"I've never met a nice South African" - The fall of Apartheid

Great Debates
1

If you failed to recognize it, the part in quotes on the title is the title of the 80s song by the Spitting Image team. It’s a parody in which a traveller tells his story of having seen extraordinary things, but he’s never met a nice South African. I am guessing that because of the constraint of the medium, he specifically refers to white South Africans (as the puppets in the video are white), which is an exageration in itself. But that leads me to my question: how popular was Apartheid among white SAs? Was it brought down by external pressure only, or was there internal pressure too (not of the “we’re hurt by the embargo, let’s free the n***ers”-type)?

I know a white SA who lives here, she left during the years before the fall of Apartheid, she’s mentioned that she has a black adopted son, but I don’t dare ask her what her opinion on the above matter is. She still seems kinda sensitive.

2

And by the way, as I just found out of Botha’s death I will need directions to his grave as soon as I finish polishing these dancing shoes.

3

Myself, I would take a six pack of beer and await the moment to release the Golden Flow from the Hammer of Thor.

4

The program was mainly popular among the Boers, who considered themselves “the white tribe” and as entitled to their own tribal areas as the black tribes of the Zulus and Lesothos, etc. Of course their tribal land included all the gold and diamonds.

Those of British ancestry were a lot less fond of the program.
All were nice (as were all the Boers I met at that time), but they had certain blind spots.
For example, they might support schools for the blacks and even hand-weave school uniforms for the blacks so they could look like proper English school children. But they would never consider it appropriate for their maids’ children to mingle with their own.

5

I read one account by an American writer who had visited apartheid-era South Africa. He said that many white South Africans saw the racial problem as insolvable - blacks are a majority so anything approaching democracy would give blacks control of the country. This “silent majority” of whites weren’t happy with the current situation of repressing blacks but they were afraid that any attempt to reform things would lead to a complete turnover where the blacks would repress the whites. So the majority of whites essentially became non-political - they stopped voting and participating in politics and allowed the relatively small handful of white “true believers” to dominate South Africa’s government.

6

Some South African anti-apartheid activists were white: Helen Sussman, Joe Slovo and Ruth First are the most famous. As According to Pliny said, the Anglos tended to be less hard-core apartheid supporters than the Afrikaaners, but there were some exceptions on both sides.

Rian Mallan, who comes from a stauch Boer background, wrote an excellent book called My Traitor’s Heart. André Brink was an opponent of the regime, as was Athol Fugard. Many whites who did actively oppose the regime but also did not feel comfortable with it, went into voluntary exile during the apartheid years. Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee are examples of this. Others behaved as Little Nemo described.

So yes, there were some “nice” (white) South Africans as well.

As to what brought down the regime, the internal dissent and external pressure was building up to the point where it might have become unsustainable anyway, but what really clinched it was the end of the cold war. South Africa no longer had many bargaining chips with the US and the UK once Angola and Mozambique were no longer perceived as a threat.

7

I read that book, it made me want to cry.

8

I would disagree. The regime, on its own, lifted the ban on the ANC, freed Mandella, ended Apartheid and cleared the way for a new constitution giving equal franchise to all South Africans under the leadership of F.W. de Klerk.

Having lived through the entire era, about 30 years, I would suggest that the perceived inferiority of blacks in the early sixties and the desire to ensure domestic stability led to the introduction of Apartheid. With the civil rights debate unfolding in America combined with the globalization of human rights and consistent opposition by the populace, the goal of stability was never realized. Never once have I read that South Africa was suffering from the boycotts economically.

You might find this 2005 speech byF.W. de Klerk very interesting in this regard.

9

The speech link takes me to WorldTimeZone.com.

10

I seem to have a problem copying the speech. I can give you a link to list of his speeches and links, and the one I had in mind was entitled “Doing the Right Thing”

11

I’ve actually got some distant relatives in South Africa, and I met one of them for the first time in Amsterdam a few weeks ago. (My grandfather was born in Lativa and came to the U.S. as an infant in 1905; another chunk of the family left for South Africa around the same time. There’s actually a decent-sized Baltic Jewish community in South Africa, particularly in Capetown, though many have since left for the U.S., U.K., Australia, and elsewhere).

