How apartheid ended: new times, selective memories

Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s death over Christmas felt like the end of an era. For millennials the story of how apartheid was ended is history. Idris Elba in “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom” joins Michael Caine in Zulu, both now movies about a fading past. The change from white to black hero is relatively recent. The screenplay of “Cry Freedom”, released in 1987, portrayed the life and murder by security police of the Black Consciousness Movement leader Steve Biko, seen through the eyes of his journalist friend Donald Woods. Journalists’ “first drafts of history” are now giving way to second drafts, with their selective memories and erasures.

In 2013, news of Nelson Mandela’s death reached London just as “Long Walk to Freedom” premiered — for a film company the financial equivalent of a miracle. The British establishment finally deemed Mandela respectable enough for a Royal Film Performance attended by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

Twenty-five years earlier the non-racial African National Congress (ANC) was on President Reagan’s list of terrorist organisations and Margaret Thatcher at the Commonwealth Conference adamantly refused pleas from Commonwealth leaders to impose sanctions on the apartheid regime. She characterised ANC threats against British companies trading with South Africa as “typical of a terrorist organisation”. A generation later, Prince William had the good sense to describe Mandela as “extraordinary and inspiring”.

There are other easily forgotten, perhaps “inconvenient”, facts about the struggle against apartheid that are worth re-stating. The conflict was inevitably drawn into the Cold War between the superpowers and seen by them through that prism. Mandela was believed to be a member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and therefore a danger to Western interests. A few weeks before the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, a CIA-linked US diplomat tipped off South African security police about Mandela’s whereabouts and, disguised as a chauffeur, he was arrested at a road block.

The ANC’s decision, after the Sharpeville massacre of unarmed protesters by police in 1960, to form a military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), and begin a sabotage campaign against the apartheid regime hardened Cold War stances. Sabotage evolved into what the ANC called “armed propaganda”, attacks on prestigious targets such as the Sasolburg oil refinery, the Koeberg Nuclear station and Vortrekkerhoogte, the Pretoria command centre of the South African Army (SADF). The ANC attempted, with varying degrees of success, to avoid civilian casualties. The Communist parties and states of the Soviet Union, East Germany and Cuba were inevitably drawn in and were soon supporting guerrilla training camps in Angola and Zambia. But a great diversity of other actors became involved.

The global anti-apartheid movement was much broader than the well-respected and effective Anti-Apartheid Movement of the same name. Compared with other nationalist and liberation movements of the time, an extraordinary combination of protagonists actively resisted the apartheid regime. Liberals as well as socialists and communists; the schoolchildren of the 1976 Soweto uprising; the scores of organisations in the 1980s popular front United Democratic Front (UDF); minority religious communities as well as mainstream Christians, including Church leaders; a broad coalition of ethnicities. Within and without South Africa, from civil disobedience to sports and consumer boycotts, from campaigns for economic sanctions to mobilising ANC front-organisations, from diplomacy to strategic planning by the exile leadership as well as guerrilla infiltration, there was a huge variety of active resistance. A broad, heterogeneous movement fighting apartheid operated in the midst of the Cold War.

In the Catholic tradition the bishops denounced apartheid as “intrinsically evil”. There were special and profound theological reasons for Christian resistance to “the system”. Their position was similar to that of the Confessing Church’s Declaration of Barmen in Nazi Germany. They confronted not only a national security state that tortured and murdered its opponents — as in Latin America — but the heresy of Christian Nationalism, the ideological justification for apartheid promoted by the Nederduiste Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK), the Dutch Reformed Church, de facto support for the state ideology.

Many different hands dismantled apartheid. But two principal factors brought it to an end. By the mid-1980s, prolonged sanctions were biting and business CEOs, including powerful multinationals, began putting pressure on the Afrikaner government to negotiate. Concurrently in Angola in 1988, Cuban and Angolan troops with East German pilots fought an overstretched SADF to a stalemate at Cuito Cuanavale, using the same tactics that had defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The South African National Security State suddenly seemed much less secure.

In 1982, Sweden’s Social Democratic government, the first and only non-communist state to do so, began clandestinely funding the ANC internally — but not the military MK. Olof Palme, Sweden’s Prime Minister who initiated the funding, was assassinated on 28 February 1986, most likely by the apartheid regime’s notorious and Orwellian Civil Cooperation Bureau. In contrast, UK government strategy was to divide what they imagined was an “Africanist” ANC from the SACP. When this failed hopes were that Inkatha, a tribalist Zulu Party with German backing, might stop the ANC sweeping the board in the 1994 elections.

Finally and sadly, South Africa’s peaceful transfer of power is a myth. In the early 1990s hundreds died in clashes between Inkatha and the ANC, and even after the 1994 elections members of the unreformed security forces continued to assassinate ANC and MK returnees. It might have been worse, had Archbishop Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission not totally discredited the Afrikaner right-wing and thus avoided more organised violence against the incoming ANC.

There have already been many touching encomia for Archbishop Tutu. He became the recognisable voice and face of non-violent opposition to apartheid violence. He also made work for human rights a key part of the life of the South African Council of Churches, which he led from 1978 to 1984. For many journalists his was the only name in their address book if and when they sought a Christian leader offering newsworthy, clear and courageous comment and advocacy.

In the repression of the mid-1980s, when the internal leadership of the ANC were almost all jailed, his leadership became even more important. In New York in 1986, following a failed effort during a UK visit to change Margaret Thatcher’s mind on sanctions, Tutu publicly challenged Reagan’s refusal to exert economic pressure on the apartheid regime. Despite Presidential vetoes, Congress later that year passed an Anti-Apartheid Act including some economic sanctions.

It was prolonged sanctions that proved to be the proverbial last straw — more a heavy bale — which broke apartheid’s back. A unique case of God and Mammon serving a common cause?

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.