Professor Colin Bundy
Apartheid in Crisis, 1973-1994

Professor Colin Bundy - Apartheid in Crisis, 1973-1994

- My talk this evening is called Apartheid in Crisis, and it covers the years 1973 to 1994. As the South African government entered the 1970s, it had pretty good grounds for optimism. The economy was buoyant. The political challenge from African nationalism had been routed and there was scant domestic opposition to apartheid. Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post concluded, and I’m quoting from him, “White nationalism has entrenched itself more firmly than ever. The chances for a successful black revolt seemed to have grown more distant with each passing year since Sharpville,” unquote. Sharpville was 1960. But such confidence proved illusory. Within just a few years, the NP government that had fairly swaggered through the previous decade lost its step, stumbled and never fully regained its balance or its confidence. The difficulties encountered by the regime had three main components, firstly, an economic malaise. Secondly, the rebirth of internal resistance, and thirdly, a shift in the regional balance of power that called into question. South Africa’s security. Let me take the first of these. Although the apartheid economy had grown during the 1950s and 1960s, it generated its own contradictions. Firstly, black poverty meant that the domestic consumer market could not expand. It was artificially restricted. Similarly, Bantu education and job reservation for whites ensured that not enough African workers had the requisite skills for an industrial economy. And then in addition to these internal weaknesses, in 1973, the OPEC oil crisis drove oil prices higher and triggered an international recession.

In South Africa as elsewhere, growth fell while inflation and unemployment rose a combination known as stagflation. Crucially, however, South Africa did not share in the economic recovery experienced by the highly industrialised and newly industrialising economies in the 1980s. Instead, in South Africa, the growth rate fell further behind the population increase, growth product per capita actually fell between 1973 and 1994. Inflation persisted, the currency remained weak and foreign debts burdensome, output productivity and exports shrank. And then secondly, the second set of problems is that the apartheid states suddenly found itself confronted by militancy and organisation amongst black South Africans. And this again, has three elements. Firstly, in the late 1960s, a generation of energetic and angry black university students formulated black consciousness, an eclectic intense ideology of psychological emancipation, self-reliance, and self assertiveness, BC, black consciousness stressed the necessity for blacks to become agents of their own liberation. And importantly, it defined blacks as including Africans, coloured and Indians, claiming that they shared a common identity because of their common oppression. Steve Biko subsequently murdered by police while in detention. Was a charismatic and influential thinker and leader of this movement that flourished on black campuses and in black schools. Now, BC may have been a middle class movement, but the other major vector of opposition in the early 1970s was a decisively working class one, A trickle of wildcat strikes by African workers became a flood in 1973 in the Port city of Durban, mass strikes broke out in supportive demands for wage increases.

That year there were 160 strikes involving more than 60,000 workers eclipsing the total number of strikes in the entire 1960s. And the Durban strikes sparked a resurgence in black trade unions. Very rapidly, a militant independent trade union movement emerged and established itself in all the major cities where it engaged with employers over recognition and wages. Then thirdly, and finally on June the 16th, 1976, they commenced what we now know as the Soweto uprising. Pupils in Soweto had been protesting at their schools for a few weeks against the imposition of lessons in Afrikaans. They did not want the imposition of Afrikaans as a teaching medium. But their action committee now decided to organise a mass march through Soweto itself. And this was a qualitative shift in protest. By taking to the streets, students directly challenged the state’s control over the township. Police tried to block them off, they’re retaliated with tear gas, and they then opened fire. This transformed a peaceful protest into a riot. The official figure was the 23 students lost their lives that day. The students attacked municipal offices in beer halls. They set cars and buildings on fire. This violence ebbed and flowed for about three months, during which about 300 black youth and adults were killed. And over 2,000 injured. The issues raised in Soweto affected black students across the country, galvanising similar protests and uniting entire communities in grief and outrage. And it was the case that militant black students and unemployed youth became key agents of protests right through the 1980s. The shock waves of Soweto spread far.

