From: http://www.facts.com/cd/c01001.htm

South Africa has archaeological sites containing evidence of very early human settlement,
some of which throw helpful light on the emergence of the first real human beings who could
think symbolically and artistically, use language and reflect on the mysteries of life and death.

For most of the past 100 000 years, the region has been occupied by small mobile groups of
hunter-gatherers who learned to adapt to the harsh environment. They expressed their beliefs
and rituals, outlook and activities in richly abundant rock art, and were only gradually displaced
by agro-pastoralists whose presence goes back hardly more than 2 000 years. Whether it is
accurate to describe the former as San and the latter as Khoikhoi (terms now favoured above
Bushmen and Hottentots), two distinct cultural groups, has been debated.

There was no sharp physiological divide between the early hunter-gatherers and the farmers,
who were sometimes driven by necessity or inspired by opportunity to enter upon the lifestyle of
the other; yet the acquisition of land and animal-husbandry skills involved a change in mindset
which had to find some expression in cultural differentiation.

The dry inland areas lent themselves best to pastoral farming, where first sheep and then cattle
were domesticated, without replacing the importance of hunting for survival. About 1 500 years
ago, immigrant Bantu-speakers began to work the soil, mainly in the river valleys of
south-eastern Africa where summer rainfall predominates. Techniques first learnt much further
north, came to be applied to the growing of edible crops such as millet and gourds.

The domestication of cattle from approximately 1 000 years ago, created new possibilities of
societal development beyond the attainments of Khoisan society. Political systems arose, not
on the same scale as the 14th-century kingdoms between the Limpopo and the Zambezi, but as
chief-dominated, polygamous communities, the size of which was determined by the extent to
which the chiefs could expand their power through control of their womenfolk as producers, and
the youth as workers and soldiers. Wealth in cattle made patronage possible, and was also used
as 'lobola'. Lobola can be described as the bride-price of a marriage which entails the handing
over of some present, goods or cattle on the part of the bridegroom's people to the father or
guardian of the bride. This is done to ensure the right of the bridegroom in any issue of the
marriage.

The acquisition of control over metallurgical skills at about the same time gave the chief an
additional valuable trading commodity and greater military potential.

Colonisation from Europe from the 1600s

The arrival of Europeans in southern Africa was by far the most traumatic experience the
resident communities had ever encountered. Western Europe was, of all the major power
centres in the world, the least likely to succeed in any grandiose attempt at territorial conquest.
However, it had three assets which proved, in combination, to be world beaters; a religious
outlook which made proselytising mandatory; a capacity to assimilate the inventions of others,
such as map-making, sailing close to the wind, and the use of gunpowder, and a hunger for
wealth and sustenance arising out of a lack of these things.

This led governments to rationalise their need by setting up marine merchant enterprises under
charter - first the Portuguese, whose early experiences of southern Africa were discouragingly
violent, and later the Dutch, English and French, all of whom saw the value of the Cape as a
strategic outpost on the route to empires in the East. Only the Dutch set up a mainland base for
their East India Company (VOC), in 1652, to provide passing ships with food, water and
hospitalization for sick sailors. They would probably have been satisfied with that if a base alone
had been sufficient.

However, the Khoikhoi realised from the building of a stone castle and settlement of farmers on
the land that the Dutch intended to stay, and began to resist barter and to fight off attempts by
VOC expeditions to take their livestock by force.

The Dutch were either repelled by Khoi-khoi social habits, or admired them as 'noble savages',
and gradually overwhelmed them by seizing their streams, land and cattle, and incorporating
them as peons on the land or in their militia. The political structure of the Khoikhoi clans was
simply not strong enough to resist.

The VOC's need for labour was so urgent that they also brought in slaves from their eastern
empire, and from regions on both sides of Africa, within the first decade of settlement. This
controversial decision cast a long shadow. A slave had no legal rights, and, unlike slaves in
America, almost no chance of liberation through conversion to Christianity. At the Cape the
obligatory freeing of converts acted as a barrier to conversion - a fact which made conversion
to Islam attractive for political as well as religious reasons. Slaves owned by the company or
residents in the town had some opportunity to practice trades. Others, especially those owned
by farmers, were more tightly controlled. For slave women marriage was not an option, though
concubinage with white males often was.

