Voice, Silence and Gender in South Africa’s Anti-Apartheid Struggle: The Shadow of a Young Woman

In 1964, the UK government imposed an arms embargo on South Africa, which it maintained until the end of the white minority rule. What explains this embargo? Using mainly archival evidence, this paper demonstrates that domestic political dynamics in the United Kingdom mediated the influence of the transnational anti-apartheid and anti-colonial struggles on the British government. The United Kingdom imposed and maintained this embargo due in part to a domestic advocacy network, whose hub was the Anti-Apartheid Movement. The paper provides a comprehensive explanation of an important issue in British foreign policy, the anti-colonial struggle, and Southern Africa's history. There are theoretical implications for foreign policy analysis concerning the role of advocacy networks, interactions between local and global activism, the role of political parties’ ideology and contestation, the effects on foreign policy of changes in a normative environment, the effects of norm contestation, and normative determinants of sanctions.

This work examines the contribution of Nigeria and Zimbabwe to the liquidation of apartheid and institutionalised racism in South Africa. It analyses the diplomatic engagement of both countries in intergovernmental organizations such as the UN, OAU and the Commonwealth in the struggle for the establishment of racial equality and democracy in South Africa. The work highlights the cooperation of Nigeria and Zimbabwe in efforts to end apartheid and racism in South Africa. Both countries were committed to pan-Africanism and united in commitment to anti-colonialism and racial equality and this made them to cooperate in the anti-apartheid struggle. A number of works exist on Nigeria’s role in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, but there is hardly any that focuses on the cooperation between Nigeria and Zimbabwe in the struggle to end racism in the country. Anti-colonialism and racial equality were important foreign policy objectives that Nigeria adopted from independence in 1960 and this made her to be involved in the independence struggle in Zimbabwe. Nigeria’s involvement in the independence movement in Zimbabwe contributed tremendously to Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980 and following Zimbabwe’s independence, both countries worked together to assist other African territories still under colonial rule. The work utilizes mainly oral sources, government records, reports of international organizations, newspaper reports and journal articles as sources of information. The work maintains that cooperation between Nigeria and Zimbabwe contributed extensively to the establishment of racial equality and democracy in South Africa in 1994. The study concludes that African states canbuild on the ideals of pan-Africanism to address contemporary problems as they did in the struggle against apartheid from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Words as Weapons

This article explores the ways in which a form of intellectual engagement has gone beyond merely studying society and sought to influence processes of change by engaging with actors outside disciplinary scholarship and the academy. In South Africa, the broad subdiscipline of labor studies provides probably the best illustration of this engagement, which Burawoy has termed public sociology. The article traces the emergence and growth of public sociology, initially from the position of relative privilege in the ivory tower and later to more direct forms of engagement with the new publics that emerged in the antiapartheid struggle. The discussion explains why the labor movement became the focal point of public sociology in South Africa. Finally, the article argues that the advent of democracy led to a growing assertiveness among the antiapartheid movements, including labor. Not only did this alter the terms on which public sociology was undertaken, it also resulted in a decline of public sociology inherited from the antiapartheid struggle.

ABSTRACTThe international struggle against apartheid that emerged during the second half of the twentieth century made the system of legalised racial oppression in South Africa one of the world’s great moral causes. Looking back at the anti-apartheid struggle, a defining characteristic was the scope of the worldwide efforts to condemn, co-ordinate, and isolate the country. In March 1961, the international campaign against apartheid achieved its first major success when Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd chose to withdraw South Africa from the Commonwealth following vocal protests at the Heads of State Summit held in London. As a consequence, it appeared albeit briefly, that external pressure would effectively serve as a catalyst for achieving far-reaching and immediate political change in South Africa. The global campaign, centred on South Africa remaining in the Commonwealth, was the first of its kind launched by South Africa’s national liberation movements, and signalled the beginning of thirty years of continued protest and lobbying. The contributions from one organisation that had a role in launching and co-ordinating this particular transnational campaign, the South Africa United Front (SAUF), an alliance of liberation groups, have been largely forgotten. Leading members of the SAUF claimed the organisation had a key part in South Africa’s subsequent exit from the Commonwealth, and the purpose of this article is to explore the validity of such assertions, as well as the role and impact it had in generating a groundswell of opposition to apartheid in the early 1960s. Although the SAUF’s demands for South Africa to leave the Commonwealth were ultimately fulfilled, the documentary evidence suggests that its campaigning activities and impact were not a decisive factor; however the long-term significance of the SAUF, and the position it had in the rise of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) has not been fully recognised. As such, the events around the campaign for South Africa’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth act as a microcosm of developments that would define the international struggle against apartheid.

