In 2020, Prof. Mamdani- Zohran's dad, published a book titled 'Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (2020)'. Responding to a book by Michael Neocosmos, a Marxist Professor in South Africa which explained why illegal migrants are classed as neither settlers nor natives, Mamdani argued that nationalism and colonialism have common origins and are two sides of the same coin even though many countries, e.g. Japan, have never been colonised but do have nationalism. Mamdani suggests responding to the violence inherent in the nation-state by rejecting the identities of settler and native and participating as equal citizens instead. Sadly, citizenship is a matter of law. Acquiring it involves a legal process. Moreover, a country may grant superior rights to indigenous people. For example, Zohran Mamdani can't become POTUS even though he is an American citizen because he was not born in the US.
Aeon magazine excerpted the following from Mamdani's book.
In the course of the struggle against apartheid,
I suppose 'Truth & Reconciliation' is meant. However, there was a legal aspect to this. Under 'comity of nations', it was important that individuals and corporations gain immunity from prosecutions brought in foreign countries- e.g. under the 'Alien Torts Act' in the US. The idea is that South Africa had already dealt with the matter and thus it was a case of 'res judicata'.
South Africans did something remarkable: they tried, with incomplete success, to destroy the settler and the native by reconfiguring both as survivors.
The ANC had won. To the victors, the spoils. But South Africa was not granting citizenship to all and sundry. Only those born in South Africa or those who had undergone naturalization were considered to be citizens.
They did so by adopting a response to extreme violence that defied the logic of Nuremberg
which was the logic of occupying powers punishing those who had started the War. South Africa had not fought a war. It had held a referendum of the White population which voted overwhelmingly to end Apartheid and transition to majority rule.
– the logic of separating perpetrators from victims, punishing the perpetrators, and creating separate spheres in which the two could live without harming each other in an ongoing cycle of violence.
If there was to be violence, it would be one-sided. The majority had all the power. True, there was some fear that the Boers might hole up in some remote patch of land, but how long would they last? Ian Smith's breakaway Republic had soon gone out of business.
By thinking of extreme violence as a political rather than criminal act, South Africans were able to shift focus from individual transgressions of law to the issues that drove the violence and the needs of the people who survived it. Instead of going to court, they sat around the conference table. Rather than turn to a trial to produce truth and punish offenders, they negotiated reforms to make the political system more inclusive, recognising that perpetrators as well had to be brought into the political fold.
The ANC had won. If they were to enjoy the spoils of office, they needed the economy to keep functioning. The 'perpetrators' too needed legal immunity. They may have to flee the country some day. If so, they wanted to be sure they could not be prosecuted for crimes against humanity in their countries of refuge.
Above all, South Africans came to recognise that political identities are not permanent or natural. Activists overcame differences of race imposed on them – differences marked as African, Coloured, Indian, and white – to join in a single cause of breaking down apartheid.
Once Reagan and Gorbachev made a deal to get the Cubans out of Angola, the Cold War aspect of the conflict disappeared. The South African Intelligence Chief (who had a PhD in Poli Sci) was already sending out feelers to the ANC. Mandela had a choice. Either do a deal and take leadership or be frozen out. Otherwise the Zulus do the deal and his own people, the Xhosa, lose salience.
Afrikaners, once champions of apartheid, became part of the movement against it.
Because the US had pulled the plug. It turned out Reagan didn't like racism. Once the Cubans departed, he supported Democracy (i.e. majority rule).
These groups had been formed under colonialism as distinct and often rivalrous, their interests said to be naturally divergent. Because of the racial difference imputed to them, they were subject to different laws and granted different opportunities to participate in the political community, or sometimes no opportunity at all. But in response to apartheid, these people learned to think anew their political relation to each other: not as others or rivals but as equals in law.
South Africa did have left-wing intellectuals, trade-unionists, pastors etc. who believed that working people should unite regardless of colour. The problem was that the Boers, who had lost the war but 'won the peace', could offer more to poorer Whites. Smuts was adroit in using the issue of Chinese labour to show the big Mining barons that the Boers were determined to be masters in their own house. But, though Smuts passed a law in 1911 establishing a colour bar in the mines, nevertheless white miners went on strike in 1913 demanding the right to form a union. In 1914, there was a general strike by white miners and railwaymen. There was a strong possibility that this might be widened to other races. Smuts acted quite harshly but he knew that poorer Whites must be conciliated. The 1922 'Rand revolt' showed this was easier said than done. Moreover, the Great Depression impacted poorer White farmers. The South African Communist party began to grow. Working people, regardless of race, were suffering all over the world. Capitalism had to be reformed or replaced. In 1948, Smuts was defeated by the National Party. The Boers were determined to create a welfare state for their own people. They rejected the approach being taken by the British Labour Party which had granted Independence to India, Burma, Pakistan, Ceylon etc.
