Part three
ANALYSIS OF RACE MAKING must address both racial ordering from above and opposition from below. Neither alone can be understood without the other, for the two emerge in an ongoing dialogue. Racial domination is shaped by its subject population, and that population’s beliefs and actions are shaped by rules impinging upon it. Out of such continual contestation, identities, discourse, and practice are reinterpreted and reconfigured. But acknowledging this dynamic does not in itself tell us very much about why and how race making proceeds. I here turn to specifying this process from below, having outlined the process from above. The order of this analysis is not meant to suggest that the racial identity, ideology, and mobilization of blacks can be reduced to a mere response to racial ordering from above. Such identity and action is self-determined, evident before racial domination is fully established, and continuing after such rules are abandoned. For the purposes of this book, this placement of analysis allows an assessment of the relationship between the two sides of race making with the framework of officially imposed racial ordering clearly established.
Racial identity among blacks has deep historical and cultural roots. Much as white prejudice existed before modern political and racial orders were constructed, and helped shape them, so a degree of black solidarity and mobilization predates the modern era. Early black identity and activism informed later processes, though it was not itself fully determinant of varying outcomes. For instance, before abolition Brazilian slaves identified themselves as such and acted accordingly, though these protests declined during the heyday of racial democracy. Still, race making from below in Brazil, as in South Africa and the United States, built upon past foundations.
Where it was enacted by state policy, racial domination further solidified black racial identity and provoked and influenced mobilization. Enforced boundaries and formal exclusion from the nation-state reinforced black solidarity in opposition to adversity, informed by cultural resources and social practices. Analysts of social movements have often ignored this crucial issue of identity formation, which I argue is prior to and determines the effects of resource allocation and political opportunities, more often the focus of study. And once identity is more consolidated, the strategy, tactics, and goals of black protest – my shorthand for opposition to racial domination that often included white allies – were themselves in part shaped by imposition from above, in an ongoing dynamic. As racial orders were refined in response to party politics and economic conflict among whites, blacks also refined their solidarity as the basis for action. Not coincidentally, when racial domination was consolidated, black solidarity and protest also reached their high points, though divisions remained. In contrast, the absence of official rules of racial domination in Brazil may have muted racial identity and thereby constrained mobilization. But even there, opportunities for protest were both created and exploited by blacks, building on traditions and institutions.
Analysis of race making must also include an assessment of the “endgame” and its aftermath. Black protest and white vulnerability to such protest were heightened by industrialization, migration, and urbanization, which concentrated blacks and increased their leverage against the racial orders under which such structural changes had occurred. Rising black protest in South Africa and the United States then succeeded in forcing an end to apartheid and Jim Crow respectively, albeit in a protracted and uneven process. And just as white racism and discrimination remain, so do black racial identity and protest. In the absence of official rules of racial domination against which blacks united and acted, many African-Americans in particular have tended to assume their own solidarity as natural, much as whites had done earlier. Such efforts to essentialize race can only be understood in the context of ongoing structure and political contestation. And what about Brazil? Racial identity and protest appear to be on the rise there, albeit still at lower levels than during the South African anti-apartheid and U.S. civil rights movements. Race making in its various forms continues; identity formation is never complete.
8
BLACK RACIAL IDENTITY MOBILIZATION, AND THE NEW SOUTH AFRICA
Early protest by black South Africans was both strengthened and weakened by its indigenous nature. Ties to the land and existent social structures provided the basis for early identity and organization, but these were largely divided by persistent language, regional, and ethnic distinctions, and as elsewhere even more broken up by dispersion. Only as white rule and a unified state were consolidated fully did black South Africans find commonality in their experiences. Cross-language, cross-ethnic, and cross-class identity emerged, as did more united mobilization. Contacts with African-American activists and growing industrialization and urbanization continually reinforced black South Africans’ efforts. Divisions remained, but were gradually eclipsed by racial identity and action in opposition to white rule, to which state authorities were forced to respond.
Consolidation of Racial Identity and Protest
Indigenous resistance to white domination predates the formal establishment of a unified South African state. Africans often either fought or sought to escape from the imposition of white rule and exploitation after the arrival of the Dutch and later the British. Africans north of the Kei River waged war against the British during the nineteenth century, a conflict resulting in considerable bloodshed. Most notably, in 1879 an entire British regiment was defeated by the Zulus.1 In that same year, the “semi-political” Native Education Association was founded, with one of its early presidents also serving as editor of the Isigidimi Sama Xhosa newspaper. Later John Tengo Jabavu used his editorship of Isigidimi, and then of his own paper, Imvo Zabantsundu (Native Opinion), to coordinate African political activity.2 By the 1880s, a separatist religious movement of Ethiopianism had emerged, encouraged by earlier-established U.S. black churches and an 1898 visit to South Africa by Bishop Henry Turner.3 Such mobilization was described in 1905 as evidence of “an aggressive spirit” with which white South African officials had little sympathy.4
Such early resistance was generally neither described nor understood by participants as being based on racial identity. It in no sense diminishes the significance of such resistance to note that it remained scattered throughout what was to become South Africa and was understood by blacks and whites as various expressions of disparate ethnic assertiveness. As colonial policies played “tribal” rulers and factions off against each other, they reinforced such groupings and provoked divided responses.5 With no central state authority yet imposing pervasive racial domination per se, little unifying cross-ethnic racial identity or mobilization emerged. Nevertheless, practical barriers to representation and unequal treatment “aroused African self-consciousness through protest.”6 For instance, 1882 saw the founding of Imbumba Yama Nyana, an explicitly political African organization.7 But despite such efforts, self-consciousness and protest still remained largely localized and ethnically distinct in form, amid pervasive deprivation, oppression, and early discrimination. With potential black resistance so divided, the expansion of white rule proceeded.
