The United States and South Africa: History, Civil Rights and the Legal and Cultural Vulnerability of Blacks

Abstract

THE CULTURAL HISTORIES of blacks in the United States and in Southern Africa provide evidence that on several levels they have been leading parallel lives. Against the backdrop of international colonialism, the two nations have emerged along similar lines as industrializing, multi-racial superpowers in which the role of blacks in the labor force and later in politics and public life has been crucial. Since the turn of the century, organized struggle against racial oppression in both nations has followed analogous patterns. The careers of individual leaders particularly of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela bear witness to a consistent feature of black leadership, that of combining strong moral leadership and effective, if militant, political intervention. Despite striking parallels on the national, organizational and individual levels however, there is a disparity in the outcome of civil rights efforts which is perhaps not as surprising as it is demoralizing. The civil rights struggle in South Africa has been dramatically less successful, though modeled on the most successful in the world that of the United States. This brief study will evaluate parallels in the cultural histories, the impact of those histories upon the formation and development of civil rights movements and the direction taken by those movements in seeking to minimize the legal and cultural vulnerability of the black populations. A look at the colonial histories of America and of Southern Africa reveals a period of several hundred years when European nations were vying with each other for control of the land and its resources. Indigenous populations were dealt with in similar ways by European powers, once they were in a position to mete out decrees. Cultural exchange with indigenous populations was viewed as inimical to the advancement of European civilization. Whenever possible the people were used as a labor force for white settlers. When locals could not or would not be used, slave or indentured populations were imported. This happened in North, Central and South America as well as in Southern Africa. The Khoisan, the original population in the Southwestern Cape area, suffered a fate similar to that of Native Americans. Contact with Europeans in both cases brought new diseases and wars of attrition which, in addition to widespread miscegenation, resulted in a drastic decline in their numbers. Though neither was ever enslaved as a group, their offspring could be made slaves if that had been the status of one parent. With the development of plantation economies came the importation of slave labor. The practices of the Boers of Southern Africa approximated those of European settler groups in the New World. They imported not only African slaves from West Africa and Madagascar, but also Malay slaves from the East Indies and Indian slaves from the Bay of Bengal. Miscegenation between Boers and these groups increased