Though the material standard of living of White South Africans rose in subsequent decades, there was a problem of corruption. That's why General Van den Bergh, head of BOSS (the National Intelligence Agency) had to resign in 1978 over 'Muldergate' (use of slush funds for Government propaganda). Cabinet Ministers had cozy relations with crony capitalists to whom they gave government contractors. There was a strong suspicion that the elite was enriching itself and off shoring assets. Meanwhile, conscription for white males, which had been introduced in 1967, was extended to two years.
There were structural problems in the South African economy which, however, could be ignored so long as there appeared to be a Soviet, or Cuban, threat- in which case American support could be relied on. But America had no love for Apartheid. Once the Red threat diminished, they wanted majority rule and full integration of South Africa into the global market. But this meant the cosseting of poorer, less skilled, Whites would end. Moreover, since the terms of trade tend to move against 'primary producers', the wealth of South Africa would increasingly end up in Western financial centres. Money has no colour. Wall street does not care if 'capital flight' is done by White people or Black people or the Gupta brothers.
In other words, South Africa attempted to decolonise, by breaking down the colonial distinction between settlers and natives and inviting them to participate in the same political community, with settlers reconfigured as immigrants.
The Boers claimed that the Zulus had come after them. Only the Khoi San had preceded them. What Mamdani means is that the Blacks expressed some sorrow for the suffering the Boers had experienced during their war with Britain. The hope was that a spirit of solidarity and a shared patriotism would come into being
This attempt was partial. Colonial authorities created, and both colonial and apartheid authorities exploited, two kinds of distinction between settlers and natives: racial distinction and tribal distinction. The struggle against apartheid, and the new South Africa that followed, have made inroads against the politicisation of race.
But corruption has increased. Race can be instrumentalized against the incumbents. More and more Whites start to flee the country. But so do skilled black people who fear Societal breakdown.
Yet today tribe remains a supposed African tradition. Thus settler and native identities have been dismantled in some respects and retained in others.
It is a fact that people have different mother tongues. However, nations have traditionally brought tribes together and given them a wider identity. This is particularly important for those from smaller tribes.
The South African case diverges instructively from that of the United States.
There was massive demographic replacement in the US. The indigenous people became a very small minority consigned to 'reservations' on marginal land.
The two countries have similar colonial histories, but only one has attempted to decolonise.
Only one is a super-power. The 13 colonies defeated Britain and became independent centuries ago. The Boers lost their war with Britain. South Africa left the Commonwealth because it wanted to cling on to its 'peculiar institution'- Apartheid.
Both are federations of colonised territories; the US formed from the union of the British colonies during the revolution,
it expanded by incorporating French, Spanish, Russian and Native American territory. It kept winning wars.
South Africa in the early 20th century from the union of the Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal and other British dominions, some of which previously had been under Dutch or Boer control. The great majority of the territory circumscribed by each federation was set aside for settlers.
As had happened in 'Rhodesia'. But once indigenous people acquired arms and began fighting back, the game was not worth the candle.
What defined settlers in both countries was not the colour of their skin, although in most settler colonies the upper echelons of the power structure were and remain overwhelmingly occupied by white-skinned people. (An exception is Liberia.)
In Liberia, the American 'freed slaves' mistreated the indigenous majority till they lost power in 1980.
The settler also was not defined by language, culture, religion, gender or socioeconomic status, however these are conceived; nor by length of residency, immigration status or even citizenship status.
There was considerable White immigration- almost 90,000 up to 1960- in the post-War years. The White population peaked in 1994 at about 5.5 million. About half a million left over the next decade. Currently, it appears that about 90,000 are in the process of leaving.
There were British settlers in South Africa, as well as Afrikaners; white European settlers in America, some who came involuntarily, as indentured servants, as well as enslaved and free Blacks. What defined the settler was
Pure 'Caucasian' ancestry. Much of the US had a 'one drop' rule.
the law to which she was subject. Call it civil law.
Don't. Anglo Saxons have common law. But there was no law when settlers took land from the indigenous people. Court houses were only gradually set up in the 'Wild West'.
Equal subjection to civil law does not mean equality of subjects; settlers were not and are not treated equally. The law may be discriminatory: it may be designed in ways that make it more useful to certain individuals than to others and more useful to certain communities than to others. But all of these individuals and communities are equally subject to the civil law.
No. There was a long process of State formation and then admission to the Federal United States. Even then, there was 'dual sovereignty'. The supremacy of Federal law was established in some fields but not others. It wasn't till the mid Sixties- when Mamdani himself was a student in the US- that one could say the equality before the law had been established.
Within the borders of each federation were and remain inhabitants subject to another kind of law: customary law.
