As a historian who specializes in African history, what encouraged the policy of apartheid in South Africa? And where does this attitude come from?
It is a very difficult question to pinpoint. But we are seeing that the people of South Africa lived peacefully within their borders as independent people, running their own businesses and owning their own land and governing themselves. Then, in 1652, the first Dutch settlers arrived at the Cape of Good Hope. They were led by a man named Jan van Riebeeck and he was at the head of the Dutch East India company. Which had been sailing around the tip of South Africa, in search of spices. Initially, they had been using the port at the Cape as a calling station. They would stop there on their way to resupply their ships with food, such as vegetables and fruits. And initially, the interaction between the Dutch and the local people used mostly the indigenous people of South Africa, whom the Dutch started calling “bushmen'' and “hottentot.” Those are derogatory terms. These were a group of people, whose correct name is the Khoi. The other group is the San. The Khoi were more mainly pastoralists and the San were hunter gatherers. When Riebeeck arrived, the interactions were very cordial. The Khoi was willing to provide the Dutch with livestock for their meat and they would trade with them. The Dutch were trading with the local people in copper, beads and tobacco. There was even intermarriage, they started intermarrying with the local people. However, things started to change when the Dutch decided to settle permanently at the Cape, as the local people were not expecting permanent settlements.
Before that, the Dutch were not willing to pay for the livestock they were expecting so they started raiding and taking the livestock from the indigenous people. That sparked the first war between the Dutch and the Indigenous Khoi and San peoples of South Africa. Because of military might, the Dutch were able to defeat these people. When Riebeeck was addressing the locals, after conquering them, they started to annex their land and he justified their settlement there by saying they had taken the land, and it belonged to the Dutch because of conquest. We can pinpoint to one greed, as the origins of the idea that white people are superior, we can add their military superiority and we can add their racial implications. What the Dutch did after defeating the Khoi and the San, they started luring them or capturing them outright and putting them in fortified military compounds and then they started enslaving them. So even before Charles Darwin had written his "Origins of Species" in 1859, which had misled Europeans to see that he had proven that Black people were inferior to white people. Racial and racist relationships are going to originate from the Dutch settlement at the Cape. By the 1880s, diamonds were discovered in Kimberley, South Africa. Later in the 80’s gold was discovered as well. This time around, the Dutch have control over the diamond and the British miners, who the Dutch called “Uitlanders” or foreigners, wanted to have control over the minerals. Because the Dutch were taxing them heavily, monopolizing provisions of water to the city of Johannesburg, monopolizing the supply of dynamite, railways and access to electricity. The British argued that they were being overtaxed and they wanted voting rights.
The conflict between the British and the Dutch resulted in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 to 1902. Which was the worst war that ever took place because the British resorted to the scorched earth policy. They established concentration camps where they brought all the Dutch women and their children in order to cut off supplies to the Commandos. And they even brought Africans into those camps, and Africans fought on both sides. But what we are seeing here is that even after the British won the war, they did not want this permanent animosity with the Dutch. So, in 1910, they agreed to the creation of the union of South Africa. So, the British had nominal control over South Africa but the Afrikaner nation, the Dutch started calling themselves Afrikaners and now Afrikaner nationalism emerges. They are very bitter with how the British have treated them and by the 1890’s Cecil Rhodes, who had come to South Africa at the age of 19 to recuperate from some illness because of the climate, he has created the De Beers Company, it is the company which monopolized diamond production around the world. So, Cecil Rhodes was dominating the diamond industry, he also established a big company to dominate the gold industry. And by the early 1900’s, Cecil Rhodes had urged to pass a law which ended up with the Afrikaner government coming up with the Native Land Act of 1913. Which took 93% of all the land in South Africa and gave it to the minority whites. Which confined the majority Africans in the remaining 7% of their land.