May we have the first photograph, please. The first casualty on June the 16th was 12 year old Hector Peterson and this famous photograph of Hector dying in dressed in school uniform, dying in the arms of a lanky 18 year old while his sister runs alongside. The photo was published the next morning, in a black newspaper called “The World,” one of the newspapers that was closed down by the government in 1977. But importantly, it was picked up by the wire agencies and splashed over newspapers across the world. It became a central image of the violence of apartheid. I would like to compare it briefly with another photograph that had a similar impact, may we have the second photo. This one with an even younger central character, the nine year old girl, the skin peeling off from a napalm attack was officially called, The Terror of War, often referred to simply as the napalm girl. And in a very similar way, it became iconic of the violence of war in Southeast Asia and a rallying symbol of opposition to that war. Thank you for the photos. Taking together these three elements, black consciousness, the new black trade unions and the Soweto generation of youth activists taken together. These recreated the possibility of mass based protest politics, which had been absent since Sharpville. The Soweto uprising also had a major impact on the exiled African National Congress, the ANC after the ANC was banned, and its national leadership imprisoned.

It operated in exile under the leadership of Oliver Tambo. In 1964, the ANC established its headquarters in Lusaka in newly independent Zambia. In exile, it received substantial financial support from Scandinavian countries, while the Soviet bloc countries provided training and weapons for its armed wing MK. In the months after Soweto, the ANC and especially MK ranks were suddenly swelled by thousands of new recruits as angry young women and men poured across the borders seeking military training so that they might reengage the regime on more equal terms. And then I’ve talked about economic malaise and the reemergence of black protest. The third dimension of this crisis was regional. In 1974, Caetano right wing regime fell in Lisbon, and led almost immediately to the abandonment by Portugal of its African colonies, including Mozambique and Angola. Newly independent Mozambique and Angola were both led by left-wing nationalist movements. And the writing was on the wall too by 1975 for Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, today’s Zimbabwe. It was increasingly clear that his white minority government was not going to defeat the African nationalist guerrilla armies. Now, previously, Angola, Rhodesia and Mozambique had formed a buffer zone between South Africa and the forces of Africa nationalism. But suddenly, South Africa now was no longer protected by a cordon sanitaire of white rural states. A real shift in the balance of forces had taken place regionally. The exiled ANC could not seek basis for its members in MK camps in states neighbouring South Africa. And South Africa responded by invading Angola, but the non-rival of anticipated American troops.

And the arrival of unanticipated Cuban troops supporting the Angolan government turned the invasion into an undignified retreat. An inauspicious beginning to what became over a decade of increasingly costly border war. Events of these years especially the depression of the Soweto uprising, had another important consequence. They added weight and impetus to an international anti-apartheid movement, which exerted diplomatic and political pressure on South Africa. Elsewhere that there were perhaps three major instances in the 20th century of political mobilisation and solidarity that crossed national frontiers and one mass support from ordinary people imbued with a sense of historical and moral urgency. The first of these was support for the Republican side in the Spanish civil War. The second was transnational opposition to the American war in Vietnam. And the third such movement began in the early ‘60s and peaked in the late 1980s. A wave of anti-apartheid mobilisation internationally. Such opposition began as small scale localised lobbies in different countries. And before 1980, its successes were largely symbolic, criticising and isolating South Africa without actually damaging its economy or power. And a particular area of such anti-apartheid activism was in the field of organised support. South Africa was expelled from the Olympics in 1970, from FIFA football in 1976. Commonwealth leaders in 1976 after Sharpville called upon their sporting organisations and sportsmen and women not to play with or against South African teams or individuals.

