Imperialism and ‘white rule' in southern Africa
While the OAU supported the territorial status quo in Africa, it naturally took a more radical line in regard to the perpetuation of imperialism on the continent and the existence of white minority governments.
Accordingly, it offered its support to the national liberation movements in these countries. By the early 1960s the areas concerned were mainly in southern Africa, consisting of two Portuguese colonies, Angola and Mozambique, South Africa and its satellite, South-West Africa, and Rhodesia. The only important exception was Portuguese Guinea (Guinea-Bissau) in West Africa.The strongest and most significant of these states was South Africa. The Union of South Africa had become an independent state within the British Empire in 1910. Its political life was, ironically, dominated by the very people whom Britain had defeated in the Boer War, the Afrikaners. Imbued with racist ideas of white supremacy and the desire to concentrate South Africa's mineral wealth in white hands, the Afrikaners had long supported the idea of racial segregation and of using the black population as nothing more than a cheap migrant labour force in the mines and factories. For example, in 1913 the Native Land Act forbade the purchase or lease of land by Africans outside certain reserved areas, while in 1923 municipalities were given the right to segregate Africans from Europeans. In 1948, in the wake of the wartime expansion of black labour in urban areas, a rise in worker militancy and black political agitation for equal rights, a more radical government took power under the leadership of D. F. Malan. The National Party, which Malan headed, won the 1948 elections on a programme of introducing apartheid (the separate development of the races). The idea behind apartheid was to safeguard white control of the country by vastly increasing the degree of segregation in South Africa.
This was accomplished in the following years by banning mixed marriages and sexual relationships, introducing separate residential districts and amenities, controlling the movements of all blacks, Indians and coloureds, and giving limited autonomy to black rural homelands, dubbed ‘Bantustans'.Afrikaners
The white population in
South Africa who are of Dutch descent, also known as Boers.
At first, apartheid won the support of only a minority of the white population, mainly Afrikaners, but over time it widened its appeal. One reason for this was that apartheid all too predictably provoked resistance by the black population, which under the leadership of the African National Congress (ANC) became increasingly militant. In 1961, following the killing of sixty-seven black demonstrators at Sharpeville near Johannesburg, the ANC adopted a policy of armed struggle, which led to a number of acts of sabotage. The government reacted by
import substitution
The process whereby a state attempts to achieve economic growth by raising protective tariffs to keep out imports and replacing them with indigenously produced goods.
autarky
A policy that aims at achieving national economic selfsufficiency. It is commonly associated with the economic programmes espoused by Germany, Italy and Japan in the 1930s and 1940s.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
Established by the North Atlantic Treaty (4 April 1949) signed by Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United States. Greece and Turkey entered the alliance in 1952 and the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955. Spain became a full member in 1982. In 1999 the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined in the first post-Cold War expansion, increasing the membership to nineteen countries.
introducing a security clampdown, and by 1964 a number of senior ANC figures, including Nelson Mandela, the head of the movement’s armed wing, had been imprisoned.
The rise in political violence, along with the fact that much of Africa was either already, or in the process of coming, under black majority rule, created a sense that the state was under siege. Accordingly, those of British descent now came to accept apartheid as the only guarantee of their security and continued social privilege. In addition, apartheid won support because it delivered sustained economic prosperity for the whole of the white population. During the 1960s the South African economy grew at 5 per cent per annum as it rapidly developed import substitution industries. Assisting this process was a rich flow of capital investment from Britain and the United States, which was in itself a sign of confidence in South Africa’s future. Thus by the 1960s apartheid was no longer the policy of a militant Afrikaner minority, but had the support of a broad white coalition.North of South Africa was another state — Rhodesia — that had much to lose from any shift towards black majority rule; indeed it unilaterally declared its independence from Britain in 1965 over exactly this issue. Faced with pressure from London to introduce a more equitable electoral system before independence could be granted, the government of Ian Smith decided that the only way to preserve white privilege was by going it alone. This was a risky policy, but the Smith regime survived, in part because the Labour government in Britain was loath to implement a military intervention against people of British descent, but also because the international sanctions introduced by the United Nations in 1966 were undermined by the support it received from South Africa and Portugal.
The last element in the white redoubt in southern Africa was the Portuguese Empire. That Portugal was able to survive as a colonial Power in Africa longer than Britain, France and Belgium might seem surprising. This, however, was based on the fact that, unlike the other imperial Powers, Portugal was an autocracy which, under the leadership of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, had developed an autarkic economy that was largely based on trade with its colonies.
The Salazar regime thus relied on continued control over its African possessions and was willing to pay the necessary blood-price to hold on to them.That the states still under white domination were neighbours was clearly a vital element in their ability to resist the ‘wind of change’ sweeping across the continent, but, in addition, they were bolstered by the fact that they could take advantage of their value to the West. Portugal was a member of NATO and, moreover, controlled the Azores in the mid-Atlantic, where the United States maintained extremely valuable air and naval bases. Salazar was therefore able to blunt American criticism by threatening to withdraw access to these facilities. South Africa was not a member of any Cold War alliance, but its virulent anticommunism, its gold, diamond and uranium deposits, and its strategic position as the power that dominated the Cape route from Europe to Asia, meant that it too was in a good position to manipulate Western governments. Rhodesia was in a much weaker position, but even it was able to find some room for manoeuvre as a result of its position as one of the world’s largest producers of chrome. Apart from the very practical ways in which these states used their assets to their own advantage, it has to be said that there also existed in the West some residual sympathy for these regimes, particularly among Republicans in the United States and the Conservative Party in Britain.
Convinced that there was no need to compromise with the forces of African nationalism and with the tacit support of the West protecting them from world opinion, the white governments in southern Africa resisted all calls for change. The result, not surprisingly, was that resistance manifested itself in the shape of armed struggle. This was very different from what had transpired in other regions of the continent, where, apart from Algeria and Kenya, the decolonization process had been remarkably peaceful. The need to resort to violence in the confrontation with imperialism in southern Africa was to have very important consequences, because the national liberation movements that emerged sought international sponsors for their wars of resistance. Unable to broker support from the West, some of them naturally inclined towards the Soviet bloc, thus helping to bring the Cold War into Africa.