From that time on, again, there are laws that are going to be put in place, for example a law they passed which banned Africans from being trained in skills so that they could remain low waged laborers. They denied Africans their suffrage from 1936. Meaning that from 1936 to 1994, Africans had no voting rights in South Africa. They passed all forms of laws to create a land hunger amongst South Africans and force the Africans to go into cheap labor such as working in the mines, factories and on the sugar plantations. And after that, we begin to see a slew of racist laws that are being implemented, not passed by the parliament before. So, we are talking about, from the time of the Dutch, there is a sort of de facto apartheid. But by 1948, we had the white only general election, where Dr. Daniel Malan runs on the slogan of “apartheid”. And apartheid literally means apartness or separate. He ran on the slogans of “black danger,” “blacks in their place,” and “coolies” a derogatory term used to describe people from India who had been brought to South Africa as slave workers. And he said, “coolies out of our country,” “white supremacy; black subservience," “white superiority; black inferiority” as well as “whites will always be bosses in South Africa.” They even abandoned the use of English, and started using the language of the Dutch, Afrikaans. So, our language, our country, our people. And then they said, we are God's chosen people. So, if you know anything about religion, even in the United States, slaveholders used the Bible to justify enslaving the Africans. “Slaves be obedient to your masters.” So, that system of apartheid is going to now legalize racist, segregationist, oppressive policies against the Africans of South Africa. And from that point, when Malan’s government comes to power, they pass a slew of racist legislation. For example, they banned interracial marriages, they passed what they called the Immorality Act which banned sexual relations between races.
They passed laws where they removed the only political representation that Africans had and created their own hierarchy of government paid chiefs to enforce these new apartheid laws. They even had the PASS laws, which was a document that was given to each of the Africans, you had your name, age, gender, ethnic group, the reserve where you lived which was called your “homeland” or “Bantustan”. And you had to have your particular pass if you were going to leave the reserve to go to an urban center and you could not go to the urban center until you proved you had a job. And this PASS could be demanded by any government official at any time. And then if you are employed, you had to be on contract. Employment for black people in South Africa was only valid if you were employed by a white person and your employer had to sign off your pass, before you leave when you finish your contract. If you did not have that they could bring you back to finish your contract, so think about that in comparison to the runaway slave laws in the United States. The PASS came to be known as the Reference Book and its important aim was to restrict and regulate the movement of Africans throughout South Africa. That, with the solidification of apartheid, such as the Group Areas Act, which segregated legalized urban segregation in South Africa. The Population Registration Act required all people in South Africa to be classified under a specific group based on their races. And you don’t even know how they were figuring out what race you are, they were looking at shoulder stooping, sticking pencils in your hair and if it stuck you would be classified as an African, since the pencil would stay in curlier hair. They would look at dark skinned Indians, and label them as Africans. And then there would be those who had been born before the banning of interracial marriages and sexual relations, who they would classify as Coloreds. That idea of making race the defining metric of who you are in South Africa, coming with different forms of restrictions, such as Indians and Coloreds were not required to carry the PASS, only the Africans did that. So, you see a lot of these rules are going to come up, that are going to codify what had previously been de facto apartheid into de jure apartheid. This is going to remain in place until the first election that Africans can participate in, during 1994.
What was the vision Nelson Mandela and others like him imagined in Africa during that period?
I would have to go to Nelson Mandela’s speech. Before he was sentenced to life in prison, he was already serving a five-year term in jail for leaving the country without travel documents when he went underground after the banning of parties. After the Sharpeville Massacres of 1960 he fled the country to travel the rest of the African continent, meeting with newly independent African leaders to seek funding, to seek training for his army. At this time, he had used passive, non-violent protests for over fifty years and the government were literally butchering unarmed people in the streets of South Africa and they had reached a point where they had concluded it was better to fight fire with fire. They were now embracing the idea of an armed struggle, forming a military wing of the African National Congress called Umkhonto we Sizwe. Umkhonto we Sizwe literally means “spear of the nation” and the spear had been used in South Africa for centuries by the African peoples to fight foreign invaders. They had formed that military wing and needed to get training, weaponry and all other kinds of funding to help with this armed struggle.
