HISTORY OF SOUTH
There seems to be general agreement among scholars that humankind had its earliest
origins in Africa. South Africa is rich in fossil evidence of the evolutionary
history of the human family, going back several million years. From the discovery
of the skull of a Taung child in 1924 to the latest discoveries of hominid
fossils at Sterkfontein caves, recently declared a World Heritage Site, and
the ground-breaking work done at Blombos Cave in the Southern Cape - all have
put South Africa at the forefront of paleontology research into the origins
Modern humans have
lived in the region for over 100,000 years. The
small, mobile bands of Stone Age
hunter-gatherers, who created a wealth of rock art,
were the ancestors of the Khoekhoe and San of historical
The Khoekhoen and San (the 'Hottentots' and 'Bushmen'
of early European terminology), although collectively
known as the Khoisan, are often thought of as distinct
The former were those
who, some 2,000 years ago, adopted a pastoral
lifestyle herding sheep and,
later, cattle. Whereas the hunter-gatherers adapted
to local environments and were scattered across the
subcontinent, the herders sought out the pasturelands
between modern-day Namibia and the Eastern Cape,
which, generally, are near the coast.
At around the same time, Bantu-speaking agro-pastoralists
began arriving in southern Africa, bringing with
them an Iron Age culture and domesticated crops.
After establishing themselves in the well-watered
eastern coastal region of Southern Africa, these
farmers spread out across the interior plateau, or
'highveld', where they adopted a more extensive cattle-farming
culture. Chiefdoms arose, based on control over cattle,
which gave rise to systems of patronage and hence
hierarchies of authority within communities.
formed the basis of polygamous marriage arrangements,
facilitating the accumulation
of social power through control over the labor of
kin groups and dependants.
developed in the mining and processing of iron,
copper, tin and gold, promoted
regional trade and craft specialization.
At several archaeological sites, such as Mapungubwe
and Thulamela in the Limpopo Valley, there is evidence
of sophisticated political and material cultures,
based in part on contact with the East African trading
These cultures, which
were part of a broader African civilization, predate
European encroachment by several
centuries. Settlement patterns varied from the dispersed
homesteads of the fertile coastal regions in the
east to the concentrated towns of the desert fringes
to the west.
The farmers did not, however, extend their settlement
into the western desert or the winter-rainfall region
to the south-west. These regions remained the preserve
of the Khoisan until Europeans put down roots at
the Cape of Good Hope. This meant that the farmers
were little affected by the white presence for the
first century during which European settlement expanded
from the Western Cape.
Currently, aided by modern science and contributing
to uncovering the continent's past which forms part
of the African Renaissance, South Africa is gaining
a greater understanding of its rich pre-colonial
past and African achievements that were to be disrupted
and all but hidden from sight in the period that
The early colonial period
Portuguese seafarers, who pioneered the sea route
to India in the late 15th century, were regular
visitors to the South African coast during the
early 1500s. Other Europeans followed from the
late 16th century.
In 1652, the Dutch
East India Company (VOC) set up a station in Table
Bay (Cape Town) to provision
passing ships. Trade with the Khoekhoe(n) for slaughter
stock soon degenerated into raiding and warfare.
Beginning in 1657, European settlers were allotted
farms by the colonial authorities in the arable regions
around Cape Town, where wine and wheat became the
major products. In response to the colonists' demand
for lab our, the VOC imported slaves from East Africa,
Madagascar and its possessions in the East Indies.
By the early 1700s, the colonists had begun to spread
into the hinterland beyond the nearest mountain ranges.
These relatively independent and mobile farmers (trekboers),
who lived as pastoralists and hunters, were largely
free from supervision by the Dutch authorities.
As they intruded
further upon the land and water sources, and stepped
up their demands for livestock
and lab our, more and more of the indigenous inhabitants
were dispossessed and incorporated into the colonial
economy as servants.
Diseases such as
smallpox, which was introduced by the Europeans
in 1713, decimated the Khoisan,
contributing to the decline of their cultures. Unions
across the color line took place, and a new multiracial
social order evolved, based on the supremacy of European
colonists. The slave population steadily increased
since more labor was needed.
By the mid-1700s there were more slaves in the Cape
than there were 'free burghers' (European colonists).
The Asian slaves were concentrated in the towns,
where they formed an artisan class. They brought
with them the Islam religion, which gained adherents
and significantly shaped the working-class culture
of the Western Cape. Slaves of African descent were
found more often on the farms of outlying districts.
In the late 1700s, Khoisan bands offered far more
determined resistance to colonial encroachment across
the length of the colonial frontier.
From the 1770s, colonists also came into contact
and conflict with Bantu-speaking chiefdoms some 700
km east of Cape Town. A century of intermittent warfare
ensued during which the colonists gained ascendancy
first over the Khoisan and then over the Xhosa-speaking
chiefdoms to the east.
It was only in the
late 1800s that the subjugation of these settled
African societies became feasible.
Their relatively sophisticated social structure and
economic systems had long fended off decisive
disruption by incoming colonists, who lacked the
At the same time, a process of cultural change was
set in motion, not least by commercial and missionary
activity. In contrast to the Khoisan, the black farmers
were by and large immune to European diseases. For
this and other reasons they were greatly to outnumber
the whites in the population of white-ruled South
Africa and were able to preserve important features
of their culture.
A spate of state-building
was launched beyond the frontiers of European settlement.
of population pressures, combined with the actions
of slave traders in Portuguese territory on the east
coast, the old order was upset and the Zulu kingdom
emerged as a highly centralized State. In the 1820s,
the innovative leader Shaka established sway over
a considerable area of south-east Africa, and brought
many chiefdoms under his dominion.