The Cape had become a society composed of distinct and unequal legal groups, and free blacks
were never numerous or strong enough to break down the barriers. Servants of the VOC and
white land-owners, even if they quarrelled with one another, established a dominance upheld by
law and boosted by free though small-scale immigration. Whites would retain this status for
three-and-a-half centuries, despite various attempts to emancipate the underdogs over the
years.

A partially successful attempt to free them was made during the years 1807 to 1838. The British
had by then taken possession of the Cape during the French revolutionary wars, and held it as a
colony from 1795, save for a brief return of Dutch rule in 1803 to 1806. Their rule was initially as
authoritarian as that of the VOC. However, the new settlers, arriving mainly from 1820, with an
experience of political conflict in Regency England, fought to gain political freedom, first with a
successful campaign for press freedom in the 1820s, and later through the establishment in
1853 of representative government on a remarkably low, colour-blind franchise.

A different kind of campaign, led by pressure groups in Britain with local missionary support,
was set in motion to free the serf and the slave. Even though, at its most rational, this was an
attempt to balance freedom with the need to keep the emancipated in remunerative
employment, it did not win much support from local employers of labour. Therefore, though the
Khoikhoi obtained a 'charter of liberties' in 1828, and the slaves were freed after a four-year
period of 'apprenticeship' in 1838, employers' pressure on the courts curbed the effectiveness
of both these measures to a considerable extent.

Conflict on the frontiers of Colonial expansion

From the early days of the settlement, slaves tried to escape from the areas of VOC control,
generally unsuccessfully. Europeans moved out to hunt, to barter, to steal and - aided by lax
land laws - to settle with their livestock. They did this because opportunities in the Colony proper
were limited, or because they, like slaves, also wanted to escape from VOC control. So they
moved into a 'frontier' zone already peopled by San hunters, and further north and east by
Bantu-speaking pastoralists. With horses and muskets they could shoot the game on which the
San depended, and by the 1880s, the San settlements had been driven north across the Gariep
(Orange) River, after a century of broken conflict.

There was another frontier of conflict from the 1770s, some 1 000 kilometres east of Cape Town,
in the area between the Sundays and the Kei rivers. Here, at the edge of the summer rainfall
area, Khoikhoi and Bantu-speaking settlers encountered European intruders who, like them,
valued the land as an asset, and used it to plant crops and to graze livestock.

Trade between these opposing groups, the former offering skins and ivory, the latter market
goods from Europe, did much to moderate relationships, as did the impact of missionaries who
could act as brokers in disputes. But this could not prevent cattle-reaving from both sides of the
border, which eventually escalated into a series of bitter wars. In these the Europeans, with
superior weaponry, gained the upper hand. They managed by the end of the 1800s to assert
control over all the territory to the borders of the British colony of Natal.

From 1836 to 1838, tensions on the frontier led to a second, more deliberate emigration from the
Cape Colony, known as the Great Trek. Organised Voortrekker parties, with their Khoikhoi
retainers, moved away northwards in protest against British frontier policy and the liberal
aspects of British rule, to set up republics of their own in what was reputedly empty land. But the
land was not empty, and in any case these Voortrekkers needed land already settled, where
there was water and a potential supply of labour.

In 1800, southern Africa was a region without any easy routes for wheeled traffic, with almost no
towns worthy of the name, few banks, and little organised commerce except for the export of
animal products, especially wool. Large herds of game roamed freely over the unfenced plains
of the interior, which could not sustain human settlements of any size.

By 1900, however, much of this had changed. The main reason was the discovery of diamonds
near the confluence of the Orange and Vaal rivers from 1867, and of gold - first in the Tati area
the same year, then as alluvial nuggets in the eastern Transvaal in the 1870s, and more than ten
years later as dust embedded in rock on the Witwatersrand (1886).