So, when he came back into the country after seeking this help he was arrested, additionally he had incited a national strike before he left the country, so he was charged with two charges, one was leaving the country without travel document and the other was inciting a worker’s strike. And he was found guilty on both of these charges and sentenced to five years. While he was in jail, the government found the Underground headquarters just in the south of South Africa. They found documents, even some with Mandela’s own handwriting and they had been smuggling some of them back and forth from the prison. Mandela had been telling them, “When you use it, tear it.” and these carriers, thinking these documents were going to be part of history, did not listen and so the government confiscated thousands upon thousands of documents. So, the whole of the high command of the Umkhonto we Sizwe was arrested. And then Mandela was brought back to court. So that is when we have this famous case MK v. The State and then it was refined to Nelson Mandela and others v. The State, but then became known as the Rivonia Trial which took from 1963 to 1964. They were charged with sabotage, trying to get funding to overthrow the government, trying to bring in foreigners, using communism to overthrow the government and the punishment was supposed to be capital punishment. Mandela and his associates decided that they were not going to try to deny what they had done because they wanted to put the state on trial. It was a State that had perpetrated violence on unarmed protesters for decades and so, Mandela misled the court. The prosecutor thought Mandela would be cross-examined, but Mandela decided that he was going to give a personal statement where he could not be cross-examined. So, when they call him and they say “Accused number one, Nelson Mandela, do you plead guilty or not guilty?” Mandela stands up and says “It is the state that should be in the dock. Not guilty.” And the next, accused number whichever, do you plead guilty or not guilty? Each would say the same “It is the state that should be in the dock. Not guilty.” When Mandela gets on the stand and says he is going to make a personal statement, you can see the prosecutor almost having a heart attack protesting Mandela giving a personal statement. So, the judge tells the prosecutor that Mandela is also a lawyer and he has another lawyer with him, a white man named Fisher. The judge says that they know what they are doing and that the prosecutor has no right to tell them what to do.
Mandela then reads his statement for four hours, I will read the portion that is not in his written document but one in which he looks the judge in the face, Judge De Wet, and read the following statement from his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom…”I had been reading my speech and at this point I placed my papers on the defense table and turned to face the judge. The courtroom became extremely quiet. I did not take my eyes off Justice De Wet as I spoke from memory the final words; ‘during my lifetime, I have dedicated my life to the struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve, but, if need be, my lord, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.’ The silence in the courtroom was now complete. At the end of the address, I simply sat down. I did not turn and face the gallery, though I felt all the eyes on me. The silence seemed to stretch for many minutes, but in fact it only lasted no more than thirty seconds. From the gallery, I heard what sounded like a great sigh. A deep, collective ‘Mmmm’ followed by the cries of women.”
So, from that reading, the idea that he cherished democratic society. The other point is, that every person of South Africa should live in harmony, peace and have equal opportunities. These are the things that Mandela was dedicated to. And so, I was listening to one of the Indian accomplices Kathrada, he was saying that Mandela wrote this statement, Mandela’s own lawyer said that if he read this statement, they would surely put him to death. Mandela said no, that he was going to read the statement and Kathrada was saying that he was so worried. When they read it, the last section, the quote I just read, they implored him to edit it. Do you know what Mandela added to the last part? The statement “if needs be.” Those, to me, are the vision that Mandela had, not just for the Africans in South Africa but for all the people in South Africa as a country, Africa as a continent and the whole world. Equity, Opportunities, Justice and Democracy.
What challenges stood in his way as he forged his path toward that vision?
Well, there were a lot of problems. First of all, Mandela was born during the First World War in 1918. His mother was uneducated and his father was uneducated. But Mandela came from Royalty. He came from the Thembu people and his family was royalty. While his father was uneducated, he was also a chief and advisor, who used to pick the kings for the Thembu people. And Mandela's father died when he was only nine years old. Even his father had been rebellious, for example there was a time when he was ordered to go to court because the white magistrate cited an issue with cows and property damage and Mandela’s father told the judge that he had no right to summon him before the court. He was fired, they took away his stipend and took away his land and property. Mandela then goes to live with his relatives and his mother and goes to school. The first time he goes to school, the white teacher ases, “What is your name?” and he says “My name is Rolihlahla.” The teacher says “No, what is your Christian name?” and when Mandela says he does not have one, she gives him the name Nelson. He goes to this school, the first school where he is not treated like royalty and to another where the principal is named Wellington, related to the famous Duke Wellington who defeated Napoleon Bonaparte in the Battle of Waterloo and refuses to remove his hat for him, as black students were supposed to do. When he moves to high school he joins student politics, lobbies other freshmen to unseat the seniors and when not everybody votes, because of what he had experienced at the palace that he was living at when other leaders would come and they would talk, reaching a consensus. He used this method to get other students to vote. When not many students did vote he said no, I’m going to retry because not many students voted, he was expelled from the school for defying authority.
