Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity | South Africa

Old South African history books date the beginning of the country to the arrival of the first Europeans at the tip of the African continent in 1652. The Dutch East India Company needed a refreshment station for its ships while sailing around Africa to trade with its empire in Batavia (Indonesia). However, when Jan Van Riebeek founded the settlement that was called the Cape of Good Hope, the first three dozen company employees did not raise cattle and grow fruits and vegetables on empty territory. Like European colonialists everywhere else, they encountered indigenous people who had lived on the land from time immemorial. The story of South Africa is the dispossession, resistance, liberation, and ultimate reconciliation of foreign intruders with indigenous inhabitants. When and how the colonialists themselves became indigenous—in short, whether there can be white Africans with equal rights and privileges, despite the colonial legacy—is still a matter of debate in the twenty-first century.

In this analysis the common label of "African" for the black majority does not preclude members of other groups from being African in the political sense of citizens belonging to the African continent as it is their only home and place of origin. In contrast to the Middle East, all parties in South Africa have accepted this status of original "settlers." Therefore, not all Africans are black, and not all blacks are Africans. It should also be noted that since the rise of the black consciousness movement in the late 1960s, "black" has become a proud political term, comprising politically conscious members of all three disenfranchised groups, including South Africans of Indian descent and those of mixed origin (the coloreds).

In the Western Cape there were two distinct aboriginal groups: (1) the Khoikhoi, seminomadic herders and (2) San-speakers, hunting and gathering people, whom the Europeans derogatively referred to as Bushmen. A hundred years later and 500 kilometers further east, the expanding settlers clashed with a third indigenous people, who spoke yet another language and practiced a different way of life: (3) agriculturalists who made their living from subsistence farming and were called Bantu, or in modern times blacks or Africans.

Because Africans were more numerous and better organized in rudimentary states with chiefs and kings, they offered the stiffest and longest resistance to the European colonization of all three indigenous groups. However, they were also weakened by their own infighting, superstition, technological underdevelopment, and the colonial policy of divide and rule. Yet, unlike the Xhosa subgroup in the Eastern Cape (from which Nelson Mandela originates), the related Zulus in Natal were only subdued by the British colonial army in protracted battles as recently as 1900. The first democratic election in 1994 reversed this colonial conquest, by replacing 350 years of minority racial domination with majority political rule. In 2004, 76 percent of South African voters belonged to the African group, whereas 11 percent were classified as white.

The weakest San-speakers befell the worst fate of near-genocide. Like wild game, they were often shot on sight by special raiding parties who claimed they were habitual cattle thieves. In the early twenty-first century only about thirty thousand San people survive in the whole of Southern Africa, mainly in neighboring Botswana and Namibia, where they are still treated as second-class citizens in state parks or reservations. Were it not for the manufactured tourist attraction they provide or the tracking services they offered to the South African army during the war, most of these survivors from a different age would have vanished altogether.

The Cape settlers initially established an uneasy bartering relationship with the Khoikhoi; their rebellious chiefs were incarcerated at Robben Island, but most of the people gradually became absorbed into the feudal Cape economy as farm laborers or domestic servants. Missionaries converted the majority of Khoikhoi to Calvinism, and many Khoikhoi women intermarried with Europeans or had children out of wedlock or as a result of rape. Descendants of this group are known as coloreds in the contemporary world; the overwhelming majority speak Afrikaans as their mother tongue and make up approximately 9 percent of the total South African population of 44 million.

The ethnic mix of South Africa was further complicated by the importation of slaves from Angola, Indonesia, Malaysia, Madagascar, and elsewhere, a mere ten years after the Cape colony was founded. During the first hundred years the Cape colony barely grew through additional immigration from Europe, yet the outpost needed a dependent labor force. The huge gender imbalance among the Europeans—three men to one woman—encouraged sexual liaisons across the groups. The leading South African historian Hermann Giliomee probably understates the sexual violence and exploitation in the colonial status hierarchy when he points out: "There was also large-scale miscegenation in the form of casual sex, especially in the slave lodge frequented by European men as well as sailors and soldiers" (2003, p. 18). Because most children born from such encounters were absorbed into the Afrikaner community, the racial consciousness and assertions of racial purity during the later apartheid period appear particularly absurd. Social science research across cultures has revealed that insistence on exclusive racial or ethnic identity is particularly strong among people who have an insecure self-concept and are not sure of their own identity. Sigmund Freud has called this phenomenon the narcicissm of small difference. Ironically, early Cape society seemed to be more color-blind and free of racially defined opportunities than the frozen twentieth-century legislated race classifications of apartheid.

