APARTHEID'S COLLAPSE: A PERSONAL RETROSPECTIVE
- robertdewar345
- Mar 29
- 12 min read
In September 1976, during the height of South Africa’s Apartheid regime, a young man from South Africa, working abroad, boarded the mail liner at Southampton, headed for his home city, Cape Town, distressed by the almost daily scenes he had been viewing on British TV of widespread violence and mass unrest across South Africa. He (like many others) was convinced that this was history in the making, and he felt he had been absent from South Africa for long enough.
This season of violence began on 16th June with up to 10 000 Black school children marching to Orlando Stadium in Soweto, the vast, sprawling black township outside Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city and commercial centre. They were marching to attend a rally organised by the South African Students Movement to protest the compulsory use of the Afrikaans language as a teaching medium alongside English, in Black high schools. Before the day was over, at least 200 Black school children had died at the hands of the Police.(1) The uprising spread right across South Africa and continued into the following year.
That evening, thousands of miles away, the young man from Cape Town viewed scenes from the day’s events on British TV. When in August the uprising spread to Cape Town, his anxieties became far more pointed: until then, Cape Town had been largely free of the violence that had spread across the rest of the country. But on 11 August riots in Black townships near Cape Town saw at least 17 Blacks killed by police. In late August the uprising spread from the Black townships outside Cape Town to sections of the Cape Coloured community, and Cape Town city centre was invaded on two successive days, first by Black youngsters, then by Coloured youth (this second occupation of the Mother City being met with a violent response by the Police, who fired tear gas canisters and birdshot into the protesters).
Then, in very early September, Black youth gangs took the protest into the exclusive white suburbs in Cape Town. Even the sleepy seaside town of Fish Hoek, where members of this young man’s family lived, was affected. Petrol bombs were thrown into White homes in Fish Hoek. Across Cape Town, armed White vigilante groups had formed, to protect their families and properties from roaming gangs of Blacks and Coloureds. Across South Africa many Whites armed themselves.(2) The atmosphere, as the young man found on his return, was charged with tension.
And things were never to be the same again in South Africa. In retrospect, June 16th 1976 can be regarded as the day Apartheid began to die. But if so, it was a slow, prolonged death.
Like the majority of Whites of his and earlier generations in Africa, the young man in question had never for long examined his largely unconscious view that Black people needed their affairs managed and directed - benignly, and for their own good - by White people. This was of course a view that other oppressive minority groups - through maintaining a monopoly of the economy, of education, and above all, of the means of coercion - had also shared in history about the ethnic majorities they oppressed. It was a view that underpinned the administration of the British Empire and its African colonies (of which there had still been many left in the 1960s, although none left by 1976: the last British colony in Africa to have gained independence was Swaziland in 1968).
It was a view held by the British (English and Scottish) occupiers of Ireland for several centuries. In Ireland, largely through the Penal Laws,(3) a numerically dominant native people and culture had been kept under political, cultural, economic and religious submission by a locally numerically inferior occupying power which had regarded the native Irish as an inferior species. This view had been supported by the damaging material consequences this oppression had had on the Irish people.(4)
In order to mistreat and oppress a people, it helps if you first regard them as an inferior species. Their supposed inferiority is of course made evident via their ignorance and poverty - an ignorance and poverty brought about by their oppression on the grounds of their supposed inferiority: a nice circular logic is here found to be at work. Such a circular logic was at work in Apartheid South Africa.
White economic dominance in South Africa (a dominance that still prevails) was founded first upon the ownership of land. White settlers had seized the major part of agrarian land, which they had held against numerically hugely superior forces through a superior technology of defence and coercion (advanced weaponry), and which they exploited to its fullest economic potential. With the discovery of deep gold deposits on the Rand in the 1880s, the foundations of a White industrial economic dominance were also laid.
Indeed, there are historians who have argued that Apartheid was primarily a system designed to sustain White economic dominance in South Africa.(5) Others have searched for Apartheid’s roots in what they felt were irrational views of other races and cultures held by Whites in South Africa.(6) In my view, Apartheid’s origins as a legal framework, in particular its Group Areas Act,(7) were founded upon predominantly economic factors - in essence, the view that the provision of cheap (Black) labour to White industrialists must be guaranteed in law, and that Black economic competition with Whites must be suppressed.
However, the National Party which came to power in 1948 and ruled South Africa until 1994, sought to give the Apartheid system a moral gloss,(8) and its religious supporters in the South African Dutch Reformed Church claimed to find a Biblical justification for the system.(9)
The creation by the Apartheid regime of Bantustans or homelands in 1959, regions founded upon the Black reserves that were a product of the 1913 and 1936 land acts of pre-Apartheid governments, was a means of excluding Blacks from the South African political system, while retaining the fiction of their preserving full citizenship rights within their own regions, or homelands.(10) In 1970 the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act stripped all South African Blacks of their citizenship, defining them as legal citizens of the homeland designated for their particular ethnic, or tribal group.