There are 567 'Indian' reservations or colonies'. However, Federal law applies in criminal cases and some civil matters.
The people governed by it are members of native tribes, so called because the civil law groups them that way.
No. Federal law does so. Civil law refers to non-criminal matters.
If this sounds circular, it is: natives are not natives because of anything essential to them but because they were created as natives in law by settlers.
This is not the case. Who your Mummy and Daddy were are 'essential' aspects of your identity. The law does not create this. If you claim to belong to a 'First Nation' admissible evidence may be a birth certificate or a DNA test. That is a justiciable matter but the evidence is biological or genealogical and not created by the law itself.
Like civil law, customary law is unequal. It can offer its native enforcers capricious and tyrannical authority over other natives.
It would be truer to say that it can't magically prevent misuse of authority. But it can provide a remedy if this happens.
But customary law, in both America and South Africa, is in no sense traditional.
Customary means 'traditional'.
It is not a practice predating colonisation.
Traditions change. We say a law is traditional or customary if it evolved out of what went before.
Customary law, like civil law, is created by settlers.
No. It is created by customs prevailing within a population. Settlers may import their own customs but they didn't create them. It is not the case that Spanish settlers in Mexico invented Spanish. They brought it with them.
The particular practices and norms associated with customary law are sometimes inspired by those of an era preceding colonialism, but customary law’s authority over natives, and the authority of natives to wield it, derives from statutes of the civil law.
Federal law. Civil law has to do with torts unless Roman law is meant.
Those who write the civil law ultimately determine what the customary law is,
No. They may say 'in civil matters, judgment may be based on customary practices'. Here evidence would be taken as to what the customary practices prevailed. This was a big feature of Indian law.
while the natives themselves serve as customary law’s custodians, implementing it within the tribal territory. Together, the authors and enforcers of law determine, say, who gets to be a tribal member, which land the member may own or use, what religion the member may practice, how the member is to dress and groom himself, or whether the member is at liberty or detained. In this way, settlers ensure that the natives are civilised according to their standards.
No. If the aim is to change customs, dress, religion, etc. another, more forcible, method is used- e.g. Jesuit reductions in South America.
As a British colonial official in South Africa put it in 1849, customary law would hold so long as it was not ‘repugnant to the general principles of humanity, recognised throughout the whole civilised world’. This proclamation underlined the fact that every colonial power held itself to be the representative of the civilised world and the guardian of general principles of humanity.
Some did. Some didn't. The Germans didn't. Nor did King Leopold's merry crew in the 'Free State' of the Congo.
Apartheid was an effort artificially to retribalise millions of natives by forcibly settling them in homelands
No. That was a separate policy featuring the creation of 'Bantustans.' The 'Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act, 1970' stripped Black South Africans of citizenship. But this was an on-going process dating back to the Natives Land Act, 1913 which gave only 7 percent of the land to Black Africans.
In the domain of civil law, the US and South African settler states subjugated residents racially.
It could criminalize 'miscegenation'.
In the domain of customary law, both settler states subjugated residents tribally.
That was Federal law.
These regimes of racial and tribal control overlapped, but they were not and are not reducible to each other. The racial regime embedded in civil law enjoined both the privileged racial community and the deprived racial community to participate in an order in which the privileged benefited from the labour of the deprived.
In the case of South Africa- yes. But this was not necessarily the case in America.
The tribal regime embedded in customary law enjoined only natives.
No. It would apply to immigrants into the reserved territory.
In South Africa, customary law applied to all natives, but only natives considered indigenous within particular tribal homelands had customary rights. Other natives, deemed immigrants within these tribal homelands, were denied the protections of customary law, including customary rights to land.
No. They may receive 'protections' but not specific 'entitlements' which were reserved for members of the tribe.
In the US, too, natives considered nonindigenous within a particular reservation are denied membership and therefore customary rights.
If that was the custom of the tribe.
Thus tribal – customary – law has itself been made discriminatory.
Only if that was what it was ab ovo. Some tribes have strict conditions for membership. Others are more flexible. But this is also true of citizenship. Some countries are generous in granting it to immigrants. Others aren't.
Customary and civil law and their divergent jurisdictions constituted the backbone of the colonial systems in the US and South Africa.
No. They were irrelevant. What constituted the backbone of colonial systems was military power. When this waned, Colonialism collapsed.
That system is retained in the US today, largely without changes.
Only about a million people live on reservations.
In South Africa, it was altered dramatically by the introduction of apartheid in the late 1940s.
No. There was a gradual process. Black workers had started working in mines in the 1860s. By the end of the nineteenth century, many were employed in factories.
From the standpoint of the white-dominated state, apartheid was necessitated by the breakdown of the dual system of tribal and racial control amid industrialisation.