Among the European colonial powers, South Africa became a desired possession and the Cape colony changed hands several times between the Dutch and British who feared the French under Napoleon. Unlike the earlier immigration by Dutch and German unemployed adventurers and a few hundred religiously prosecuted French Hugenots, large-scale immigration from Britain started only in the early nineteenth century. These were largely government-selected immigrants with crafts and skills who came with their families. Most settled on the Eastern seaboard, particularly in Natal. British control of the Cape and the abolition of slavery are usually mentioned as the reasons for the Great Trek of Afrikaner farmers beyond the Cape frontier into the interior in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Giliomee sees the diverse causes in "a lack of land, labor and security, coupled with a pervasive sense of being marginalized" (2003, p. 142). The trek left Afrikaners dispersed throughout the country. The Orange Free State and Transvaal emerged as the two new independent Boer republics.

The British influence and influx were also supplemented after 1860 by immigrants from British India on five-year contracts as indentured laborers for the sugar plantations and market gardens around Durban. Most of these poor labor migrants stayed in South Africa after the expiration of their contracts, brought their families over, and gradually prospered on the basis of solidarity with their kin and emphasis on education for their children, despite severe discrimination. This middle minority faced animosity from the dominant whites as well as the subordinate blacks. During the 1949 Durban riots 150 Indians were killed until the army restored order belatedly. Unlike the wealthy Indian trading minorities in East Africa, the Indian community in Natal consists mostly of working-class people. This did not prevent them from becoming a scapegoat and target of resentment for the Zulu population, who competed with them for jobs and scarce resources.

About 75 percent of the 1.3 million Indian population are Hindus from various Indian linguistic groups and 20 percent are Muslims. Together with the socalled Malay coloreds, 800,000 Muslims comprise approximately 2 percent of the South African population. The majority of the South African population profess to belong to various mainstream Christian denominations, whereas about 30 percent claim membership in independent (Zionist) churches.

Rise of Afrikaner Nationalism

The discovery of diamonds in Kimberley and rich gold reserves around Johannesburg in the second half of the nineteenth century again changed the course of South African history. It established the foundations for the only industrialized country in Africa. Deep level mining required long-term capital investments that only British imperialists were prepared to supply. Unlike colonies of exploitation where a few temporary colonists export their profits to the European metropole, the permanent settler colony of South Africa reinvested its profit inside the colony for further economic expansion. That presupposed political control over the territory which Cecil Rhodes and other British rubber barons needed to wrest from the Boer republics.

Imperialist greed was the simple reason for the Boer war at the turn of the century. The Boers outgunned in their guerrilla war against superior English forces enjoyed widespread global support, including that of Lenin, in what was considered the first anticolonial war of Africa. The Boers lost this war and about 10 percent of the Afrikaner population was killed. In the bitter struggle the ruthless British army practiced a scorched earth policy against the rural civilian population and established for the first time concentration camps in which many women and children died from starvation and disease.

The trauma of the conflict resulted in a quest for revenge and the emergence of Afrikaner nationalism. British colonial policy everywhere aimed at the anglicization of culturally different groups. The public use of the Afrikaans language was discouraged, outlawed in public, and penalized in schools. British cultural arrogance denigrated different cultural practices. Very much like the situation in Quebec until 1960, English-speakers dominated the economy and only English-speakers could hope for a substantial business career. This forced assimilation triggered a counternationalism that clamored for the equality of an impoverished people with their English overlords. The Afrikaner intellectual ethnic mobilizers stressed pride in the then fully developed Afrikaans language. They encouraged Afrikaners to accumulate capital in their own insurance companies. About 90 percent of Afrikaners in the 1920s and 1930s lived in rural areas; many drifted as landless, unskilled bywoners into the cities in search of work. They competed with African workers who were largely preferred by employers, because they were cheaper and considered less rebellious and more malleable. Approximately 25 percent of Afrikaners were classified as poor whites at the time.

