Botha on 15 August 1985. Botha had been expected to announce major reforms to apartheid and the release of Nelson Mandela. Instead he asserted that Mandela would not be released and that he would not change his stance on apartheid.
p.370 Griffiths Mxenge: A lawyer and activist who was a member of the ANC and had served a prison term on Robben Island, he was married to Victoria Mxenge. He was murdered by government agents in Umlazi, near Durban, in November 1981 four years before Victoria was similarly murdered.
p.370 Victoria Mxenge: A member of the defence team in the Pietermaritzburg Treason trial, Victoria Mxenge was shot and killed outside her home on August 1st 1985. Her murderer later admitted to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he had been recruited by the Special Branch.
p.370 Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkonto and Sicelo Mhlawuli: The ‘Cradock Four’ murdered by the South African police in July 1985. The 1985 State of Emergency was declared on the day of their funeral in the Eastern Cape, at which Victoria Mxenge was one of the speakers.
p.370 Steve Biko: Stephen Bantu Biko was one of South Africa’s most influential anti-apartheid leaders. Having initially been involved with the National Union of South African Students as a student at the University of Natal Medical School, he was one of the leaders of the breakaway South African Students’ Organization whose black consciousness agenda then informed the subsequent development of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. He was beaten to death in police custody in September 1977.
p.370 Joe Slovo: A South African lawyer who was one of the drafters of the South African Freedom Charter and one of 155 people accused with Mandela in the 1956 Treason Trial. Married to Ruth First, Slovo was one of the founders of Umkhonto we Sizwe, MK (Spear of the Nation), the armed wing of the ANC.
p.375 Gavin Relly: Chairman of Anglo American who led a group of five South African businessmen to meet Oliver Tambo and other representatives of the banned African National Congress in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1985.
