Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (103 page)

The second phase followed the appointment of the ideologist H.F.Verwoerd as Minister of Native Affairs in 1950. He was an intellectual, Professor of Social Psychology at Stellenbosch, who significantly was not an inward-looking old-style Boer but had been born in Holland and educated in Germany. He gave the system a new unity, especially after he became premier in 1958.
⁴⁵
His Bantu Education Act of 1954 imposed government control over all African schools, brought the missions to heel, introduced differential syllabuses and an educational system specifically designed to prepare Bantu-speakers for their place in society. At the same time, the systematic creation of separate living areas, the ‘Bantustans’, was begun. Segregation began to penetrate every aspect of life, including sport, culture and, not least, church services; and by 1959 the government had effectively segregated higher education.

During the years 1959–60, which in effect created the black African continent, many observers believed apartheid was doomed to collapse in the near future. That was Harold Macmillan’s view when he gave his ‘Winds of Change’ speech in Pretoria on 3 February 1960, followed almost immediately by the Sharpeville shooting, in which sixty-nine Africans were killed.
⁴⁶
It was thought that an Amritsar syndrome would now at last set in, that the tide of African
advance was irresistible, that the Boers would lose their will and their nerve. There was a flight of capital. South Africa left the Commonwealth. There was likewise a belief that apartheid, even on its own terms, was unworkable. It conflicted with many of the demands of the market economy, on which South Africa depended for survival. It conflicted, too, with the ineluctable logic of demography. The central blueprint for progressive apartheid was the so-called Tomlinson Report of 1956, probably the most elaborate description of and justification for large-scale social engineering ever put together. It stated that ‘the dominant fact of the South African situation’ was that there was ‘not the slightest ground for believing that the European population, either now or in the future, would be willing to sacrifice its character as a national entity and a European racial group’. And it proceeded from there to knock the country into an appropriate shape.
⁴⁷
The Report was criticized at the time for its absurd over-optimism, both about the ease with which industry could be sited near Bantu areas and about the growth of the black population. The accumulating evidence of the 1960s appeared to confirm these
caveats.
In 1911, when race policy started, Europeans were nearly a third of the black population (1,276,242 whites against 4 million blacks, 500,000 coloureds and 150,000 Asians). In 1951, when apartheid had got going, there were 2,641,689 whites, 8,560,083 blacks, 1,103,016 coloureds and 366,664 Asians. By 1970 the whites had risen only to 3,752,528, the blacks had jumped to 15,057,952, the coloureds to 2,018,453 and the Asians to 620,436. It was calculated that, by the year 2000, Africans and coloureds would outnumber whites by ten to one.
⁴⁸
This made the relative areas assigned to whites and blacks seem unrealistic, particularly since the creation of industrial jobs near Bantu areas was proceeding at only 8,000 a year against the Tomlinson projection of 50,000. The moral inequities of the system were gruesomely apparent. By 1973 only 1,513 white families had been forced to move out of the ‘wrong’ race areas, while 44,885 coloured and 27,694 Indian families had been engineered out of their homes, some of them occupied since the days of the Dutch East India Company.
⁴⁹
There was a constant process of African squatting in forbidden areas, accompanied by equally constant bulldozing, under heavily armed police and army guard, horribly reminiscent of Russia, 1929–32. Presiding over this exercise in perverted Utopianism were Boer intellectuals, trained in the social sciences. Granted its internal contradictions and implausibilities, and the fact that African, and increasingly, world opinion were mobilized against it, the experiment seemed destined to collapse.