And indeed, over the next few years, New Zealand, Australia and Britain cut the ties between their countries in South Africa in the key sports of cricket and rugby. This may seem a trivial form of isolation, but it mattered a great deal to white South Africans. Anti-apartheid activists, mobilised, advocated, campaigned, and raised substantial amounts of money. The most significant aspect of international solidarity was the extent to which it shaped public opinion, especially in the West. And I’ll say a bit more about that a little later. Now, faced with this treble layered crisis and the international pressures, South Africa responded from 1978 onwards under a new leader, President P. W. Botha and Botha headed a deeply ambivalent programme of what I shall call authoritarian reform. That is a combination of real reforms and very significant repression. Botha’s reforms included far greater spending on black education, the recognition of black trade unions, expanded rights for black urban insiders and a whole raft of other overtures to try to win support from a growing black middle class. Simultaneously along exactly at the same time as these reforms. The government sought to beef up external defence and internal law and order measures. Between 1973 and 1980, military spending grew by 450% and consumed 20% of the national budget.

Before we became president, Botha had been minister of defence for 20 years, and he was strongly influenced by the thinking of military intelligence and by theorists of counterinsurgency. Botha followed them in defining the threats that his country faced as a total onslaught, and he promised to respond by a total strategy. The state he wrote should muster all activities incorporating political, economic, psychological, technological, and military means. He created a national security management system, a kind of quasi secret bureaucracy, a hidden parallel administration, militarising day-to-day administration and reporting only to the office of the state president. Compulsory military service for young white men was doubled from one year to two years. I like to think of the representative apparatchik of the Botha era as an awkwardly ambidextrous individual clutching a reform bill in one hand and a shambok whip in the other. The great Tocqueville writing about the French revolution was the first of many to observe that the most dangerous moments for oppressive governments is when they take their first steps of reform. A group of right-wing national party MPs, hostile to Botha’s reforms, broke away to form a new party, the Conservative Party. And Botha staked a great deal on a form of political, a reform of the political structure. He created a Tricameral, a three chamber parliament, a governing body with three chambers, which had elected representatives respectively from white, Indian and coloured populations. Africans, 78% of the population were not included in this body. Instead, they were offered an expanded form of local government in the black townships structures called black local authorities.

The timing of these BLAs was inauspicious because it coincided with the emergence in these townships of a new mode of popular resistance, militant, decentralised, radicalised, community politics, a mushroom growth of local bodies, many of whom turned on the BLAs on the councillors now responsible for imposing rent risers and transport risers. And then in Cape Town in August, 1983, a new national umbrella body was formed, A body giving a home, a single home to these local community organisations. It was called the United Democratic Front or UDF. And the UDF at its launch brought together over 400 affiliated organisations, youth groups, student groups, women’s organisations, religious bodies, community organisations know as civics, trade unions, and many others. The UDF stated goal, and I’m quoting, “Is to establish a democratic non-racial United South Africa in which society is freed from institutional and systematic racism,” unquote. Its slogan was UDF Unites, Apartheid divides. And from the outset, the UDF identified itself with the chartist tradition. That is with the ANC LED alliance politics of the 1950s, which created the freedom charter. UDF rapidly became the most pervasive and the most widely supported movement in the history of South African extra parliamentary politics.

The exiled ANC did not create the UDF, nor did it control it, but it was a major beneficiary of the UDFs creation. Most of the UDFs affiliates and especially the youth and student groups supported the ANC. ANC colours and flags appeared at their rallies and demonstrations. ANC songs were sung ANC heroes, sorry, ANC leaders like Mandela and Tambo were idolised. And in December September, 1984, townships in the heavily industrialised Vaal Triangle, an area south of Johannesburg exploded in violence. Local communities turned against their BLAs driving many of them from office. The urban revolt, which began in the Vaal Triangle, spread to other cities and ushered in 18 months of sustained and often violent resistance. It was geographically dispersed. It involved action by unionised workers, by community organisations, by students and the unemployed. They mounted strikes and boycotts stay aways and civil disobedience on a mass scale. And Botha’s government responded with an equally massive show of force. In mid 1985, it declared a state of emergency, subsequently extended to the whole country. Policing was militarised. Army troops were sent into the townships in heavily armoured vehicles. This meant, and I’m quoting, “That young white conscripts, many of whom were confused and traumatised, were duty bound to fire birdshot, rubber bullets, and tear gas on black youth the same age as them,” unquote.