The government at the time consisted of an English-Afrikaner United Party under the leadership of the highly reputed General Jan (Christiaan) Smuts. In 1940 it joined the war against Nazi Germany on the British side. A minority of nationalist Afrikaners strongly opposed this, mainly because of anti-British sentiments but also because of residual sympathies for German racist ideologies and anti-Semitic sentiments. The many alienated Afrikaners considered Jewish owners (Hoggenheimer) of the large Anglo-American gold and diamond corporation the local oppressors and exploiters.

Being that Afrikaners constituted 60 percent of the white voting population (as compared with 40% English-speakers) and only a few Cape nonwhites were enfranchised, the Afrikaner National Party not surprisingly won the 1948 general election. Capturing state control marked the triumph of Afrikaner nationalism. It now could use the state apparatus for patronage of Afrikaner interests and keeping black competitors at bay. The English United Party also practiced racist segregation, but less openly than Afrikaners. The National Party replaced segregation with apartheid, an unprecedented policy of statutory racial reordering. Its main architect was the new charismatic leader of the National Party, Hendrik Verwoerd.

In short, Afrikaner nationalism, with exclusive control of the South African state, institutionalized the Anglo informal segregation policy into formal, legalized apartheid. This grand experiment of race-based social engineering eschewed any assimilation and instead fostered ethnic difference among the black population. Separate development, as the ideology of divide and rule was euphemistically labeled, attempted to ethnisize the black majority and racialize the white minority of different cultural origins. It thereby tried to unify Europeans (particularly the Afrikaans and English-speakers of the white minority) into a white nation, but fragment Africans into nine tribal national groups. The imagined white nation was built on race and biology. The envisaged black nations were based on partially invented ethnic and cultural differences. The fate of the two middle groups (colored and Indians) was left undecided initially, but this changed in the early 1980s when open cooptation strategies were adopted. Coloreds and Indians were enfranchised on separate voter's rolls for separate parliaments with limited powers that could not threaten overall white domination. The attempt back-fired because of the exclusion of the majority black African population. Apartheid imposed a state-decreed identity on different groups and disallowed people to define their own identity. In all other ethnic conflicts around the world, people belong to and identify with a group because of self-association.

Many Faces of Apartheid

The American sociologist Pierre van den Berghe has distinguished three forms of apartheid:

1. Micro-apartheid, or petty apartheid, segregated people from birth to death in daily life. Whites and nonwhites had to use separate facilities, from hospitals to cemeteries, elevators to toilets, restaurants to park benches, buses to beaches, post-office counters to railway coaches. All facilities were of superior quality for whites and, if provided at all, of inferior quality for blacks, Indians, and coloreds.
2. Meso-apartheid denotes the residential segregation enforced under the Group Areas Act. Cities that had once been integrated were forcibly segregated during the 1960s and nonwhites deported to outlying areas. In the contemporary world this is referred to as ethnic cleansing. The four racial groups were allocated different residential areas of their own. Whites could generally remain in the better parts of the city, while houses and shops were expropriated (particularly from Indians and coloreds) and the owners forced to relocate far from city centers. This eliminated competition for white traders and amounted to the confiscation of valuable real estate. The policy was justified under the banner of "slum clearing." However, once a slum was cleared, its residents or shop- or home-owners were not allowed back to rebuild.
3. Macro-apartheid refers to the division of South Africa into nine tribal homelands on 13 percent of the land, while the rest was declared white territory. Blacks could live in white South Africa only with special permission, if they were needed as laborers. Slightly more than half of the total black population fell into this category. Some of the black homelands, which were also called Bantustans, declared themselves politically independent with their own flags and border controls, but their alleged sovereignty was recognized only by white South Africa. The government in Pretoria heavily subsidized its homeland creations, because they were the supposed answer to the anticolonial independence movements on the rest of the African continent.