The few of my relatives who have discussed apartheid with me were vehemently against it, but were rather well-off for the most part and not terribly politically active. Here’s an interesting Wikipedia article on the Jewish role in the anti-apartheid movement.

On the other hand, a good friend of mine, a very left-wing Afrikaner who spent chunks of his college years (early 1990s) volunteering to do literacy tutoring in the townships outside of Johannesburg, an activity which could easily have gotten him killed, would probably have a few things to say on the subject. I haven’t seen him in person in ages, and if he ever straightens out his visa situation, I hope to see him over Christmas and have a good long talk with him about it. (He apparently got himself kicked out of the ANC during the fall of apartheid, though as he explained, “hey, why am I not African? My family has been here for hundreds of years!” but well, the guy can’t help what his ethnic heritage is any more than black South Africans can.)

12

Well, “on its own”, if you exclude the active armed resistance…
The Apartheid government was forced to negotiate as much by the actions of the ANC’s armed wing as by sanctions, they did not have a change of heart, it took an internal “coup” in the National Party to even get them to start talking.

Apartheid stretched back a lot further than the 60s.

It was pretty popular. Sure, now everyone was secretly against it, just like no German’s Granddad was a Nazi and no Southerner’s Grandad was a Klansman, but I assure you, it was certainly popular and lots of people (English as well as Afrikaners) reaped the benefits. True, there was a white component to the dissident movement, but don’t for a minute believe there was a silent majority of opposition as well. Most people were complicit, in lots of little ways. The fear was always there, fear of the Swart Gevaar (“Black Danger”).

But why would any of you want to dance/piss on Botha’s grave? What did he ever do to you? Hell, I’ve got a sjambok scar on my leg & the memory of teargas in my eyes, and I don’t want to. Better he died a sad lonely old man in Wilderness. I holiday there every year, and I often pictured him looking out through the curtains at Coloured me and White MrsDibble walking along the beach hand in hadn, and impotently fuming. Sometimes, the best revenge is living well.

13

For what it’s worth, those whites were apparently right. The idea of South Africa as a mix of white and black is quickly dying, as whites are fleeing en masse.

14

Hmmmm, where to start.

In 1980, I turned 18. I grew up with Apartheid, it was simply the way life was. It was a legacy. That said, although I’m white, I’m also English speaking, which put me a little on the fringe. Apartheid was predominantly an Afrikaner philosophy, and many Afrikaners still hadn’t come to terms with the Anglo-Boer War, so the Engelsmanne were still to a large extent hated.

Yes, I benefitted from Apartheid, there is no doubt about that. I lived a better life, materially speaking, than the majority of the population. Did I regard “non-whites” as inferior? No. I can say that without hesitation. Did I see them as different, somewhat removed from my reality? Yes, because we did in fact live different lives, under different rules. Did I see that as unfair? Yes. Both ways, to certain extent. Whites were conscripted, blacks weren’t. Did I do enough to change it? Probably not. But then, what does an 18 year old know about politics, about life, about what really is the truth, and what is being fed to you by the powers that be?

One thing that must not be overlooked is that the “Swart Gevaar” (Black Threat) was not limited to our internal woes. Apartheid was undoubtedly a gross violation of human rights, but there was also the “Rooi Gevaar” (Red Threat). It was indeed a very real threat. The USSR was hell bent on global expansion at the time, and saw South Africa as a vital asset to their power. Hence they deployed in Angola what was arguably the largest Russian military force outside the USSR at the time. They saw the ANC as a useful tool, and supplied them with training and weapons. Their objective was to destabilize the region, and take control. This is what the South African bushwar was all about: stopping insurgencies from Angola into South west Africa/Namibia, and ultimately South Africa.

In my opinion, the fall of Communism also contributed greatly to De Klerk’s decision to release Mandela, and to start CODESA. There was no need to fear the Russians anymore.