By 1943, the manufacturing sector was bigger than the mining sector. The fact is, South Africans could have chosen the Brazilian path- i.e. have a colour bar but don't call it that. They chose to go down a different road.
With the economy booming, Africans were moving into cities for work. And when they arrived, some of them organised into unions demanding better pay and treatment.
The 1946 strike by black workers was a turning point.
The presence of African agitators in urban South Africa – and the threat they posed to the economic interests of whites – was a crisis in need of solution. Apartheid was that solution: an effort artificially to retribalise millions of natives by forcibly settling them in homelands, renamed Bantustans, which would be administered under the tightened fist of native authorities.
Mamdani means the Bantu Authorities Act in 1951. It was the victory of the National Party in 1953 which sealed the fate of the Black majority. Cape Coloured, who had voted for the United Party, lost the vote.
Africans could return to cities as migrant labourers, but they would be denied the right to reside there.
They could reside there. They just couldn't vote or acquire property. But this was an ongoing process from the late nineteenth century.
If the market economy detribalised labour, forcing it out of villages into industry, apartheid’s political solution was to retribalise that labour by sending it ‘home’.
No. White South Africa had been taking rights away from non-Whites for a very long time. It wasn't trying to 're-tribalize' anyone. Smuts had got rid of the Chinese. He could not get rid of the Indians because the King Emperor would be forced to resettle his own subjects at great cost and expense.
Apartheid, too, sparked unrest and eventually crisis.
The first sign that 'winds of change' had come to South Africa was the Portuguese Carnation revolution. Ian Smith's breakaway Republic too was coming under more and more military pressure. Then the Cubans entered the Angola conflict in 1975. By 1976, they had 36,000 troops and had driven out the South Africans.. By 1988, there were 55,000 Cuban troops in Angola. This led to the New York accords and the departure of the Cubans in 1991. The time had come for the US to pull the rug from under the Apartheid regime. But the South African intelligence chief had already begun secret negotiations with the ANC. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no Cold War angle to the conflict. The ANC would prefer to preserve the wealth of the country rather than turn it into a Socialist shithole.
But this time the crisis had a productive resolution: the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), the negotiations to end apartheid carried out between 1990 and 1994. It is CODESA, in particular, that rejected the Nuremberg model.
Because the country had not been conquered and occupied.
The goal was never to single out perpetrators – to name and shame, in the parlance of the contemporary, Nuremberg-inspired human rights regime. CODESA’s goal was to create a new political system in which all members of the preceding regime – both enemies and supporters of apartheid – would be included.
The ANC did not want to kill the golden goose.
The creation of a new political system did not happen in Europe after the Second World War.
Yes it did. Countries occupied by the Soviets became Communist one-party states. West Germany became a multi-party Democracy because that is what its occupying powers wanted. Austria was a special case. The Soviets gave up their portion of it in return for it becoming neutral.
The victims and the perpetrators were separated by means of ethnic cleansing
Mamdani meant that a lot of Germans were driven out of territory claimed by Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, etc.
and the establishment of the state of Israel.
or the state of Pakistan which occurred around the same time.
The post-conflict German state was built by outsiders, while the internal resistance to the Nazis was denied participation.
Communists were welcome to go to East Germany and become part of the new ruling elite there. In West Germany there was 'de-Nazification' though enthusiasm for this lessened as the Cold War hotted up.
In South Africa, internal resistance movements forced the issue of apartheid’s injustice, necessitating the settlement that ended apartheid. In critical ways, that settlement reflected the key transformation wrought by the resistance. The Black Consciousness Movement, labour organisers and student groups opposed to apartheid overwrote the political identification associated with race. They encouraged Africans, Coloureds, Indians and whites to see themselves as capable of inhabiting the same political community. They showed that political identity is mutable, not inborn; that it is a product of history.
This was also the view of Niel Bernard, the South African intelligence chief. He saw National Security and prosperity as requiring a unified South African citizenship.
The state that followed apartheid bore this out by uniting South Africans under a single government and law – albeit with many concessions to whites, intended to keep them at the negotiating table. It was, however, not the internal resistance from anti-apartheid groups that led the negotiations.
In other words, Communists did not take the lead. Indeed, they felt betrayed. Then they remembered Mandela had always been a moderate. He was radicalized by the Sharpeville massacre. At best, you could say he was like Nehru- i.e. left of centre but not a full fledged Communist.
That task fell to representatives of more mainstream organisations, such as the African National Congress (ANC), headed by Nelson Mandela. In the 1960s, the ANC and others initially engaged in a militant ‘liberation movement’ modelled on those of other decolonising African states such as Mozambique, Angola and Algeria. But efforts at armed liberation in South Africa resulted in crackdowns on militant leaders such as Mandela, who were imprisoned or expatriated. In prison and exile, armed liberators lost connection with the very constituencies whose challenges they were committed to addressing. More like diplomats, they won the favour of international politicians and boycott movements, and gained prestige.
