I think that it’s quite interesting to look at the white reaction. They were fed this kind of total onslaught on civilization nonsense by the military and the police and the politicians, the apartheid politicians, for ages, but not less so in the 1980s. So I think if you asked—if you had an opinion survey in 1988 among white people and Afrikaans people, “Should we have a democracy, should we abolish apartheid?” 80, 90 percent would’ve said, “Absolutely not.”
“Should we release the ANC [African National Congress]?”
“Absolutely not.”
[The African National Congress (ANC) is a political party that served as the most prominent resistance movement against South Africa’s apartheid system, at times resorting to violence through its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. It was officially banned by the South African government from 1960 to 1990. As apartheid collapsed, the ANC’s leader, Nelson Mandela, was elected President of South Africa in 1994 and established a democratic government.]
So there was a bit of a bravery going on in terms of de Klerk and his inner group. The Afrikaner Broederbond played an interesting role in preparing for this decision, because they—where they were kind of behind the party and further back, they suddenly went ahead because they had a new leader, a man by the name of Pieter de Lange, and they realized—he had meetings with Thabo Mbeki in New York earlier, and he realized that the Afrikaner Broederbond was ideally placed to prepare society, Afrikaner society for this kind of thing. So over months and months and months they had masses of private meetings and small meetings and house meetings and influenced leaders and kind of prepare the ground for this.
[The Afrikaner Broederbond, or Afrikaner Brotherhood in English, was a South African secret society composed of Afrikaans-speaking, Protestant, white men over the age of 25 that was established in 1918. Pieter de Lange served as the organization’s chairman from 1984 to 1994. Thabo Mbeki (1942 – ) is a South African politician and anti-apartheid supporter from the ANC. He was the second post-apartheid President of South Africa from 1999-2008.]
I think F.W. de Klerk, if he does deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, it would be for the fact that once this decision was made, which he had little other choice but to make, he should get credit for the fact that he then sold it to his constituency. He worked tirelessly—I watched him. He crisscrossed this country. He spoke at house meetings, at town meetings, at church meetings. He spoke to the military. He spoke to the police to try and sell the idea that the tide of history has turned. It’s safe now with international communism gone. We need prosperity in this country, and we’re not gonna get it.
And apartheid didn’t work out, and here’s a way, and I promise you you’re gonna have minority protection and all kinds of other things. And then he had the guts to call a white referendum in ’93, which if he had lost it—and a lot of people before that referendum said he could lose it—it would’ve meant the end of his career. And that took guts, to say, “Well, then, so be it. Then I’ll go down with it.” And in the end he got almost 70 percent.
[Frederick Willem de Klerk (1936 – ) served as President of South Africa from 1989 – 1994. Under de Klerk’s leadership the apartheid system was dismantled, the African National Congress’ 30 year ban ended, political prisoners were released and majority (multiracial) elections were established.
So yeah, it went against the grain for most whites, especially most Afrikaners, but this cajoling was going on, and a bit of false promises and a bit of wrong expectations and a bit of pressure. And of course then you had stuff like the international community started playing a role and saying, “Well, we like what we’re seeing. You can have the All Blacks and the Australian rugby team come and play in South Africa again for the first time in many years.” Now that is a very, very strong thing to tell an Afrikaner audience, that if you prepare to compromise and we have a deal here, you can—because rugby is very close to Afrikaner middle class religion.
We can play the All Blacks again, we can play the English, because Afrikaners always believed that we were the best in the world, and the only reason why we’re not the champion rugby team is because we were not allowed to play them. And here was the chance.
[The All Blacks are the national rugby team of New Zealand.]
So all those kind of—we could travel again. White people could travel all over the world. The passport suddenly became one accepted everywhere. So all these little things added up.
There was a right wing that resisted this, and the very same Constand Viljoen that I referred to earlier was the man who—he had then retired as head of the Defense Force, but he was still a very powerful man. He formed a committee of generals and they mobilized something like 150,000 people in the country with arms, and a lot of them inside the Defense Force, to essentially, if need be, effect a coup. And again, two factors meant that that didn’t happen. One was the regular Defense Force stayed true to course. They stayed true to culture of serving the government of the day, which is why the blessings we have in South Africa before ’94 and after 1994. We don’t have a culture of a military breathing down the neck of a civilian government.
So we know—I know how unhappy the military were at de Klerk’s plans, and yet they had to support him.
[General Constand Viljoen (1933 – ) is a former South African military commander and politician.]
So the head of the Defense Force at the time, General [Georg] Meiring, went to General Constand Viljoen who was the leader of this masked group of people all over the country who were going to stage a coup and said to him—and Viljoen was his mentor. They were close friends, and he said to him, “My friend, you know that I will have to shoot you if you launch this campaign, because this is my job under the constitution.” So that was a little fortuitous thing.
[General Georg Meiring (1939 – ) was the last commander of the South African Defense Force from 1993 – 1994 and first commander of the South African National Defense Force in 1994 – 1998.]
The other thing was Nelson Mandela. You could never throw out the role that he played. He specifically met with Constand Viljoen and his generals and his men, and reassured them and cajoled them and seduced them. But also in terms of broader South Africa he became the face of the ANC, and white South Africans were astonished to see this handsome, dignified man walk from jail—27 years—and he didn’t want to chuck them in the sea.