As splinter groups
conquered and absorbed communities in their path,
the disruption was felt as far north
as central Africa. Substantial states, such as Moshoeshoe's
Lesotho and other Sotho-Tswana chiefdoms, were established,
partly for reasons of defense. The mfecane or difaqane,
as this period of disruption and State formation
became known, remains the subject of much speculative
But the temporary disruption of life on the Highveld
served to facilitate Boer expansion northwards from
the 1830s, and provided a myth of the 'empty land'
which whites employed to justify their domination
over the subcontinent in the 20th century.
The British colonial era
In 1795 the British occupied the Cape as a strategic
base against the French, controlling the sea route
to the East.
After a brief reversion
to the Dutch in the course of the Napoleonic wars,
it was retaken in 1806 and
kept by Britain in the post-war settlement of territorial
claims. The closed and regulated economic system
of the Dutch period was swept away as the Cape Colony
was integrated into the dynamic international trading
empire of industrializing Britain.
A crucial new element
was evangelicalism, brought to the Cape by Protestant
missionaries. The evangelicals
believed in the liberating effect of 'free' labor
and in the 'civilizing mission' of British imperialism.
They were convinced that indigenous peoples could
be fully assimilated into European Christian culture,
once the shackles of oppression had been removed.
The most important
representative of the mission movement in South
Africa was Dr. John Philip, who
arrived as superintendent of the London Missionary
Society in 1819. His campaign on behalf of the oppressed
Khoisan coincided with a high point in official sympathy
for philanthropic concerns.
One result was Ordinance
50 of 1828, which guaranteed equal civil rights
for 'people of co lour' within
the colony and freed them from legal discrimination.
At the same time, a powerful anti-slavery movement
in Britain promoted a series of ameliorative measures,
imposed on the colonies in the 1820s, and the proclamation
of emancipation, which came into force in 1834. The
slaves were subjected to a four-year period of 'apprenticeship'
with their former owners on the grounds that they
must be prepared for freedom, which came on 1 December
Although slavery had become less profitable because
of a depression in the wine industry, Cape slave-owners
rallied to oppose emancipation.
The compensation money, which the British treasury
paid out to sweeten the pill, injected unprecedented
liquidity into the stagnant local economy.
This brought a spurt of company formation, such
as banks and insurance companies, as well as a surge
of investment in land and wool sheep in the drier
regions of the colony in the late 1830s. Wool became
a staple export on which the Cape economy depended
for its further development in the middle decades
of the century.
For the ex-slaves, as for the Khoisan servants,
the reality of freedom was very different from the
promise. As the wage-based economy developed, they
remained a dispossessed and exploited element in
the population, with little opportunity to escape
their servile lot.
Increasingly, they were lumped together as the coloured
people, a group which included the descendants of
unions between indigenous and European peoples, and
a substantial Muslim minority who became known as
the 'Cape Malays' (misleadingly, as they mostly came
from the Indonesian archipelago).
The coloured people were discriminated against on
account of their working-class status as well as
their racial identity. Among the poor, especially
in and around Cape Town, there continued to be a
great deal of racial mixing and intermarriage throughout
In 1820, several thousand British settlers, who
were swept up by a scheme to relieve Britain of its
unemployed, were placed in the eastern Cape frontier
zone as a buffer against the Xhosa chiefdoms.
The vision of a dense settlement of small farmers
was, however, ill-conceived and many of the settlers
became artisans and traders. The more successful
became an entrepreneurial class of merchants, large-scale
sheep farmers and speculators with an insatiable
demand for land.
Some became fierce
warmongers, who pressed for the military dispossession
of the chiefdoms. They coveted
Xhosa land and welcomed the prospect of war involving
large-scale military expenditure by the imperial
The Xhosa engaged in raiding as a means of asserting
their prior claims to the land. Racial paranoia became
integral to white frontier politics. The result was
that frontier warfare became endemic through much
of the 19th century, during which Xhosa war leaders
such as Chief Maqoma became heroic figures to their
By the mid-1800s, British settlers of similar persuasion
were to be found in Natal. They too called for imperial
expansion in support of their land claims and trading
Meanwhile large numbers of the original colonists,
the Boers, were greatly extending white settlement
beyond the Cape's borders to the north in the movement
that became known as the Great Trek in the mid-1830s.
Alienated by British liberalism, and with their economic
enterprise usurped by British settlers, several thousand
Boers from the interior districts, accompanied by
a number of Khoisan servants, began a series of migrations
northwards. They moved to the Highveld and Natal,
skirting the great concentrations of black farmers
on the way by taking advantage of the areas disrupted
during the mfecane.
When the British, who were concerned about controlling
the traffic through Port Natal (Durban), annexed
the territory of Natal in 1843, those emigrant Boers
who had hoped to settle there returned inland.
The Voortrekkers (as they were later called) coalesced
in two land-locked republics, the South African Republic
(Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. There, the
principles of racially exclusive citizenship were
absolute, despite the trekkers' reliance on black
labour. With limited coercive power, the Boer communities
had to establish relations and develop alliances
with some black chiefdoms, neutralising those who
obstructed their intrusion or who posed a threat
to their security.
Only after the mineral discoveries of the late 1800s
did the balance of power swing decisively towards
the colonists. The Boer republics then took on the
trappings of real statehood and imposed their authority
within the territorial borders that they had notionally
claimed for themselves.
The Colony of Natal, situated to the south of the
mighty Zulu State, developed along very different
lines from the original colony of settlement, the
The size of the black population left no room for
the assimilationist vision of race domination embraced
in the Cape. Chiefdoms consisting mainly of refugee
groups in the aftermath of the mfecane were persuaded
to accept colonial protection in return for reserved
land and the freedom to govern themselves in accordance
with their own customs. These chiefdoms were established
in the heart of an expanding colonial territory.