Understate of the emergency regulations, over the next four years, the police and army detained 33,000 activists. UDF leaders were arrested and charged with treason in eight high profile court cases. In 1976, the government cut off the UDF’s foreign funding. It made it illegal for them to receive any funds from overseas drastically weakening the central capacity of the body. Violence escalated. Some eight and a half thousand people died in political violence between September, 1984 and 1990. The greater body, the majority of these casualties occurred internecine conflict between supporters of the ANC or UDF on the one hand, and those of Inkatha, a Zulu grouping led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi head of the Zulu Homeland. Quelling Popular protest was not the only challenge faced by Botha’s government in the 1980s. Now able to operate from underground structures in Mozambique, Swaziland and Lesotho. MK launched its first military attacks on South African soil since the sabotage of the early 1960s. Between 1980 and 1983, MK units achieved a series of spectacular attacks on oil refineries, on power stations, and on the military headquarters in Pretoria. The ANC also succeeded in establishing a modest network of underground operatives on South African soil. The white regime was, in other words, opposed now by an array of forces. By mass based protests at local level, by trade union militancy, by an underground ANC presence and MKs gorilla activities. Their cumulative effect was to make it impossible for those in government to govern in the old ways. And in addition to these direct and immediate pressures on Botha’s government, there were also long-term roots to the crisis. And I’m going to briefly identify three of these deeper, less visible elements of crisis. One basic and inescapable source of pressure was demographic.

In 1960, one in five South Africans was classified as white. By 1996, 1 in 10, by 1990, the African population was growing at 3% a year. And white population increase had shrunk below 1%. The long-term implications for white minority rule hardly needs spelling out. Secondly, over the 20th century, South Africa had industrialised and had come to depend more and more heavily upon the labour of a black working class. Industrialising countries, erstwhile peasants have shed their passivity and launched effective demands for political inclusion. That is a universal process. But in South Africa it created a specific problem because there was a basic incompatibility between the forces generated by industrial modernization on the one hand, and a system of rule by a racial minority, which excluded the black working class on the other hand. And then thirdly, the ideological cohesion of the ruling party and more especially of Afrikaner society had begun to crumble. In the heyday of apartheid, there had been a sense of purpose and destiny attached to the apartheid project. Apartheid’s ideologues claimed then that it was a road to lasting peace and progress. But by the mid 1970s, writes, Herman Giliomee. the leading scholar of Afrikaner history. By the mid 1970s, apartheid as an ideology was beginning to collapse in many areas. The shock of Soweto raised doubts and anxieties. An older insistence that apartheid was morally defensible, was suddenly thread bare.

And many Afrikaner intellectuals found themselves out of step with their government, and some became fiercely critical. There were other forms of Afrikaner disaffection. Young Afrikaners enjoyed a countercultural viscerally anti-apartheid form of rock music. South Africans listening, may remember Koos Kombuis, and Johan Kerkorral. And they listen to music in a way that would’ve been unthinkable for their parents’ generation. And similarly, from the war in Namibia and Angola, a new genre of literature emerged called French literature or border literature in which Afrikaners wrote about how the violence that they were called to inflict upon the indigenous population brutalised them, themselves and also help them, them find a common humanity with their enemies. And in 1986, the Dutch Reformed Church for so long involved in the theological defence of apartheid now declared that that was an error, that apartheid was a sin, and that their church was open to all South African Christians, regardless of colour, a central legitimating prop of apartheid had been removed. Old certainties dissolved factions formed and disagreements arose within the National Party. And leading figures took up startlingly different new possessions. In 1979, P.W. Botha himself advised that whites must adapt or die. He told his ruling party in caucus that apartheid was, and I’m quoting, “A recipe for permanent conflict.” Dramatic shift in perspective.“ And this translated into waning political support for his party. In the general election of 1989, fewer than half of the white electorate voted for the NP and it leaked support to the conservative party on its right and the Democratic party on its left.