The end of the Boer War proved a turning point in establishing pervasive official racial domination to reconcile Afrikaners and English within a unified white racial identity and nation. A unified and strong state acted to refine the racial order, assuming that long-divided blacks could be suppressed. Belittling the viable threat from blacks and acting accordingly, the state enacted policies that gradually consolidated the racial identity of its own adversary. Official policy reinforced the nationwide category of racially defined natives, gradually unifying and provoking further mobilization among Africans. Racial domination constructed the category of a subordinated race as such, in effect forcing previously disparate groups into a common identification. In accordance with the Treaty of Vereeniging and British efforts to unify the white races, the South Africa Act effectively excluded “natives” from the franchise, though Cape coloureds retained the vote. The rude shock of entrenched exclusion and white racist unity further propelled unified African responses and protest. Noting the oppression of blacks in America, South African blacks described themselves as being Jim Crowed.8
In the aftermath of the founding of a consolidated state, an opposition based on race emerged more strongly. Blacks well understood that the union of 1910 united only the whites.9 In anticipation, what was to become the African National Congress (ANC) was formed in 1909. According to the ANC’s founding president at its first meeting, the Congress was
for the purpose of creating national unity and defending our rights and privileges as subordinated Africans rather than as distinct tribes. . . . The white people of this country have formed what is known as the Union of South Africa – a union in which we have no voice .. . We have called you therefore to this Conference . . . for the purpose of creating national unity and defending our rights and privileges.10
ANC President Pixley Seme further called for “all the dark races . . . to come together,” overcoming interethnic “divisions . . . [and] jealousies.”11
A consolidated state reinforcing racial domination not only brought together Africans across ethnicity, but also gradually united Africans and coloureds sharing common grievances. ANC membership was open only to Africans, but discrimination also imposed on coloureds, albeit in different forms, encouraged cooperation between the ANC and the predominantly coloured African Political Organization.12 The common destiny of those suffering from some form of political exclusion and segregation was portrayed as the basis for united action in response.13 The urban mixing of Africans from different ethnic groups and provinces, along with coloureds, further encouraged a sense of solidarity undermining the divide-and-rule tactics of the state.14 The solidifying of racial domination had begun to foster a common racial identity and protest among those dominated, buttressed by earlier organization. Race was imposed and then embraced as a basis of resistance.
In its early years, the ANC remained hopeful that earlier British commitments to reform would be honored. The result was a relatively constrained form of protest. Dominated by lawyers, other mission-educated professionals, and chiefs, the ANC petitioned the British crown as “loyal and humble subjects.”15 Only the most polite references were made to Africans’ services for the British in the First World War and to the expectation that these services would be rewarded.16 As it had after the Boer War, such mild petitioning fell on deaf ears. Still, the ANC remained in loyal opposition, later calling for “the ultimate creation of a South African nation . . . [and] the extension of the rights of citizenship to all groups.”17 The ANC recognized that “the colour bar struck the death-knell of Native confidence in what used to be called British fair play. That cow of Great Britain has gone dry.”18 But still influenced by earlier British promises, they remained expectant and did not quickly or easily abandon their polite efforts. Popular support for the Congress remained low, with expectations of reform from above mollifying the populace and restraining mass protest demanding such reform.
Consistent with earlier divisions and its call for inclusion in a polity implicitly recognized as legitimate, the ANC kept its distance from non-Africans and more radical groups. Most notable among these was Clement Kadalie’s Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), a militant union that sought to unify coloured and African workers brought into the workforce by increased demands for labor during and after the First World War.19 Kadalie proclaimed that “we natives . . . are dealing with rascals – the Europeans are rascals,” and criticized the “good boys” of the ANC for remaining respectful of the British.20 Prime Minister Hertzog later sought to co-opt the ICU and its coloured constituency by advocating further preferences for coloureds aimed at dividing the potential unity of nonwhites. Mean while, Indians organized separately, following Gandhi’s early efforts at mobilization in South Africa.21
Somewhat mollified by the growth of a small black middle class amid emerging industrialization, the best the ANC could muster was to call again for common citizenship.22 But with white party competition bringing further reinforcements of segregation and exclusion, even this modest effort failed, bringing the ANC to the nadir of its influence.23 Mobilization remained muted under elite African leadership more interested in reconciliation with whites than in challenging consolidated white rule.
As in the United States, the Second World War further raised expectations for reform among black South Africans, who became increasingly vocal in their demands. Hertzog lost power to Smuts, who brought South Africa into the war against Nazism, aligning it, among other things, with the Atlantic Charter reaffirming the Allies’ antiracism. As Smuts pulled back from reforms after 1943, a new generation of ANC leaders sought to increase the pressure with a shift from polite petitioning to mass mobilization. The ANC Youth League, formed in 1944, advocated “Africanism” and “national consciousness and unity,” revitalizing the ANC.24 The Youth League pushed for further unification of subordinated Africans and encouraged greater mass participation by an increasingly urbanized population, expecting that the greater reliance on black labor would provide leverage with the state.
The ANC’s long-standing patience in requesting reforms was most dramatically abandoned after the 1948 election of the National Party and its imposition of apartheid. White nation-state building and racial domination reached a high point. Segregation was reinforced, systematized, and extended. Prior petitioners were convinced that they had been protesting too feebly, reinforcing the Youth League’s argument for a more assertive strategy of opposition.25 Led by the Youth League, this more militant stance was advocated and implemented. In 1949, the Youth League’s Programme of Action, calling for massive protests and nonviolent disobedience, was approved. This eventually led to the Defiance Campaign of protests in 1952, which boosted ANC membership above 100,000.26 By then the Youth League officials had taken control of the ANC as a whole.
