A Brief History of South Africa, with Dave Steward | Big Think

One of the things that's very important to understand about South Africa is that it is, like so many other African countries, an artificial entity created by the Brits. The South Africa that we know in its present borders is only 104 years old. And in 1990, when we went through our transition, it was only 80 years old. It was the creation of the British Empire. Britain acquired possession of most of the territories of Southern Africa in the nineteenth century in what one historian referred to as a fit of absentmindedness.

At the beginning of the century, it found itself in possession of a rag bag of territories which were difficult to manage and very expensive. The whole of the nineteenth century had been about the British conquest of Southern Africa. First of the Xhosa people in nine wars of the axe that finally led to, in 1856, a national suicide by the Xhosa people, where they decided that they would kill their cattle and destroy their crops on the advice of a prophetess who said that if they did this the British would be driven into the sea. But of course they weren't. And tens of thousands of Xhosa people died.

The second major people who were conquered in the nineteenth century by the Brits were the Zulus. The Zulus had been the dominant tribe in Southeastern Africa after the foundation of their nation by their great King Shaka. The British settled what is now the Natal Province of South Africa and they brought in white settlers and Indians to work on sugar farms. But they were very nervous about this powerful Zulu kingdom to the north of them, the Tugela River. And so they found a reason to declare war against the Zulus.

To their enormous surprise, at the Battle of Isandlwana in 1878, a whole British army was wiped out, 1,500 men. This was just a few years after the Little Bighorn, but it's five times as big. And the Zulus wiped out a whole British army. Of course, the Brits sent more troops and they defeated King Cetshwayo by the next year in 1879. The third people that the Brits conquered were the Afrikaners or the Boers, who had been settled in South Africa since 1652. They didn't like British rule, so in the nineteenth century, they trekked into the interior.

They founded two republics: the Republic of the Orange Free State and the Republic of The Transvaal. But then the people in the Free State made the big mistake of discovering the biggest diamond load in history at Kimberley. So the Brits annexed that. And then in the 1880s, the Transvaal Republic made the huge mistake of discovering the biggest gold-bearing body in the world, the famous Johannesburg reef. The result of this was that the British again sought a pretext for war with these two republics. That led to the Anglo-Boer War in 1899.

Now, the Anglo-Boer War was the biggest war that the British fought between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. They deployed over 438,000 imperial troops in South Africa. They conquered the two territories and then, having taken them over at the beginning of the twentieth century, they didn't know what to do with them. So they looked around the empire and said, "Oh well, look, in Canada we had this dominion. We had a federation there and that's worked very well. We did it in Australia and in different states. We created a federation there. Why don't we do that in Southern Africa?" So they did.

But they decided to keep some territories in and some territories out. They included the Zulus and the Xhosas of the new society, but they gave control of the new country, the Union of South Africa which was established in 1910, to the whites. Because at that time, black people in Africa, throughout the world, didn't really have political rights. So for most of the twentieth century, the big question in South Africa was not the relationship between whites and blacks but the relationship between English-speaking whites and Afrikaans-speaking whites.

The Afrikaans-speaking whites wanted to reestablish their republics. That was the driving force behind the National Party which came to power in 1948. Now they then instituted, or they—not racial segregation—they gave it a new name: apartheid. And it was straightforward racial domination. But before we become too morally self-righteous, that is what was happening in the rest of Africa: unacceptable, indefensible. It was what was happening in the South in the United States at the time: indefensible, unacceptable. But it wasn't unusual.

Then Africa started moving toward independence with Ghana in 1957. A new prime minister came to power in 1958 called Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, and he thought, "Okay, right. The British and the French are decolonizing in Africa. We'll do the same here. This country's only 60 years old, so we'll give the Zulu bits back to the Zulus. We'll give the Xhosa bits back to the Xhosas and the other national groups." And he had this great idea of unscrambling this South African omelet. That was called "separate development."

Everybody would be able to develop to the top level in their own societies. And this way, whites would be able to retain a right to national self-determination that they'd always had. Unfortunately, he was a sociologist, and you never, never put a sociologist in charge of countries because they will do social engineering. And this is a really good example of the negative effects of social engineering. The idea was, "Okay, we've got too many blacks here. Let's move them over here, you know." They don't want to, but you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.

And that was, I think, where a lot of the hardship in South Africa under apartheid came from. But it was an illusion. There was no way that you were gonna unscramble this omelet and unscramble the eggs. Economic growth was bringing more and more South Africans together in the economy in the so-called white areas. So it was a delusion, and Verwoerd was assassinated in 1966. His successor, John Foster, continued with this delusion for the next 10 years, 12 years until he was replaced by a guy called P.W. Botha.

P.W. Botha said, "Look, this isn't working. We're going to have to reform this." So he was a reformer. By 1986, he'd abolished a hundred apartheid laws, including some of the most repulsive mixed marriages, legislation limiting the ability of black South Africans to move from one place to another. He looked at the political rights of the Coloured and Indian minorities and adopted a new constitution in 1983, in terms of which Coloureds and Indians were brought into the same party as whites.

But of course, all of this raised the question and focused the question on the right of black South Africans to political self-determination. So at the beginning of the 1980s, white South Africans found themselves riding a tiger. The tiger was an increasingly articulate and increasingly economically aware black population. The rest of the world was shouting at South Africa—get off the tiger. The problem with riding a tiger is actually how you dismount it because the audience isn't really concerned whether you're gonna get eaten or not.

And white South Africans had concerns. They were concerned about the fact that they had had a right to self-determination. The Afrikaners had for 100, 200 years striven to rule themselves. They didn't want to rule anybody else. The question was how would they be able to maintain their right to national self-determination and a one man, one vote dispensation in South Africa. The second problem was the fact that democracy, one man, one vote elections hadn't worked very well in the rest of Africa at that stage.