Natal developed a system of political and legal
dualism, whereby chiefly rule was entrenched and
customary law was codified. Although exemptions from
customary law could be granted to the educated products
of the missions, in practice they were rare. Urban
residence was strictly controlled and political rights
outside the reserves were effectively limited to
whites. Natal's system is widely regarded as having
provided a model for the segregationism of the 20th
Natal's economy was boosted by the development of
sugar plantations in the subtropical coastal lowlands.
Indian-indentured labourers were imported from 1860
to work the plantations, and many Indian traders
and market gardeners followed.
These Indians, who were segregated and discriminated
against from the start, became a further important
element in South Africa's population. It was in South
Africa that Mohandas Gandhi refined from the mid-1890s
the techniques of passive resistance, which he later
effectively practised in India. Although Indians
gradually moved into the Transvaal and elsewhere,
they remain concentrated mainly in Natal.
In 1853, the
Cape Colony was granted a representative legislature
in keeping with British
in 1872 by self-government. The franchise was formally
non-racial but also based on income and property
qualifications. The result was that Africans and
coloured people formed a minority although
in certain places a substantial one of voters.
What became known as the 'liberal tradition' at
the Cape depended on the fact that the great mass
of Bantu-speaking farmers remained outside its colonial
borders until late in the 19th century. Non-racialism
could thus be embraced without posing a threat to
Numbers of Africans within the Cape colony had had
sufficient formal education or owned enough property
to qualify for the franchise. Political alliances
across racial lines were common in the eastern Cape
constituencies. It is therefore not surprising that
the eastern Cape became a seedbed of African nationalism,
once the ideal and promise of inclusion in the common
society was so starkly violated by later racial policies.
The mineral revolution
By the late 19th century, the limitations of the
Cape's liberal tradition were becoming apparent.
The hardening of racial attitudes that accompanied
the rise of a more militant imperialist spirit
coincided locally with the watershed discovery
of mineral riches in the interior of southern Africa.
In a developing economy, cheap labor was at
a premium, and the claims of
educated Africans for equality met with increasingly
At the same time,
the large numbers of Africans in the chiefdoms
beyond the Kei River and north of
the Gariep (Orange River), then being incorporated
into the Cape Colony, posed new threats to racial
supremacy and white security, increasing segregationist
were discovered on the Vaal River in the late 1860s.
The subsequent discovery of dry
deposits at what became the city of Kimberley drew
tens of thousands of people, black and white, to
the first great industrial hub in Africa, and the
largest diamond deposit in the world. In 1871, the
British, who ousted several rival claimants, annexed
fields, which fell in sparsely populated territory
to the west of the main corridors of northward migration.
of Griqualand West thus created was incorporated
into the Cape Colony in
1880. By 1888, the consolidation
of diamond claims had led to the creation of the
huge De Beers monopoly under the control of Cecil
Rhodes. He used his power and wealth to become Prime
Minister of the Cape Colony (1890 1896) and,
through his chartered British South Africa Company,
conqueror and ruler of modern-day Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The mineral discoveries
had a major impact on the subcontinent as a whole.
A railway network linking
the interior to the coastal ports revolutionized
transportation and energized agriculture. Coastal
cities such as Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London
and Durban experienced an economic boom as port facilities
The fact that the mineral discoveries coincided
with a new era of imperialism and the scramble for
Africa brought imperial power and influence to bear
in southern Africa as never before.
chiefdoms were systematically subjugated and incorporated
by their white-ruled
neighbours. The most dramatic example was the Zulu
War of 1879, which saw the Zulu State brought under
during which King Cetshwayo's impis inflicted a celebrated
defeat on British forces at Isandlwana.
In 1897, Zululand was incorporated into Natal. The
South African Republic (Transvaal) was annexed by
Britain in 1877. Boer resistance led to British withdrawal
in 1881, but not before the Pedi (northern Sotho)
State which fell within the Republic's borders had
been subjugated. The indications were that, having
once been asserted, British hegemony was likely to
The southern Sotho and Swazi territories were also
brought under British rule but maintained their status
as imperial dependencies, so that both the current
Lesotho and Swaziland escaped the rule of local white
The discovery of the Witwatersrand goldfields in
1886 was a turning point in the history of South
Africa. It presaged the emergence of the modern South
African industrial State.
Once the extent of the reefs had been established,
and deep-level mining had proved to be a viable investment,
it was only a matter of time before Britain and its
local representatives again found a pretext for war
against the Boer republics of Transvaal and the Orange
The demand for franchise
rights for English-speaking immigrants on the gold-fields
(the Uitlanders) provided
a lever for applying pressure on the government of
President Paul Kruger.
Egged on by the deep-level mining magnates, to whom
the Boer government seemed obstructive and inefficient,
and by the expectation of an Uitlander uprising,
Rhodes launched a raid into the Transvaal in late
The raid's failure saw the end of Rhodes' political
career, but Sir Alfred Milner, British High Commissioner
in South Africa from 1897, was determined to overthrow
Kruger's government and establish British rule throughout
the subcontinent. The Boer Government was eventually
forced into a declaration of war in October 1899.
The mineral discoveries
had a radical impact on every sphere of society.
Labor was required on a
massive scale and could only be provided by Africans,
who had to be drawn away from the land.
Many Africans did
respond with alacrity to the opportunities presented
by wage labor, travelling long distances
to earn money to supplement rural enterprise in the
In response to the
expansion of internal markets, Africans exploited
their farming skills and family
labor to good effect to increase production for
sale. A substantial black peasantry arose, often
by means of share-cropping or labor tenantry on
For the white authorities,
however, the chief consideration was ensuring a
labor supply and undermining black
competition on the land. Conquest, land dispossession,
taxation and pass laws were designed to force black
men off the land and channel them into labor markets,
especially to meet the needs of the mines.