The more apartheid was entrenched, the more the opposition coalesced. Race was fast becoming the sine qua non of South African society.27 The reinforced racial order further fostered a common identity among its victims and a more formal coalition of its opponents. As segregation applied in varying forms also to coloureds and Asians, representatives of these groups moved increasingly toward an opposition alliance with the ANC.28 The banned Communist Party joined this alliance, assuming that racial domination would have to be ended before class exploitation could be challenged, an objective not necessarily shared by all within the alliance. That such varying goals were incorporated within “the great tent” of what became the Congress Alliance suggests that many shared Mandela’s view: “I was far more certain in those days of what I was against than what I was for.”29 In 1955, the Alliance adopted the Freedom Charter, calling clearly for nonracial democracy, but somewhat vague on the potentially divisive issues of tactics and economic redistribution. Opposition in itself provided a firm foundation for unity, feared by state officials who were increasingly concerned that Africans were becoming more and more politically conscious.30 When such unity found expression in a further explosion of protest after the Sharpeville massacre of peaceful pass law protestors in 1960, the state banned the major opposition groups. The ANC then established itself in exile as a nascent guerrilla movement.
Despite more militant tactics, the ANC and its allies still remained relatively modest in their goals. On economics, the Freedom Charter called for nationalization of the mines, but not for a more general challenge to basic property relations. The Communist Party advocated a national democratic revolution as a precondition for a more fundamental economic transformation. The ANC embraced the former without committing itself to the latter.31 The pragmatic logic of this position was that redistribution could only be planned and carried out after the poor majority had been included in the polity, and that only limited change could be achieved at once.32 Critics suggested that the omission of economic redistribution from immediate ANC goals instead suggested a continued appeasement of the white establishment, but the ANC argued that its demand for political inclusion was by itself a radical challenge to the racially ordered state and white privilege.
The ANC did not simply call for inclusion of those racial categories excluded by apartheid, but also advocated that all such categories be abandoned in a nonracial state. This idealistic stance did not preclude the ANC from recognizing racial categories as they had been imposed. Racially defined, distinct groups were incorporated into the ANC alliance. But the goal of nonracialism did imply that such distinctions would be abandoned after inclusive national democracy had been achieved. And Marxists assumed that class then would become the more pressing identity and issue, forcing economic transformation. A more radical ideological challenge to racial domination is difficult to imagine, but nonracialism can also be seen as a response to state policies. The ANC remained committed to the principle of nonracialism, confident that with a black majority the extension of democracy in itself would ensure redress.
Even within the opposition, not all agreed with the ANC’s ideology and strategy. More militant African nationalists within the Youth League were dismayed by the ANC’s alliance with non-Africans. In 1959, this group broke away from the ANC to form the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), open only to those giving “primary loyalty” to Africa and thereby effectively excluding coloureds, Asians, and whites. The PAC attacked the ANC’s lack of commitment to economic change, but also dismissed Communism as a white ideology inconsistent with African traditions of communalism and sharing. They also disparaged nonracialism for its abandonment of African nationalism, which the PAC embraced as a powerfully assertive mobilizing ideology. The Africanists assumed that their rhetoric would inspire mass insurrection, which later the PAC’s small guerrilla activities were intended to spark. The ANC also used violence, concluding that a minority regime held in power by force would not succumb to previously attempted Gandhian tactics. In later years, the ANC maintained civil disobedience while it pursued an organized guerrilla campaign, targeting state installations not so much to foment insurrection as to unsettle the white regime.
Ideological and strategic disagreements and basic organizational competition produced considerable ill will between previous allies divided in the ANC and PAC.33 In part, this tension reflected the defensiveness of those within the ANC who earlier had been or remained sympathetic to African nationalism. They well understood the emotional drawing power of Africans acting alone as a response to heightened repression. And in its early years, the PAC did give the ANC much to worry about, growing quickly in size. But during the decades of exile that followed its banning with the ANC in 1960, the PAC was torn by leadership disputes, corruption, and lack of funding, leaving it weakened by the time it was again legalized in 1990. By contrast, the ANC remained well funded and organized, its popularity bolstered by more effective guerrilla activities and by the carefully nourished image of Nelson Mandela in prison. The ANC would emerge from banning and exile with much greater strength and popularity.
The 1960s were the high point of the apartheid state. Opposition had been largely crushed and Verwoerd’s systematic design of racial domination was put into place with the construction of separate homelands for excluded Africans. Asians and coloureds found themselves increasingly subject to apartheid regulations that treated them more as subordinates than intermediaries. Demands for skilled industrial labor fed the growth of urban areas, schools, and universities, all officially separated by racial groups. For instance, the number of Africans enrolled in separate residential universities rose from 619 in 1959 to 2,604 in 1971 and to 12,204 by 1982, with the number of such institutions growing from one in 1959 to five by 1982. The number of Africans employed in manufacturing grew from 308,332 in 1960 to 780,914 by 1980.34 Such development and dependence on black labor were seen by the state as consistent with, or at least containable within, apartheid.
Unintentionally, however, apartheid and economic growth served to concentrate blacks, exacerbating long-standing white fears of the black majority. Concentration in urban areas made organization more feasible; in segregated townships, factories, and educational institutions, blacks met across ethnic lines, providing a locus and unifying target for seeing in each other a common identity. Speaking on behalf of a new generation of blacks coming of age under apartheid, Steve Biko argued that
every . . . facet of my life [has] been carved and shaped within the context of separate development. . . . What blacks are doing is merely to respond to a situation in which they find themselves the objects of white racism. We are in the position in which we are because of the color of our skin. We are collectively segregated against – what can be more logical than for us to respond as a group?35
The Black Consciousness movement founded by Biko in 1969 embraced imposed racial identity as a basis for resistance, defining and including as “black” all those subject to apartheid. Thus, state consolidation of racial domination also consolidated opposing racial identity cutting across cultural differences and the official categories of African, coloured, and Asian. Self-deluding official views and biased survey findings that most coloureds did not favor an alliance with blacks missed the powerful emergence of just such an alliance.36 The high-water mark of racial domination produced a correspondingly high point of unified racial identity, thereby inspiring mobilization.