Apartheid constituted domestic or internal colonialism. Generally corrupt and unpopular black appointees of the white government in the capital of Pretoria were designated to administer their own poverty and police themselves. The minority Afrikaner central government wanted to shed territory and responsibility for people considered useless, costly, and politically undesirable. Since all blacks would have acquired citizenship in their own independent states, there would be no need to grant them a vote in the white state. They would have been legally denationalized in the country of their birth. Only a few black Bantustan leaders, the Zulu chief Mangosutho Buthelezi being the most prominent, refused to go along with this charade. His Inkatha movement had broken away from the African National Congress (ANC) in 1979 and decided to oppose apartheid legally from within.

Economically, a small aristocracy of whites benefited from job reservation, differential salaries for work of the same variety, or preferential promotion in a system that officially referred to itself as a "civilized labor policy." Poor Afrikaner whites enjoyed the most successful affirmative action policy. They found jobs on the railways, in the post office, or with state corporations, whether they were qualified or not. Forty-five percent of economically active Afrikaners were employed in the civil service, in what comprised a unique nation of bureaucrats. Better qualified professionals were looked after by the secret Broederbond, an ethnic male employment agency which ensured that Afrikaners and not English competitors filled the most influential positions in the universities, media, or senior civil service. The 12.000 member elitist organization simultaneously functioned as a think tank and clearing-house for strategies of Afrikaner nationalism. Together with the founding of several new Afrikaner universities and the expansion of several older ones, such patronage activities ensured that Afrikaners gradually closed the wide educational and income gap with their English counterparts. Especially after Harry Oppenheimer's giant Anglo-American corporation allowed Afrikaner entry into the mining sector in the 1960s, the traditional ethnic divisions within the boardrooms of the nation faded. Beyond continuing ethnic particularities, Afrikaner and English capitalists shared basic common interests in defending their country against sanctions, perceived ANC communists abroad, and increasingly militant trade unions at home.

The majority of rural blacks were deprived of the right to seek work in urban areas through pass laws. These restrictions banned the elderly, women, and children to the desolate countryside, in order to save the system the social costs of education, unemployment, and old age. Eventually, all black South Africans were supposed to become foreigners in the country of their birth by acquiring citizenship in one of nine ethnic homelands. They would be "guest workers" without rights in 87 percent of the land, unable to own property or acquire a sense of a permanent home and belonging.

Colonialism everywhere operated on the distinction between citizens and subjects (Mamdani, 1997). Just as women in Europe were variously disenfranchised until the first half of the twentieth century, so indigenous subject populations (both in Africa and North America) were treated as so-called wards of the state, unworthy or incapable of participating in public affairs as equal citizens. A condescending paternalism confronted the allegedly childlike underlings when they demanded their rights: These had first to be earned, they were told, and their abilities demonstrated during a slow process toward equality. Colonial ideologues declared this the "burden of the white man" who had assumed the mission of "civilizing" primitive Natives in Africa.

Segregated education with different curricula and characterized by the differential allocation of resources was one of the main tools by which this policy was achieved. Bantu education was shaped by essentialized notions of what the black mind was capable of and the kind of corresponding lower skills needed in an industrialized economy. Depoliticized compliance, acquiescence, and acceptance of the status quo as the natural order were the expected attitudes. More open and progressive missionary schools were brought under state control. The few nonwhite students who attended the liberal white universities were channeled into new tribal colleges of students from the same ethnic group, all located in remote rural areas with the exception of the Coloured University of the Western Cape and the Indian University of Durban-Westville. Most faculty at these ethnic institutions were initially conservative Afrikaner civil servants. Little did the apartheid planners envisage that these colleges would gradually evolve into hotbeds of black nationalism and anti-apartheid resistance.