He was this generous, sweet, wise man. And it’s not something one can measure, but my feeling is always that if we had a different kind of leader than Mandela, a lesser charismatic, a less—someone who didn’t understand that what he was supposed to do, that we would’ve had a different way of developing.
But he came with this vision of, “I have to seduce the white people. I have to take them with me. I have to reassure them. I have to take them with me. I have to liberate them, also, and at the same time I have to keep my constituency behind me.” And that was a dance that few people could dance, that he danced very successfully.
[Nelson Mandela (1918 – 2013) was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary and politician who served as the first post-apartheid President of South Africa from 1994-1999.]
Max du Preez is a South African journalist, author and documentary filmmaker. He was an anti-apartheid journalist who worked to expose government repression.
Born in 1951, Max du Preez grew up in Kroonstad, South Africa. Unlike many Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch colonial settlers who largely supported the apartheid government, his parents were open-minded toward integration of whites and non-whites.
After attending Stellenbosch University, an Afrikaner institution, du Preez began a career in journalism writing for Afrikaans and English language newspapers supportive of the apartheid government. Du Preez quickly became disenchanted by the South African media’s blatant political bias and abandoned his work in the mainstream media.
Du Preez became involved with anti-apartheid movements like the United Democratic Front. In 1988, he founded Vrye Weekblad, the first Afrikaans-language, anti-apartheid newspaper that offered alternative policy perspectives from mainstream media and was critical of the government. The government attempted to stifle the paper financially and legally by levying exorbitant registration fees and charging it with various infractions. In 1990, a member of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, a pro-apartheid group, bombed Vrye Weekblad’s headquarters. Vrye Weekblad survived, however, until 1994 when the government’s financial pressure finally forced its closure. Ironically, apartheid collapsed and South Africa transitioned to democracy later that same year.
During the transition, du Preez covered the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission on television, publicizing the body’s efforts to ease tension and promote a unified, post-apartheid South Africa.
Today, Du Preez remains a prominent South African columnist and media personality. He has received several awards including the Nat Nakasa Award for Courageous Journalism and been named the Yale Globalist International Journalist.
South Africa is a nation of almost 53 million on the southern tip of Africa. The nation has a unique multicultural character and is approximately 80 percent African and 10 percent European, with the remaining 10 percent being of mixed race or Asian heritage. These broad racial categories include a multitude of ethnic and linguistic groups.
Although it has the largest economy on the continent, much of the nation remains in poverty and there is great economic disparity. Historically, the mining industry has played a key role in South Africa’s economy and it continues to remain an important industry today, alongside manufacturing, tourism, and financial services.
South Africa was first settled by non-natives in 1652, when the Dutch established an outpost in what would later become Cape Town. Soon after, British, French, and German settlers came to the area. The descendants of the original Dutch settlers became known as Afrikaners. Conflicts over land and power arose between the settling groups as well as between the settlers and the native people of the region. In 1910, Britain formally created the Union of South Africa as a self-governing dominion within the British Empire.
Throughout South Africa’s history, non-whites were subjected to widespread discrimination. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the government passed a series of laws institutionalizing discrimination and segregation. In the 1948 elections, the National Party, which served as a platform for Afrikaner nationalism, gained power. The National Party program was centered on the system of racial segregation known as apartheid. Supporters of apartheid argued that South Africa was made up of four distinct racial groups: white, black, “Coloured” or mixed-race, and Indian.
The white minority oppressed the African majority and other non-white groups. Black Africans were particularly disadvantaged in terms of education, housing, income, and health. Blacks were denied citizenship and not permitted to use the services and facilities accessible by the white minority. Many blacks were forced to relocate when their neighborhoods were declared “white.” A series of laws enacted in the 1950s further codified and expanded racial segregation. In part, the National Party justified its policies by branding its opponents as communists.
The African National Congress (ANC) was founded in 1912 to advocate for the rights of black South Africans. As apartheid expanded, the ANC and other groups used both nonviolent and violent actions to combat the government. The ANC and other groups were oppressed by the government, and many of their senior leaders were banned or imprisoned. Nelson Mandela, a prominent ANC leader, was imprisoned from 1962 to 1990.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the anti-apartheid movement gained strength. Foreign governments and the international community isolated South Africa. International sanctions damaged the economy and helped erode domestic support for apartheid. Meanwhile, the end of the Cold War weakened the government’s claim that yielding power would lead to a communist takeover.
In 1990, the government of South Africa took its first steps toward ending apartheid when it ended a ban on certain political organizations including the ANC. Nelson Mandela and other opposition leaders were released from prison and apartheid legislation was repealed. F.W. de Klerk, President from 1989-1994, helped to broker this transition of South Africa from the apartheid-era to a multi-racial democracy. In 1993, de Klerk and Mandela received the Nobel Peace Prize for their work.
In 1994, South Africa held its first election that allowed all adults to vote, regardless of race. The ANC gained power and Nelson Mandela was elected president. South Africa enacted a liberal, democratic constitution, backed by a strong and independent judiciary. While the ANC has remained the strongest party, elections are vigorously contested and democratic safeguards are respected. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigated abuses and crimes committed during the apartheid era.
Freedom House’s 2013 Freedom in the World report categorized South Africa as “free” with an overall freedom rating of two, with one being the most free and seven being the least. The country also received ratings of two in political rights and civil liberties. However, in the 2013 Freedom of the Press report, the nation was categorized as “party free” due to government restrictions on the press and the prevalence of civil cases brought against journalists for libel.
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