The Black Consciousness (BC) movement had organizational components, but was most prominently an ideological expression of racial unity and opposition. BC employed the state’s own rhetoric to reinforce popular consciousness of racial domination and the separation of black and white. Official projections of inferiority were reversed by positive expressions of black unity. The movement spread the message that being black didn’t mean being inferior. BC asserted racial identity as a basis for mobilization, using the experience of imposed domination as its defining and unifying force rather than defining race with a vision of biological or cultural coherence. Black Consciousness was intended “to cope with colour oppression located in power. We are a group of the oppressed,” as Bishop Mames Buthelezi later said.37 Fearing a more direct mass confrontation with the repressive state, the BC movement focused on spreading racial identity defined by and opposed to domination.
At first the authorities saw BC’s exclusion of whites as an acceptance of the racial distinction imposed by apartheid, as compared with the ANC’s advocacy of nonracialism. “The government hailed the formation of [BC] as consistent with separate development.”38 But as the true meaning of Black Consciousness became clearer, the state moved to crush this positive assertion of racial opposition and to denigrate it as an ideological import inspired by the Black Power movement in the United States. The idea of BC was not as easily crushed as its organizational expressions, for the state’s own ideology and repressive policies reaffirmed racial unity. By 1976, BC rhetoric converged with student opposition to the state’s imposition of Afrikaans school instruction for blacks, leading to the widespread Soweto uprising.
The state violently repressed the Soweto uprising and later banned the BC movement, forcing a reevaluation within the opposition. The very fact of the uprising suggested that the goal of inspiring greater assertiveness and unity had largely been achieved. But its supression also demonstrated that such assertiveness provided little cover once bullets started flying. Many BC activists, influenced by growing links with the ANC, concluded that a less ideological and more mass-based, locally organized resistance was now necessary. The state unintentionally encouraged this new strategy when in 1979, seeking to appease its opponents, it instituted reforms that provided breathing space for greater mass organization. Ironically, the emerging mass organizations benefited from reforms while publicly rejecting them to further bolster their popular appeal. For example, when P.W. Botha later proposed a new tricameral parliament intended to attract back the loyalty of coloureds and Asians by giving them limited representation, activists used the proposal as the impetus for a national unification of localized resistance under the United Democratic Front (UDF), founded in 1983. The state’s gambit to win over coloureds and Asians subsequently failed, with a majority of those constituents refusing to vote for the new parliament, thereby reaffirming the unity forged under BC and in the process channeling it into a highly organized national movement.
The UDF was distinguished from BC not only by its greater focus on mass organization over ideology, but also by its conscious return to the tradition of nonracialism. UDF affiliates included African, coloured, Asian, and white groups. In part, this return to nonracialism was pragmatic: by including whites, the UDF could attract financial support needed for its mass organization and publicity. It also demonstrated a return to prominence of ANC loyalists, though “the UDF was afraid to openly claim ties to the ANC,” which was still banned.39 And nonracialism reflected the Marxist leanings of the many within the UDF, the ANC, and the unions who saw any retained focus on race as an impediment to class consciousness and mobilization.
Resurgent nonracialism was also influenced by a shift in state policy. Reforms of petty apartheid and the inclusion of nonwhites in the new parliament signaled a loosening of racial domination and an effort by the state to reach out for new allies across the color line. The UDF responded by denigrating these reforms but also offered a countereffort at inclusion, inviting whites instead to join in the opposition to apartheid. At the same time, the UDF was careful not to distance itself too much from the mobilizing potential of racial assertiveness. The resulting ideological vagueness allowed the UDF to incorporate diverse interests and motivations, much as the ANC had benefited from a vague inclusiveness to attract a wide alliance.
Mass mobilization exploded throughout the 1980s, including rent and consumer boycotts, worker stayaways, protest meetings, and marches. Ensuing destabilization caused more than $69 million in damage by 1986 alone, and left more than a thousand dead each year from 1985 through 1989.40 But the more the state attacked UDF activists, even violently, the more it created sympathy and gave credibility to the opposition, feeding further mobilization. And when state of emergency regulations and bannings reduced UDF activity, legalized trade unions representing more than two million workers took the lead in maintaining popular pressure through massive stayaways that disruped the economy. White labor in the mines and elsewhere had been replaced steadily by cheaper blacks, and so had lost some of its previous leverage. Where before a white labor force had posed a threat, now a black one did.41
Rising black solidarity and protest, itself shaped by the prior nation-state configuration, now challenged the white nation-state. Africans were increasingly unified by the racial terms of their domination, with coloureds and Asians joining in black identity as segregation and apartheid were applied to them. The more the state sought to unify whites by harsher exclusion of blacks, the more it forced blacks to identify themselves as such. Mobilization building on this black identity also responded to the patterns of domination. When the racial order remained relatively fluid, protest remained polite and elitist, but when the state responded to party competition by reinforcing the racial order to unify whites further or to encourage Afrikaner nationalism, black protest became more widespread and assertive. Reforms of apartheid encouraged the inclusion of whites in the opposition, though the continued exclusion of blacks from fall citizenship maintained racial solidarity and mass mobilization. Finally, the rock of solid black protest threatened the very state stability that had been built on racial domination.
Black Protest Forces Inclusive Nation-State Building
By the late 1980s, the confrontation between white racial unity and domination on one side and rising black unity and resistance on the other had produced a crisis. Black popular and labor mobilization had reached unprecedented levels, challenging the legitimacy and control of the nation-state and undermining an economy ever more dependent on blacks, mirroring the instability earlier intrawhite conflict had brought. To head off this rising challenge, ruling elites would abandon apartheid while hoping to preserve the polity, restore growth, and thereby retain long-entrenched white advantage. Other pressures and events were important, such as the end of the cold war, new leadership, and international sanctions. But geopolitical changes would have been less meaningful in South Africa without already rising black opposition within the country. Protest shook the economy, scared domestic and foreign capital, inspired the international pressure, and brought new leaders to the state. Disagreement over reform did not disappear, but protest forced fundamental change. The result was what the state’s mainstream opponents sought, though the end of apartheid then brought new challenges to nation-state building.