So, when Nelson Mandela leaves there he goes to Fort Hare, which was the Oxford, Cambridge and Yale of Africa at the time. While he was there, he began to understand some people would come to speak to them saying that they could become teachers but there were not any schools for them all to teach in. Some of them will become soldiers but there isn’t even military training or rank for Africans. So, Mandela begins to see this and starts meeting other people from outside South Africa as well as studying African history and he starts to see himself as an African. By the time he comes home, the king has arranged marriages for him and his cousin. And they run away, ending up in Johannesburg. There, he worked as policeman at one of the biggest mines, he was also a watchman and then he enrolled at the University of Witwatersrand. There, he met all these important people, like Walter Sisulu who became his political mentor. He worked at a small law firm, Sisulu wrote him a letter and he started working for a law firm, Watkins Skidelsky and Eidelman Law Firm as a clerk, doing the work of filing things. And meets a man there by the name of Gaur Radebe, another clerk but he was a member of the African National Congress and a member of the South African Communist Party. He is the one who introduced Mandela to township meetings, taking him to the National Congress meetings and from there Mandela becomes a member of the ANC.
Mandela is now studying for law school and while there he met a lot of liberal and moderate white students; he met a lot of Indian students and Colored students but he was the only Black student. On the first day, a white student left and when he sat close to him and his own teacher said that blacks and women were not meant for law school. So, he, again, faced that discrimination, but he had these other people who would become comrades in the long struggle. So, when Mandela joined the ANC, he didn't have the rank and it was one of the leaders at the time. Dr. Xuma did not want to rock the boat, he did not want to destroy his law practice and did not want any radical measures. Mandela and some others formed the Youth League, in order to put some fire into the ANC because they felt that the current leaders were not doing anything. And then you also have problems where there are differences of opinions on what way to go. In fact, in 1952, Mandela met with Chief Luthuli, who was a Zulu chief and government chief, and the first South African to receive the Nobel Peace prize. And they are meeting with Mandela and Mandela is saying, “we need to do this” and Chief Luthuli is saying that his actions are a bit more radical, and if he is even telling Mandela that if he thinks that because he does not agree with him then he is siding with the whites, maybe he should just resign instead. So, there were a lot of conflicts, but Mandela was very determined. He had some confidants whom he could listen to and he had some people who listened. So, by the time he was elected to the ANC executive, in 1947, he was beginning to rise up. Then he is elected to be the President of the ANC in Transvaal. He begins to build his position.
There is still a lot of fear here, you know, when people have been oppressed so much, it takes a lot of time to convince them that it is worth doing what needs to be done. So, we have a lot of negotiations, a lot of disagreements, for example; in the 1950’s a young man named Robert Sobukwe. He was a member of the ANC but he did not like the fact that Mandela has come around and he was trying to work with moderate or liberal whites while reading about Karl Marx. Not that he had become a communist, but he chose one defining thing about communism. He said that the Communists talked of revolution to change the government. So, to Mandela, a revolution was like music to a freedom fighter. And he argued that he was not a communist, saying that I am not a member of the communist party, not a card-carrying member. But it is only Communists who are willing to sit, talk, listen and eat with us. I am taking what is good from them. But the ideology behind Communism is about class and class struggle. Mandela believed there was no class struggle in South Africa, it was race. And so, if we could use the revolution part of it. Then, when he had to leave the country without a passport, he went to Ethiopia and many African countries that had become independent had met in Ethiopia to form the Organization of African Unity to bring all the African countries together and figure out how they could all help to liberate the rest of Africa. Mandela went to address them and Sobukwe had broken away from the ANC and formed the Pan-Africanist Congress because of the fact Mandela was working with Whites, Indians, and Coloreds. Sobukwe and others believed that only the Africans should fight for their freedom and these other people were just using or manipulating the Africans. He believed in Africa for Africans but we can see Mandela has this sort of open tent. In fact, in 1960 it was Sobukwe, the Pan-African Congress, who organized that protest where the government shot 69 people, the Sharpeville Massacre. Once that happened, Sobukwe was hailed as the liberator of South Africa. So, Mandela had to go to Ethiopia to address the leaders of newly independent Africa to tell them the difference between the ANC and Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) so they would support him. There was this inner conflict.
