This is the picture of Zolile Hector Pieterson described but curiously not shown on page 180, one of the first children to be killed at the Soweto uprising becoming an icon of the anti-Apartheid struggle.
In this chapter I was really taken by the TOKiness of the “Black Consciousness” movement. How important words and thoughts were. And how even the Afrikanner press started using the language not realizing they were helping to unify the “non-White” population of South Africa, something they had tried very hard to divide.
Then there was the “Cordon Sanitaire” How’s your French? Did you look it up? Actually, interestingly to us today, it was first used by the French to stop spread of yellow fever in Spain. French deployed troops to the border to stop person crossing border and spreading contagion. In political science in the 20th century it is often used when referencing an attempt to contain an idea or ideology (think Containment).
Here in South Africa suddenly Portugal falls to a coup and her neighboring colonies to South Africa, formally sympathtic to Apartheid and creating a a “Cordon Sanitaire” from any crazy notions of black self rule, suddenly fall away and become advocates of black self rule and further diminish South Africa and Apartheid’s geopolitical standing.
The resistance to Apartheid grows with the emergence of the Black Student Organization led initially by T+Steve Biko. Biko of course is later brutally murdered by the police dying of brain injuries 4 weeks after his arrest and assault. In an eerie parallel to the Baltimore murder Freddie Gray the authorities claim his injuries are self inflicted.
Sports come up several times in this chapter. The IOC (Olympics) bans South Africa starting in 1970 and continuing on until the 90s I think. Rugby is singled out as important to South Africa as it “exemplifies white national pride”, and posters like the one above try to get fans around the world to boycott their games. They even tried to ban South African tennis players from the US Open.
But there is a lot more here of course. The treatment of the arts, the story of the photographer, dying homeless and forgotten after creating such powerful imagery of the savagry of Apartheid, and the severe blow delievered to actors, musicians and artists of all types under the mechanism of apartheid are really devastating.
The role of the Soviet Union I also find interesting. They support the ANC which one could imagine would lead to claims of “Communist infiltration” but I don’t really see that come up here. The US has an uncomfortable relationship with South Africa throughout this time. Democrats like LBJ and Carter call out the injustices of apartheid but really do nothing about it while Republicans Nixon and Ford look the other way. In the Reagan era protests in the US against apartheid and calls for disinvestment become louder and louder but the Reagan administration does nothing in response.
Though some horrific events are outlined in this chapter, such as the resettlement policy, there appears to be an increasing voice of criticism. Above is a cartoon, I don’t know exactly from what year, from one of the artists the author names who was “tolerated” by the authorities. Student voices, plays, books and films are all noted as an important voice of helping the outside world, and the inside world, feel the odiousness of apartheid. One film in particular “The Last Grave at Dimbaza” seemed strikingly successful so I looked it up on You tube. Here is screen shot for the last moment of the film where they show the graves dug for the children expected to die.
t’s tough stuff I know. Sorry. But if we don’t confront the horrible things people have perpetuated on one another in the past we will be lacking a potentially valuable context for events to come. We know, because we are in 2024, that Apartheid does end. But in the 1970s and 1980s it seemed to many as permanent as the Soviet Union. Which means really permanent though the irony hopefully is not lost. Interestingly South Africa is the only country that bans the communist party like the USA where if not officially banned its so sidelined as to be effectively so. I wonder why.
Sharpeville. 1960. Largely seen as a turning point in the fight against Apartheid. Throughout the 1950s the “Defiance campaign” worked in the vein of Ghandi and King with protests and boycotts… non-violently. After 1960 there was a decided turn to violent resistence. Though our author here wants to argue the turn wasn’t as simple as others have said, there was a turn. Mostly bombings with an effort not to put human life at risk, though this was not always successful.