The South African state was unable to contain the protests its own policies had provoked, as it wavered between reforms and repression.42 Former parliamentarian Helen Suzman describes the reaction: “Further escalation of black resistance would have meant continuous repression. [The National Party] took the necessary steps to contain the rebellion. Some said we cannot keep doing this.”43 The state’s military and repressive apparatus had remained strong, reinforced by ethnic loyalty among the army’s officers, 85 percent Afrikaners.44 But this loyal force was unable to halt popular unrest, and the greater use of force only threatened further economic dislocation. Broederbond Chairman P. J. de Lange concedes that “the unrest was important” in forcing a reconsideration of the viability of continued minority rule. And Beyers Naude adds that “the 1980s couldn’t have been avoided” and were needed for state “leaders to be confronted by the reality of the depth of black feelings.”45 Certainly the level of mass protest engendered by state repression shook the commitment to minority rule among many whites.
The central thrust of the UDF and related mobilization was a demand for inclusion in South African citizenship, unifying the opposition despite other disagreements. The state had set the agenda in excluding blacks from the new constitution and formal citizenship. Opposition movements rejected the creation of separate homelands, as they had rejected the tricameral constitution. Even within the homelands themselves, the artificial construct of non-South African citizenship was challenged. Most notably, the Inkatha movement in Kwazulu under Chief Buthelezi rejected formal independence, even as it distinguished itself from national black unity and movements.
Despite Buthelezi’s rejection of independence, Inkatha distanced itself from mainstream opposition. Buthelezi himself had earlier been sympathetic to both BC and the ANC. But in accepting the government post of homeland leader he had shifted to a more ambivalent position toward the state, blurring the distinction between homeland semi-autonomy and formal independence. He now used patronage, and later coercion, to bolster his support, primarily among Zulus, with the state providing the resources.46 The National Party increasingly viewed Buthelezi as an anti-ANC ally. “We are natural allies,” said Nationalist Gerrit Viljoen. Inkatha “has emphasized the free market, was against violence, and opposed foreign sanctions.”47 In response, the ANC’s Oliver Tambo denigrated Buthelezi for “defending the system. . . . [H]e embraces tribalism, plays into the hands of the enemy.”48
Buthelezi’s Inkatha encouraged loyalty with images of ethnic Zulu nationalism, differentiating it from the black unity projected by BC and the national anti-apartheid, nonracialism of the UDF and ANC. This difference exacerbated basic political competition. Conflict emerged between Inkatha and the UDF and ANC, exploding into massive violence in Natal by the mid-1980s and in the Transvaal thereafter. Such internecine fighting served the interests of the state, in keeping with the old tradition of divide and rule, though the conflict in Natal pitted Zulu against Zulu. The state and media described the violence as “black on black,” hiding or ignoring the state’s role in fanning divisions and the greater emergence of unified opposition to apartheid. By thus projecting blacks as prone to violence and unprepared for democracy, the state hoped to diminish support for reform.
The other major counterpressure against inclusive citizenship came from the white, largely Afrikaner, right wing. Representing up to one-third of the white electorate, the right wing claimed that “apartheid was another word for self-determination.”49 According to Afrikaner stalwart Jaap Marais, since “every nation on this earth should have its own ground,” Afrikaners deserved to rule South Africa.50 The right wing therefore continued to advocate the Afrikaner ethnic separatism of Hertzog and the early National Party. They resented the reformist impulses of British manufacturers and verlighte, or reformist, Afrikaners. The right wing sought to represent the interests of poorer Afrikaners, grudgingly incorporating sympathetic English who shared “a common cultural heritage” not shared by blacks.51 In their view, apartheid had successfully produced a great industrial revolution; its continuation was necessary because “Africans cannot run their own country.”52 While disingenuously denying that South Africa was suffering any great disorder, the right wing did acknowledge that black militancy might prevent them from holding all of South Africa. They retreated to advocating a separate white homeland, or volkstadt. Right-wingers like Pieter Mulder who participated in the inclusive 1994 elections did so on the understanding that they would gain such “self-determination” if they garnered “sufficient support.”53
With rising black protest matched by repression and some division among both blacks and whites, how then can we account for the dramatic shift of state policy toward negotiation? In part, the answer lies with events external to South Africa. Decolonization in Africa, and particularly the liberation of neighboring Mozambique and Angola in 1975, added to the perceived threat to the regime. It also gave confidence to black South Africans that the tide was turning their way.54 According to then-Minister Gerrit Viljoen, the results of the negotiated independence of Namibia in 1988 were “influential.” Pretoria officials were encouraged by their “positive experience” of former adversaries who “got along well with each other” and successfully managed a transition.55 More generally, “the end of Communism in 1989 was the ultimate key,” according to Viljoen.56 The collapse of the Communist bloc deflated white fears that majority rule would bring Soviet domination, and further undermined Western support for Pretoria as an anti-Communist bulwark. And with the end of Western cold war strategic interest in South Africa, Pretoria feared a heightening of international sanctions and condemnation. Whereas state officials had earlier argued that international pressure would “have the effect of strengthening [white] determination to retain their right of self-preservation,”57 in an age of international economic integration this bluster became hollow.
These practical and psychological pressures from outside were shaped by and combined with internal pressures. Most notably, protest and disorder had brought capital flight and added to pressure on foreign lenders and governments to impose significant informal and state sanctions. In particular, images reminiscent of its own civil rights movement inspired U.S. domestic protestors to demand punitive actions against South Africa. Economic disruption threatened the white privilege apartheid had served, as real GDP growth, for example, fell from 3.7 percent to 2.1 percent just from 1988 to 1989.58 Unemployment rose to dramatic levels, further threatening general prosperity and unrest. Because whites had become increasingly dependent on black labor and markets with rising industrialization, black strikes and boycotts hit home. Finally, the costs of enforcing apartheid had risen to unbearable levels as the black population had grown in both size and willingness to challenge the state.