Mamdani is saying they were 'sell outs'. They should have done more than establish majority rule. They should have uprooted Capitalism.
Perhaps it was through these international engagements that they learned to be neoliberal – to reduce the work of political systems to the work of individuals, as Nuremberg had.
The Soviets had imposed Communism in territory they occupied. Why did President Bush not destroy Capitalism in South Africa? Was it because Mandela was a 'sell-out'?
The result was the most famous but least constructive mechanism of the post-apartheid transition: truth and reconciliation.
It had a positive impact on financial markets. South Africa received a lot of investment. A new Black bourgeoisie emerged. South African schools and colleges were turning out high quality graduates able to rise in knowledge-based industries.
Whereas CODESA responded to apartheid by imagining a new political community in which enemies became adversaries,
enemies are adversaries. What Mamdani means is that peaceful methods replaced violence.
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
led by Bishop Tutu
sought to pin blame on individual perpetrators and provide restitution to individual victims.
It opened the door to amnesty and forgiveness.
Formed in 1995, the TRC transformed the political violence of apartheid into criminal violence, per the Nuremberg-inspired human rights regime. The results were perverse. The TRC ignored millions of Black political prisoners and victims of ethnic cleansing, displaced from their homes into Bantustans. The commission catalogued just 20,000 cases of victimisation. In the meantime, the TRC absolved apartheid’s white constituency by putting all responsibility on individual perpetrators.
Mamdani is saying that the TRC was not delivering 'Social Justice' of the Communist sort. It was Christian and focussed on mercy and forgiveness.
The TRC’s narrative of apartheid tells South Africans to ignore their history. It says that violence comes down to people’s personal choices – that it is not a matter of how the state functions, or a product of the ways that political constituencies think about the issues that matter to them. This narrative helps to maintain racial privilege even in a South Africa with formal racial equality: whites, ignorant of their complicity as beneficiaries of apartheid, continue to function as a social elite. The result is growing tension over a political system that provides for universal franchise but cannot supply social justice.
There is lack of clarity as to how much land is White owned. Some claim it is only 22 percent (Whites make up about seven percent of the population). But a lot of land is owned by companies and trusts. The suspicion is that Whites have managed to hang on to a lot of land gained by unfair means. South Africa now has an Expropriation act which permits the State to take and redistribute land without compensation. This has provoked Trump's ire. But South Africa is a sovereign country and can do what it likes.
The concessions made to whites during the negotiations to end apartheid – concessions enshrined in the national constitution and in laws governing local administration – ensure that the problem of social justice will not be solved any time soon.
Five years after Mamdani wrote this, the Expropriation law was passed.
But it is important to realise that, in exchange for those concessions, something critical was achieved. The crisis of apartheid might have been resolved with mass bloodshed, leading either to new forms of legal subjugation or to political and spatial separation. Both outcomes would likely have fostered more violence, in an ongoing cycle. Instead, South Africa now has competing political constituencies working to achieve their goals under the aegis of a system seen as legitimate by the participants. This is possible because, in spite of the TRC, enough South Africans have been willing to rethink political identity.
By emigrating?
They have come to recognise that the racial political identities of the past were not timeless but rather created by political processes. As such, they could be dismantled by political processes as well.
Like the Expropriation Act.
South Africans have thus felled one pillar of the settler-versus-native distinction in their country: race as political identity.
Next, they should get rid of gender. Everybody should have both a penis and a vagina.
This is the key divergence from the US situation.
Whites aren't fleeing the US.
The US, too, has partially deracialised but, in the US condition, this does not constitute decolonisation, for racialisation in the US does not distinguish settler from native.
Which is why Mamdani's son is the mayor of New York.
In the US, the determinants of the native-versus-settler distinction are more firmly rooted today than ever before – so deep in the marrow of law and society that they are invisible. In South Africa, half of those determinants were made visible and were contested.
Hopefully, the US will send immigrants or 'settlers'- like Kamala Harris or Zohran Mamdani- packing. The First Nations will once again possess the whole of 'Turtle Island'.
The other pillar of the settler-versus-native distinction – tribe – persists in the architecture of the South African state, as it does in the US. In South Africa, tribe has been naturalised, presumed to be part of a timeless native – that is, African – culture. In the former Bantustans, the regime of customary law remains substantially unreformed.
The 1996 constitution recognizes customary law. But Bantustans don't exist. They have been reincorporated into the nation state.
It must be said, all courts recognize customary law to some degree in civil cases. Sadly, this raised the bogeyman of US courts upholding Shariah law.
In rural South Africa, violence continues among Africans who define themselves as tribally distinct.
because they speak a different language and have a different homeland
Africans are still denied rights under the customary regime, should they live in the ‘wrong’ tribal homeland.