Sharpeville, according to Dubow, could have happened anywhere. And Sharpville could have marked a real turn in the fight against Apartheid if the 10s of thousands of protesters had not turned away. If the rural masses had risen up when the police were forced to turn all their attention to the urban areas in an attempt to arrest every dissenter it could. Maybe if Verwoerd had actually died from the two bullets in the face Apartheid would have ended sooner, but he didn’t and it didn’t. It would last another 30 years.
For almost all of those 30 years Mandela and other leaders of the ANC and PAC would be in prison. The world would largely condemn South Africa. Even America, in the 1980s during a reign of Republican ascendancy passed a bill to introduce harsh sanctions on South Africa, and though Reagan vetoed it, condemnation was so great a fellow Republican Richard Lugar from Indiana led the charge to win the votes and over ride the veto. Universities like the ones many of you will attend next year, were pressured by their students to “disinvest” in South Africa, which they did.
Today though, in South Africa, as this article makes clear, racial problems are far from over. The winemaker there is is Stellenbosch. We will see Stellenbosch on a 400 year old Dutch settler map today. The Afrikaners roots run deep.
Sharpeville should loom large in your narrative of Apartheid and South Africa. What else should?
This is one of the most famous photos from South Africa’s Apartheid system. This is from 1976. I know this is alter than our current reading but it underscores the importance of how we could have gotten to such a terrible place. The Soweto Massacre. Hundreds of students were gunned down by the police because they were protesting a change in their education.
So there is a lot here. In the first section the author contends that the new government must act very quickly passing things like the Group Areas Act of 1950 and the Population Registration Act also of 1950. The section on Global response reminded me a bit of Dudziak’s book and I think it is the rise of Strijdom in the next section, after Malan’s unexplained resignation, that Apartheid takes on its most brutal face. Strjdom’s “Baaskap” wing of the Nationalist party means something like “white supremacy”.
I was struck by certain parallels with the American civil rights movement and the author pointed them out. I was also struck by some stark differences. 18 protesters were gunned down by police during a one day work stoppage. Can you imagine if 18 protesters had been gunned down during the Montgomery bus boycott?
Also all those acts that are passed are creating a completely segregated nation. Segregated communities, segregated education etc etc. In the USA we are desegregating at least in federal law and local state law is protesting and in turn the minority population being segregated is protesting back but at least with the legal support of the federal government. In South Africa they are segregating at a federal level and the protests are coming from the majority population that the segregation is being aimed at.
Mentioned at the end of the chapter, Sharpeville, is a massacre by the police which will mark a decided turn in Apartheid and the resistance to it. Hundreds gunned down by the police again. That’s the subject of the next chapter, only 25 pages long. Whew.
I can think of no better way to introduce you to South African history than with the opening of Robert Kennedy’s article above. Though I am more of a believer in social history, movements of people, rather than the “great man” school, I wonder here what would have been different had RFK not been killed. He certainly would have (?) beat Nixon in 1968. There would then have been no Watergate. Would he have gotten the US out of Vietnam more quickly, as he promised on the campaign trail? Would he, for purposes here, have put enough pressure on the South African government to end Apartheid earlier? A counter-factual question of course. We will never know because it didn’t happen.
“Suppose God is black” was the powerful title Robert Kennedy gave to an article he wrote for Look Magazine which you can find here after his visit to South Africa which you can find described here. He went there at the bequest of an Anti-Apartheid leader who was subsequently arrested. The quote is from a retort to a questioner of a white audience he addressed.
So to be clear South Africa is, in the time period being studied, believed by many to be inhabited by 5 distinct peoples. There are the British Colonizers who had “Subjugated” South Africa to their rule since the 19th century. There were the “Afrikaners”, descendants of Dutch settlers from the 17th century, described here as poor, white, farmers or laborers in the cities. If you speak German you may recognize many words as Dutch is similar and the Afrikaner language though distinct from Dutch is maybe best thought of as a dialect. There are Indians, like Ghandi, who spent 1893-1914 there. There are “Natives”, or black Africans (with a C not a K) who are persons who have always lived in South Africa and are the most populous in the nation. Finally there are the “Coloureds”, like Trevor Noah, whose book you should really read which you can find here. Or listen to it. He does the voice in the audio version and I’ve heard from reliable sources that its very funny.