Despite rising domestic mobilization and international and economic pressures, Pretoria still retained the military resources to resist change. But the state was under extreme pressure, and many within the National Party concluded that the challenge would be better addressed from a position of relative strength, for instance while the police force retained its ability to “combat violence.”59 According to Nelson Mandela, State President F. W. de Klerk pragmatically bowed to the pressure for reform not “with the intention of putting himself out of power . . . [but] to ensure power for the Afrikaner in a new dispensation.”60 De Klerk acted before he fully lost control of the situation. Economic and international pressure had forced many whites to conclude that the status quo could not be maintained and that the time was ripe to get the best deal possible. Many Afrikaners in particular, conscious of being a minority, supported de Klerk’s reform efforts. A compromise was needed to ensure survival and the preservation of social and economic gains made by Afrikaners since 1948.
That many Afrikaners were rethinking their commitment to apartheid does not mean that all shared such reforming impulses. The simultaneous rise of the right wing and verlighte reformers suggests a significant split within the Afrikaner population, which in itself further weakened its domination. According to Allan Boesak, protest aimed at “making black townships ungovernable” had also “made white South Africa ungovernable. . . . [We] achieved a division of white politics.”61 By 1986, 35 percent of Afrikaners polled described current reforms as proceeding “too fast,” 40 percent supported reforms, and 15 percent described reforms as going “too slow.”62
Division among Afrikaners was not new, for there had been a long debate about whether to unify with the English or to assert a separatist Afrikaner nationalism. What was new was that the focus of the debate had shifted to the pressing question of whether or how to incorporate blacks, an issue raised forcibly by black protest. This shift indicates that many Afrikaners had concluded that English domination was no longer their greatest problem. They were now primarily concerned about the threat posed by blacks themselves. Even the white right wing advocated a separate volkstadt to protect themselves not primarily from the English, but from the black majority. The central issue of white politics, and the most pressing challenge to the nation-state, had shifted from Afrikaner-English conflict to the rising white-black conflict, reflecting greater white unity.
Black South African racial identity and mobilization had been provoked by the imposition and elaboration of racial domination designed to unify whites. Racial domination used as a means to unify whites had also reinforced black identity, unity, and mobilization, largely cutting across ethnic distinctions. The price of Afrikaner–English reconciliation was rising black protest. The state’s shift to negotiations was in large part a response to this rising threat. According to the ANC’s Walter Sisulu, as a result of the pervasive experience of apartheid “people are very much politicized in this country.. .. They will challenge anybody.”63 In addition, many black South Africans were unified and inspired by their support for Nelson Mandela, whose “charisma and [living] martyrdom” led many to proclaim “he is our God.”64 Mass mobilization generally rested on such popular imagery and direct experience more than on ideological points over which diverse opposition groups differed; “Masses don’t see the ideological differences,” remarked Natal professor Fatima Meer. “For the common man, all opposition groups are ‘out there’ and supportable for opposing the state.”65 Though ideological divisions remained, fueled by leadership competition, the varying opposition tendencies all pressed together. With the ANC acknowledging that a military victory was out of reach, popular protest was seen as a way to destabilize the regime.66
Rising popular protest was used by mainstream opposition leaders to project a threat against the state sufficiently strong to force negotiations. But they were also eager to contain that threat in order to avoid scaring whites into a defensive retreat, into circling the wagons in a laager, or into greater use of force. The state’s shift toward negotiations was therefore encouraged by opposition pragmatism, itself informed by the prospect of negotiations. In effect, the regime’s primary opponents offered to collude in reconfiguring the nation-state, avoiding a full-scale civil war that would destroy both the state and its economy. Most prominently, the ANC took pains to reassure whites that democratic inclusion would not jeopardize existing property rights and economic privilege entrenched under apartheid. In meetings with businessmen, the ANC distanced itself from nationalization and socialism.67 Such reassurances were consistent with the ANC’s long-standing advocacy of national democracy and its avoidance of demands for radical economic redistribution. For such practical reasons, ANC-aligned unionist Cyril Ramaphosa concluded that the struggle would “have to be in two stages,” using the language of the Communist Party.68 Such pragmatism also reflected the interests of the growing black middle class, well represented among the ANC leadership. The very existence of such an African bourgeoisie sharing an interest in economic stability and growth itself reassured whites.
Opposition efforts to reassure whites would continue even after formal negotiations began. The ANC formally abandoned the armed struggle, if not mass protest. Afrikaners in particular were mollified by the prospect of continued civil service postings, guaranteed both in the negotiations and by necessity. According to former National Party Minister Gerrit Viljoen, “blacks will come to power but will need Afrikaners [to run the state], just as the British were essential to the Afrikaners. Afrikaners cannot now be marginalized.”69 Surveys reaffirmed that most blacks had relatively moderate expectations about economic change.70
Symbolism was also reassuring. Mandela himself was only the most visible figure advocating forgiveness and reconciliation. “After 1990, there was a sudden appearance on television of blacks,” P. J. de Lange recalled in 1994. “They were sophisticated and articulate. The seclusion of white and black under apartheid was breached. [We] saw people on both sides as rational and capable,” and thus less threatening.71 Whites took solace in such moderation.