This chapter explores the ways in which a form of intellectual engagement has gone beyond merely studying society and sought to influence processes of change by engaging with actors outside disciplinary scholarship and the academy. In South Africa, the broad sub-discipline of labour studies provides probably the best illustration of this engagement, which Burawoy has termed ‘public sociology’. The chapter traces the emergence and growth of public sociology, initially from the position of relative privilege in the ivory tower and later to more direct forms of engagement with the new publics that emerged in the antiapartheid struggle. The discussion explains why the labour movement became the focal point of public sociology in South Africa. Finally, the chapter argues that the advent of democracy led to a growing assertiveness among the antiapartheid movements, including labour. This not only altered the terms on which public sociology was undertaken, but also resulted in a decline of public sociology inherited from the antiapartheid struggle.

Pijovic offers a historical overview of Australia’s engagement with Africa from its earliest days to the end of apartheid in South Africa. The chapter firstly explores Australia’s ‘flawed’ history of supporting colonialism and sympathy for apartheid, and then turns towards examining the country’s role in the anti-apartheid struggle between the 1970s and 1990s. Detailing engagement with Africa through successive Australian governments between the late 1940s and early 1990s, Pijovic highlights how Australia’s engagement with the continent came to be so centrally focused on racism in Southern Africa (South Africa and Rhodesia/Zimbabwe) and the anti-apartheid struggle, and why that engagement mostly came through multilateral settings such as the Commonwealth—Australia’s traditional ‘window’ into Africa.

(2000). The Ambiguous Commitment: The People's Republic of China and the Anti-Apartheid Struggle in South Africa. Journal of Contemporary African Studies: Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 91-106.

In the past decade, South Africa's “miracle transition” has been interrupted by waves of protests in relation to basic services such as water and electricity. Less visibly, the postapartheid period has witnessed widespread illicit acts involving infrastructure, including the non-payment of service charges, the bypassing of metering devices, and illegal connections to services. This book shows how such administrative links to the state became a central political terrain during the antiapartheid struggle and how this terrain persists in the postapartheid present. Focusing on conflicts surrounding prepaid water meters, the book examines the techno-political forms through which democracy takes shape. It explores a controversial project to install prepaid water meters in Soweto—one of many efforts to curb the non-payment of service charges that began during the antiapartheid struggle—and traces how infrastructure, payment, and technical procedures become sites where citizenship is mediated and contested. The book follows engineers, utility officials, and local bureaucrats as they consider ways to prompt Sowetans to pay for water, and shows how local residents and activists wrestle with the constraints imposed by meters. This investigation of democracy from the perspective of infrastructure reframes the conventional story of South Africa's transition, foregrounding the less visible remainders of apartheid and challenging readers to think in more material terms about citizenship and activism in the postcolonial world. The book examines how seemingly mundane technological domains become charged territory for struggles over South Africa's political transformation.

South Africa has a unique and vibrant interreligious solidarity movement. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the interreligious movement played a significant role in the anti-apartheid struggle via the South African Chapter of the World Conference of Religions for Peace. Since the onset of a non-racial and democratic dispensation in 1994, the interreligious movement forms an integral part of South Africa’s burgeoning civil society, attempting to hold the post-apartheid government accountable for its political and moral mandate. This article explores the development of South Africa’s interreligious movement with special reference to the role of the Muslim community. It argues that, relative to its small size, the local Muslim community has played a disproportionate role in shaping the history and trajectory of the South African interreligious solidarity movement during the anti-apartheid struggle (1948–1994) and in the contemporary democratic period (1994–2023).