Prospectors arrived, mainly from Britain but also from elsewhere. They drew in black migrant
workers from the regions of African settlement: Sotho from north and south of the Vaal, Tswana
from the Marico, and Zulu and Swazi from the south-east. Imperial banks and railways followed.
Shanty towns were set up. Diggers quarrelled with one another, and tried to exclude African
claim-holders (subsequently introducing fenced compounds as devices for their control), and
stole or smuggled the precious commodities, presenting a serious threat to public order.

Sovereignty over the diamond fields was contested. The strongest legal claims based on
occupation were those of the Griqua and Rolong, and in terms of international agreements that
of the Orange Free State (OFS). A British mediator awarded the territory to the Griqua.

Britain then accepted control of it at their request in 1871, as the Crown colony of Griqualand
West, ignoring the Rolong claims and those of the Boer republics, and protesting the need to
impose law. She also realised the strategic value of the 'road to the north' running along the
eastern edge of the Kalahari desert, which Boer republican governments could easily block.

The OFS was conciliated by a cash settlement in 1876; but the problem of inter-state relations
did not die down for several reasons. The discoveries led to demands for closer economic ties
between the separate states and colonies than their political mood could sustain.

Workers flowed to the mining fields through republican territory, and returned with firearms in
their possession. This can be linked to the outbreak of a sequence of bitter conflicts with the
colonial and republican armed forces between 1876 and 1881, stretching along a horseshoe of
frontiers from the eastern Cape through Lesotho, Zululand and the eastern Transvaal and round
to Griqualand West. This was the most savage era of fighting in the history of South Africa, in
which black chiefdoms fought a number of heroic rearguards in defence of their lands - notably
those of the Phuting against Cape forces, and of the Pedi against both Boers and British in the
Transvaal.

However, Africans also fought one another for the residue of their diminishing territory - notably
the Ngqika-Mfengu conflict in the trans-Kei in 1874, and that within the Rolong and Tlhaping
chiefdoms on the edge of the Kalahari, in which white 'volunteers' took part on both sides. As a
result, all African chiefdoms south of the Limpopo had fallen under white rule before 1900.

Meanwhile, as desire for access to Africa among the European powers grew, the British
Government's will to establish its paramountcy kept pace. It resolved to bind the separate
territories in a federal scheme of its own devising, of which the annexation of the Transvaal by a
coup in 1877 formed part.

This federal scheme was effectively quashed by a Boer victory over the British at Majuba in
1881, but the consolidation of Transvaal gold mining threatened so to upset the economic
balance of the region to the disadvantage of the coastal colonies, that Britain still fearful for her
paramountcy, set about weakening that republic, now under the leadership of Paul Kruger,
through encirclement.

Confrontation began between Kruger, a leader of great charismatic power on the one hand, and
Cecil Rhodes, Cape premier and tycoon, with a power base in De Beers diamonds, the
Chartered Company north of the Limpopo and in Consolidated Goldfields, on the other. When
Rhodes was discredited by his plotting of a second coup against the republic in the Jameson
Raid of 1895, the mantle of British policy fell on Sir Alfred Milner's shoulders, and it was his
pressure, supported by Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial Secretary, that induced Paul
Kruger to pre-empt a British declaration of war in October 1899.

The Anglo-Boer War of 1899 to 1902



Militarily, the conflict between Boer and British forces can be divided into two phases: first, a
period of Boer commando successes, quickly reversed after the arrival of the main British force
in January 1900, which captured the republican capitals between March and June. Then came a
guerrilla phase when the Boer forces regrouped after the fall of Pretoria and carried on the
conflict for two years before reluctantly accepting peace terms from the British in May 1902 in
the Treaty of Vereeniging.

Though often called a 'white man's war', this conflict involved the entire population of South
Africa in one way or another. African ex-miners and farm labourers were also concentrated in
camps, and drawn into labour tasks by the British Army. Boers raided the African reserves for
food. Africans reasserted control over land and livestock previously taken by Boers, and on rare
occasions attacked Boer commandos. Martial law was proclaimed step by step across the
whole region, and the movements of people were drastically restricted. For African scouts on
the British side, or Boers caught in captured British uniforms, punishments were swift and final,
while of the 10 000 Cape Afrikaner rebels convicted of treason, a small proportion of those
sentenced to death by military courts were indeed shot.

