As we celebrate Black History Month, we have the opportunity to commemorate both the achievements of the past and look to an uncertain but promising future. Nothing illustrates this duality better than the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, which achieved a great victory with political racial integration in 1994, but continues to deal with the enduring legacies of apartheid and settler colonialism that still define South African society today. Much like in the United States, de jure segregation in South Africa is a thing of the past, but the culture shaped by apartheid is alive and well.
South Africa has been uniquely molded by a complex history of colonialism grounded in its settler past--it was colonized by the Dutch East India Company on the authority of the Dutch Republic in 1652 after long being inhabited by the indigenous Nguni people, who were comprised of various ethnic groups including the Zulu and the Xhosa, whose descendants make up most of South Africa’s population today. The Dutch established a colony at Cape Town and brought a substantial number of enslaved people from Eastern Africa and Southeast Asia. Seeing little value in anything other than the strategically and economically crucial Cape Town port, the Afrikaners (European colonial immigrants to South Africa and their descendants) did not attempt to venture further into the African mainland to any significant degree until the 19th century. Over the years, while the bulk of what is now South Africa remained uncolonised, Cape Town rose to global prominence as a major juncture on the fastest naval route between Europe and East Asia until the completion of the Suez Canal in the mid-19th century.
In 1787, a domestic revolution in the Dutch Republic saw Prince William V ousted; the Prince fled to Great Britain, who in return for providing him asylum, forced him to relinquish Dutch colonial holdings to the British crown, including South Africa and the Cape Town port. Britain had little interest in directly governing this new colony, instead simply collecting on its considerable economic importance.
Afrikaner migration out of Cape Town did not begin in earnest until Britain took a heavier hand in colonial governance in Cape Town. Though the local government was still allowed to function mostly as before, in 1806, Britain banned the speaking of Dutch, which prompted a number of outraged Afrikaners to venture for the first time deeper into greater South Africa to evade the perceived British impingement on their culture. This outrage was only exacerbated when, in 1838, the British Parliament abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. Afrikaner farmers relied on slavery to make a living, and could no longer sustain themselves post-emancipation. These combined factors led to a large exodus of these so called Boers, who would go on to establish Catholic, Dutch-speaking communities in the South African interior that eventually became known as the Boer Republics.
These Boer Republics fought a series of wars against Great Britain and were eventually forcibly reconciled into the British Empire, but the new Union of South Africa had greatly expanded into the South African interior. While there had been little conflict with Indigenous peoples in the early colonial period, the colonists had, by the early 20th century, encroached on the former Zulu and Xhosa empires. With much of the Indigenous population now under direct colonial rule, racial segregation was implemented with the explicit puropse of maintaining Afrikaner dominance. Legislation like the Natives’ Land Act ensured not only political inequality, but egregious wealth disparity such that Afrikaners, who at this point made up only twenty percent of the population, owned ninety percent of South Africa’s land. In combination with Afrikaner control of the mercantile economy of the Cape Town port, the Act forced most of the Indigenous population into wage slavery as part of a permanent socioeconomic underclass.
South Africa gained the right of self-governance from Great Britain in 1931. In 1948, with the ascension of the South African Nationalist Party to federal political power, apartheid (systematic segregation) was codified into official state policy. The white supremacist Nationalists wasted no time in implementing apartheid policies, beginning with anti-miscegenation laws like the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and Immorality Amendment Act, which banned any sexual relationships between white and non-white persons. The definition of ‘non-white persons’ was defined by the Population Registration Act of 1950, which outlined three classifications: Black, “coloured,” and Asian. These classifications were further subdivided into smaller subcategories with the ultimate goal of creating a strictly regimented caste system that would allow for the preservation of white hegemony, by not only placing the white Afrikaners at the top of this rigid hierarchy, but also by using these subcategories to keep groups with a common interest in overthrowing the apartheid government from organizing and taking collective action.
The racial classifications denoted by the Population Registration Act were used for a variety of purposes, including mass eviction and relocation to townships, which were underdeveloped and segregated ghettos, and bantustans, which were regions set aside for the relocation of peoples of various ethnicities with varying degrees of autonomy. The Act also served a similar purpose to Jim Crow laws in the United States; opportunities for transportation, entertainment, education, employment, and even access to basic facilities were limited for those designated as “nonwhite.”
What’s more, despite the reformation of the Union of South Africa into the so-called Republic of South Africa in 1961, “nonwhite” South Africans were completely disenfranchised until apartheid was abolished, save for a thirteen year period between 195 and 1969 when coloured South Africans were allotted four seats in the legislature. As anti-apartheid sentiment fomented courtesy of the African National Congress (ANC), the Nationalist government imprisoned revolutionary leaders like Nelson Mandela and utilized extrajudicial killings to stifle dissent.
Between 1990 and 1994, apartheid was abolished, “nonwhite” South Africans were enfranchised, and the ANC gained control of the government. For the first time, a Black president was elected: revolutionary leader and anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela. Despite these momentous victories, however, apartheid still remains in all but name. While South Africa is the second richest country in Africa and is one of the fastest developing countries in the world, it is also the world’s most unequal nation. An elite class almost entirely comprised of the descendants of the white Afrikaners, who now only make up 7.9% of the population, reaps the fruits of the labor of the descendants of those up until recently designated as “nonwhite.” Among the beneficiaries of this system has been one Elon Musk, whose father owned an emerald mine in Zambia which funded a lavish lifestyle at the top of the South African food chain and provided a young Elon with substantial capital to pay for an top private education and found several startups including Zip2 and PayPal.
The self-perpetuating mechanisms through which wealth maintains its concentration cannot be eliminated through political enfranchisement alone--our own experience in the United States is evidence enough. It is nothing more than fantasy to think that the extension of equal political rights after hundreds of years of inequality in all aspects of life, absent any sort of socioeconomic reparations, will achieve anything other than the de facto maintenance of the previously existing systems of oppression.
In this vein, the governance of the ANC has not acted to reverse the systematic inequality that has defined South African history. While employment, education, transportation, and housing are no longer legally segregated, they may as well be. The apartheid-era townships remain populated by Black South Africans, while opportunities for social mobility are near nonexistent. The World Economic Forum ranks the South African education system as 126th out of a total 138 countries studied. Combined with the stunning level of wealth inequality, white South Africans often have the ability to attend the prestigious South African universities that are among the most reputed post-secondary educational institutions in Africa, which allows them more opportunities for employment and higher levels of income.
What’s more, attempts to level the socioeconomic playing field have been stifled rather than encouraged by the ANC. Most notably, federal police violently subjugated overwhelmingly poor Black striking platinum mine workers making the equivalent of less than three hundred dollars a month in the 2012 Marikana massacre. In total, forty-seven people, most of them striking miners, were killed in a declaration of state policy to side with the (predominately white) interests of capital over the population the South African government is supposed to represent.
All of that is not to say we should be disillusioned with the potential for progress that is so evident all around us. The lesson, rather, is that progress is not something that will passively accumulate with the passage of time and that we must safeguard against the name of progress being diluted to maintain a corrupt and unjust status quo. If we can recognize the nature of that which has historically subdued progress, we can take the crucial first step toward breaking the cycle of history that has slowed our advancement in the direction of equality in all walks of life.
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