In the late 1970s the South African government proclaimed four of these Bantustans to be fully independent: Transkei, Bophutatswana, Venda and Ciskei. Six other Bantustans, though not “independent,” were autonomous. Within the homelands Black élites collaborated with the Apartheid regime and governed (or misgoverned) their people. This system bore perhaps far from coincidental similarities with the system in British India that had seen a large number of Princely States retain their independence from British administration - up to a point.
That young man returned to a country where most of his fellow Whites continued in their unexplored acceptance of Apartheid. South Africa’s White government, aware that Apartheid was morally unacceptable, sought to justify it via legal fictions such as the theoretically full citizenship, political and civil rights enjoyed by Blacks in their respective homelands. South Africa was a country whose social culture was an old fashioned one, with perhaps a majority of its people being church goers. It was a country in which the young man with whom this essay opens represented a tiny minority of people who had been abroad. Of South Africa’s then population of approximately 22 million, only just over 4 million were Whites.(11) And with its declaration of so-called “independence” for four of the Bantustans in and after 1976, the South African government signalled its intention to forge ahead with the implementation of the Apartheid system, having apparently learned nothing at all from the June 1976 Uprising and from the unrest that followed.
Many of that young man’s contemporaries and classmates - young White South Africans - had to undergo compulsory national armed service of two years’ duration on leaving school. Call-up could be deferred for youngsters registered for university degree and college courses, and before 1985 national service was cancelled altogether for holders of foreign citizenship (such as the young man) who expressed their intention not to take out dual South African citizenship. National service for young White men remained in place until 1993, by which time a great many young White conscripts were evading call-up. (See below).
Between 1966 - 1990 South Africa and some of the “frontline states” (including South West Africa, administered by South Africa; Rhodesia; and from the later 1970s, Moçambique and Angola), were all in varying conditions of civil and military turmoil as a consequence of some type of communist-backed guerrilla war. The “Border War” as it was called in South Africa was fought largely by SADF conscripts. From the mid-seventies through the eighties, with South Africa’s involvement in the Angolan civil war (which saw SADF personnel in combat against Cuban regular forces), the Border War became far hotter. Many of the young White men who had little choice but to participate in this war (and for the most part did so with little introspection), are now in their seventies. In most cases the traumas and interior conflicts these young White conscripts may have suffered remain unspoken, unresolved,(12) though the young man returning to Cape Town from abroad was able to witness their effects on some of his friends as early as 1976.
From 1983, with the founding of the End Conscription Campaign, and the Black Sash’s resolution (a women’s movement) that year to call for an end to conscription, there were movements which sought to mobilize public opinion against conscription. The most effective and dynamic of these was the Committee on South African War Resistance (COSAWR), which provided refuge for conscientious objectors seeking sanctuary abroad, and which debriefed ex-soldiers and carried out extensive research on the South African military, providing clandestine structures of the ANC with intelligence which helped it to undermine the police and the military from within.(13) The National Union of South African Students and the Congress of South African Students were also engaged in anti-conscription activities.
Invariably, young White men who refused to answer their call-up were subjected to scorn by their peers and exclusion from their communities. The general mood among Whites in South Africa was one of support for the conscription of young White men. Looking north to Zambia, Zimbabwe, and other African states, the White community in South Africa was granted an object lesson in the malign social and economic consequences of Marxist inspired land-grab and capital-grab initiatives.(14)
Following the then State President PW Botha’s “Rubicon speech” in 1985, this conscript army (the SADF) was used increasingly for internal peace-keeping duties, in response to growing civil dissonance, unrest, armed insurgency and violence in South Africa’s Black townships. In general, members of the White community appreciated that these young White men were all that stood between them and communist-backed revolution.(15)
By the mid eighties the country was on fire.(16) Looking back, the young man who landed at Cape Town docks in September 1976 (and who had to carry his own baggage from ship to quayside due to the strike which had paralysed Cape Town) struggles to remember the full impact of the atmosphere of violence, threat, and inflammatory propaganda issuing both from the Apartheid regime and its increasingly active opponents.