Gradually, the alternatives
available to them were closed, and the decline
of the homestead economy
made wage labor increasingly essential for survival.
The integration of
Africans into the emerging urban and industrial
society of South Africa should have
followed these developments, but short-term, recurrent
labor migrancy suited employers and the authorities,
which sought to entrench the system.
The closed compounds
pioneered on the diamond fields, as a means of
migrant labor control, were replicated
at the gold-mines. The preservation of communal areas
from which migrants could be drawn had the effect
of lowering wages by denying Africans rights within
the urban areas and keeping their families and dependants
on subsistence plots in the reserves.
Africans could be denied basic rights if the fiction
could be maintained that they did not belong in 'white
South Africa' but to 'tribal societies' from which
they came to service the 'white man's needs'. Where
black families secured a toehold in the urban areas,
local authorities confined them to segregated 'locations'.
This set of assumptions and policies informed the
development of segregationist ideology and, later
(from 1948), apartheid.
Anglo-Boer/South African War (October 1899
- May 1902) and its aftermath
The War that followed the mineral revolution was
mainly a white man's war. In its first phase, the
Boer forces took the initiative, besieging the frontier
towns of Mafeking (Mafikeng) and Kimberley in the
northern Cape and Ladysmith in northern Natal. Some
colonial Boers rebelled, however, in sympathy with
the republics. But after a large expeditionary force
under Lords Roberts and Kitchener arrived, the British
advance was rapid. Kruger fled the Transvaal shortly
before Pretoria fell in June 1900.
The formal conquest of the two Boer republics was
followed by a prolonged guerrilla campaign. Small,
mobile groups of Boers denied the imperial forces
their victory by disrupting rail links and supply
Commandos swept deep into colonial territory, rousing
rebellion wherever they went. The British were at
a disadvantage owing to their lack of familiarity
with the terrain and the Boers' superior skills as
horsemen and sharpshooters.
The British responded
with a scorched-earth policy. This included farm
burnings and looting and the setting-up
of concentration camps for non-combatants, in which
some 26,000 Boer women and children died from disease.
The incarceration of black (including coloured)
people in the path of the War in racially segregated
has been absent in conventional accounts of the War
and has only recently been acknowledged. They too
suffered from appalling conditions and some 14,000
(perhaps many more) are estimated to
At the same time,
many black farmers who were in a position to meet
the demand for produce created
by the military, or avail themselves of employment
opportunities at good wages, benefited from the War.
Some 10,000 black servants accompanied the Boer commandos
and the British used Africans as labourers, scouts,
dispatch riders, drivers and guards.
The War also taught
many Africans that the forces of dispossession
could be rolled back if the circumstances
were right. It also gave black communities the opportunity
to recolonize land lost in conquest, which enabled
to withhold their labor after the War. Most supported
the British in the belief that Britain was committed
to extending civil and political rights to black
In this they were to be disappointed, as in the
Treaty of Vereeniging that ended the War, the British
agreed to leave the issue of rights for Africans
to be decided by a future self-governing (white)
All in all, the Anglo-Boer/South
African War was a radicalizing experience for Africans.
Britain's reconstruction regime set about creating
a white-ruled dominion by uniting the former Boer
republics (both by then British colonies) with Natal
and the Cape.
The most important
priority was to re-establish white control over
the land and force the Africans
back to wage labor. The labor-recruiting system
was improved, both internally and externally. Recruiting
agreements were reached with the Portuguese authorities
in Mozambique, from where much mine labor came.
When, by 1904, African
sources still proved inadequate to get the mines
working at pre-War levels, over
60,000 indentured Chinese were brought in. This precipitated
a vociferous outcry from proponents of white supremacy
inside South Africa and liberals in Britain.
By 1910, all had
been repatriated, a step made easier when a surge
of Africans came forward from areas such as the
and the northern Transvaal, which had not been large-scale
suppliers of migrants before.
This was the heyday
of the private recruiters, who exploited families'
indebtedness to procure young
men to labor in the mines. The Africans' post-war
ability to withhold their labor had been undercut
by government action, abetted by drought and stock
The impact of the Anglo-Boer/South African War as
a seminal influence in the development of Afrikaner
nationalist politics became apparent in subsequent
The Boer leaders most notably Louis Botha,
Jan Smuts and JBM Hertzog played a dominant
role in the country's politics for the next half
After initial plans for anglicisation of the defeated
Afrikaners through the education system, and numerical
swamping through British immigration, were abandoned
as impractical, the British looked to the Afrikaners
as collaborators in securing imperial political and
During 1907 and 1908, the two former Boer republics
were granted self-government but, crucially, with
a whites-only franchise. Despite promises to the
contrary, black interests were sacrificed in the
interest of white nation-building across the white
language divide. The National Convention drew up
a constitution and the four colonies became an independent
dominion called the Union of South Africa on 31 May
The 19th-century formally non-racial franchise was
retained in the Cape but was not extended elsewhere,
where rights of citizenship were confined to whites
It was clear from
the start that segregation was the conventional
wisdom of the new rulers. Black
people were defined as outsiders, without rights
or claims on the common society that their labor
had helped to create.
Government policy in the Union of South Africa did
not develop in isolation, but against the backdrop
of black political initiatives. Segregation and
apartheid assumed their shape, in part, as a white
response to Africans' increasing participation
in the country's economic life and their assertion
of political rights.
government's efforts to shore up traditionalism
and to retribalize them,
black people became more
fully integrated into the urban and industrial society
of 20th-century South Africa than happened elsewhere
on the continent. An educated èlite of clerics,
teachers, business people, journalists and professionals
grew to be a major force in black politics.
