Moving Towards an End to Apartheid South Africa

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Union and student opposition

In the early 1970s South Africa entered a new era of opposition to Apartheid, but this time not led by organized political groups such as the ANC and PAC but by the trade unions. During the 1960s there had been very little labour unrest; only about 2000 workers went on strike each year. Then in early 1973 there was suddenly a huge rise in strike activity and in the first three months of the year there were 160 strikes involving something like 61,000 workers. The epicentre for the strike activity was Durban but they quickly spread to other areas such as East London and then on to the Rand. These strikes were unusually successful in gaining the workers' demands; almost always this was for increased wages to reflect the recent sharp rises in the inflation rate. One reason they were surprisingly successful was that the workers refused to elect leaders to enter into negotiations with their employers; rather they simply published their demands and then went on strike for short periods, usually staying in the vicinity of the factory. This meant that the employers had no target on which to aim reprisals and the police could not be called in to arrest strike leaders.

The early 1970s also saw the rise of a more vocal African student protest movement. This was spearheaded by the South Africa Students Organization (SASO), which had broken away from the white-dominated National Union of South African Students in 1968, under the leadership of Steve Biko. SASO had a Black Consciousness ideology, which stressed the need for all black people in South Africa, Africans, Indians and coloureds, to free themselves from the mental oppression that taught them white people were somehow innately superior to blacks. SASO took this message out into the country at large and played particular attention to spreading the ideology amongst school pupils.

With the example of the striking workers before them and a Black Consciousness message in their minds, school pupils began to rebel against an education system designed to make them fit only for unskilled and semi-skilled occupations. The immediate issue around which they organized their protest was the new rules enforcing the Afrikaans language as a medium of instruction. On the 16 June 1976 a Soweto school pupils' committee organized a mass march to deliver their complaints to the local authorities. This peaceful march was met with a violent response and the police shot two of the pupils. At first the pupils fled but then many turned and started throwing stones at the police. They then went on a rampage throughout the township destroying every symbol of their oppression that they could get to, including the government-run beer halls which many pupils felt bought off their fathers' opposition to state oppression with cheap beer. The Soweto Uprising, as the incident soon became known, marked an important turning point in the history of opposition to Apartheid: from 16 June 1976 onwards there was constant and violent unrest across South Africa, lead by school pupils but gaining widespread support.

Rioting erupted around the country when news of the Soweto Uprising spread. The government was hard pressed to stop the unrest spreading beyond the townships but in a nationwide clampdown they eventually managed to quieten some of the protest. The SASO and school pupil leaders found themselves under arrest or harassed by the police. Many of the young people involved in the uprising escaped across the border.

ANC re-enters the scene

Though the ANC had not been involved in the organization of the school pupils' protest, their underground cells, which had been carefully and quietly organizing in the early 1970s, it did help channel escaping pupils towards the guerrilla training camps they had set up in countries like Tanzania, Algeria and the newly independent Angola. The ANC benefited greatly from this new arrival of activists and managed effectively to amalgamate them into their organization. The ANC had made better use of their time in exile than the PAC, who suffered from poor organization and internal splits. Many of the pupils were ideologically closer to the PAC but they nevertheless ended up in ANC camps. In recent years these camps have been revealed to have often been pretty brutal places and people who disagreed with the camps' leaders were sometimes dealt with extremely harshly.

Despite the government crackdown, protests continued and a generalized culture of resistance was fostered. The ANC made use of this new climate of opposition to begin to reinfiltrate South Africa. In the late 1970s they began a new campaign of sabotage, but now there was less care to avoid civilian casualties and the ANC released a statement saying they were at war with the Apartheid state and, whilst their attacks were aimed at Apartheid and economic targets, they could not promise that civilians would not be caught up in the struggle. A number of Unkhonto cells seemed to ignore these commands and bombs were set off in shopping centres and similar locations.

The ANC quickly regained legitimacy amongst Africans, many of whom had been disillusioned with the organization during its long dormant period. Black Consciousness organizations, smashed apart by the police after the Soweto Uprising, lost support to the ANC, though it could be argued that the movement had achieved its aim of increasing African pride. In August 1983 there was a large gathering of 575 community, church and similar non-governmental organizations which resulted in the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF), which spearheaded protest throughout the 1980s. The government argued that the organization was simply a front for the ANC. This was an exaggeration but it is true that the UDF did have strong links with the ANC and that they regarded it as the government in exile and the imprisoned Mandela as the legitimate president of the country.

'Total onslaught' and destabilization

The Apartheid state was not only coming under attack from internal protest but from international criticism of the Pretoria regime. The ANC in exile had managed to foster anti-Apartheid groups in Europe and North America that began to put pressure on their governments to institute economic sanctions against South Africa. Most Commonwealth governments supported these sanctions and also instituted sporting and cultural sanctions on South Africa. The anti-Apartheid movement also started campaigns detailing the working conditions inside branches of multi-national companies in South Africa and asking individuals to boycott companies with large investments in South Africa. Despite the resistance of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, during the 1980s these campaigns began to take effect and a number of important companies withdrew from South Africa.

This international isolation of Pretoria added to their gradual geopolitical isolation in Southern Africa during the 1970s. Up until the mid-1970s South Africa had been surrounded either by states run by white settler régimes or by small states that rarely criticized their actions. However, independence for Angola and Mozambique in 1976 and Zimbabwe in 1980 changed all that. Now South Africa had hostile, left-wing neighbours right on its doorstep, and even the previously compliant weaker states, such as Lesotho, began actively to oppose the Apartheid state. White South Africa felt increasingly vulnerable and the government argued that they were now facing a 'total onslaught' led by communists that were intent on bringing them down.

