Jan van Riebeeck, commander of the Dutch post at the Cape, ranted in a diary entry of 28 January 1654 that the indigenous people’s misdeeds were hardly bearable any longer: “Perhaps it would be a better proposition to pay out this guilty gang, taking their cattle and their persons as slaves in chains for fetching firewood and doing other necessary labour.”
Under orders from the Dutch East India Company not to antagonise the locals on whom it depended for trade, van Riebeeck restricted himself to planting a protective bitter almond hedge along the borders of his besieged encampment while continuing to negotiate with the enemy. Thus was early laid the pattern of future South African race relations: an equilibrium of teeth-gritting mutual tolerance mitigated by social distance and punctuated by sporadic violent irruptions, conquests and subjugation.
Remarkably, a single South African constitutional order emerged 340 years after van Riebeeck’s almond hedge through the Act of Union of 1910, and after another 84 years, in 1994, a functioning modern democracy. It is the one we have now, an imperfect and in many ways still teeth-gritting order, but somehow hanging together, somehow prevailing over a society where race may be the driving narrative but economic self-advancement, the consuming passion.
There have indeed been episodic attempts at creating a multi-racial system, such as the qualified enfranchisement of mixed-race people in the Cape Colony. The segregationist viewpoint, however, has long held sway: from its mildest imperial form under the famed administrator Sir Theophilus Shepstone, who created reserves in the Natal Colony for native populations in the mid-19th century, to the ruthless segregation of the Boers, who even trekked from their homes in the Eastern Cape in the early 19th century to escape what they saw as the iniquitous egalitarianism of the British.
But the policy of separation, Apartheid, was only officially crafted in 1948. Race, from then on, was no less omnipresent than it was in the previous century; it was just more complex. After the resurgent Afrikaner middle class, driven by the new Afrikaner nationalism, seized power as the National Party, a class alliance between the poor Afrikaners and poor black population was off the cards. Instead, the Afrikaner nationalists created tribal statelets in which the black population were supposed to be grateful to exercise their vote but still forced to export their labour. The scheme foundered on the implacable reefs of economic implausibility and passive African resistance.
More successful was the way the National Party turned the state into a vast affirmative action engine for the working-class white population, so successful that three generations later their confident descendants, now affluent, educated and cosmopolitan, overwhelmingly voted in a referendum in March 1992 to surrender political power to the black majority, one of the few occasions in history when a dominant minority voluntarily cedes power to a dispossessed majority.
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SubscribeInteresting article; but I deplore the use of the term ‘reverse racism’. There really is no such thing: it’s racism or not racism, regardless of the perpetrator or the target.
I agree – Dr King understood that well; so should we.
Also worth noting that it isn’t a zero sum game as the author states. What’s happened in Zimbabwe and South Africa looks far more like a negative sum game (one in which value is destroyed) to me.
its patently not a zerosum game-quite the opposite as measured by every available metric.
wrong.. its racialism.. which in itself is a meaningless term
Lovely overview of political dynamics in SA. We are visiting for 3 weeks early next year and look forward to observing the social atmosphere ourselves. Fortunately, every place we are staying has backup protections for “load shedding” (power outages), as sadly the government can’t figure out how to keep the lights on, unlike even the poorest countries on earth. Odd…
Good news. Load shedding is over and has been for almost a year
Bad news. NetZero load shedding is coming to a UK town near you…
As a SAFA, I can say that you will love here. Don’t worry about loadshedding. Rather just don’t take chances with your personal safety. Leave your expensive belongings hidden or at the hotel and don’t carry large sums of cash around. And don’t stick to the touristy things, there is much to be discovered in SA by going off to quieter and less flashy places. Enjoy.
I used the term SAFA incorrectly there, sorry. Still living here!
The black man votes for the black man in SA. Do we blame the white man for voting the same way?
Of course they do, the Blacks at least are still at the tribal level. It would be absolutely stupid in their view to not favor the tribe.
A “functioning modern democracy” it is not.
That is a pretty harsh assessment. I am a born and bred South African and can say with truth that democracy is doing very well here. It’s not perfect, this article already states that. But to my mind, we are doing a lot better than numerous developed countries.
The question is, is SA getting better or regressing? I suggest the latter makes more sense now.
I like South Africa and wish them well (as part of the Commonwealth) but having the same party in power for 30 years and with no prospects of non-racialised voting in the near future I don’t think there is a case for it being either a modern or flourishing democracy. Such wasted potential. I am struggling think of a developed democracy with the same sort of problems.
You don’t think the US has problems with their democracy?
I don’t think this is an honest comparison. Every democracy has problems but the fact that Republicans and Democrats have exchanged wins in the last 30 years (with another change soon to come) is a good sign. Hotly-fought elections are a positive sign. I don’t see that in South Africa where the ANC is just so dominant; “losing” the last election with 40% of the vote and their man still in power. Apart from African-american voters there isn’t a racialised voting block and even there with Black men this might be changing because of Trump.
Maybe that’s because blacks are 80% of the population and whites only 7. And real democracy has only been in place for 30 years in South Africa where blacks could vote. It takes decades to recover from oppression on that scale, and huge inequalities remain.
Try the UK. We’ve had the ConLabLib uniparty in power since 1997. Vote Reform.
the usual crumbling black African totalitarian state, going backwards fast, like all the others who have not even reached Roman levels of 2000 years old plus… but no one has the backbone or guts to say so.
Sadly a disaster based on woolly socialist politics and rampant corruption. A combination we have no reason to be complacent about. Coming soon!
It was all General Montgomery’s fault. If he had acceded to Jan Smuts’ request for leave for South African troops in the Western Desert, Smuts would have won the election post war and the democratic aspirations of the indigenous races would have been accommodated.
I visited SA recently and found everyone I met friendly and welcoming. Just the corrupt politicians who muck it up.
South Africa sure has its problems and the author’s analysis of why is spot on. But I love living here. You have to keep your wits about you but there’s a freedom and joy here that is fierce. Hulle weet nie wat ons weet nie.
Comparison are odious, yet, I shudder to think where white South Africans would be today had they not voted for a unified non-racial South Africa in 1994. This against the Ash Sarkar interview in which Avi Shlaim sets out: ‘I used to support a two-state solution but Israel killed it, and therefore the solution I advocate today is one democratic state from the River to the Sea with equal rights for all the people who live there regardless of religion and ethnicity.’ (Source: YouTube: ‘Arab Jews: the hidden history. Ash Sarkar meets Avi Shlaim’ >01:05:04.)
How did the ‘two-state’ solution work out in India-Pakistan?
Or how about the original two-state solution, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland (and, yes, I know the Irish constitution says “Ireland” is the name of the country before some pedant tries to chime in on that).