Equally alarming was the realisation that the NP could no longer count on the business community for support. Leading capitalist interests were already planning for a post NP, post apartheid dispensation. And in 1985, Gavin Reddy, the head of South Africa’s most powerful conglomerate Anglo-American, led a group of his businessmen to Lusaka, where they met with the ANC leaders, including Oliver Tambo, Thabo Mbeki, and Chris Hani. And a year later, Botha must have been stunned to receive a private letter from Anton Rupert, the dominant Africana businessman in which Rupert wrote that apartheid I’m quoting, "Is crucifying us, It is degrading a once heroic nation to be the lepers of the world,” unquote. And Rupert’s fear that his country was becoming a global outcast was justified. As television screens around the world carried footage of the confrontation between security forces and township activists. The anti-apartheid movement swelled. A highly personalised focus on Mandela became a current within anti-apartheid campaigns. And by the 1980s, organised anti-apartheid movements were able to exert pressure on big business, on banks and on governments. In the United States, for example, democratic politicians like Ted Kennedy and Howard Wolpe supported by the Congressional Black Caucus were calling for economic sanctions on Pretoria. American campuses thrummed with campaigns for divestment from South Africa. And in mid 1985, P.W. Botha scored a spectacular own goal.

Shortly after the Declaration of Emergency, he was scheduled to make a major policy speech. It was dubbed in advance his Rubicon speech and diplomats and journalists were briefed that it would herald major reforms. But Botha changed his mind at the last minute, he adopted a stubborn and belligerent tone. He famously wagged a finger at the camera and growled, don’t push us too far. It was an mitigated public relations disaster. Immediately followed by Chase Manhattan Bank announcing that it would no longer roll over debts to South Africa and other banks followed suit. In 1986, the US Congress passed a landmark comprehensive anti-apartheid act passed with bipartisan support over President Reagan’s Veto. The Act outlawed all new US investment and trade in South Africa and restricted imports of key commodities from South Africa. Big business followed the lead of Congress. By mid 1987, a 120 American companies, including General Motors, IBM, Coca-Cola, Xerox, Exxon, and Barclays Bank had divested from South Africa, withdrawn completely or cut back their operations. The Commonwealth and the European Union passed a more limited set of sanctions, largely symbolic. And their relative mildness was almost entirely the result of Margaret Thatcher’s strenuous opposition to sanctions. While American legislation specified a timetable for the political change, including the release of Nelson Mandela. Thatcher continued to regard Mandela as a subversive and argued that anyone who thought that the ANC could form a government was living in cloud cuckoo land. But if the government faced internal pressures, so did the exiled ANC and especially its army MK.

In 1984, MK was wrecked by mutinies in its Angolan camps. It lost its bases in Mozambique, Lesotho and Swaziland. And by 1987, the Soviet Union was signalling that it favoured political, not military solutions in Africa. It was going to cut back support for MK. In 1988, the USA backed by the USSR brokered an accord signed by the South African, Cuban, and Angolan governments. And an immediate outcome was that MK must withdraw all its personnel from its Angolan camps. A military struggle that relied on external support was no longer even notionally feasible. At no point in its history had MK ever posed a serious military threat to South Africa. By 1989, the ANC leadership was acutely aware of the disjuncture between its militaristic rhetoric and the reality. As the guerrilla project stalled, paradoxically, the political power of the exiled ANC increased exponentially. The ANC was far more successful in winning the war of words and ideas than the war of arms. Its diplomatic leverage before 1980 had been largely restricted on the one hand to hospitality from Tanzania and Zambia, military aid, Soviet bloc, and financial aid from the Scandinavian countries, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland ad Denmark. But it was really in the 1980s that the great wave of international opposition to apartheid reached new heights. From 1985 onwards after Anglo American and the ANC first shook hands in Kenneth Kaunda game lodge, a faint whiff of negotiations was constantly in the air. Emissaries scurried back and forth, meetings took place in London, in Lusaka, in New York.