The Apartheid government reacted to this 'total onslaught' with a careful mixture of economic, diplomatic and military foreign policy designed to neutralize the threat. The exact mix of the different elements varied in each country and over time. In Angola, for example, intervention was in the form of a direct military invasion designed to overthrow the communist government. When the invasion faltered they concentrated on supplying an armed opposition movement and therefore helped to fuel a bloody civil war that has gone on more or less ever since. In Mozambique they also intervened militarily, but this time through another opposition organization that had originally been set up by Ian Smith's settler régime in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. They encouraged their clients in Mozambique to blow up railways and pipelines running from Zimbabwe to their nearest ports. With these out of action, Zimbabwe and other landlocked central African states were forced to continue trading with South Africa in order to get access to the sea. This, in turn, gave the South Africans an important economic hold over the countries to the north.

Across the region South African guerrilla troops carried out occasional raids designed both to knock out ANC camps and to keep their neighbours in political and economic turmoil and therefore as less effective opponents. South Africa's proxy war with the rest of the region caused a huge amount of suffering to very many people, especially in Mozambique and Angola. Though these states did receive some international support the international media tended to concentrate more on events unfurling in the South African townships than on these regional events.

Reform or revolution?

In the mid-1980s South Africa's townships, simmering since the Soweto Uprising, exploded into violence. The primary target of the violence were Africans who had taken jobs as administrators in the 'homelands' or townships and African policemen. Many had their families killed and their houses burnt down and a new and horrendous form of execution was invented, called 'necklacing'. This involved placing a car tyre full of petrol over the victim's torso and then setting fire to it. The police reacted violently to unrest in the townships and shot, arrested and beat many protesters. Bus boycotts, strikes and 'stay aways', were frequent and often met with violence by the police.

Violence became endemic to the townships and there was a fine line between political violence and general crime. Many of the young ANC supporting comrades decided that they should take the law into their own hands and kangaroo courts were frequent occurrences. Older Africans sometimes found it hard to take orders from the youngsters and inter-generational battles broke out on a number of occasions, most violently at Crossroads squatter camp on the outskirts of Cape Town. The violence was fanned by massive new flows of illegal migrants into the towns. The government was unable to cope with the new influx of people and eventually was forced into the withdrawal of the hated pass laws. The growth of squatter camps was spectacular and no sooner had the government removed squatters from one site than they appeared somewhere else.

During the 1970s wage increases in established industry had been generous, partly reflecting the move towards a more capital intensive economy and partly a result of the strikes. The downside of this was massive and endemic unemployment, especially among the young. A whole generation of young people missed all their formal education because of their involvement in 'the struggle' and their chances of employment were extremely remote. Inevitably this fuelled the violence and crime.

The worst violence took place in the townships surrounding Pietermaritzburg and Durban. These areas were within the KwaZulu 'homeland' run by Gatsha Buthelezi. Originally Buthelezi had been an ANC supporter and had even received the organization's (reserved) blessing in the establishment of a Zulu cultural organization called Inkatha. The organization, however, began to act much more like a political party and ran the KwaZulu 'homeland' administration. When ANC supporters began to challenge the 'homelands' authority this lead to violent clashes as the two organizations vied for control of the townships. This conflict has continued until the present and has involved numerous atrocities committed by both sides.

By the late 1980s the South African state had more or less lost control of large portions of the townships. The unrest and international sanctions were hitting the economy hard and South African businesses were feeling the pinch. While the state security apparatus was strengthened and numerous crackdowns were attempted, the government, fearing revolution, also undertook a programme of reform. To some extent this programme had begun in the 1970s but it was accelerated in the early 1980s under the presidency of PW Botha. One strand of the reform process was to pull coloureds and Indians into the political process under a new tri-cameral parliament. Under a new constitution there were to be three houses in the parliament, one for white voters, one for coloureds and one for Indians. Most coloureds and Indians saw this move as an attempt to drive a wedge between them and the African population and refused to vote for the new parliament. The National Party's reform policy also lead to a new split in Afrikaner ranks and the creation of a new, more right-wing, Conservative Party. Over the 1980s the new Party was to attract more and more Afrikaner support and the National Party became increasingly reliant upon English-speaking supporters.

Botha also set about dismantling some of the segregationist policies, in particular the 'petty Apartheid' legislation that divided up facilities such as beaches. These did very little to assuage the unrest in the townships and were probably more to do with creating an international impression of reform to hold off further sanctions. Under these circumstances the National Party began to do the unthinkable and sat down to negotiate with the ANC. Business leaders were the first South African establishment figures to talk with the ANC in exile, in September 1985. With sanctions and unrest big business was being squeezed hard and Apartheid was no longer making them good profits as it had in the 1960s. The business leaders were therefore keen for a political settlement, but were obviously nervous about the intentions of an ANC strongly influenced by communist ideology. South African ministers and eventually Botha himself met with Mandela, offering him his freedom if he repudiated the use of violence as a weapon in the fight against Apartheid. Mandela refused the offer and for a time it seemed further reform was impossible.

The late 1980s, however, saw a crucial shift in the global political scene that opened up an important window to allow a negotiated settlement. The unexpected collapse of the Soviet block suddenly made Botha's image of a 'total onslaught' seem meaningless and the ANC was no longer seen by whites as a front for Soviet-backed communist expansion into South Africa. These changes coincided with a change in leadership of the National Party and the replacement of Botha with FW de Klerk. Even though de Klerk had been regarded as a conservative he soon made it clear he was embarking on a bold new policy. The ANC was unbanned, Mandela and other political leaders were released and the process of negotiating a settlement got underway.

Source: footprinttravelguides

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