So here we are. Another book. Another country. Another revolution. The election of 1948 is not seen as a revolution, but it stirs a decided change in direction in South Africa that will ultimately be met with revolutionary fervor. According to our author people in 1948 weren’t really sure how “Apartheid” was going to be different from existing segregation laws. It turned out to be very different.
That Dubow, writing in 2014, did not know of the US election in 2016 is quite surprising. Those opening paragraphs describing the victor as being as surprised as anyone, and the discussion about whether he had really won or had the expected winner lost certainly echo some of the discussions around 2016. Later the author points out that the electoral system favored rural white voters draws even more parallels with our modern US system.
I don’t want to drag this on too far but as our familiar ground is US history it might be helpful. Did anyone else think the Boers were sort of like the southern white culture in the US around the time of the civil war? Inventing great mythologies of their past (“Gone with the Wind” in the US), generally a poorer, working class or farming part of the population that imagines itself suffering great abuses from a larger federal or colonial antagonist. There appear to me to be many parallels.
Finally the commentary about lynching, or the lack thereof, in South Africa as compared to the United States reminded me about an article I read about lynchings of Mexican Americans in the Southwest of the United States. You can find that here.
Questions, comments confusions? Anything you find interesting, odd or confusing? Leave a comment. Comment early and often.
It was sure interesting to run into the Selma march in the reading. Remember “March“? 2019 was the 55th anniversary of the march and the late John Lewis was there, despite being treated for stage 4 pancreatic cancer, along with all of the then Democratic presidential hopefuls. What many don’t know is the march, as illustrated in map above went straight through Lowndes county, a stronghold of the KKK, subject of “lynching rampage” earlier in the century and one of the poorest and least literate parts of the state if not the country. The marchers were really taking their lives in their hands walking through that deeply rural territory with nothing but the shirts on their backs.
Dudziak’s story takes us from the days just after Kennedy’s assassination to the election of Nixon. This story of course focuses on the Civil Rights acts of 64, 65, the growing violence not only in the south like Selma and Mississippi, but in the north in Harlem and out west in LA. The story illustrates the growing frustration with many actors in the civil rights movement and the rise of militant voices like Malcolm X and Stockely Carmichael.
In the end she concludes that the civil rights movement after 1968 holds little sway over USFP (US foreign policy). I’m not so sure. Nixon’s “Law and order” (’68-’74) which I’ve always described as a euphemism for “lock all the black people up” will give way to Carter’s attempt to build a “humanitarian” foreign policy. Affirmative action, appointments of black judges and elections of black officials I’m sure are all played up by USIA as increasing evidence of American progress and superiority. But then there is Reagan in ’80 returning to the “Law and order” via the euphemistic “War on Drugs”.
Then of course we have the 21st century. Obama’s election. Kamala as VP. The murder of Tyre Nichols. The continuing BLM movement. How have these events played out in the foreign press?
That would be another story though. Maybe a story you or I could write.
“The problem we all live with” is the title of this 1964 Norman Rockwell piece. The “problem”is of course not Ruby Bridges herself, but the fact that to go to school she had to be escorted by federal marshals. White parents pulled their kids out of the school. Only one teacher would teach her. Some protesters showed up with miniature coffins with miniature versions of Ruby Bridges in them. No kidding.
This chapter of course doesn’t begin with Ruby Bridges though, it begins with US 40 across Maryland. Though geographically next to NY and Pennsylvania, Maryland is the South. They grow peaches. Google a map and you’ll see what all of those new African diplomats had to cover moving from NY to DC.
Then there are more horror stories, like those of James Meredith and Ole Miss and the extent to which JFK really wanted to get involved in Civil Rights. Finally we get to the story of the march on Washington. You have to love John Lewis. He wanted his own Sherman’s March through the South with a Scorched Earth policy against Jim Crow, but nonviolently. How do you do Scorched Earth nonviolently? You can find his speech here. You can def sense the vibe he was after.