South African politics converged on the center, propelled by the threat of further instability, protest, and dislocation, which the mainstream opposition promised to contain. The National Party leadership concluded that continuing apartheid was impossible, and eagerly looked for a compromise deal despite right-wing condemnations. The Nats were particularly eager to strike a deal with Nelson Mandela, whose secret meetings with government in the late 1980s assured state ministers that he was a moderate prepared to compromise.72 These officials pressed for negotiations before Mandela was replaced by the next generation of ANC leadership, which they saw as likely to claim his legacy for more militant aims. “If Mandela died he would be a permanent martyr. Everyone would claim him and he wouldn’t be able to say no,” argued Gerrit Vilgoen. “[Our] greatest fear was the high expectations of the youth.. . . We need Mandela for quite some time.”73 The ANC itself was also eager for a deal, tired of its years of exile, fearful of losing popular support if it failed to deliver. If negotiations faltered, the ANC might have been swept aside by popular anger, so it was eager to take up the state’s invitation to join talks. A corresponding convergence developed on the military front: “the South African Defense Force knows the ANC can cause mayhem and the ANC knows the right can cause mayhem. That balance of power is a basis for national unity.”74 The army certainly retained the ability to repress, but at a high cost to both the opposition and themselves. Blacks and whites both had an interest in preserving the state and its economy. The result among whites was, in Viljoen’s words, “a shift from confrontation to negotiations, with a realization that neither can we win, nor can the ANC win.”75
Stalemate and convergence on the center pushed both state and opposition elites to negotiate; they lacked any viable alternative. De Klerk and Nelson Mandela seized this opportunity, forging a tenuous and often tense partnership testing their diplomatic skills. The result was an extended period of negotiations from 1990 until 1994. But South Africa’s transition was not controlled from above, as a comparison with Brazil’s transition from dictatorship suggests.76 Negotiations proceeded amid the din of continued mass mobilization and pressure, which increased as talks proceeded. Whenever negotiations faltered, resurgent mass protest forced a return to the table. Violence was not eliminated; instead, its occasional outbreak pressed the negotiators forward. Between 1990 and 1993, more than 9,000 people died in conflict between the ANC and Inkatha, with the latter bolstered by secret state support and seen by the ANC as an opponent of change to be headed off in negotiations, if not by force. In 1992, the bloody Boipotang massacre of peaceful marchers and rising protests thereafter brought the ANC back to the table with greater strength.77 In short, the continuation of negotiations was driven by mass mobilization and violence, much as their start was. A consensus on the need to contain instability and to preserve the nation-state and its economy provided the essential common ground, much as it had fitfully brought together Afrikaners and English earlier in the century.
The results of negotiations and even the following elections were carefully balanced to reduce tensions. The Nats and ANC finally agreed upon a five-year interim Government of National Unity, with representation of all parties that reached a minimal threshold of popular support in the April 1994 election.78 Both sides sought to deal with images of tribalism, most notably that of Inkatha: the Nats until 1992 hoped to forge an alliance with Inkatha, and the ANC sought to diminish the division of the African electorate.79 At the last minute, Inkatha agreed to participate in elections, with the Zulu king enticed to support this participation by a controversial grant of land.80 Amid some claims of fraud, Inkatha was rewarded with an equally controversial electoral victory in Natal. The National Party was able to win a majority in the Western Cape. The other provinces were won by the ANC, falling just below the overall two-thirds majority needed for absolute control over the subsequent process of constitution writing. Even ANC supporters confessed, though, that it was not in the interests of any party to gain absolute control; a government of national unity was essential.81 In May 1994, South Africans celebrated the inauguration of Mandela as president. Thereafter the potentially more militant UDF was disbanded, union demands and more militant parties were largely pushed aside, and the official Reconstruction and Development Program avoided pitting redistribution against growth.82
Efforts to encourage newly inclusive national unity prevailed. The suspiciously neat election results, appeasing the National Party and Inkatha and giving the ANC a majority short of two-thirds, raised liberals’ accusations of deception and election tampering.83 But the result was just the sort of balance the elites had hoped for, providing an incentive for all major parties to remain within the newly inclusive government. These parties recognized that the negotiation and election results would reaffirm the image of the state as autonomous, with varied representation in government ensuring popular loyalty. Much as intrawhite party competition had earlier helped to preserve the polity amid deepening racial domination, inclusion of an array of parties within the new government helped to preserve the polity and unify the newly inclusive nation-state.
The transition process and form of the interim government reflected the pressing need to encourage national unity. Given the history of ethnic and racial antagonism, National Party and ANC elites were eager to ensure that their efforts contributed to a healing of prior conflicts. The imperative for nation-state consolidation to avoid disruptive conflict, earlier applied exclusively among whites, now applied across the racial divide. The historically inclusive election of April 1994 was anticipated and did serve as a nation-building experience. Until 1996, the resulting Government of National Unity was purposefully inclusive, at the price of precluding any parliamentary opposition, generally an ingredient of democracy.84 The framers of the interim constitution did not believe that South Africa could contain a system of partisanship likely to exacerbate conflict. Instead, they forced all major parties together into the governing cabinet to encourage cross-ethnic and cross-racial compromises and alliances. Debate was shifted to within parties and the government, whose structures contained conflict.