However, the Boers, having lost the war, won the peace. British pro-Boers had undermined the
moral complacency of the victors, who decided to grant generous terms to the Boers, in order
to ensure an enduring influence in southern Africa. This was largely at the expense of Africans
(who were excluded from political power and forced to give back much land retaken from Boers
during the war years). Britain implemented this decision from 1906 to 1907, by granting
constitutions which gave Afrikaners political control of both ex-republics - with perhaps more
generosity than was intended. But they did not object in 1909 when the South African National
Convention opted for a constitution which ensured the retention of political power in white
(predominantly Afrikaner) hands.

The Union of South Africa 1910-1960: a white-run state

The dominant mood within Afrikanerdom after the return of self-government, was one of
conciliation; first between the Boers and the King (whose subjects they agreed to become); next
between Cape and republican Afrikaners; and finally between hensoppers (quitters) and
bittereinders (die-hards) in the Boer ranks. This brought Louis Botha and Jan Smuts to the head
of a coalition government in all but name, and the English-speaking Unionist party disappeared
from politics within a few years.

Yet the wounds inflicted on Afrikanerdom by the war ran deep. The agonised writings of Eugene
Marais and others reflected a much more intense nationalism than Afrikaners had felt before.
Gen JC Smuts, in justifying his decision to surrender in 1902, had argued that this was to ensure
the very survival of the Afrikaner people.

Conciliation did not hold. Earlier attempts to consolidate Afrikanerdom behind cultural and
political movements in the 1870s and 1880s were revived, and found a focus in a reaction
against the imperial connection, and in opposition to war against the Germans in 1914, which
brought several ex-commando leaders out at the head of a rebellion. A new Afrikaner
republicanism, with Gen JBM Hertzog as its interpreter, boosted by the elitist, covert
Broederbond and a host of cultural and welfare societies, emerged to look after the Afrikaner
people, in particular the many Afrikaner poor - themselves largely victims of the war.

The imperial link remained a problem, but one which Hertzog was able to resolve for some of his
followers by accepting a face-saving formula in 1926, when he was Prime Minister. This entailed
that South Africa could retain membership of the British Commonwealth on a basis of legal
parity under the Crown. However, not all his followers could accept this, and the 'Empire' was
still a bone of contention when World War II broke out in 1939 - even for Hertzog himself, who
tried and failed to keep South Africa neutral. Dr DF Malan and his 'purified' nationalists, who had
broken away from Hertzog in 1934, then won the initiative and built up a strident opposition
during the war years, yet managed to keep within the discipline of parliamentary government. In
so doing they outmanoeuvred those who favoured rebellion, such as the Ossewa Brandwag and
Oswald Pirow's national socialist New

Order Group.

Malan's chance came in 1948, when his National Party gained a majority of seats on a minority of
votes. Under successive leaders, notably Hendrik Verwoerd, BJ Vorster and PW Botha, it held
power until 1994, through a remarkably successful demonstration of political control, despite
the case which could be brought against it. To get rid of coloured voters, it overrode the
Constitution. In 1961 it worked its way out of the Commonwealth without inconvenience or
incurring the wrath of sufficient English-speaking voters to break its hold. It subjected the
country to massive social surgery, which brought great distress to all black communities but
security and greater comfort for most of the white minority. It managed to introduce the judicial
mechanisms of a police state by stealth, by making extra-parliamentary opposition illegal, but
without having to abolish the Parliamentary Opposition or the total freedom of the media. It
survived for two decades the indignity of being cast in the role of international pariah in the
United Nations.

The apartheid state

The political successes of the National Party can be explained partly by the fact that many of its
activities and policies did not represent a major break with the past. This was also true in its
handling of inter-group relations. It did not invent segregation, which was a hallmark of the
Reconstruction era under Lord Milner, and had already found expression in the land and urban
residential legislation of 1910 to 1924 and (for Natal Indians) of 1943 to 1946. It did not invent
the colour bar, which dated from before Union and had been regularised by Hertzog in 1926. It
did not invent the pass laws, though it held on to them in spite of the Sharpeville revolt of 1960,
and the need to arrest over 600 000 people yearly in the late 1960s in order to enforce them.