There were also cases where he had to endure a lot of banning, he would be banned from many things. At one point he could not attend his own child's birthday party because he could not be found to be in the presence of more than one person. He is restricted in Johannesburg for five years, banned from meeting with anyone and relying on newspapers just to know what is happening around him. After the Suppression of Communism Act, which happened after the Sharpeville Massacre when they banned to Communist party, the ANC, and was a very broad Apartheid Act which banned any social criticism of the Apartheid regime. As a result, nobody could read Mandela’s work since nobody could publish Mandela’s work. If you were found to be promoting Communism, you could be detained without trial since they suspended habeas corpus. Mandela sacrificed his life. At the Skidelsky law firm, Skidelsky predicted what was going to happen to Mandela. He told Mandela “Politics brings out the worst from man.” He was warned politics would be ugly, he could lose his practice as a lawyer, his clients, his marriage and his family, ending up in jail.
He was told this and that is exactly what happened. Mandela married his first wife, Evelyn Mase, they had two children, the second of which died when she was nine months old. Mandela was working, coming home when the children were asleep and leaving while the children were still asleep and his wife had told him that their son had asked “Where does Daddy live?” So, Mandela was an absent father and absent husband. Evelyn was married to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mandela was married to the struggle, so the marriage between them broke apart. Then, Mandela met Winnie Mandela and was again arrested, leaving his two little kids. He had to lose his law practice, he lost his freedoms, his family and everything. His mother died while he was in jail, he could not attend her funeral. His son died in a car accident and again, he could not attend the funeral. Mandela sacrificed everything for the freedom of the people in South Africa.
What do you think is the most important thing to tell your students about the legacy of Nelson Mandela?
Nelson Mandela is the ultimate iconic, larger than life, figure of the twentieth and twenty-first century. I say this because one; Mandela was offered conditional release. He was supposed to receive capital punishment but if you read Mandela’s book, the judge reduced their sentence to life in prison because he did not want to create Mandela the martyr. When Mandela is on Robben Island, the government sends the Minister of Justice to him that they will reduce his sentence and release him, if he will agree to renounce violence, not to return to Johannesburg, returning to the reserve in which he was born. Mandela points out that prisoners cannot negotiate and enter into contracts and maintains that he was not going to leave the jail on any condition, going back to Johannesburg once he leaves the jail. He also asserted that the ANC was not responsible for violence, it is the state who is responsible for violence on unarmed people. Mandela was released from jail unconditionally. When he started negotiating with the government about potential release and what would happen to South Africa, in his book, he titled that chapter Talking with the Enemy.
When Mandela came out of prison, while anyone might have avenged or tried to send the white people out of the country, Mandela stayed true to his word and sparked reconciliation. In fact, there were people in South Africa who had believed that Mandela was a sell-out. And though there were people unhappy with what Mandela had done, he continued to preach reconciliation. He created what he called the “Rainbow Nation.” So, reconciliation was very important because when someone puts you behind bars for twenty-seven years, you miss your whole life, you don’t see your children, you come out and you shake their hand…that is Humility at the highest center. Forgiveness and forgiving. The last value that I would add is honesty and the idea that you have to stand your ground as long as you are fighting for morality. What Mandela teaches is that you have to be persistent if you are on the right side of history. Mandela epitomizes the idea of Ubuntu, meaning Humanity. The idea of being humane. As the late great South African Reggae Legend Lucky Dube says in one of his songs, that God created humankind in his image. Nobody has the right to separate people since they are in his image, targeting the South African government. He says ”Different colors, one people, different colors.”