Mission Christianity and its associated educational
institutions exerted a profound influence on African
political life, and separatist churches were early
vehicles for African political assertion. The experiences
of studying abroad and in particular interaction
with black people struggling for their rights elsewhere
in Africa, in the United States and the Caribbean,
also played an important part. A vigorous black press,
associated in its early years with such pioneer editors
as JT Jabavu, Pixley Seme, Dr Abdullah Abdurahman,
Sol Plaatje and John Dube, served the black reading
At the same time, African communal struggles to
maintain access to the land in rural areas posed
a powerful challenge to the white State.
Traditional authorities often led popular struggles
against intrusive and manipulative policies. Government
attempts to control and co-opt the chiefs often failed.
Steps towards the
formation of a national political organisation
of 'coloureds' began around the turn of
the century with the formation of the African Political
Organisation (APO) in 1902 by Dr Abdurahman in
mainly the Cape Province.
The African National Congress (ANC), founded in 1912,
became, however, the most important black organization
drawing together traditional authorities and the
educated African èlite in common causes.
In its early years, the ANC was concerned mainly
with constitutional protest. Worker militancy emerged
in the wake of the First World War, and continued
through the 1920s.
It included strikes
and an anti-pass campaign given impetus by women,
in particular in the Free State,
resisting extension of the pass laws to them. The
Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union, under the
leadership of Clements Kadalie, was (despite its
name) the first populist, nation wide organization
representing blacks in rural as well as urban areas.
But it was short-lived.
The Communist Party, formed in 1921 and since then
a force for both non-racialism and worker organisation,
was to prove far longer-lasting.
In other sections
of the black population too, the turn of the century
saw organized opposition emerging.
Gandhi's leadership of protest against discriminatory
laws gave impetus to the formation of provincial
The principles of segregationist thinking were laid
down in a 1905 report by the South African Native
Affairs Commission, and continued to evolve in response
to these economic, social and political pressures.
In keeping with its recommendations, the first Union
government enacted the seminal Natives Land Act in
1913. This defined the remnants of their ancestral lands
after conquest for African occupation, and declared
illegal all land purchases or rent tenancy outside
The reserves ('homelands' as they were subsequently
called) eventually comprised about 13% of South Africa's
land surface. Administrative and legal dualism reinforced
the division between white citizen and black non-citizen,
a dispensation personified by the Governor-General
who, as 'Supreme Chief' over the country's African
majority, was empowered to rule them by administrative
fiat and decree.
The government also
regularised the job color bar, reserving skilled
work for whites and denying African
workers the right to organize.
was consolidated in the Natives (Urban Areas) Act,
1923, entrenched urban segregation
and controlled African mobility by means of pass
laws. The pass laws were intended to enmesh Africans
in a web of coercion designed to force them into
labor and to keep them there under conditions and
at wage levels that suited white employers, and to
deny them any bargaining power.
In these and
other ways, the foundations of apartheid were
laid by successive governments
the compromises hammered out by the National Convention
of 1908 1909 to effect the union of English
and Afrikaans-speaking whites.
Divisions within the white community remained significant,
however. Afrikaner nationalism grew as a factor in
the years after union.
It was given impetus in 1914 both by the formation
of the National Party (NP), in a breakaway from the
ruling South African Party, and by a rebellion of
Afrikaners who could not reconcile themselves with
the decision to join the First World War against
Germany. In part, the NP spoke for Afrikaners impoverished
by the Anglo-Boer/South African War and dislodged
from the land by the development of capitalist farming.
An Afrikaner underclass
was emerging in the towns, which found itself uncompetitive
in the labor market
as white workers demanded higher wages than those
paid to blacks.
Soon, labour issues
came to the fore. In 1920, some 71,000 black mineworkers
went on strike in protest
against the spiralling cost of living, but the strike
was quickly put down by isolating the compounds where
the migrant workers were housed.
Another threat to
government came from white workers. Immigrant white
workers with mining experience abroad
performed much of the skilled and semi-skilled work
on the mines. As mine-owners tried to cut costs by
using lower-wage black labor in semi-skilled jobs,
white labor became increasingly militant. These
tensions culminated in a bloody and dramatic rebellion
on the gold-fields in 1922, which the Smuts government
put down with military force. In 1924, a Pact government
under Hertzog, comprising Afrikaner nationalists
and representatives of immigrant labor, ousted the
The Pact was based
on a common suspicion of the dominance of mining
capital, and a determination
to protect the interests of white labor by intensifying
discrimination against blacks. The commitment to
white-labor policies in government employment such
as the railways and postal service was intensified,
and the job color bar was reinforced with one of
its main objectives to address what was known as
a 'poor white problem'.
In 1934, the main white parties fused to combat
the local effects of a world-wide depression. This
was followed by a new Afrikaner nationalist breakaway
under Dr DF Malan.
In 1936, white supremacy was further entrenched
by the United Party with the removal from the common
voters' roll of the Africans of the Cape Province
who qualified. Meanwhile Malan's breakaway NP was
greatly augmented by an Afrikaner cultural revival
spearheaded by the secret white male Afrikaner Broederbond
and other cultural organisations during the year
of the Voortrekker Centenary Celebrations (1938)
as well as anti-war sentiment from 1939.
After the Second World War, in 1948, the NP, with
its ideology of apartheid that brought an even
more rigorous and authoritarian approach than the
segregationist policies of previous governments,
won the general election. It did so against the background of a revival of
mass militancy during the 1940s, after a period of
relative quiescence in the 1930s when black groups
attempted to foster unity among themselves.
The change was marked by the formation of the ANC
Youth League in 1943, fostering the leadership of
figures such as Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and
Walter Sisulu, who were to inspire the struggle for
decades to come. In the 1940s, squatter movements
in peri-urban areas brought mass politics back to
the urban centres.
