In lieu of a mini-lecture on South African apartheid, here are my notes. Be advised these are very spare.
Roughly 75 percent of the population are Black. Bantu speakers are the largest language group. Others: Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho-Tswane. Less than 15 percent of pop. is white (Dutch and British descent). 3 percent Asian (primarily Indian). The remainder, 9 percent, are “colored”– ie. mixed.
Apartheid (Afrikaans: “apartness”) era, 1948-1994. Introduced by Popular Registration Act of 1950 which classified S. Africans as “Bantu” (Black) White or “Colored” and the so-called Lands Acts, which created a racially exclusive geography.
Whites only: vote, hold office, high positions in gov/military/pvt. business. Kept out of cities, Black South Africans compelled to live in slums and Bantustans– “homelands” or townships outside major urban areas. ANC– mixed race organization, anti-apartheid. ANC banned, leaders exiled and imprisoned. “any expression of support” for ANC prohibited. Mandela jailed as a “terrorist”. (And to the great shame of the US State Department, Mandela was on a so-called terrorist watch list until July 2008. Incidentally, over 1 million people are included on this list).
Contrary to popular version of events, the struggle against apartheid was not a peaceful or civil process. Armed struggle an important feature of overall resistance.
Early 50s: a passive resistance campaign of civil disobedience. No concessions from gov., who labeled resistance to segregation “communism”. [Compare with response in the American South during the Civil Rights Era when desegregation was characterized as a “communist plot.” See, for example, Mary Dudziak’s Cold War Civil Rights.]
Non-violent tactics met with brutal repression and State violence.
1960: Sharpeville Massacre. Probably 69 killed, 178 wounded– many shot in the back.
From 1960-1990 UK and US vetoed UN sanctions against white minority government. Again, S. Africa seen as a Cold War ally who must be protected.
Post-Sharpeville: 20,000 activists arrested. Political parties banned. Resisters began to form armed units. Meanwhile, African independence movements (Decolonization) pick up speed.
1976: Soweto Uprising against mandatory use of Afrikaans in school. Linked in the imagination with the collapse of Portugal’s colonial subjugation of Angola and Mozambique (Amilcar Cabral and FRELIMO)
Campaign of attacks against S. African State– none radically undermined the State’s power, yet they had symbolic significance for anti-Apartheid movement.
Absence of civilian fatalities; unwillingness to target white non-combatants. Armed struggle not particularly successful, move to other tactics such as community organizing.
Student strikes, production strikes and slow-downs, demonstrations, boycotts.
Guerrillas and above-ground activists and organizers linked. Multi-pronged attack on Apartheid; a front with many different foci and tactics.
Necklacing: ostensibly a punishment for informers. Later, evidence emerges that the practice may have been introduced by the “Third Force”– a collection of security forces members and their allies.
Unlike in other African freedom struggles, armed insurrection was not successful in overthrowing the racist S. African State yet the presence and actions of those willing to fight created a shared sense of purpose and identity among various dissident groups, boosting morale and offering individual S. Africans the sense that they were part of a larger struggle where resistance was not only possible but effective.
ANC’s non-racialist ideology: was Marxism the key?
Collective memory and aspiration. National liberation.
analepsis 