I think by the mid-1980s, there'd been more than 90 coups d'état in the rest of Africa. So a lot of whites were worried—look yeah, the rest of the world tells us to get off the tiger, but if we do that, we have one election and then we have chaos. And then a third great concern was the role of the South African Communist Party within the ANC. During the 1970s and 1980s, virtually all of the members of the ANC's National Executive Committee were also members of the South African Communist Party.

And we knew that the Communist Party had adopted a two-phase revolutionary process. This was a classic Soviet model throughout the world. The first phase of the process is called national liberation, and it takes place under the aegis of the national liberation movement, which unites all factions in society opposed to the regime. It leads society to the national liberation. And at that stage, the Communist Party takes over as the vanguard of the process and leads on toward the establishment of a communist state.

Now, we weren't too keen about this. It wasn't just a question of Reds under beds. The Soviet Union was really interested in expanding its influence in Southern Africa. In the cold war, the main theater of activity was proxy wars as sponsored by the Soviet Union in third-world countries. So we had the problem of 50,000 Cuban troops to the north of us in Angola. We had, on the east, a Mozambique Communist government very closely allied to the Soviet Union. So we were very worried about the Communist dimension in all of this.

But then as he progressed, P.W. Botha found out that it wasn't going to be possible to reform apartheid. He couldn't really bring himself to accept that a new South Africa would have to be on a one man, one vote basis. That it would not be possible for whites to maintain any kind of sovereignty within the new South Africa because they were nowhere close to being in the majority. But this is something that he couldn't really accept.

During this period, however, a huge debate was taking place in the ruling National Party. And by the mid-1980s, by 1987, 1988, it had been accepted that we really needed transformation rather than reform. And P.W. Botha, I don't think, was a student of Tocqueville. He didn't realize that revolutions take place in situations of rising expectations. That it's when states begin to reform that they really take the lid off the pressure cooker. And that's what had happened in South Africa, so we had widespread unrest and protests in 1984 and 1985.

We had a state of emergency in 1986 which put the lid back on. But the National Party leadership then realized that look, there was not gonna be any way of doing this without transformation. And that's when de Klerk became the leader of the National Party in February 1989 after P.W. Botha had suffered from a stroke. De Klerk, in his first speech, said we need a totally changed South Africa. When he became president in September 1989, he immediately moved toward normalizing the situation.

He allowed protests in the streets, much to the delight of Archbishop Tutu. He released all of the remaining high-profile ANC prisoners except Mandela. He held talks with Mandela. And then on the second of February, 1990, he made a speech in parliament in which he opened the way to negotiations. He put it all on the table at once. This was very important because he surpassed expectations, and it meant that we could get the ball rolling in terms of a negotiation process.

The ANC was taken unawares. On the, I think, the ninth of February, de Klerk had a meeting with Mr. Mandela, who was then a prisoner, but under raised favorable circumstances he had his own house and so forth. And he said, "Mr. Mandela, we're releasing you on Sunday in two days." And Mr. Mandela's response was, "No, you can't possibly do that. We do not have enough time to make arrangements." And de Klerk said, "Look, we have to do it then, but you can choose where you want to be released: in Johannesburg or Cape Town."

And that was the first of many, many compromises that were made in the subsequent negotiations. The factors that made the negotiations possible included the following. First of all, by 1987, all sides to the conflict had accepted that there would not be an armed solution. Our own security forces, which were very powerful, realized that you could not maintain the situation through armed force forever.

We could have kept on for another two or three decades but under really negative circumstances. The ANC realized there wasn't going to be a revolutionary outcome. And it's only when parties accepted there will not be an armed outcome that you can have genuine negotiations. Something that hasn't happened yet, for example, in the Middle East. So that was the first green traffic light.

Then, in 1988, in fact in September 1987, our armed forces were involved in very severe conflict, in battles with Cuban and Russian-led forces in Southern Angola. The Battle of the Lumber River was probably the biggest set-piece battle in Africa since the Second World War. More than 5,000 Angolan troops died in that battle, hardly covered at all in the international media. But what it meant was that the Russians got tired of trying to find an armed solution in Southern Africa.

Gorbachev was more interested in Perestroika and Glasnost, and that was the turning of the tide. So, in 1988, there was an international agreement between the Angolans, Cubans, and the Americans regarding the withdrawal of the 50,000 Cuban troops from Angola. This opened the way for the independence of Namibia, immediately to the south of Angola, that South Africa had ruled since 1915 under a League of Nations mandate. The elections were supervised by the U.N. They worked well.

What it proved was that positive outcomes could be achieved in negotiations even with one's bitterest enemies, provided there's a proper constitutional framework. So that was traffic light two and three turning green. Underlying all of this, there had been huge shifts in economic relationships, social relationships in the 70s and 80s. In 1970, black South Africans' share of personal disposable income in South Africa was only about 20 percent. Whites' share was 72 percent. The rest was Coloured and Asian.

But by 1994, the whites' share had fallen to under 50 percent. Black share was up around 38 percent. Coloureds and Asians the rest. And this meant that relationships had changed also quite dramatically. The economy could not be run on the basis of the white workers alone. By the end of the 1970s, we had to make our first really big reforms, and they were labor reforms, and they gave genuine trade union rights to black South Africans.

But that also increased the bargaining power of black South Africans, incomes rose, and the economy became much more integrated. You had more and more black kids coming into the economy at higher and higher levels. So in your average bank, you would have had black tellers and white tellers doing the same jobs working beside one another. There's no way they're gonna go to segregated dining rooms. There's no way, ultimately, they're gonna go to segregated places of entertainment.

So it was a question of economic forces changing social relationships, putting unbearable pressure on outmoded constitutional relationships. And that, in fact, has been the process of development throughout the world.