Yet the lesson of Soviet collectivization has been that such schemes, however morally and economically indefensible, can endure, if pursued with sufficient ruthlessness and brute physical power. Moreover, there
were certain factors working in favour of the regime. Like Russia, South Africa is immensely rich in minerals: gold, coal, diamonds, manganese and copper (in order of importance), plus antimony, asbestos, chromium, fluor-spar, iron ore, manganese, mica, platinum, phosphates, tin, titanium, uranium, vanadium, zinc and many others.
⁵⁰
Far from declining, as had been predicted in 1960, the South African economy flourished mightily from 1962 onwards, throughout the boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. When the boom ended in 1973–4, world inflation produced a price-revolution in gold from which South Africa, the world’s largest producer (gold forms more than half the total of her mineral wealth), was the principal beneficiary. While incomes over virtually all the rest of Africa, including those of her most dedicated and active enemies, fell, South Africa’s rose. Between 1972 and 1980, for instance, a standard sixty-pound gold ingot rose in retail value from $250,000 to $2.5 million, a tenfold increase.
⁵¹
The price-revolution benefited government revenues by over $1 billion a year and also provided funds for a huge rise in capital investments.

This steady growth in South Africa’s income in the two decades after the ‘Winds of Change’ struck the continent enabled the regime to construct shelters against it in the form of a self-contained arms industry, which made South Africa virtually independent of reluctant foreign suppliers, and a military nuclear-weapons programme. By the early 1980s South Africa was spending $2.5 billion annually on defence, but this was no more than 6 per cent of
GNP
, a tolerable burden (by this point many black and Arab African countries were spending 25–50 per cent of
GNP
on their armed forces).
⁵²
South African forces were periodically involved in maintaining security in South-West Africa, a former German colony Smuts had failed to secure outright at Versailles in 1919, South Africa being given it in trusteeship, a formula which (by another irony) he had invented himself. But in general South Africa survived with remarkably little damage, either to the military power or to the morale of the white ruling class, the decolonization by force of Angola, Mozambique and Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) during the 1970s.

The Boer nationalists, as opposed to Smuts, had always criticized his unrealized scheme to create a ‘great white dominion’ including Rhodesia and Mozambique, and running from the Cape up to Kenya. They argued in the 1920s that this would merely ‘engulf the whites in a future black Africa. In the 1970s their caution was proved justified, when the ratio of white to black even within South Africa fell to 1:5. The South African regime refused to commit its own fortunes to the preservation of the crumbling bastions of colonialism to the north. When, in due course, they fell, the white
laager
contracted. This brought triumphant, militant and armed black nationalism to South Africa’s own frontiers, backed by overwhelming majorities in the
UN
,
the Organization of African Unity and a growing measure of Soviet-bloc physical support, chiefly in the form of Cuban troops and advisers.

Yet the ‘confrontation’ between South African apartheid and black nationalism was verbal and political rather than military, still less economic. The nearer the African states were to South Africa, the more they felt the pull of her immense and prosperous economy and the less inclination did they display in carrying their resolve to destroy apartheid further than words. Ordinary Africans voted with their feet, not indeed in favour of apartheid but for the jobs the South African economy provided. At the time of the boycott organized by the
AUO
in 1972, the South African Chamber of Miners employed 381,000 blacks, one-third of whom came from north of latitude 22 degrees S, and one-third from Mozambique. The number of blacks coming to South Africa increased steadily in the 1970s, not least because real wages for blacks in the Rand rose rapidly at a time when they were falling in most of black Africa. The neighbouring regimes called themselves ‘front line states’ and kept up the anti-apartheid rhetoric, but in practice the governments of Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe and, above all, Mozambique made themselves systematic collaborators with the apartheid system by deliberately increasing their exports of labour to the Rand. Malawi, Botswana and Zambia pulled out of the
AUO
boycott; other states simply broke it, as they had earlier broken the boycott of Southern Rhodesia. South Africa built Malawi’s new capital at Lilongwe and the Cabora Bassa dam in Mozambique; and when one front-line president, Seretse Khama of Botswana, fell ill, he was immediately flown to a ‘whites only’ hospital in Johannesburg.
⁵³

It is significant that by the early 1980s the most active of South Africa’s enemies was remote Nigeria, the only major black oil producer. Its royalties, which exceeded $23 billion in 1980, preserved it (as gold did South Africa) from the 1970s recession and gave it the luxury of preserving an independent foreign-economic policy. But states south of the Congo and the Great Lakes could not resist the pull of the Rand magnet and, in practice, adjusted their ideological policies accordingly.

