Race And Reconciliation: Essays From The New South Africa

Introduction

≈ xi ≈ Introduction Historical Background The inauguration of a new nation. 1985. P. W. Botha, expected to make a speech announcing massive reform of the crumbling apartheid state, instead refuses to “cross the Rubicon.” Overnight the rand devalues by more than 100 percent in a country already embroiled in war, chaos, township violence, and spiraling state terror. 1985 and 1987. The business and academic communities secretly meet the African National Congress, first in Lusaka and then in Dakar. The African National Congress begins to consider the idea of a negotiated settlement rather than an outright victory. All parties to the South African conflict fear the massive social upheaval that would come with a civil war in the country. No side can expect easy “victory” or even victory at all. 1989. Communism collapses, eroding the African National Congress’s most important financial and military support bases. The National Party begins to realize that the likelihood of a Soviet-style state in South Africa is evaporating. This catalyzes the party into preparations for a negotiated settlement. 1990. Nelson Mandela is released from prison. 1991. The apartheid state is formally ended and the CODESA talks (Coalition for a Democratic South Africa) take place at Kempton Park, outside of Johannesburg. The African National Congress has decided to forgo the continuation of the armed struggle, which it now believes will lead to nothing beyond a destructive stalemate. Mandela immediately I n t r o d u c t i o n ≈ xii ≈ attacks the African National Congress for having formally disbanded “MK,” the arm of the revolution. The talks promise to be stormy. They are boycotted by the Pan Africanist Congress (the PAC), which declares that the only serious way to achieve power-sharing is through direct election of representatives, thus achieving popular democracy. The CODESA talks are tumultuous, breaking down at least once. However, they eventually lead to a power-sharing arrangement (the interim government) and set out time lines and power lines for the transition to a broad-based South African electoral democracy. The African National Congress relinquishes the brunt of its leftist position during these talks in exchange for what it sees as peace and stability in the wake of an ongoing fear of revolt from the far right in South Africa. It has agreed to respect the rule of property, even though its official position has been that property acquired in a context of racist capitalism could not be deemed morally, legally, or politically valid in the new, more just society. Moreover, it has relinquished what was a personal credo of Mandela’s, namely the nationalization of the gold and diamond mines. The National Party has agreed to retrench itself from control over the state apparatus, but has managed to give its employees huge pensions. What the National Party gives up is essentially its claim on governance, since it knows that in the first election it will lose power. The CODESA talks and the formation of the interim government take place in the context of massive social insecurity. Forty-nine percent of white people vote against the ending of apartheid. The spiral of violence between Inkatha (the “pro-Zulu” party) and the ANC that will grip the KwaZulu-Natal province in the first half of the 1990s will just possibly claim more lives by the gun, the knife, and the “necklace” (tire-burning) than apartheid ever did. It is a well-known historical fact that two major threats to any incipient democracy are the dictatorship of the majority and the breakaway of the minorities into separate states. Inkatha fears the dictatorship of the Xhosa-based African National Congress and is in favor of, at minimum, a Federated South Africa in which it has the autonomy of a Zulu kingdom. (Zulu nationalism remains dominant in the province. Even in the year 2001 the Zulu king receives more funding from the provincial budget than that dispensed in the fight against HIV/AIDS—this, although 39 percent of all persons in the province are HIV positive.) And so the leopard and the lion draw knives and fight it out, with the help of the secret Third Force, always vigilant to stamp out potential communist threats in these insecure and less than salad days of the new nation. The interim government, meanwhile, protects the interests of business , which will remain the most powerful and richest sector of the South I n t...