There are Rural or Tribal Trust lands in South Africa. There may be legal challenges to this.
In urban South Africa, Africans and other persons of colour seen as tribal strangers, and thus intruders, are periodically the target of what is called xenophobic violence.
Immigration can be a problem in any country.
South Africa’s story tells us much about how a society can go about decolonising.
So can India's story. But the topic is of little interest.
But it also speaks to the enormous challenge of that worthy project.
The challenge is to stop productive people running away from a collapsing economy.
On 2 February 1990, the State President of South Africa F W de Klerk opened a new session of parliament with the announcement that apartheid was over.
Mandela would be released. South Africa would begin attracting a lot of investment.
In doing so, he made official what had become clear on the ground, thanks to the uprisings of the previous two decades. Whatever the supporters and beneficiaries of apartheid might have wished, the system was no longer functional. Once a pillar of South African society, apartheid had become the central focus of what was in effect an insurgent war. To sustain apartheid risked national destruction.
Gorbachev was still in power. The Cubans may have agreed to leave but the Soviets might continue to apply pressure. The US was in no mood to stick its head out for an apartheid South Africa which would decline economically if forced into a war of attrition.
The end of one period was the beginning of another: that of negotiation. But when negotiations began in May, they sidestepped the organisational architecture of the uprising.
i.e. Winnie Mandela
Like the colonial authorities who allied with customary authorities at the outset of indirect rule, the South African government turned to partners said to be the legitimate leaders of Black South Africa, even though they were marginal to the internal anti-apartheid movement that had actually forced the change that was now afoot.
They were welcome to stand for election. If Communists had come to power through the ballot box, they could expropriate assets and set up a Socialist economy.
This time, the negotiating partner would be the ANC-in-exile, and one of its jailed leaders: Mandela. Mandela was released from prison a week after de Clerk’s speech, but his role as the leader of the anti-apartheid negotiators was established earlier. Inside the prison, there was every attempt to isolate him from other activists, especially those associated with the urban uprising – militants who might imbue in him the lessons of Black consciousness and the hope of a nonracial society. His wife Winnie was likely among those who had adopted the new philosophies and methods so threatening to the apartheid system. Unlike Nelson, who had been in jail for the entire duration of the urban uprising, Winnie was very much a product of that uprising, adopting its daring and confrontational attitude.
e.g. 'necklacing'- i.e. putting a rubber tyre around the neck of your victim and setting it on fire.
Nelson and the ANC – which began discarding apartheid’s racial distinctions only a few years before his release – were no longer at the political cutting edge. Indeed, their methods had been repudiated.
Why did they keep winning elections?
Their legitimacy came from international approval and Nelson Mandela’s celebrity as a political prisoner, not from their leadership. Mandela wrote of his first meeting with the government’s ‘secret working group’ in May 1988 ‘at a posh officers’ club’ within Pollsmoor Prison. The working group’s primary question was: ‘How would the ANC protect the rights of the white minority?’ The following year in March, Mandela sent a memorandum to State President P W Botha regarding, among other things, the minority question. ‘Two political issues will have to be addressed,’ Mandela wrote. ‘Firstly, the demand for majority rule in a unitary state; secondly, the concern of white South Africa over this demand, as well as the insistence of whites on structural guarantees that majority rule will not mean domination of the white minority by blacks. The most crucial tasks which will face the government and the ANC will be to reconcile these two positions.’ Upon his release in 1990, Mandela brought up the issue at his first press conference:
I wanted to impress upon the reporters the critical role of whites in any new dispensation. I have tried never to lose sight of this. We did not want to destroy the country before we freed it, and to drive the whites away would devastate the nation. I said there was a middle ground between white fears and black hopes, and we in the ANC would find it. ‘Whites are fellow South Africans,’ I said, ‘and we want them to feel safe and to know that we appreciate the contribution that they have made toward the development of this country.’ Any man or woman who abandons apartheid will be embraced in our struggle for a democratic, non-racial South Africa.
The fact is, South Africa was economically successful and would become more so as international investment poured in. There was a 'cooperative solution' such that everybody could be materially better off. The problem with 'necklacing' is that those doing it might themselves be accused of being traitors tomorrow.
It is striking that Mandela had the same the notion of majority and minority as did the apartheid government: both accepted the racialised notion of a Black majority and a white minority.
Worse yet, they both recognized that some people have a penis. Others have a vagina.
Even though Mandela wrote and spoke of ‘a democratic, non-racial South Africa’, he had yet to formulate the notion of a democratic, nonracial citizenship. Even so, his politics had clearly evolved.