“Where Shall We Place Our Hope?”: COVID-19 and the Imperiled National Body in South Africa's “Lockdown Collection”

Reviewed by: Limpopo’s Legacy: student politics and democracy in South Africa by Anne K Hefferman Zolani Noonan-Ngwane (bio) Anne K Hefferman (2019) Limpopo’s Legacy: student politics and democracy in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits UP. The last decade has seen the publication of an impressive number of historical studies that question and problematise the picture of Black Consciousness drawn by an earlier body of scholarship. In the latter works Black Consciousness often comes across as either an anticlimactic culmination to earlier forms of radical African nationalism (Gerhart 1978) or as a gateway to a more substantial political treatment of subsequent historical moments such as the secondary school student uprising in 1976 (Brooks and Brickhill 1980, Hirson 1979), and the popular mass movements in the 1980s (Marx 1992). Emerging at the end of the supposedly quiescent 1960s the political force of Black Consciousness is represented as ‘muted’, with its protagonists locked in an endless quest for ‘mythical self-sufficiency’, all this at the expense of providing both a political leadership for a restive working class and organisational structure for the largely spontaneous surge of student protests. Black consciousness historiography has come a long way since then. From in-depth intellectual histories (Magaziner 2010) to studies of the material impact of its developmental programmes on the countryside (Hadfield 2016), Black Consciousness has recently been treated substantially both in its own internal complexity and in relation to the broader anti-apartheid struggle within the country and, as in the volume under review, in exile. Limpopo’s Legacy: student politics and democracy in South Africa is a timely and unique contribution to this new body of work. The book tells the story of student and youth politics as they developed in today’s rural Limpopo Province and went on to influence, if not shape, the national struggle in South Africa. Thus, the book centres ‘local and regional experiences’ as its [End Page 133] main contribution both to the historiography of Black Consciousness and the recent histories of student and youth activism. Indeed, to the general international literature on youth the book’s particular contribution, both theoretically and ethnographically, is a Global South perspective. The book begins with the ‘incubation and development’ of Black Consciousness at the University of the North, currently the University of Limpopo, or more popularly Turfloop, in the late 1960s and 1970s, through the resurgence of multiracial Charterist local and regional student and youth congresses in the 1980s, and ends with the African National Congress’ (ANC) Polokwane national conference held at Turfloop in 2007. Indeed, the timeline for this study can be extended at both ends to start with the formation, at students’ agitation, of the first Student Representative Council (SRC) at Turfloop in 1960 (and its squabbles with the administration throughout that decade) and ending with the second wave of #FeesMustFall as it manifested at Turfloop in 2016. On the one hand, then, Limpopo’s Legacy problematises the widely held notion of the ‘quiescent 60s’ (see also Brown 2016) while, on the other hand, it anchors its historical narrative in recent events affecting higher education in South Africa. Besides its unique focus on local experiences, another rewarding and distinctive aspect of the book is that it is also an extended political profiling of generations of actors associated, by birth or education, with the Northern Transvaal (Limpopo Province): from Onkgopotse Tiro – through contemporary national figures such as Cyril Ramaphosa, Frank Chikane, Mosiuoa Lekota and Aubrey Mokoena – to Peter Mokaba and Julius Malema, Limpopo Provinces’ ‘most famous sons’ (216). While most of the literature on, and popular memories of, the national anti-apartheid struggle have focused on the urban political careers of these individuals, the book traces the trajectory of their activism from the rural Northern Transvaal where they politically came of age. Its argument is that this geographically marginal enclave was in fact the crucible of political activism and ideologies that influenced the national struggle. Like all black universities founded under the grand scheme of Bantu Education, Turfloop was designed to produce graduates who would form an ethnically homogeneous civil service and intellectual vanguard for the apartheid homeland system. Unlike some of the other black universities, however, Turfloop had...