Ethnically based apartheid education, although imposed and resented, nevertheless built on entrenched traditions and linguistic backgrounds that are alive and relevant among the African rural population. Even in the cities, every black South African speaks an African language and more often is polyglot, although the medium of public discourse is almost exclusively English, despite eleven official languages. But English, poorly taught as a second language, severely disadvantages many African learners in the competition for good grades and jobs.

Even in the early twenty-first century those living in the rural areas under the authority of traditional chiefs are handicapped by customary law. Officially recognized as a concession to powerful traditional leaders, customary law does not sit well with liberal notions of equality and individual freedom. An unresolved contradiction exists between individualistic notions of citizenship and community-based rights and customs. The authority of chiefs does not rest on democratic legitimacy. Traditional leaders insist on inherited, dynastic rights. Women, in particular, suffer under communal obligations and status inequalities. Mamphela Ramphele speaks of a "dual citizenship that creates tensions between loyalty to the nation and to one's own group, however defined" (2000, p. 7). The tensions remain unresolved, and glaring discrepancies exist between the constitution and customary law. For example, the post-apartheid constitution insists on gender equality, but under customary law women cannot inherit property. Precolonial African society tends to be romanticized as communal decision making by consensus, but the monopoly of power in the hands of male elders and chiefs can hardly be called democratic.

Resistance and Liberation

European penetration of the African hinterland destroyed most of the traditional African subsistence economy. Squeezed into ever more overcrowded reserves, its inhabitants increasingly relied on the remittances of migrant workers in the cities. At the beginning of industrialization Africans had to be forced into poorly paid work on the mines through "head and hut" taxes that British administrators first introduced in the Eastern Cape. Later it was sheer rural poverty that drove blacks into the city slums, dormitories, and compounds. Migrant labor not only destroyed the African peasantry but also undermined the traditional family. The competition among ethnically housed migrants in insecure urban settings encouraged tribalism as a form of solidarity and the protection of one's own group in a tough struggle for survival.

In 1910 the ANC was founded. Among its first goals was the battle for African unity against tribalism. Under the influence of supportive white and Indian liberals and communists, this priority was later extended to color-blind nonracialism. A moderate black elite, educated at Christian missionary schools, repeatedly pleaded with the government for recognition. The much celebrated Freedom Charter of 1955 claimed the right of all South Africans to the land of their birth. A campaign of civil disobedience against new pass laws, inspired by the earlier campaigns led by Mahatma Gandhi, who lived as a British-trained lawyer in the Transvaal and experienced racial discrimination firsthand, was tried in Natal, but failed when the government simply imprisoned its peaceful protesters. The National Party government responded with ever more repressive legislation. The 1960 Sharpeville massacre of more than sixty protesters marked a turning point. The ANC and its rival, the more radical Pan African Congress (PAC), decided to go underground, revert to sabotage without hurting civilians, and establish an in-exile presence for the anti-apartheid struggle after both organizations were outlawed inside the country. After a few years in hiding Mandela and his comrades were caught and sentenced to life imprisonment, to be freed in 1990 only after serving twenty-seven years on Robben Island.

In 1983 the National Party split and shed its conservative wing. In 1989 its hard-line president, Pierre Willem Botha, was replaced with Frederik Wilhelm de Klerk, who had finally realized that apartheid did not work. Its costs outweighed its benefits. Attempts to control the influx of blacks into the cities had failed; businesses needed more skilled employees who were also politically satisfied; a powerful union movement had assumed the role of banned political organizations starting in the late 1970s; restless townships could not be stabilized, despite an essentially permanent state of emergency; demographic ratios had changed in favor of blacks, with more whites emigrating and draining the country of skills and investments; the costs of global sanctions, particularly loan refusals, and moral ostracism of the pariah South African state were felt. The collapse of communism and the end of the cold war in 1989 provided the final straw for the normalization of South Africa. The National Party decided to negotiate a historic compromise from a position of relative strength while whites were still dominant. With the loss of Eastern European support, the ANC also had to turn away from an armed struggle and seek a political solution. A perception of stalemate on both sides prepared the ground for a constitutionally mandated agreement to share power for five years. The first free democratic elections in 1994 and 1999 provided the ANC with a two-thirds majority.