The 1946 mineworkers' strike was a turning point
in the emergence of a politics of mass mobilisation.
As was the case with the First World War, the experience
of the Second World War and post-war economic difficulties
For those who supported the NP, its primary appeal
lay in its determination to maintain white domination
in the face of rising mass resistance, to uplift
poor Afrikaners, to challenge the pre-eminence of
English-speaking whites in public life, the professions
and business, and to abolish the remaining imperial
The State became
an engine of patronage for Afrikaner employment.
The Afrikaner Broederbond co-ordinated
the Party's program, ensuring that Afrikaner nationalist
interests and policies attained ascendancy throughout
In 1961, the NP government under Prime Minister
HF Verwoerd declared South Africa a republic, after
winning a whites-only referendum on the issue. A
new currency, the Rand, new flag, anthem and coat
of arms were formally introduced. South Africa also
withdrew from the British Commonwealth, and a figurehead
president replaced the Queen (represented locally
by the Governor-General) as Head of State.
In most respects, apartheid was a continuation,
in more systematic and brutal form, of the segregationist
policies of previous governments. A new concern with racial purity was apparent in
laws prohibiting interracial sex and in provisions
for population registration requiring that every
South African be assigned to one discrete racial
category or another.
For the first time
the coloured people, who had always been subjected
to informal discrimination,
were brought within the ambit of discriminatory laws.
In the mid-1950s,
the government took the drastic step of overriding
an entrenched clause in the 1910
Constitution of the Union so as to be able to remove
coloured voters from the common voters' roll. It
also enforced residential segregation, expropriating
homes where necessary and policing massive forced
removals into 'coloured group areas'.
Until the 1940s,
South Africa's race policies had not been entirely
out of step with those to be found
in the colonial world. But by the 1950s, which saw
decolonization and a global backlash against racism
gather pace, the country was dramatically opposed
to world opinion on questions of human rights.
The architects of apartheid, among whom Dr HF Verwoerd
was pre-eminent, responded by elaborating a theory
of multinationalism. Their policy, which they termed
'separate development', divided the African population
into artificial ethnic 'nations', each with its own
'homeland' and the prospect of 'independence', supposedly
in keeping with trends elsewhere on the continent.
This divide-and-rule strategy was designed to disguise
the racial basis of official policy-making by the
substitution of the language of ethnicity. This was accompanied by much ethnographic engineering
as efforts were made to resurrect tribal structures.
In the process, the government created a considerable
The truth was that the rural reserves were by this
time thoroughly degraded by overpopulation and soil
erosion. This did not prevent four of the 'homeland'
structures (Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei)
being declared 'independent', a status which the
international community declined to recognise. In
each case, the process involved the repression of
opposition and the use by the government of the power
to nominate and thereby pad elected assemblies with
a quota of compliant figures.
Forced removals from
'white' areas affected some 3.5 million people,
and vast rural slums were created
in the homelands, which were used as dumping grounds.
The pass laws and influx control were extended and
harshly enforced, and labor bureaux were set up
to channel labor to where it was needed.
to growth points on the borders of (but not inside)
the homelands was
promoted as a means of keeping blacks out of 'white'
In virtually every sphere, from housing to education
to health care, central government took control over
black people's lives with a view to reinforcing their
allotted role as 'temporary sojourners', welcome
in 'white' South Africa solely to serve the needs
of the employers of labour.
The ending of apartheid
The introduction of apartheid policies coincided
with the adoption by the ANC in 1949 of its Programme
of Action, expressing the renewed militancy of
The Programme embodied a rejection of white domination
and a call for action in the form of protests, strikes
and demonstrations. There followed a decade of turbulent
mass action in resistance to the imposition of still
harsher forms of segregation and oppression.
The Defiance Campaign
of the early 1950s carried mass mobilization to
new heights under the banner
of non-violent resistance to the pass laws. These
actions were based on the philosophy of Mohandas
A critical step in
the emergence of non-racialism was the formation
of the Congress Alliance, including
the Indian Congress, the Coloured People's Congress,
a small white congress organisation (the Congress
of Democrats) and the South African Congress of Trade
The Alliance gave formal expression to an emerging
unity across racial and class lines that was manifested
in the Defiance Campaign and other mass protests
of this period, which also saw women's resistance
take a more organised character with the formation
of the Federation of South African Women.
In 1955, a Freedom Charter was drawn up at the Congress
of the People in Soweto. The Charter enunciated the
principles of the struggle, binding the movement
to a culture of human rights and non-racialism. Over
the next few decades, the Freedom Charter was elevated
to an important symbol of the freedom struggle.
The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), founded by Robert
Sobukwe and based on the philosophy of Africanism
and anti-communism, broke away from the Congress
Alliance in 1959. The PAC slogan 'Africa for the
Africans' was strongly pan-Africanist in nature.
The State's initial
response, harsh as it was, was not yet as draconian
as it was to become. Its attempt
to prosecute more than 150 anti-apartheid leaders
for treason, in a trial that started in 1956, ended
in acquittals in 1961. But by that time, mass organized
opposition had been banned.
Matters came to a head at Sharpeville in March 1960
when 69 PAC anti-pass demonstrators were killed.
A state of emergency was imposed, and detention without
trial was introduced.
The black political
organizations were banned, and their leaders went
into exile or were arrested. In
this climate, the ANC and PAC abandoned their long-standing
commitment to non-violent resistance and turned to
armed struggle, waged from the independent countries
to the north.
Top leaders still inside the country, including
members of the newly formed military wing Umkhonto
we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), were arrested in
1963. At the 'Rivonia trial', Mandela, Sisulu, Ahmed
Kathrada and others convicted of sabotage (instead
of treason, the original charge) were sentenced to
The 1960s was a decade of overwhelming repression
and of relative political disarray among blacks inside
the country. Armed action from beyond the borders
was effectively contained by the State.