 
 
 
 I
 
 There is a new whiteness in South Africa. The Vryheidsfront Plus is critical to this whiteness. A predominantly Afrikaner political party with few seats in the national parliament, the Vryheidsfront Plus (“Freedom Front Plus” or “VF+”) uses technology—in particular, the Internet and the Front’s website—to construct a particular brand of post-apartheid whiteness. It must be pointed out, however, that this power to harness new technology in formal politics is limited to major political parties and organisations—black and white—but not to a populist organisation like the radically redistributionist Landless People Movement. After all, South Africa is, in 2006, a nation where only five percent of the population—”harnessing” that fifteenth century technology, “movable type”—can afford to regularly purchase books for anything more than academic study.
 
 VF+ politicos, using new technology available to some but not to others, actually create a politics centred around racial “cyborgs”—“cybernetic organisms”. Technologies giving rise to the VF+’s racial cyborgs bring about a race and racism dynamic and hybrid enough to make race and racism appear to nimbly change form. Technologies, like the Internet, not only allow the Vryheidsfront Plus to construct a post-apartheid whiteness in which whites are a beleaguered minority, technology enables the VF+ to construct a post-apartheid state led by black supremacists. So, as the VF+ uses technology, whiteness looks like the new blackness, privilege comes across as the new disadvantage, and multiracial democracy seems to be the new apartheid. 
 
 Cyborg qualities marking the Vryheidsfront Plus’ race and racism can be interestingly situated next to Donna Haraway’s “cyborg”. Haraway imagines a cyborg freeing human bodies from modern supremacies. This freedom arrives, according to Haraway, because cyborg existence deconstructs binaries (e. g., white-black, masculine-feminine, heterosexual-homosexual) fundamental to the old racism, patriarchy, and heterosexism, as well as old strategies deployed to fight these supremacies. Or, as Haraway’s post-embodiment manifesto reads, the cyborg replacing the old modernist body “is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of political work” (154). The VF+ cyborgs, though, are not quite Haraway’s superheroes. Unlike Haraway’s cyborg forging socialist transformation, VF+ cyborgs facilitate the “freeing” of an “oppressed” minority still enjoying apartheid privileges. Critiques of Haraway, as offered by Lisa Nakamura, for example, seem apt. Specifically, according to Nakamura, “cybertypes” emerge online, not anything like freedom, not anything “which progressive people might explore”. Nakamura’s “cybertypes”—a technologically inflected version of “stereotypes”—exist as new modernist tools used by whites in order to make sense of and to rewrite post-conditions (e. g., post-apartheid) in which the preeminence of whiteness and white privilege are questioned (3-4). 
 
 II
 
 The Vryheidsfront Plus’s arrival on the South African political scene materialised as the Front “cybertyped” itself, and others. The party—online for users to access worldwide—traced Afrikaner whiteness to the arrival of South Africa’s first Dutch settlers in 1652 making Afrikaners “Africans”, not “settlers”. “The struggle over the past centuries was a struggle for freedom, liberty, self-determination and independence in our own Republic”, as the Front constructed Afrikaners and their history, 1652 to the present. This was a struggle against British colonial “conquest”. Afrikaners fleetingly won their struggle, according to the Front’s online history, with the declaration of two Afrikaner republics in the mid-nineteenth century, only to see freedom disappear after the South African War, 1899-1902, also known as the Anglo-Boer War. Afrikaners suffered during the War; according to the Front’s website, nearly 28,000 (22,000 children under 16) Afrikaners died in concentration camps run by the British (“Historical Background” 1-3).
 
 Apartheid as state policy was intended to reestablish Afrikaner autonomy, and freedom. In its e-newsletters as well as in other online documents, an Afrikaner political party like the VF+ had to reinvent itself as a racial minority in a multiracial and democratic South Africa. So, VF+ members declared their desire “to establish a fair and legitimate dispensation for Afrikaners in South Africa” in which language and cultural rights would be guaranteed. The electronically-posted manifesto of the VF+ culminated when the authors stated the ultimate desire of the VF+: “To attain freedom for the Afrikaner in a territory of his own”. Articulating their desire, Front leaders called for an Afrikaner “homeland” (their term) which would be more than the pseudo-states created during apartheid. VF+ leaders went so far as to present a hypertext link to a map demarcating boundaries of an Afrikaner “homeland” which, unlike the black “homelands” chiseled out by the apartheid state, would include prime coastline, fertile farmland, and significant mineral wealth (“Policy of the Freedom Front”).
 