Young White conscripts had been indoctrinated to believe that it was their unquestioned duty to defend the country against the twin threats of African nationalism and communism (the “rooi/swart gevaar” - red/black danger). Such an attitude made sense in terms of the “total onslaught” ideology which justified the authoritarian nature of the Apartheid regime as a necessary response to the existence of an implacable enemy beyond (and within) South Africa’s borders.(17)
Yet by the mid-eighties thousands of young White men were evading national service. 1985 was the last year that the South African government published the numbers of draft-evaders: 7 589 conscripts had failed to report for their military service that January. About 7 000 war-resisters were in exile in Europe. Others dodged the call-up by going on the run within South Africa, always one jump ahead of the military police. Some avoided call-up by prolonging their academic studies indefinitely.(18)
This then was the country that that young man had returned too: a country in a state of increasing civil turmoil and on a growing war footing. But for that young man, it was Home. With the declaration by State President PW Botha of a State of Emergency in July 1985, civil rights even for whites were suspended, and the rule of law was effectively overturned. Indefinite detention, imprisonment without trial, and conditions of house arrest (whereby one was prohibited from leaving one’s home), became far more commonplace. The press was savagely censored. Readers of the national dailies became accustomed to seeing blacked out rectangles in their newspapers where reports and articles had been removed by the state censors. Organisations such as the End Conscription Campaign were banned. The regime appeared to interpret the events which followed the 1976 Uprising as a signal for an ever more zealous prosecution of Apartheid. But the forces against Apartheid, both internally and internationally, were gaining in strength. The United Nations was by the end of the 1970s an implacable opponent of Apartheid. South Africa was expelled from an increasing number of international bodies.(19)
From the mid-sixties a number of South African churches had moved ever closer to outright confrontation with the Apartheid regime.(20) By the time of the young man’s return to South Africa in late 1976, the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches were firmly opposed to Apartheid.
Churchmen such as the Rt. Rev. Bill Burnett (Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town in the year of the young man’s return, and whom the young man was to grow to know well); the Rev. Trevor Huddleston (the Anglican cleric who devoted a lifetime to anti-Apartheid activism in and outside South Africa, and in 1981 became president of the Anti-Apartheid Movement); the Rev. Beyers Naudé (a Dutch Reformed minister, the leading Afrikaner anti-Apartheid activist, who was “banned,” that is, placed under house arrest by the regime between 1977 – 1984, and from 1985 became secretary general of the South African Council of Churches); the Roman Catholic Archbishop Denis Hurley; the Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu (whom the young man was to meet on a number of occasions), who in 1976 was Bishop Suffragan of Cape Town, but later became better known as the Archbishop of Cape Town; and the Rev. Allan Boesak (a Cape Coloured clergyman, president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches), were all prominent in the clerical anti-Apartheid movement. The Dutch Reformed Church itself (Afrikanerdom at prayer), was not a member of the South African Council of Churches, and it distanced itself from those churches who opposed Apartheid.(21)
In April 1986 the infamous Pass Laws were repealed. People of colour no longer had to show a policeman a pass which gave them permission to be present within any particular district - even if it be a White district. But the “Whites Only” notice boards continued to be found within public spaces; Cape Town’s beaches continued to be segregated, as were public lavatories, public transport, and all other public amenities.
In 1988 the South African government announced an amnesty for all dissidents, and in 1990 the state of emergency was not renewed. In the same year the ban against the African National Congress (ANC) was lifted, and FW de Klerk, State President, freed Nelson Mandela from prison in February of 1990. The young man who had returned to South Africa fourteen years earlier was swept up in the wave of excitement and optimism which followed this event, and like so many South African residents, he hoped that this might mark the beginning of the end of one and a half decades of ever more bitter conflict.
Negotiations between the White government and the ANC and other organizations took place from 1990 onwards. However, persistent violence added to the tensions during these protracted negotiations. The vicious rivalry between the Inkatha Freedom Party (which was largely of an ethnic Zulu character) and the ANC (with its Xhosa orientation), saw terrible violence, especially in Natal, but also in Black townships adjacent to a number of major cities. (The young man who had returned home in 1976 was to witness a fatal episode of such black-on-black violence in KwaZulu-Natal in 1991). There was violence also in some of the other pseudo-independent Bantustans, such as Ciskei, with Ciskei security forces shooting at protesters demanding the reincorporation of the Bantustans into the Republic of South Africa.(22)
The last of the Apartheid era laws affecting daily life, the Group Areas Act (which designated specific areas or suburbs within which the particular races were permitted to live), was repealed in June 1991. The cosmopolitan White Johannesburg suburbs of Hillbrow, Berea, Bellevue and Yeoville saw people of colour begin to move in.
In March 1992 a referendum in which all White residents in South Africa could vote was held to decide whether to end Apartheid: the result was a clear “Yes.”
In September 1993 the South African legislature approved the setting up of a multi-party Transitional Executive Council to manage the transition to multi-racial democracy in South Africa. In April 1994 South Africa held its first ever multi-racial general election, which was won by the ANC. (The young man now grown old, who is writing this essay, was by then living in London. He cast his vote at the South African Embassy fronting on Trafalgar Square).
Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as Head of State of the Republic of South Africa in May 1994. It had taken almost eighteen years following the June 16th Uprising for Apartheid to die. That young man in 1976 had been correct: history had then been in the making.
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