The resurgence of resistance politics in the early
1970s was dramatic. The Black Consciousness Movement,
led by Steve Biko (who was killed in detention in
1977), reawakened a sense of pride and self-esteem
in black people. News of the brutal death of Steve
Biko reverberated around the globe and led to unprecedented
As capitalist economies
sputtered with the oil crisis of 1973, black trade
unions revived. A wave of strikes
reflected a new militancy that involved better organization
and was drawing new sectors, in particular intellectuals
and the student movement, into mass struggle and
into debate over the principles informing it.
The year 1976 marked the beginning of a sustained
anti-apartheid revolt. In June, school pupils of
Soweto rose up against apartheid education, followed
by youth uprisings all around the country. Youth
activism became the single most effective arm of
the politics of resistance in the 1980s.
The United Democratic Front and the informal umbrella,
the Mass Democratic Movement, emerged as legal vehicles
of democratic forces struggling for liberation. Clerics
played a prominent public role in these movements.
The involvement of workers in resistance took on
a new dimension with the formation of the Congress
of South African Trade Unions and the National Council
of Trade Unions.
Popular anger was directed against all those who
were deemed to be collaborating with the government
in the pursuit of its objectives, and the black townships
became virtually ungovernable. From the mid-1980s,
regional and national states of emergency were enforced.
The Inkatha movement, which from 1979 became increasingly
oppositional to the externally-based liberation movement,
played a straddling role in the 1980s. Stressing
Zulu ethnicity and traditionalism, Inkatha claimed
a mass following in the rural areas of the KwaZulu
Its leader, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, carved a
distinctive niche for himself, refusing 'independence'
for KwaZulu but squeezing patronage from the apartheid
State by casting Inkatha in the role of loyal opposition.
The State sought to use Inkatha structures as surrogates
in its war against the liberation movement.
Battles for turf between Inkatha and the ANC became
a very destructive accompaniment to South Africa's
transition to democracy. Developments in neighbouring
states in the face of mass resistance to white-minority
and colonial rule, notably Portuguese decolonisation
in the mid-1970s and the abdication of Zimbabwe's
minority regime in 1980, left South Africa exposed
as the last bastion of white supremacy.
The Government embarked
on a series of reforms, an early example being
the recognition of black trade
unions to stabilize labor. In 1983, the Constitution
was reformed to allow the coloured and Indian minorities
limited participation in separate and subordinate
Houses of Parliament. The vast majority of these
groups rejected the Tricameral dispensation but it
was nevertheless kept intact by the apartheid regime.
PW Botha further modified the Westminster constitutional
model by instituting an executive presidency and
doing away with the function of Prime Minister. In
1986, the pass laws were scrapped. These initiatives
went hand-in-hand with the militarization of society
and the ascendancy of the State Security
Council, which usurped the role of the executive
in crucial respects.
Under the states of emergency, a comprehensive counter-insurgency
strategy was implemented to combat what, by the mid-1980s,
was an endemic insurrectionary spirit in the land. At the same time, the international community strengthened
its support for the anti-apartheid cause. A range
of sanctions and boycotts was instituted, both unilaterally
and through the United Nations (UN).
FW de Klerk, who had replaced Botha as State President
in 1989, announced at the opening of Parliament in
February 1990 the unbanning of the liberation movements
and release of political prisoners, notably Nelson
A number of factors led to this step. International
financial, trade, sport and cultural sanctions were
clearly biting, even if South Africa was nowhere
near collapse, either militarily or economically.
These sanctions were
called for in a co-ordinated strategy by the internal
and external anti-apartheid
movement in South Africa. The ANC, enjoying wide
recognition as the foremost liberation organization,
was increasingly regarded as a government in waiting.
International support for the liberation movement
came from various countries around the globe, particularly
from former East Bloc and Nordic countries as well
as from the Non-aligned Movement.
During the 1980s,
the ANC moved its headquarters from London, England
to Lusaka, Zambia. The other
liberation organizations increasingly experienced
various internal and external pressures and did not
enjoy much popular support.
Internal and external
mass resistance continued and it was obvious that
Botha's strategy of reform
initiatives combined with repression had failed to
stabilize the internal situation.
observers, and also in the eyes of growing numbers
of white South Africans,
exposed as morally bankrupt, indefensible and impervious
to reforms. The collapse of global communism, the
withdrawal of Soviet and Cuban support for the MPLA
regime in Angola, and the negotiated independence
of Namibia formerly South-West Africa, administered
by South Africa as a League of Nations mandate since
1919 did much to change the mindset of whites.
No longer could whites demonise the ANC and PAC as
fronts for international communism.
Africa had also changed in deeper ways. Afrikaner
nationalism had lost
much of its raison
d'ètre. Many Afrikaners had become urban,
middle class and relatively prosperous. Their ethnic
grievances, and attachment to ethnic causes and symbols,
had largely waned.
A large part of the
NP's core constituency was ready to explore larger
national identities, even across
racial divides, and yearned for international respectability.
Apartheid increasingly seemed more like a straitjacket
than a safeguard. In 1982, disenchanted hardliners
had split from the NP to form the Conservative Party,
leaving the NP open to more flexible and modernizing
influences. After this split, factions within the
Afrikaner elite openly started to pronounce in favor
of a more inclusive society causing more friction
with the NP government, which increasingly became
militaristic and authoritarian.
A number of business, student and academic Afrikaners
held meetings publicly and privately with the ANC
in exile. Secret talks were held between the imprisoned
Nelson Mandela and government Ministers about a new
dispensation for South Africa with blacks forming
a major part of it.