Assessing the Post-Apartheid State and Future Trends

The compromise for whites involved handing over political power to the black majority, but in return leaving the economic order essentially intact. The ANC abandoned its socialist platform of "capturing the commanding heights of the economy" and turned into a right-of-center social democratic party with neoconservative fiscal and privatization policies that suited the powerful business community. A rapidly growing patriotic bourgeoisie has happily joined its white counterpart in defending nonracial capitalism (see Adam et al., 1997). Although the white–black income gap has narrowed, the inequality within each racial group has widened. Black empowerment programs and affirmative action policies have mainly favored an already privileged elite, but barely addressed mass unemployment and poverty.

The ANC has to ask itself what happens when the euphoria of liberation wears off? Black frustration has turned inward: A spiraling crime rate, sexual violence, and escalating rates of HIV infection, due to inexplicable government stalling on available counterstrategies, affect the physical well-being of the post-apartheid generation even more than what their parents experienced under apartheid. Despite holding one-third of the seats in the South African parliament, African women are not yet empowered in the private sphere in a highly patriarchal system. Although the government has made significant progress in supplying new housing, electricity, water, health, and educational services to the needy, it has also wasted precious resources on unnecessary arms purchases. Several high-profile corruption scandals have raised eyebrows. Quiet ANC support for the tyrannical Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe has not reassured jittery minorities that their long-term interests are safe in South Africa.

The cherished South African constitutionalism has not yet been tested in a real crisis of good governance, although the democratic record of the post-apartheid government cannot be faulted. Trends toward authoritarianism and highly centralized decision making in the president's office undermine democratic grassroots participation. Authoritarianism originates not from overwhelming governance as in the former order, but on the contrary, from the widespread crisis of authority and the inability to enforce order. The country lacks the institutional capacity for effective governance in many realms. An admirable human rights culture but fledgling democracy, it faces its most severe challenge both from cynical withdrawal into the private realm and support for a strong hand to impose order and economic progress without debate. A fragile, colonized civil society in South Africa is no guarantee that democracy will prevail in a crisis when even black and white businesses might side with the stability and predictability that a more authoritarian order promises.

The celebrated Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has affirmed the past sufferings of victims and made some perpetrators confess, because of its unique reward of amnesty after full disclosure of past crimes. The commission has, however, only achieved symbolic reconciliation. The TRC is more admired abroad than within South Africa. By focusing only on perpetrators and a few thousand individual victims of gross human rights violations, the TRC ignored the millions of ordinary people who suffered under apartheid. It also let white beneficiaries off the hook. Claims for reparations are still being debated.

Was apartheid genocide, or a crime against humanity? If one defines genocide as the planned and premeditated physical elimination of a people on the basis of their group membership, apartheid did not constitute genocide. Whites depended on blacks for cheap labor. However, depriving a people of fundamental human rights on the basis of their race and origin, stifling and wasting untold talents through arbitrary restrictions of advancement and differential resource allocation, or systematically insulting the dignity and equal recognition of citizens because of their descent, certainly constitutes a crime against humanity. That atrocities also occurred in countries who were among the harshest critics of apartheid South Africa should not be used to excuse the crimes of apartheid. While the perpetrators should not be labeled the Nazis of Africa, their different motivations and actions do not exonerate them. Although guilt cannot be collectively ascribed and there were also many brave dissidents and human rights activists among the dominant group, the white community bears responsibility for the continuing legacy of crimes committed in its name. All South African whites benefited, willingly or unwillingly, from a horrendous legalized racial system whether they supported it or not. Many victims of apartheid continue to bear visible and invisible scars. That those historical legacies must be acknowledged by all sides and serious efforts made to redress such wounds should be self-evident for all politically literate South Africans.

SEE ALSO Apartheid; Goldstone, Richard; Identification; Mandela, Nelson; Nationalism; Racism; Reparations; Shaka Zulu; Truth Commissions; Zulu Empire

Kanya Adam
Heribert Adam