No. He was consistent. The truth is, all productive South Africans had a common interest in seeing their country flourish economically. In the short run, discrimination of the basis of colour could yield benefits to poorer Whites. But they would also have to go into the Army in increasing numbers. Like the Rhodesians, there would be a war of attrition which they were bound to lose.
Once, he had admired Algeria and Mozambique, where the postcolonial leadership had been uncompromising in its demand for ‘justice’ and which most settlers had fled rather than become citizens of the new state. Now, he worried that ‘to drive the whites away would devastate the nation’. What had changed? When was Mandela’s moment of epiphany? Had he come to see Mozambique as Aimé Césaire had experienced Haiti in the 1940s – a warning against letting justice turn into revenge – and thus determined to avoid such an outcome in South Africa?
He could either do a deal and become the new President or he could sulk and talk nonsense. Aime Cesaire's Martinique chose to remain with France. It is doing very well.
If states like Mozambique highlighted the possibility of justice turning into revenge, Mandela’s radical critics would later charge that the post-apartheid transition had not been vengeful enough: reconciliation seemingly turned into an embrace of evil. Specifically, these critics argued that Mandela erred in focusing exclusively on the question of political equality while ignoring extreme social inequality.
He should have killed the golden goose. South Africa should have gone in the direction of Mugabe's Zimbabwe.
But to believe that apartheid could simply give way to social equality was to ignore the critical tensions of the South African moment. The consolidation of the anti-apartheid movement had fostered a crisis, not a victory.
No. There was a victory. Some ANC politicians became very rich. A large Black bourgeoisie emerged. Black people were doing very well in the learned professions.
The option in the early 1990s was to keep fighting,
not after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Communism had failed. Reagan had triumphed.
to keep breaking down the state and pitting enemies against each other, or else to reach out and achieve some compromise whereby enemies might live together as political adversaries. The success of the anti-apartheid movement had been based on such compromises, whereby whites accepted that they would not be in charge, and Blacks accepted that whites had something to offer – that their participation meant not capitulation to apartheid but rather resistance to it.
Between 1990 and 1994, there were international sanctions, disinvestment and capital flight. Even after that most capital flows were short term 'hot money' portfolio flows. It was privatization after 1997 which saw significant FDI inflows. Relaxation of exchange controls in 2009 had big effect. However, there were concerns about corruption, infrastructure degradation and high youth unemployment.
Thabo Mbeki,
who was educated in both England and the Soviet Union but was far from being a doctrinaire Communist
who in 1999 succeeded Mandela as president of the Republic of South Africa, made a notable speech, ‘I Am an African’, clarifying that the truly radical move was the creation of a new and inclusive political order, which is what he meant by ‘reconciliation’. The speech marked the adoption of the new constitution on 8 May 1996, and took on the question of whether yesterday’s settlers would be accepted as citizens of the new South Africa. Or would they be flushed out of the colony to make way for a racially cleansed independent country? Mbeki’s answer was unequivocal:
I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still part of me … I am the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas, who sees in the mind’s eye and suffers the suffering of a simple peasant folk: death, concentration camps, destroyed homesteads, a dream in ruins … I am an African.
He was an economist who had kept his eyes open. The fact is, by the mid-Seventies Marxist Economists were having to admit the many shortcomings of the Command economy. There was even a new 'Marxist-Hayekian' school which sought to combine the advantages of the market (including privatization to raise efficiency) with a Socialist Welfare Model.
The concentration camps Mbeki referred to were built by the British to house Boer prisoners during the Second Boer War, when the British conquered their fellow whites and took their colonies. Mbeki was announcing a transformative revision of history, in which it was not only Africans who were colonised – by the British and the Boers – but also the Boers. He was challenging South Africans to reimagine political identity, to see that political identity could be reimagined because it is a product of histories, not nature. If whites, too, could be colonised Africans, then they could be citizens of the postcolonial state.
Could South Africa emerge as an affluent Welfare State with liberal political institutions? Yes. Its people were hardworking, intelligent and enterprising. But could jobs be generated fast enough for young people? Wages were lower in other places and labour-intensive industries appeared exploitative to the new governing class. The focus was on the higher end of the job market even though, for the majority, there was a considerable 'skills gap' worsened by apartheid. Mbeke was himself from the last cohort permitted to study the same curriculum as the Whites. It must be said that access to education has greatly increased. 84 percent of the population has secondary or post-secondary education. Sadly less than 10 percent of Blacks have tertiary qualification. The figure for Whites is close to 40 percent. Still, great progress has been made. What is lacking is work experience. It is estimated that some 62 percent of 15 to 34 year olds are unemployed. By contrast university graduates have only 23 percent unemployment. The solution to the problem must involve more vocational training and work placement.