 VF+’s construction of Afrikaners as multicultural advocates of a new apartness was intriguing, given the transnational history of whiteness, and the history of Afrikaner whiteness in particular. Accessing VF+ multiculturalism proved as easy as pointing and clicking through the multilingual VF+ website. (The site is in Afrikaans with, after a click of a mouse on the VF+ homepage, English, French, Russian, Setswana, Spanish, Zulu and German translations.) The current leader of the VF+, Pieter Mulder, used the text of a 2003 parliamentary speech posted on the VF+ website to brandish VF+ multiculturalism. Mulder pointedly asked whether or not diversity is a “curse” or a “blessing”. He concluded that it is a “blessing”. But the VF+ “blessing”, as understood by Mulder, went beyond the “Westminster and British political models” also advocated, according to Mulder, by the post-apartheid state. Mulder contended that British citizenship ideals “tend to simplify politics to individual citizens that must be moulded into a nation”. “I am not only an individual but I am also part of a community”, said Mulder. Against British ideals, Mulder presented a position that, he argued, dismissed Britain’s “simplistic solutions” because British ideals “always ignore diversity, ignore communities and try to assimilate instead of to accommodate” (Mulder, “President’s Budget Vote Debate”).
 
 In this vein, Pieter Mulder, made use of technology to post a passionate 2005 speech—downloadable and streamable to MP3—on freedom and hate after apartheid. Mulder, echoing a sentiment made potent during the anti-apartheid struggle, rhetorically asked whether South Africa belonged to all who live in it. Mulder’s answer was “no” because whites do not equally share in post-apartheid freedoms. Black racist hate directed at whites caused this inequality to foment, according to Mulder. Black racist hate, especially in the form of hate speech but also in the form of affirmative action, preceded the normalisation of black threats towards Afrikaners as well as the murders of Afrikaner farmers and their families, according to Mulder. Hate persisted, according to Mulder, because of the racist speech of some ANC leaders. Yet, Mulder asserted, “Whites are accused of racism while blacks can do no wrong”. Quoting an ANC Youth League official, Mulder said, ‘“When a black person says he does not like white people, that is not racism; that is prejudice. Blacks have no capacity to be racist; they can only respond to it”’. Mulder pointedly asked whether threats to South African Indians and the murder of rural whites was “prejudice, or racism” (Mulder, “Listen to Pieter Mulder”). 
 
 III
 
 VF+ politicking, here, is problematic. On the one hand, Front leaders use their webbed discourse to express an outlook underestimating social and economic disparities underlying black-on-white violence in rural areas. Specifically, VF+ representatives deny material disparities separating blacks and whites, blame negative black perceptions of whites largely on the rhetoric of the ANC leadership, fail to acknowledge that there is white-on-black violence in rural areas and misrepresent the relationship between the pace of land redistribution and rural violence. On the other hand, though, the murder of whites in rural areas and on farms in particular is not a myth, and it impinges on the right of a minority to be free.
 
 This makes it possible, and necessary, to make some observations about freedom, hate, and fronts after apartheid.
 
 Freedom is constructed just as its meaning is contested. And technology doesn’t make freedom inevitable; technology makes freedom even less clear and certain.
 
 Like freedom, whiteness and Nakamura’s “cybertypes”, after apartheid, are neither clear, certain, nor guaranteed.
 