Yet the National Party after 1948 bonded itself to the apartheid ideology which had been refined
in the Broederbond's conclaves. This plunged South African politics into a dark age, arising out
of the conviction of a few prominent leaders, some of them ideologues and others amoral
pragmatists (who did not always see eye to eye), that they had found a formula which could
ensure the future of the white minority into the next century. The plan was to fabricate a
permanent white political majority by purging the voter's role of all blacks; and by creating
'homelands' for Africans (and perhaps coloured people) where alternative political provision
could be made for them leading up to self-government and a form of independence. It included
enforcement of total segregation (subject to economic necessity according to the pragmatists
but not the ideologues), so that nearly every town was carved into separate 'group areas',
sorting people by racial categories as shown in their identity books and entered in a national
register. The aim was to eliminate irregular categories by a total ban on 'mixed' (i.e. inter-racial)
marriages. Apartheid also included the retention of economic power in white hands, by
tightening the job colour bar and directing skilled blacks into their own areas. For a time this was
linked to a policy of industrial decentralisation, so that centres of industry could be set up on the
borders of homelands, to which black and white employees could travel from opposite sides
without infringing group areas delimitations or necessitating too much long-distance migrancy
for blacks. Such was the dream.

The overthrow of apartheid

South African history has shown how effectively a distorted but legalised distribution of power
can bring about a warped social system, when backed by strong-willed security forces; and how
the moral authority of a determined Opposition, even outside the legalised structures, can
challenge that power, if it can operate from a secure base and receive support from outside.

Extra-parliamentary politics in South Africa are not new. They began to take shape in the
colonies and republics well before the end of the 1800s. They provided a climate for the political
strategies based on 'soul force' developed by the Indian leader, MK Gandhi, during his early
career in Natal, echoes of which were to be heard in later acts of defiance against the pass
laws, notably in 1952 and 1960.

The body which emerged in 1912 as the South African Native, later the African National
Congress (ANC), looked back for its origins to a group of provincial 'native congresses' and a
South African Native Convention whose protests against the decisions of the white National
Convention in 1909 had gone largely unnoticed. Other forms of resistance which developed
under the shadow of white supremacy can be seen in appeals to desperate but suicidal
remedies, as among the Xhosas in 1857; in the breakaway separatist movement of black
churches especially from the 1880s; in the African press from 1884; in periodic acts of rebellion
(above all in Natal in 1906) and small-scale rural revolts; in the formation of various political
unions among urban and rural workers (notably the Industrial and Commercial Union of 1919
and the South African Communist Party's (SACP) link-up with African trade unions in the 1930s
and 1940s).

Voteless (save for a short period in the Cape), prevented by law from taking effective industrial
action and unable to get a proper hearing from either the South African or the British authorities
in the early formative years, the black political movements had little chance of success. At first
they tried collaboration with liberal whites; but as white liberals were unable to build up a power
base, they were either attracted to the SACP, whose stance was more radical, or turned
towards direct action through demonstrative pass-burnings, strike action in defiance of the law,
and various community boycotts.

Resistance grew perceptibly during World War II, and reached a climax with a mineworkers'
strike and a walk-out by Hertzog's abortive Native Representative Council in 1946. Then
followed a decade of direct confrontation during the 1950s, when the main body of apartheid
legislation was enacted, and black movements threw all they had into defiance.

Then, after the seventh major anti-pass demonstration since 1900, came Sharpeville. Police
killed 69 and wounded 180 African pass protesters in this Transvaal township just at the time
when Sir Harold Macmillan's celebrated 'winds of change' speech and Dr Verwoerd's campaign
to set up a white-run republic were pulling South Africa in opposite directions. The State
proceeded against black political movements with tough new intimidatory legislation,
conducting mass arrests, depriving political prisoners of rights and making it possible for police
officers to use third degree methods against them with impunity.

