Going Against the Tide: South Africa's Search for Democracy

GOING AGAINST THE TIDE: SOUTH AFRICA'S SEARCH FOR DEMOCRACY by Pauline H. Baker N.o country confronts the thorny questions of self-determination more directly than South Africa, a nation of 40 million people who represent a microcosm ofthe world. For over 300 years, a white minority has dominated this racially, ethnically and religiously mixed society. Whites, the largest proportion of whom are descended from Dutch Protestants and French Huguenots, are a dwindling minority that now represents 13 percent of the population. To protect their status and ostensibly, to prevent racial conflict, whites adopted the policy of apartheid, the Afrikaans word for "separateness." It entrenched the notion of racial and ethnic identity in the country's ideology, law, economy, educational system, and public institutions , including the government. Race-based rules and practices regulated every facet of an individual's life from birth to death. Now South Africa is undergoing a radical transformation, testing whether democracy can be nurtured in a system based on institutionalized racism. Racial and ethnic classification divided the society in two ways. It separated whites from blacks, a designationthatrefers to Africans, coloreds (mixed race) and Asians. Whites were themselves culturally but not legally divided into Afrikaner, English, Portuguese, Greek, and other European communities. Second, the classification further divided Africans, who reprePauline H. Baker is Associate Director of the Aspen Institute's Congressional International Program and author of The United States and South Africa: The Reagan Years (New York: Ford Foundation: Foreign Policy Association, 1989). The views expressed in this article are those ofthe author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Aspen Institute. 13 14 SAIS REVIEW sent 75 percent ofthe population, into ten ethnic bantustans, or homelands, a patchwork offragmented and impoverished territories groomed for what Pretoria hoped would be eventual political independence. When by the late 1970s the scheme was clearly not working, it was modified under a new constitution, promulgated in 1984. The provisions gave some voice to coloreds and Asians through separate and unequal parliaments, and to African local councils in the townships. However, rather than ameliorate racial conflict, these bodies became the targets of a nationwide protest that escalated into the 1984-1986 black uprising. The idea behind this modernized form of apartheid, people correctly perceived, was essentially the same: all groups had to remain separated in their "own affairs" departments, consistent with the group rights approach to political representation. The release ofNelson Mandela and the government's legal recognition ofthe anti-apartheid movement in February 1990, was a political watershed that symbolized the final discrediting of separate development. Decades of black resistance, international financial and trade sanctions, the collapse of Soviet communism, and South African economic decline combined to erode a system whose legacy ofracism, repression and rebellion continues to tear the country apart today. "For too long," President F.W. de Klerk acknowledged, "we clung to a dream of separate nation-states when it was already clear that it could not succeed. For that we are sorry."1 South Africa's recent history is vital to understanding the inherent contradictionsofself-determination as itunfolds inthe contemporaryworld. South Africa is moving simultaneously in two directions: toward the fulfillment of traditional self-determination, by conceding political rights for blacks that had been granted long ago by European powers and white minority regimes in the rest ofsub-Saharan Africa; and toward the defiance of self-determination in the modern sense of the term, by rejecting race or ethnicity as explicit criteria for political representation in the new constitutional order. South Africa, in short, is pioneering a bold, iftortuous, political experiment that goes against the post-Cold War tide ofracial and ethnic nationalism . Ifthe experiment succeeds, it will stand out as a model for culturally divided societies everywhere, pointing a way out ofthe fratricidal war that group nationalism inspires. But it is a risky undertaking. South Africa will either become one ofthe most remarkable examples ofconflict resolution in this century or a monumental missed opportunity. Collapsed Expectations Events since Mandela was released from prison suggest that the verdict dictating the national fate will not be known for some time. The transition 1. "De Klerk Apologizes for Apartheid's Ills," Washington Post, October 10...