All of them in secret. Exploratory meetings were held between handpicked ANC members and some Afrikaner academics acting with the authority of the National Intelligence Service. These were not negotiations, they were proto negotiations, rehearsals, talks about talks. And within the ANC’s leadership, the balance tilted away from military hardliners towards those who were prepared at least to consider negotiations. As late as 1985. At its Cowboy consultative conference, only the second of these in 30 years of exile, the ANC still spoke of a people’s war leading to insurrection and the seizure of power. But this was largely rhetoric. January, 1986, Tambo appointed a constitutional committee calling on it to provide for a multi-party electoral system, a mixed economy, and an entrenched bill of rights. Its constitutional guidelines were published in 1988, outlining a non-racial democracy based upon universal suffrage and with a liberal bill of rights. In a parallel development, beginning early in 1988, Nelson Mandela met 47 times with a secret committee of four men headed by the Minister of Justice and the head of National Intelligence Services. In 1986 and 87, the ANC held its first official meetings with members of the British and American governments. As the Cold War thawed, Western powers now broadly accepted that the ANC headed opposition to apartheid. That it was key to any negotiated outcome and that it would relinquish its armed struggle. It now enjoyed access to embassies and governments and it had offices in more countries than South Africa’s had embassies. International anti-party enthusiasm and energy peaked in July 88 with the famous Wembley Pop concert to celebrate Mandela’s 70th birthday. Which the BBC broadcast live for 10 hours to an estimated audience of 500 million people in 63 countries.

An icon long in the making now became transcendent. Mandela the man was every man. Mandela the prisoner was prophet, liberator, a hero poised for return, he was Moses Bovis Ulysses. In South Africa in 1989, January 89, Botha suffered a stroke and was replaced as president by F. W. De Klerk a politically astute conservative who represented sections of his party, which wanted greater control over the executive and a more orderly form of reform than the erratic cycle of reform, rebellion and repression that characterised the Botha years. De Klerk was determined to seize the initiative from opposition forces and keep his party in the political vanguard. By his own account, De Klerk regarded the fall of the Berlin Wall and the death throws of communism. As he wrote, a God sent opportunity, and by the end of 1989, De Klerk had decided to take a decisive step. He briefed his cabinet and swore them to silence. He kept his cards close to his chest. On February the second, 1990 delivered the annual opening of Parliament speech, a speech he had written out by hand, having consulted only his closest advisors about its precise details. To an astonished chamber and press gallery. He announced that the ANC, the PAC and the Communist Party would be unbanned.. That exiles might return, that Nelson Mandela would be released, that the state of emergency would be ended, and that he would begin negotiations to end the apartheid system and would negotiate for an equal country with equal rights and protections for all.

Nine days later, Mandela emerged from the small rural prison where he had lived in some comfort for the last of his 27 years imprisonment out into bright sunshine and the even fiercer glare of the world’s media. Now, 10 months earlier, Mandela had written directly to President Botha. It was he wrote necessary in the national interest for the ANC and government to meet urgently to negotiate an effective political settlement, a settlement which would address two issues, the demand for majority rule by the ANC, and the concern of white South Africans over this demand. The interventions by these two leaders, Mandela’s memorandum to Botha, De Klerk’s bombshell announcement on February the 2nd. Really crystallised an emerging logic. The NP had suffered a debilitating decline. It had lost its certainties, much of its support and its way. In exile, the ANC had clung to the limits of physical survival. It had recovered in regrouped and by 1990 had been swept by internal activism and international solidarity to the status of a government in waiting. And the positions of the ANC and De Klerk’s government reflected this balance of social and political forces. After three years of swirling urban resistance, the government had imposed a shaky piece in the country by force majeure. But while it remained militarily powerful, the state was politically weak.