The ANC went underground, with a strategy of controlled but accelerating violence. A
breakaway Pan Africanist Congress was less accommodating, and its offshoot Poqo began a
campaign of terror. With bases in exile, both the ANC and the PAC struggled for over a decade
without managing to penetrate the security of the apartheid state - even with growing
international support.

By the 1970s, however, the balance began to change. The oil-price hike of 1973 led to
worldwide inflation, and put such pressure on living costs that black South African workers,
including the miners, broke the ban on strike activity and were able to obtain important wage
gains from employers. In 1976 a revolt by students in Soweto against an offensive educational
system spread like wildfire throughout the country, on the heels of a new 'Black Consciousness'
movement set up under Steve Biko's guidance to encourage Africans to walk tall. The arrest
and killing of Biko in police custody created a fresh outburst of public anger.

The Government began to bend its industrial legislation to accommodate the workers' pressure,
in a step-by-step retreat against trade union demands. After acknowledging a distinction
between 'grand' and 'petty' apartheid in order to strengthen the former, it now brought other
aspects of apartheid, including education and the whole strategy of economic development,
based on homeland development, under review. It had known since the 1970 census that the
statistics on which Verwoerd's policy had been based made no sense.

The morale of the Government had been broken by irresistible pressures. States of emergency,
first brought in after Sharpeville and repeated in 1976 and 1985, proved less and less effective.
The liberation of Africa had reached South Africa's borders with the end of the Rhodesian war
and the collapse of colonial Mozambique. International trade and armaments boycotts escalated
with the involvement of South African troops in war on the Angolan border - at first a sideshow to
the crisis in South West Africa (Namibia), but a major economic and military challenge when the
world's banks began a financial squeeze and Cuban Migs and ground troops came to the aid of
the Angolan government.

Extraordinary footwork, combined with good fortune, eventually enabled the Government to
work a way out of its predicament. The temper of conflict in Africa dropped with the collapse of
the Soviet Union, making the American policy of 'constructive engagement' as orchestrated by
Dr Chester Crocker suddenly realistic. The ANC had built up a position of strength far greater in
the outside world than within the Republic, or that of the Republic in the outside world. However,
it was closely linked to the Mass Democratic Movement, an internal response to President PW
Botha's attempt to set up a new parliamentary system in 1983 which included coloured and
Indian representatives but no Africans.

The ANC's key role in any movement forward was clearly shown in the decision of white leaders
across the spectrum to engage its exiled leaders in exploratory conversations between 1988
and 1989.

The upshot was a decision by President FW de Klerk to release the imprisoned ANC leader,
Nelson Mandela, unconditionally in February 1990, after the latter had served 27 years in jail. At
this point the ANC's consistent adherence to the principle of non-racial democracy paid
enormous dividends. It created a ground base of trust which enabled all political parties, black
and white, to meet at the World Trade Centre near Johannesburg from 1991 to 1993 and to
hammer out a transitional constitution.

This led to a Government of National Unity far wider and more explicit than the attempts to heal
political breaches made by Louis Botha in 1910 and Barry Hertzog in 1933. There were hiccups,
indeed, as when white rightwingers drove an armoured car into the World Trade Centre to make
their point.

However, conciliation won through both the constitutional negotiations and the first democratic
election, held in April 1994, despite serious attempts to undermine them. Its greatest
challenges, the local elections of 1995, the drafting of a final Constitution, and the major task of
socio-economic reconstruction and development still lay ahead, leaving a key question in the
minds of the South Africa public: would conciliation, which had collapsed remarkably quickly
after the Anglo-Boer War, hold its ground in the late 1990s, and would President Mandela pull off
a far greater act of statesmanship than had ever been attempted by General Smuts?

PROVIDED BY STEVE MOSCA (11/12/02)

English 2100H is taught by Dr. Richard Nordquist.
Armstrong Atlantic State University
University Hall 297D
11935 Abercorn Street
Savannah, Georgia 31419
912-921-5991
e-mail: nordqudi@mail.armstrong.edu        

 
13 November 2002

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