In any case, differences between Pretoria’s policy and those of most black African states were more theoretical than real. All African states practised racist policies. In the 1950s and 1960s, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia expelled more than a quarter of a million Jews and ghettoed the few thousand who remained. In the 1960s the United Republic of Tanzania expelled its
Arabs or deprived them of equal rights. In the 1970s Asians were expelled from most states in the Horn and East-Central Africa and they were discriminated against everywhere; even in Kenya they were threatened with expulsion in 1982. In most cases race-discrimination was a deliberate act of government policy rather than a response to popular demand. When the Uganda government expelled the Asians in 1972 the motive was to provide its members and supporters with free houses and shops, not to please ordinary black Ugandans, whose relations with the Asians had been friendly.
⁵⁴
Anti-Asian racism was usually propagated by official or semi-official newspapers controlled by governments. In the 1970s they regularly published racist material: that Asian women had feelings of superiority, hence their refusal to sleep with black men; that Asians smuggled currency out of the country in suitcases; that Asian businessmen were monopolists and exploiters; a typical headline read ‘Asian Doctors Kill their Patients’.
⁵⁵

From independence onwards, most black African states practised anti-white discrimination as a matter of government policy. In the second half of the 1970s Kenya and the Ivory Coast were virtually the only exceptions. Houphouët-Boigny, President of the latter, drew attention to anti-white racism at the
OAU
, telling the other heads of state:

It is true, dear colleagues, that there are 40,000 Frenchmen in my country and that this is more than there were before Independence. But in ten years I hope the position will be different. I hope that then there will be 100,000 Frenchmen here. And I would like at that time for us to meet again and compare the economic strength of your countries with mine. But I fear, dear colleagues, that few of you will be in a position to attend.
⁵⁶

But the commonest, indeed the universal, form of racism in black Africa was inter-tribal, and it was this form of racism, for which one euphemism is social control, which led a growing number of African states, in the 1960s and still more in the 1970s, to exercise forms of social engineering not unlike apartheid. One of the merits of colonial rule in Africa (except where white supremacy policies dictated otherwise) was that it geared itself to tribal nomadic movements, both cyclical and permanent. It permitted a high degree of freedom of movement. As populations rose, and pressures on food resources increased, this
laissez-faire
policy became more difficult to maintain. But it was a tragedy that, when independence came in the early 1960s, the successor-states chose to imitate not colonial-style liberalism but white-supremacist control. The Bandung-Leninist doctrine of the big, omnicompetent state joined in unholy matrimony with segregationism. But of course the Soviet state had always controlled
all internal movement and settlement, not least its own Asian tribes. Leninist and South African practice fitted in comfortably together. Throughout black Africa, the documentation of social control – work permits, internal and external passports, visa requirements, residence permits, expulsion orders – proliferated rapidly with independence. And, as South African experience testified, once documents appear, the bulldozer is never far behind. In the early 1970s it emerged in many places in West Africa, to shift squatters from coastal towns back into the interior.
⁵⁷

The great drought which struck a dozen Central African countries near the desert-bush border in the 1970s increased nomadic movement and so the practice of violent social control. There had long been racial enmity along the desert line, since nomadic tribes (especially Touregs) had seized southerners for slavery. One of the first acts of independent Mali, which straddled the line, was to massacre its northern Touregs. When drought-relief funds became available, Mali (and other states) used them to finance control systems. As the Secretary of the International Drought Relief Committee in Mali put it: ‘We have to discipline these people and to control their grazing and their movements. Their liberty is too expensive for us. This disaster is our opportunity.’
⁵⁸
Control of movement, in Mali and elsewhere, was accompanied by other forms of social engineering. In such states development plans were deliberately drawn up in the late 1960s and 1970s to force everyone, nomads included, into the money economy by taxation. They did not differ in essentials from the old forced-labour system devised by the French, Spanish, Portuguese and Belgian colonizers.
⁵⁹