It retained the capacity to repress, but had lost the ability to persuade. And for its part, the liberation movement headed by the ANC and embodied by what was called the mass Democratic movement remained politically powerful, but militarily ineffectual. The UDF and MDM could mobilise huge numbers in protest, but they lacked the capacity to defeat or even threaten the state’s army and police forces. In sum, the regime had realised that even if it could impose order from above, it could not win acceptance from below. Opposition forces led by the ANC had realised that they were unable to seize power from below. An unstable equilibrium prevailed. The NP and the ANC confronted one another in a hurting stalemate, A stalemate that would be mutually damaging to both sides The longer it persisted. Both sides came to a reluctant recognition of this onpass, and they opted to negotiate. Negotiations began formally the end of 1991, what the NP and the ANC wanted to achieve, how they went about it and crucially what the outcomes were, or questions I shall try to answer in a week’s time. Thank you very much. I’m going to visit the Q&A and take any questions here or that you want to submit later.

Q&A and Comments:

There’s a message here that Mandela’s granddaughter, Zoleka has just passed away, I didn’t know that. Thank you for letting me know.

Leonard Zadinsky writes that the napalm girl is now a happy, healthy adult living in Canada. She’s Phan Thi Kim Phuc.

And Betty Lowenstein writes to the same effect living in Canada, in Toronto for many years. After multiple surgeries, she speaks to many groups about the horrors of war and violence. Wendy, Stan Kaplan says, Wendy, I believe that many of your students would appreciate you giving a one hour lecture on growing up in South Africa. I need to leave that thought with Wendy.

• Well, you know, Colin, I remember that day so clearly when, you know, Pik Botha shook his finger at the world. ‘Cause at that stage, we were living in Cape Town and we were waiting to hear about reform.

• That’s right. The Rubicon.

• And when we finished that speech, the Rubicon speech, Robin said, we’re leaving tomorrow, we’re out of here. And my heart absolutely sank because I’ve been so involved in Cape Town working with Helen Lieberman in the sub townships teaching all kinds of, I was very, very involved in South Africa and loved my country and would loved being part of the journey of reform. And when he made that speech, we just knew. No.

• That ties up with the very next question in the Q&A.

• Yeah.

Q - Ruth, she asks, did a lot of well-educated whites leave during the strife?

A - Absolutely.

A - The short answer is yes.

Q - Joe asks, did the fall of communism affect the fall of apartheid?

A - And Jill answers him, yes, it was a critical event.

A - Perhaps I can just elaborate that it was indeed critical. I think in two main respects. Firstly, the fall of communism, the really from Gorbachev onwards, the backpedalling from Moscow of support for MK crucially meant that even the idea of an armed struggle was no longer available to the ANC. And so it moved quite rapidly, 1986 onwards towards preparing itself to negotiate. And that was an absolutely critical preparation for what happened. The second thing that happened, particularly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Eastern European Soviet block, was that the West no longer no longer had to worry about Soviet support for a future ANC government. That was quite simply not part of the future and not a danger to Western interests. Sheila says, very powerful session, a point to share regarding sports sanctions Soon.

• Colin, Colin, can I just jump in? Sorry, because I’m going to have to run in two minutes, but just before we leave, so Alibaba on Wednesday on the fourth, is going to be talking about sports sanctions and his life. And just before I leave, I just want to thank you for the most outstanding presentation and informative and just to say to those people who are not South African, because I’m sure many of South Africans would agree with me, it was heart wrenching to leave our beloved beautiful country with amazing people with a terrible government. We were always working towards liberation, we were doing our bit and we always hoped that there would be transformation while we lived there and that we could be part of a peaceful transition. But Colin, to be continued, you know, just a million thanks. And to all of you who have listened today, Colin, you can continue with the questions. But I want say thank you and say, I’ve got to run. Thank you very much.