Was Apartheid popular amongst whites? I would say, among Afrikaners, maybe. English speakers, not so much. The PFP was largely an English speaking party at the time, and if I recall, the official opposition. Was there a large disinterested, apathetic sector? Probably. A lot of people just got on with their lives and did the best they could. To them politics was like religion, a subject to be avoided after the third beer.

Nice white South Africans? Yes, most certainly they existed. Mostly they were kind, gentle souls trying to make sense of their lives and their environment, and the best they could do was treat “non-whites” with respect and kindness. Unreported, unseen, unsung.

15

Hi, my name is grimpixie and I’m a white South African…

I must have grown up just down the road from MrDibble - probably less than a mile or two (Rondebosch), but we would have been separated by a freeway (physically) and several million miles (thanks to the ideology of Apartheid). The only black people I knew were our maid who lived in a room at the back of the house, her son who was a playmate of ours when I was small, the garden boy (so called although he was an adult), the beggers that came to the gate, the diplomat’s son who went to our school for a year or two and the huddled masses that built tin shacks along the road to the airport. This was my normality. I didn’t realise how abnormal it was and what effect it had had on me until I was in the UK with my family during a gap year (so aged 18) - we drove past a building site, and I did a double take, as something was wrong, but it took me several minutes to identify what it was. All the labourers were white, and not black! It was not that I thought that they should be black, but that was my norm, and to recognise where my expectations lay was quite a shock. My family was liberal/progressive, voted for the opposition party and tried to help those in poverty through assorted charities, but we were the beneficiaries of Apartheid and it really isn’t easy to give up privilege when you’re used to it. I think we somehow felt that the poor needed to be raised to our level, that we shouldn’t have to give anything up to achieve equality.

I saw a statistic some years ago that showed that the Apartheid government spent 10 times as much on my education as it did on a black child’s and about twice as much as it did on a coloured/indian child’s. This surely helped me get a better education which meant that I could go to University and get qualification which I’m no longer using, but that’s a different story… :wink: But I also benefited from growing up in a (comparatively) rich family - my mother was a stay at home mom, so available to help with our development; we lived in an affluent neighbourhood on a quiet street and I had my own room in the house. By contrast, many black South Africans would have grown up in a tin shanty, with both parents either absent or working two jobs to keep the money coming in, with gang warfare going on and no electricity… This too was a direct consequence of Apartheid - it was the black man’s destiny to be the servant of the white man, indeed, that was all he was really capable of (or at least most of them, you always had a few clever ones). Keeping them in poverty was a way of maintaining control, of keeping them in their place.

I turned 20 in 1990, the year that the ANC was unbanned and Mandela released, and I often feel that I was too young to have been politically aware - but there were children being killed in the townships daily, so that’s a lie that I tell to make myself feel better. The Apartheid government was very good at controlling the media, and it was hard to find out what was really going on some of the time - when the riots were taking place in the coloured schools (where I’m guessing MrDibble got his sjambok scar) we really didn’t know what was going on, even though it was happening just a few miles away. Having said that, it was safer not to know - you were literally risking your life to get involved in the struggle - and it was easier not to know, there was no need for self-examination that way…

Grim

16

Just an extremely minor note, for those not already aware of it:

“Colored” is an old Southern (US) euphemism for “Black” (ethnically).

“Coloured” (the “-u-” is as de rigueur as the one in the British Labour Party) is South African usage for persons like Mr Dibble, of mixed white and Khoikhoi ancestry, who lived as a “civilized” (sic = non-tribal) minority before the end of Apartheid. They even had a separate small representation in the Cape Province legislature in the early years of apartheid, before that was blocked by the more extreme Afrikanders.

It’s one small element in the South African racists’ efforts to split their opposition and keep them under their thumbs as much as possible. And worth taking into acount.

“Coloured” in South Africa never meant “black” (=Bantu). It was a different, smaller, differently-discriminated-against group.

And, Mr Dibble, with every post I see from you, my respect for you as a person grows rapidly. Thanks for being a part of us; you raise the already high standard of Doperdom even higher. :slight_smile:

17

Polycarp, you’ll make me blush.