This did not entail blindness to the stark problem of social inequality. In another speech two years later, titled ‘Two Nations’ and given at the opening of the National Assembly debate on reconciliation and nation-building, Mbeki spoke to ‘the difficult but inevitable challenges posed by white class privilege’. Some on the Left welcomed the speech for addressing so much unfinished business; others dismissed it as a rhetorical gesture that had come too late. But this view unrealistically assumes that more could have been done earlier. And it is not at all clear that the most hardline anti-apartheid activists had something better to offer. The Pan Africanist Congress rejected compromise under the slogan ‘one settler, one bullet’.
They had split off from the ANC in 1959. But they never got more than about 1 percent of the vote. I suppose Mamdani does not approve of them because they repudiate Marxism.
The fact is that apartheid and the trappings of white privilege were popular among white South Africans. To steamroll it all at once and right away would have required a political movement much stronger than the one anti-apartheid forces had built. The National Party, the party of apartheid, had come to power in the whites-only House of Assembly through elections in 1948 and was returned to power in every election thereafter for the next 40-plus years. As the anti-apartheid movement gained momentum in the 1970s, the National Party gained in public support. What is more, the process leading to the dissolution of political and juridical apartheid involved a whites-only referendum. It was essential that a majority of the white population authorise its government to negotiate with representatives of the Black majority.
Almost 70 percent voted 'yes' in the referendum in 1992.
An uncompromising push for social justice might well have swung the white referendum in the direction of the rejectionists, who were gaining power as apartheid came to a close. The pro-apartheid Conservative Party gained seats at the National Party’s expense in the late 1980s, emerging as the official opposition. There was a real risk that organisations such as Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, a separatist white-supremacist outfit, would sway hearts and minds. Even liberal intellectuals stoked the fears of whites. For instance, the journalist Rian Malan’s book My Traitor’s Heart (1990) won big sales numbers and widespread admiration with a detailed investigation of what the pro-apartheid press called Black-on-Black violence. The descendent of a former South African state president who considers himself a liberal, Malan wrestled with his family’s contributions to apartheid even as he narrated the story of the Hammerman: a big Zulu who wielded a heavy hammer with which he smashed the skulls of his Black victims, for gains that were often puny. If they can do this to their own, Malan was asking, what will they do to us, given half a chance?
Malan had been smart enough to escape conscription by moving to America. He might be worth listening to.
Yet white fear did not carry the day. Why? Because
the Soviet Union had collapsed. America would not prop up apartheid South Africa. There had to be a transition to majority rule. The hope was that greedy ANC politicians would permit economic growth. True, poorer Whites might suffer but they could always emigrate.
important sections of the liberation movement had learned to think in holistic terms. They told anyone who would listen – and these numbers grew over time – that the struggle was against not settlers but settler power. Without a state legally underwriting settler privileges, settlers would be ordinary immigrants.
citizens.
This was the heart of the South African moment: redefining the enemy as not settlers but the settler state, not whites but white power. By doing so, South Africa’s liberation movements eased whites into the idea of a nonracial democracy.
For economic reasons. There was high inflation. International banks were refusing to roll over debt. Businesses were closing down. Others were threatening to leave the country. It is said that employees were being pressured to vote 'yes'. There was also the risk of lawlessness in the townships spreading. The old theory was that the African native was traditional in his thinking and had a strong sense of loyalty. But traditional African society was breaking down. South Africa could not pretend that it was immune to what Macmillan called the 'winds of change' at the beginning of the Nineteen Sixties. The American army was now headed by a Black Man. The 'Powell doctrine' made it clear that the US would not come to the rescue of apartheid South Africa because there was widespread repugnance, amongst the American public, for the colour bar. It must also be said that in 1992, it appeared that the Whites who had stayed on in Mugabe's Zimbabwe were doing well. Majority rule might mean increased affluence and security for Whites. In any case, what was the alternative? Militarization and a war of attrition? Could seven percent of the population really prevail over the vast majority? Moreover, income growth had stalled for most Whites over the course of the Eighties. Indeed, by the end of the decade, there was a growing White underclass and, for the first time, net emigration of Whites. The writing was on the wall for all to read. The hope was that Black votes would get split along tribal or factionalist lines. Whites might survive by cunning and guile even if they could no longer dominate the country. Moreover, sooner or later, Sub-Saharan Africa would take off economically. South Africa and Nigeria- as the two biggest economies would gain vast markets. Indigenous conglomerates would operate across African borders. But the first step to reaping this windfall was dismantling Apartheid. Foreign capital would then start flooding in.
This dream did in fact come true for many. Sadly, poorer whites and jobless young Black people got left behind. The Whites could emigrate and, I believe, have done well for themselves. Sadly, infrastructure problems and skills mismatch remain a problem. The Communist ideology can offer no solution here. Nor can redistributing land solve the underlying problem. It is up to the youth of the nation to find a way forward.
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