Finally after the speech is the horrific bombing of the 16th st Baptist church that killed the four little girls. This seems to be the point that JFK turned and began to take Civil Rights as a real moral issue, not simply a political one.
Oh, and a word on the title. Camelot. Do you understand reference? It is a reference to JFK’s presidency. Jackie coined the phrase as a reference to his administration in a post-assassination interview.
So I had sort of a WTHeck??? moment when I saw the quote that “Confidential” magazine had labelled Gov. Faubus as an undercover communist agent. I decided to look up “Confidential” magazine and discovered it was kind of a sleazy tabloid like the old National Enquirer. I’m not sure what happened to so called “Tabloid” journalism in the age of on-line news. I feel like it sort of assimilated into a lot of “free” news sites dog whistle politics and conspiracy theories. I doubt too many people took it too seriously at the time but I don’t really know. I had another aha moment last year which went something like this;
So something just occurred to me on rereading Chapter 4. The Russians. In 2016 Trump asked during or after the campaign “Why?”. Why would the Russians be interested in him being elected president and Clinton not? And then I am reminded of my friend, who happens to be a Trump supporter who claimed, “He only ran as a racist to beat Hillary”. And then this morning I was like, oh dang. Is it possible that at least part of Russian’s interest in Trump becoming president was to discredit the US as a racist country? Is it possible that we are a continuing part of the narrative that Professor Dudziak lays out in her book? Is it possible that this is a coordinated effort to make the US look horrible, and conversely make Russia, which has had terrible problems with the mafia and corruption since the collapse of the USSR, not to mention Ukraine and the recent murder of Putin critic, Alexei Navalny, look great… again?
I wonder how the years of the Trump presidency were reported in the Russian press.
IDK but back to chapter 4. The Little Rock 9 is a big deal and could be “worse for us than Hungary was for the Russians” according to one quoted source. The international outrage at this point is to be expected but what surprised me was West Germany. They were like nah. Remember the Holocaust? We can’t say anything about anybody. South Africa did not surprise me. You’ll understand more after our next Unit which will be on South Africa.
“White people must realize that the more a Negro hates communism because it opposes democracy, the more he is going to hate any other influence that kills off democracy in this country—and that goes for racial discrimination in the Army, and segregation on trains and buses, and job discrimination because of religious beliefs or color or place of birth”. Jackie Robinson testifying before HUAC.
So back to the idea of “Telling Stories” from last chapter… I’ve got a story for you.
From the days of the Truman administration the administration had to “Scare the hell” out of the American people to get them to agree to contain the tyrannical Soviet Union. Eisenhower in 52 was like “contain” that’s not good enough we are going to “Liberate the enslaved nations” (Truman had been tempted by this in 1950 in Korea but then China kicked our butt back down past the 38th parallel), but then 1956 and Hungary presented the lie, the hypocrisy of Ike’s claim. There would be no liberation. Then Kennedy will come on the scene and promise to “Pay any price, bear any burden” and we do bear a burden in Vietnam and pay a big price and by time 68 rolls around Nixon is elected with a secret plan to end the war. Again the lie laid bare. No liberation.
I see a concurrent story here. Promises promises promises in regards to civil rights. From Truman to Eisenhower to Kennedy, and though legislation is passed and some things actually change (desegregation of military, of buses in Montgomery) much doesn’t change hence the explosive riots in Watts in 1965. No liberation.
Professor Dudziak is telling a story here and includes many characters like Jackie Robinson and Dean Acheson. I hope you are enjoying it. Besides those two Truman and Earl Warren play a big role in the chapter. Important events are of course the desegregation of the military and Brown vs. Board. I’ll be keenly interested to hear your “Questions, comments and confusions” about Professor Dudziak’s story tomorrow.
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