 References
 
 Campbell, John Edward. Getting It On Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality, and Embodied Identity. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2004. Featherstone, Michael, and Roger Burrows, eds. Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment. London: Sage, 1995. Gunkel, David J. “Virtually Transcendent: Cyberculture and the Body”. Journal of Mass Media Ethics 13.2 (1998): 111-23. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-81. Hardey, Michael. “Life beyond the Screen: Embodiment and Identity through the In

This article analyses the multifaceted relations between apartheid-era South Africa and Iran. In 1942, the exile of Iran’s ex-Shah in Johannesburg put South Africa on the map of Iran’s rulers. In the 1970s, close economic and military ties were established between the two states, based on economic complementarities and shared concern with the threat of communism and Soviet penetration into the Indian Ocean. By 1978, Iran provided over 90 per cent of South Africa’s oil. These ties did not prevent the Iranians from denouncing apartheid or bending its rules when in South Africa. The Islamic revolution of 1979 caused a break in formal relations. It affected South Africa in two ways: oil imports were disrupted, and it contributed to the growing militancy of South African Muslims in the anti-apartheid struggle. Iran then made financial contributions to the ANC, resulting in a friendly resumption of ties after the end of apartheid. The article uses extensive interviews with South African and Iranian diplomats who served in both countries.

The New South AfricaRenewing Civil Society Wilmot James (bio) and Daria Caliguire (bio) South Africa is fast approaching the beginning of its third year of democratic rule. Against a background of intractable conflict spawned by apartheid and the uncertainty and fragility of the preelection negotiation period, the democratic transition that the country has undergone over the past two years has been remarkable—even miraculous. The 1995 edition of the Human Rights Watch World Report refers to South Africa’s transition to democratic rule as “the magnificent outcome of [a] long and costly struggle.” 1 Indeed, the end of apartheid and the installation of Nelson Mandela as president of a new government led by the African National Congress (ANC) was one of the great historic moments of the twentieth century. For South Africans of all races, the nationwide balloting of April 1994 was more than an election; it was a celebration. Although the party is not quite over, South Africa has already settled sufficiently into a new pattern of politics to permit us to ask some important questions: What kind of democracy is it that South Africans have crafted? And what are the long-term prospects for the new political arrangements? These are difficult questions to answer, both because the process of democratization remains relatively open and undefined and because there is little agreement in the analytic community as to the necessary conditions for democratic sustainability. Accounting for much of the uncertainty is the absence of a permanent constitution. South Africans went to the polls in April 1994 with the understanding that the elected government would form a Constituent Assembly, one of whose tasks would be to fine-tune the interim [End Page 56] constitution adopted by the outgoing parliament at the end of 1993. Still unsettled are several major issues of institutional design, such as the degree of federalism that will characterize South Africa and the nature of the country’s electoral system. There are also deeper questions. For example, what kinds of strains will the country’s inherited social and economic conditions place on the political system? To what extent will the nation’s vibrant—and, in some respects, uniquely configured—civil society, which was shaped by the antiapartheid struggle, be able to meet the numerous challenges it now faces and help institutionalize the new democratic regime? Terms of the Transition South Africa’s transition to democracy was not a revolution in the classic, radical sense in which the term is used by Theda Skocpol—that is, a transformation of the structures of both state and society. 2 Rather, it was a negotiated settlement among opposing parties that resulted in representative government based on universal franchise. Such an agreement had come to be perceived by all parties as the only viable exit from a situation of stalemate. Under the terms of the settlement, some key institutions of the state—including the military, the police, and the civil service—were left intact, but the legislative and executive branches of government were redesigned so that those who governed South Africa would represent the entire citizenry. New institutions, such as a Constitutional Court, were created in order to complete the separation of powers. Preexisting patterns of ownership and control of property were protected, so that the racial composition of the different socioeconomic classes remained unchanged. A government of national unity would emerge as the institutional manifestation of the settlement among the parties. An extremely inclusive system of proportional representation was adopted for the national elections, with no minimum threshold required for entry into parliament. In addition, all parties that received more than 5 percent of the national vote gained representation in the executive cabinet; the threshold required for representation in the nine provincial cabinets was 10 percent. In the April 1994 elections, the ANC received 62.6 percent of the national vote, the National Party (NP), 20.4 percent, and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), 10.5 percent. All the other parties, including the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), received less than the minimum threshold both nationally and in each province and are therefore without representation in national and provincial cabinets. In the spirit of accommodation and inclusiveness, Mandela has appointed representatives...