Even with institutional incentives for unity, the legacy of past divisions would not be easily or quickly overcome. F. W. de Klerk sought to finesse the issue rhetorically, arguing, in Viljoen’s words, for “nation-building . . . without denying the existence of [separate] nations in the cultural sense, just like Hertzog saw two streams without denying togetherness.”85 Certainly the end of formal racial domination opened the possibility of inclusive nationalism cognizant of cultural diversity. But no institutional arrangement could magically produce this result, for antagonisms had been long entrenched by prior institutional rule.86 According to activist Neville Alexander, “in South Africa, building a nation has to be a conscious process; it won’t just happen.. .. Previously no government tried. To the contrary, they divided. . . . Blacks identified themselves more as African, denied South African nationality. . .. Now people are proud of being South African.”87 Many hoped that unity would be reinforced by common interest in economic growth, which would require stability within a newly consolidated nation-state. “The glue is the comfortable living of whites and the hopes of comfortable living of blacks,” according to Helen Suzman,88 though for most blacks such hopes remained unfulfilled, even as a few were greatly enriched by corporate concessions. Despite the slow pace of reforms, education was also generally seen as an essential tool for encouraging such national unity, together with meeting some minimal expectations of concrete change in the living conditions of the majority. But no one was sanguine about the prospect of quick redress, easy unity, and reconciliation. As described by anti-apartheid stalwart Beyers Naude:
A nation in a fall sense is not possible without conflicts and disagreement. A nation is a product of cultural conflicts that have been resolved. In South Africa, we are all talking about a South African nation. We don’t yet have a South African nation, but we are moving in that direction. We must be careful not to talk too glibly about a South African nation. It is a process, sometimes very agonizing. . . . [E]thnic groups each want to establish their own language and culture. Certain groups are more privileged. [Nation building] will require a conscious education of our peoples, but it can be done. I fear we won’t understand the significance of the process and will allow old forces of distrust to prevail.89
Ethnic, class, and racial tensions, building on historical legacies, remained just under the surface of the newly democratized South Africa. “Latent ethnic conflict is always there, as in any multicultural and linguistic society"; for instance, the rising use of English as the common language generated some resentment among Afrikaners.90 Spokesmen for the increasingly marginalized white right wing continued to maintain that “there is no [common] South African language” (Pieter Mulder) and to proclaim that “we want a Boer republic. Sooner or later, we will fight” (Fred Rundle).91 Fear remained that Afrikaners, Zulus, and others might further embrace such separatism.92 Middle-class fears that reforms would bring a further influx of the unemployed into urban areas raised the possibility that inclusive nation building would be swamped by a class antagonism. And among “marginalized” people, resentment over the lack of jobs and services and over the perks enjoyed by new government officials was evident after the 1994 election.93 Such resentment did not coalesce into a strong, organized opposition to the ANC, but it raised the future possibility of a class or ideological division within the ANC ranks.
Neither could long-entrenched racial animosity easily be defused by democratic inclusion and nonracialism. According to one activist, “it is difficult for people to overcome distrust of whites. . . . A lot of hatred between black and white has been created and will remain after liberation.”94 Such tension could be manipulated among whites or blacks. For instance, the majority of coloureds in the Western Cape voted for the National Party in 1994, induced by Nationalist electioneering to fear that an ANC victory would undermine coloureds’ relative privilege.95 Zulu supporters of Inkatha similarly feared a loss of autonomy and distanced themselves from others. As in the past, issues of race and ethnicity were enmeshed with the definition and encouragement of national unity. Democracy in itself could give voice to such potential divisions, without neccessarily or quickly leading to redress or uniform loyalty. Divergent groups fearing the interference of the ANC-controlled central state called for greater local authority.
Prior nationalism had been constructed and reinforced through antagonism; it was defined by who was excluded, and following an ethnic rather than a civic logic. Afrikaner nationalism had emerged in response to British domination, and had vied with white South African national unity for the first half of the twentieth century. To the extent that English and Afrikaners had unified, they had done so by agreeing to exclude the black majority. Such domination had further enforced and then been challenged by black identity and provoked protest, adopting its own form of exclusivity in the case of African nationalism, or incorporating all supporters of nonracialism as advocated by the ANC. But even the ANC defined and projected its nationalism in opposition to supporters of apartheid; the ANC was “based on uniting those ‘against,’ without examining what they are ‘for.’ “96 With the loss of a unifying target of opposition, many felt the loss of identity more than they immediately adopted an inclusive nationalism. “The people are shattered into a thousand pieces. Everyone is just running with his own little piece of hatred.”97
Given the history of Afrikaner, white, African, and anti-apartheid nationalism, the transition to an inclusive form of nationalism remained uncertain. The onus for this transition fell on the new government and its president, Nelson Mandela, who faced the challenge of redirecting past forms of exclusive nationalism. According to Broederbond chairman P. J. de Lange:
We need to forge mutual respect for various cultures. . . . We have to eat a few bags of salt.... The experience of struggle has created a certain mind-set. We have to get beyond that. While chasing the bus, people could shout. Once you catch the bus, you have to drive it and prevent it from going over the cliff. A major shift in attitude is needed, an acceptance of responsibility.98
This challenge of forging national unity not only had to overcome the particular pattern of South African antagonisms, but also the more general tendency to define and construct a nation in opposition to some “other.” Nationalisms had long been expressed in antagonistic terms. A newly inclusive South African nation was envisioned and could only be constructed without vindictiveness or the crutch of exclusion used so pervasively for nation building. National unity required grappling with the past, led by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Beyond that, “we need the state to give incentives to allow for unification, for a national consciousness,” says Neville Alexander. “Not ‘nationalist,’ as usually against something. National is for something. Statesmen must ensure ‘national’ doesn’t become ‘nationalist.’ 99 How to define and encourage such national unity without revenge or reference to some ethnic, racial, or class exclusion remained the fundamental challenge of the new South Africa.
Negotiated transition to a nonracial democracy in 1994 brought to the fore challenges remaining from past antagonism. Ethnic and racial policies of divide and rule had coalesced with assertions of tradition and culture. Elites then sought to define and reinforce an inclusive nationalism, to heal divisive legacies that continued to impede such nation-state consolidation. As the South African nation-state had been built on the basis of racial exclusion, ending such exclusion required a fundamental change in the form and constitution of the state. But institutional change ending formal racial domination did not immediately end entrenched inequality or bring a change in popular loyalties. The nation’s wounds remained open amid continued violence, notably in Kwazulu. Encouraged by their democratic inclusion, the majority of black South Africans would continue to look for further substantive changes in their lives. The potential threat remained that they might return to protest for such change, or fissure into ethnic, class, or regional blocks. Arguably this threat would continue to offer leaders pragmatic incentive for further redress and nation-state consolidation in its new, inclusive form.