Apartheid, 1948–1994 by Saul Dubow; Inside South Africa’s Foreign Policy: Diplomacy in Africa from Smuts to Mbeki by John Siko

Abstract

Reviewed by: Roel van der Velde (), School of Languages and Area Studies, University of Portsmouth, UKAs the fourth African National Congress (ANC) leader to become the president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma once boasted that the party which had defeated racial segregation would rule the country until Jesus comes.[1] Twenty years on, the once exemplary democracy sees its very institutions crumbling under cronyism and corruption. Even before his 2016 Speech of the Nation was heckled by opposition, Zuma found himself grappling with disgruntled voters, racial tensions, and a largely self-inflicted economic crisis.[2] To fully understand present-day South African politics requires an understanding of the country's past. Two books published on South African political history in 2014 can help us gain just that.The first study is by Professor Saul Dubow of Queen Mary University of London, who has written extensively about his native country. His latest book focuses on the ideology and practice of apartheid and the way they were understood and resisted. The other book, by diplomat-scholar John Siko, focuses on political networks involved in South African foreign policy formulation. It examines the extent to which formerly disenfranchised groups have overcome the system of apartheid. Siko finished his research while working at the US embassy in Cape Town. Together, the books offer a comprehensive view of political mobilization under apartheid and its democratic successor.Building ideologies, resisting powerDubow has written a reintegrated history of the many sides of apartheid, woven from budding from below and an analysis of apartheid state power (ix). His study in state ideology and the social counter-movements resisting its implementation covers the span from the 1948 Malan government to the election of majority government in 1994. Throughout this period, an ideological conflict was fought between and among generations of government officials, social movements, and affected populations.Interaction constitutes the central theme of Dubow's book: the initiatives and exchanges of government and various societal actors. Dubow reintroduces contingency and historicity to the dusty narratives of apartheid and resistance. He synthesizes old and new scholarship on a host of political, biographical, and cultural dimensions and has a keen eye for diversities of gender, race, and language. This often leads him to revise the actual importance of events that would enter resistance lore. To give but one example, the Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960 was neither the worst example of callous government policies at that time, the author maintains, nor was the ANC's subsequent choice for armed resistance as inevitable or uniformly shared as later contended.Dubow's elaborate rebuttal of rise-and-fall histories of apartheid describes the socio-economic, ideological, and spatial dimensions that combined to assure the surprising longevity of that system. From a winning 1948 electoral slogan and then ambivalent administrative segregation, apartheid became a robust ideology of Afrikaner Christian-nationalism that secured the dream of the 1961 republic, free from British tutelage. Separate development would become an article of faith, but its success had not been inevitable, nor was it secure. Accordingly, the eight loosely chronological chapters have the same move-and-countermove character.Retracing the idea of apartheid from its colonial-era components to its 1960s hubris and traversal in the late 1980s shows the many turns in racist policy. Constantly evolving militant and military movements combined with ever-changing economic and international contexts to upset the governmental fiction of segregated and contented tribal nations. Even so, divisive measures and forced relocations hit populations unevenly, and resistance to them was not unified or wholly black. …