• Thank you.

Q - James Patterson asks, in fact, there are two questions. I’ll mention them both and then respond. How does the ANC now characterise the arms struggle? Is it generally guarded as having been justifiable in the battle against apartheid? Or do some within the ANC accept that the apartheid would’ve crumbled in any case by means of peaceful protests and strikes? Was there always a split within the ANC between those who advocated violence and those who refuse to condone it?

A - And Jill Murray partly answers you, James. She says, the current leadership of the ANC clings to the notion of a successful armed struggle and as witnessed their performance at the Truth and Reconciliation Hearing seeks to deny any wrongdoing in exile. Stephen Ellis’s book, “External Mission, gives a masterful account of ANC and Communist party trials and tribulations. Yes, I would say that the official, that is not a scholarly or academic, but a kind of routinized ANC view of its own past the struggle narrative, I will call it. The struggle narrative does pay homage to the arm struggle. And at the same time, there’s been a good deal. There been a lot of very, very good scholarly work on the arm struggle, which I think completely different from from the struggle narrative. Problematizes it, looks at its weaknesses as well its occasional strengths and puts it in a correct perspective. I think I would say this, that the moment that my lecture reached this evening, decision to enter negotiations owes a great deal to sacrifices that were made not only in exile, but I’m thinking particularly of decades of struggle inside the country, sacrifices of liberty, and of livelihood and some cases sacrifice of lives. And I certainly think that it’s necessary in looking at the long arc of South African history to recognise those sacrifices.

Then somebody else who decided the day Hector Peterson was killed to immigrate, Josie Adler asks, was BOSS within the National Security, BOSS preceded, the Bureau of State Security preceded the National Security management system. There were a number of different intelligence elements. Both the military and the police had diligence arms, which carried out so-called dirty tricks, including assassinations, abductions, and grossly illegal torture, particularly in the Eastern Cape during the UDF years, some absolutely horrendous assassinations took place. And somebody draws comparisons with the strategies of the Israelis and Palestinians and the fact that we speaking from Israel, have not been able to realise a resolution of the contract.

Q - How could you not mention Joe Slovo and his group of Jewish friends?

A - I’ve written about Joe at length elsewhere. I’ve very recently been involved in editing a book, by an unsung hero of the struggle called Leon Levy. And Leon does have a very interesting chapter in which he reflects on his own radicalization as a young Jewish activist and why and how in white left-wing circles, South African Jews were overrepresented. I’ve no idea, Josie, about your question about F.W. De Klerk stopping the Rubicon speech. I’ve not heard that.

Q - How would Mandela look upon the ANC today?

A - I think with a mixture of continuing pride, he remained a great loyalist until the end, but also real disquiet, he would’ve been very, very exercised by some of the excesses of corruption and self-seeking.

Somebody recommends "Tomorrow is Another Country,” by Alistair Sparks. Sorry, I’m just looking. One gets the impression that Western Capital played a much lesser influence bringing about the end of apartheid. The narrative of the current ANC leadership was that Russia and the socialist bloc was the pressure that broke the back of apartheid. Okay, well that’s clearly wrong. Pressure from Russia and the socialist did not break the back of apartheid. What it did do was ensure that an armed struggle could continue for years longer than it would have otherwise. Western Capital played an influence late in the day from after the Rubicon speech. You get the move I mentioned by Chase Manhattan and other banks not to simply roll round South African debt. So for the last four years of the 1980s, the South African economy was increasingly starved of foreign investment and access to Western capital and the burden by 1990 servicing its debt consumed 17% of the national expenditure. So at that latest stage in the day, steps taken by Western capital. And don’t forget, partly by the urging of that international popular anti-apartheid movement, put real pressure on the ANC leadership. I think I’ve held you long enough. Thank you all. There are too many Q&A for me to respond to each of them. I’m going to read them now. But thank you all very much and I hope some of you can join me in a week today, thank you very much.