Inside the country, mass action became the order
of the day. Petty apartheid laws and symbols were
openly challenged and removed. Together with a sliding
economy and increasing international pressure, these
developments made historic changes inevitable.
Birth of a democratic South Africa
After a long, bumpy negotiation process, marked by
much opportunistic violence from the right wing
and its surrogates and in some instances sanctioned
by elements of the State, South Africa held its
first democratic election in April 1994 under an
The ANC emerged with a 62% majority. Its main opposition
came from the NP, which gained 20% of the vote nationally,
and a majority in the Western Cape where it was strongly
supported by coloured voters. The Inkatha Freedom
Party (IFP) received 10% of the vote, mainly in its
South Africa was divided into nine new provinces
in place of the four provinces and 10 'homelands'
that existed previously. In terms of the interim
Constitution, the NP and IFP participated in a Government
of National Unity until 1996, when the NP withdrew.
The ANC-led government
embarked on a program to promote the reconstruction
and development of the
country and its institutions. This called for the
simultaneous pursuit of democratization and socio-economic
change, as well as reconciliation
and the building of a consensus founded on the commitment
to improve the lives of all South Africans, in particular
the poor. Converting democratic ideals into practice
required, among other things, initiating a radical
overhaul of the machinery of government at every
level, towards service delivery, openness and a culture
of human rights.
A significant milestone
of democratization during the five-year period
of the Mandela presidency was
the exemplary constitution-making process, which
delivered a document that is the envy of the democratic
world. So too were the local government elections that
gave the country its first democratically elected
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, under the
leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, helped inculcate
a commitment to accountability and transparency in
South Africa's public life, at the same time helping
to heal wounds inflicted by inhumanities of the apartheid
The ethos of partnership was reflected in the establishment
of the National Economic Development and Labour Council
and in the Presidential Jobs Summit.
These brought government,
business, organized labor and non-governmental
development organizations together
to confront the challenges of achieving growth and
development for South Africa in a turbulent and globalizing
international economy. From the start, emphasis was
placed by the Government on the meeting of basic
needs, through various programs for socio-economic
development such as the provision of housing, piped
water, electricity and rural health care. Also a
priority was the safety and security of citizens,
requiring both transforming the police into a service
working with the community, and overcoming grave
problems of criminality and a culture of violence
posed by the social dislocations inherited from the
The second democratic election, held on 2 June 1999,
saw the ANC increase its majority to a point just
short of two-thirds of the total vote. South Africa
was launched into the post-Mandela era under the
presidency of Thabo Mbeki.
The 1999 election also saw the sharp decline of
the NP (now known as the New National Party [NNP]),
which had ruled South Africa from 1948 to 1994, and
its replacement by the Democratic Party, under the
leadership of Tony Leon, as the official opposition
in the South African Parliament. The two parties
merged in 2000 to form the Democratic Alliance. However,
in October 2001, the NNP suspended its membership
of the Alliance pending a final decision, changing
the face of politics in the Western Cape.
President Mbeki promised
a tough, hands-on managerial style, geared for
efficiency and delivery. In particular,
the Mbeki administration is committed to the African
Renaissance based on democracy and economic development,
and a co-operative approach to resolving the emerging
political challenges across the continent. The African
Renaissance ideal found manifestation in the New
Partnership for Africa's Development. It was spearheaded
by, among others, President Mbeki and Nigeria's President
Olusegan Obasanjo, an advocacy campaign was launched
focused mainly at the G-8 countries but also the
process to establish the African Union (AU) to
replace the Organization for African
Unity bore fruit with the adoption of the Constitutive
Act of the AU on 9 July 2002 in Durban, South Africa.
This was seen to be a major step towards bringing
about unity, co-operation, economic development and
social integration for collective action to ensure
sustainable development across the continent in all
From August to September
2002, South Africa hosted the World Summit on Sustainable
Development in Johannesburg.
Representatives of nearly 200 countries with widely
divergent positions, including civil society organizations,
grappled with complex and difficult issues. Among
the victories of the Summit was the launch of over
300 partnerships including 32 energy initiatives,
21 water programs and 32 programs for biodiversity
and ecosystem management.
The biggest success
was to get the world to turn the UN Millennium
Declaration into a concrete set
of programs and to mobilize funds into those programs.
The Implementation Plan includes programs to deliver
water, energy, health care, agricultural development
and a better environment for the world's poor. It
also includes targets for the reduction of poverty
and protection of the environment.
too faces what some refer to as its 'second revolution',
challenge to transfer
economic ownership to black people through meaningful
participation and skills acquisition. In other spheres,
major achievements were attained political
democracy has become entrenched, indigenization
continues to find expression in name changes of towns,
provinces, and cultural expressions at local, provincial
and national levels.
The Freedom Park
Project was launched in 2002, commemorating and
honoring those who contributed to bring about
a new order in South Africa. A significant national
event took place on August 9, National Women's Day,
when the remains of Sarah Bartmann, a Khoikhoi woman,
was buried during a ceremony in Hankey in the Eastern
Cape. She became a powerful symbol in the quest of
Khoisan peoples and indeed the whole nation to
restore dignity and respect, particularly among
Many challenges face
the nation as South Africa moves into the 21st
century. Globalization, the digital
divide, abject poverty, HIV/AIDS and creating conditions
conducive to sustainable development are a few of
the critical issues the nation is seeking solutions
for in partnership with other international role-players.
But the fabric of South African society is continually
being transformed, creating greater stability and
peace and laying the foundation for creating circumstances
in which both the individual and collective human
potential of the nation can truly come to full fruition.
The museum at Robben Island, where former President
Nelson Mandela and several other key political figures
were imprisoned, portrays among other things, the
struggle for freedom and democracy in South Africa.
Robben Island has been declared a World Heritage
(The above was excerpted
African Government Online)
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