Anti-Apartheid Literature - Essay Example

 Anti-Apartheid Literature The terms ‘apartheid’ and ‘South Africa’ seem to go hand in hand in today’s world. It seems common knowledge that South Africa has finally managed to overcome the effects of apartheid, but not such common knowledge what exactly is meant by the word apartheid or what it means to have overcome it. With the formalizing of segregation laws and policies already in practice in South Africa in 1948, the term apartheid became officially applied to the concept of South Africa where it would remain until 1990 when negotiations finally opened up to end the practice. These negotiations were brought about as the result of internal as well as external pressure through the organization of groups such as the ANC (African National Congress) and international support of ICSPCA (International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid). The ANC, a group of African and Indian leaders working within Africa against issues of suppression and oppression of people of color by a white minority, eventually gained power in the 90s, but does this mean apartheid is overcome? The international community has declared, through ICSPCA, apartheid to be a crime against humanity although several of the ‘power’ countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the Netherlands have not ratified this statement (Morton, 2000: 27). Has this ensured the end of apartheid in South Africa? The purpose of this paper is to discover the answers to these questions by first defining what is meant by the term and determining the conditions that existed under apartheid and then researching the elements and process of change in South Africa to understand more about conditions as they exist today. Definition of Apartheid It is very appropriate that the term apartheid is so closely linked with South Africa because it is from this region of the world that the term was first employed. According to Alonford James Robinson Jr. (1999), the term is actually Afrikaans and translates to mean ‘apartness.’ This is, essentially, what apartheid is. As a political term, Robinson (1999) indicates the term first began to be used as early as the 1930s, but it didn’t appear as a political slogan until 1948. In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela indicates this was Dr. Daniel Malan’s Nationalist Party slogan that year, introducing a term that “represented the codification in one oppressive system of all the laws and regulations that had kept Africans in an inferior position to whites for centuries. What had been more or less de facto was to become relentlessly de jure” (Mandela, 1994: 97). Never very clearly defined, the term was given some clarity in the 1973 Apartheid Convention in which some direction was required in order to place the ‘crime of apartheid’ within a legal framework. Article II of the convention identifies a number of specific inhuman acts that fall under the heading of apartheid and thus provide some direction regarding how the term should be defined. These inhuman acts include denial of the right to life and liberty through murder, infliction of bodily or mental harm or by arbitrary arrest; deliberate imposition of harmful living conditions; legislation designed to limit a racial groups’ ability to participate in the political, social, economic and cultural life of their country; the creation of reserves or ghettos for the housing of a racial group; forcing or exploiting labor; and persecution of those who oppose apartheid (Bassiouni, 1999: 206). Many of these conditions of apartheid were brought into clear definition by taking a look at the practices and policies then in existence in South Africa, but could be applied to numerous other regions of the world as well. Malan’s political platform in 1948, actually referred to directly as apartheid, introduced the policies that informed the 1973 Apartheid Convention’s definition of this set of criminal acts against humanity. In 1948 South Africa under the Nationalist Party, which was predominantly Afrikaner, a number of policies were implemented that were designed specifically to establish a separated population. Like the Jim Crow laws of the American South that existed in this period in time, it was held that the best way to manage a multi-racial population was to allow each race to pursue their natural positions in life. In South Africa, though, it was blatantly held that Africans, being a barbarian race, were only suited for manual labor and a servant class, enforced by the levels of instruction, regulation and oversight they were forced to endure in their own country. “The official justification underlying apartheid was that each race – rigidly divided into ‘Whites’ (all Europeans), Bantus or ‘Blacks,’ ‘Coloureds’ (people of mixed race), and ‘Asians’ (Indians and Pakistanis who had been brought to South Africa as laborers) – would prosper and live in harmony with one another if allowed to develop separately, while tension would result from the races living together and competing for the same resources” (Anti-Apartheid Literature, 2005). By ‘developing separately’, the Nationalist government intended to ensure that the black population of Africa halted its development at approximately the stage they were in when discovered in the colonial age, thus ensuring a permanent servant class without the means or ability, despite their higher numbers, to overcome the cultural divide between the world they’ve been reduced to as compared to the modern world assisted by technology, education and trade. Under apartheid, a number of policies were put into place that were intended to ensure this racial divide remained firmly entrenched in the minds, hearts and souls of the people. Although complaints about apartheid policies were taken to the international level as early as 1948 (Robinson, 1999), little notice was taken in the 1950s regarding the increasingly more restrictive laws passed that ensured black people in Africa would be forever suppressed. These included the Group Areas Act of 1950, the Land Acts of 1954 and 1955 and numerous other laws that “prohibited most social contacts between the races; enforced the segregation of public facilities and the separation of educational standards; created race-specific job categories; restricted the powers of nonwhite unions; and curbed nonwhite participation in government” (Robinson, 1999). Looking at the conditions of life under apartheid, it is not surprising to discover it was declared ‘inhumane’ by most of the humane countries of the world. Conditions of life under Apartheid Established as a single nation by the British colonizers in 1910, the Union of South Africa was still a largely disorganized nation by 1948, which is well illustrated in Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country. Although the book was published just as apartheid as a political system was put in place, it nevertheless manages to illustrate a number of the tremendous inequalities that apartheid made into policy. In the pages of the novel, it can be seen how the traditional society of black South Africans was confused with the introduction of the cities and the emphasis on mining for diamonds and gold. As the blacks were pushed more and more unto unproductive lands, the youth were increasingly forced to attempt looking for work in the cities and in the mines, where their movements and professions were severely restricted by education and custom. Crime became rampant and solutions were unacceptable unless they guaranteed white supremacy: “For we fear not only the loss of our possessions, but the loss of our superiority and the loss of our whiteness” (Paton, 1948: 79). Through the words of Arthur Jarvis, already deceased by the time he is introduced, the history of Africa is summed up as a history of innocent capitalism developing into conscious exploitation and abuse. “Our natives today produce criminals and prostitutes and drunkards, not because it is their nature to do so, but because their simple system of order and tradition and convention has been destroyed. It was destroyed by the impact of our own civilization” (Paton, 1948: 146). From these common practices, the Nationalist Party created legislative ‘reform’ designed to address the more pressing issues of the day by enforcing white superiority. Following the 1948 election, these restrictions began to be enforced through legislation such as the Population Registration Act or the Group Areas Act of 1950. The Population Registration Act divided the African population according to the color or shade of their skin and required all people of some color to carry identification indicating which classification they had been given. Because of the external and somewhat arbitrary nature of these divisions, individual members of the same family could often be segregated in entirely different classes “where one was allowed to live and work could rest on such absurd distinctions as the curl of one’s hair or the size of one’s lips” (Mandela, 1994: 106). Under this Act, the various levels of society were relatively imprecisely defined so as to exclude any and all persons who might have a hint of non-white blood in them. “A White person is one who is in appearance obviously white – and not generally accepted as Coloured – or who is generally accepted as White – and is not obviously Non-White, provided that a person shall not be classified as a White person if one of his natural parents has been classified as a Coloured person or a Bantu” (cited in Boddy-Evans, 2008). The Population Registration Act also gave the Governor-General the power to sub-divide the coloured and natives groups into any “ethnic, linguistic or cultural sub-groups” he felt might be necessary, which fed strongly into the Group Areas Act, also passed in 1950. Under the Group Areas Act, the Governor-General had the ability, with the help of a special Group Areas Board, to partition given land areas and designate them for use by a particular ethnic group. Unsurprisingly, profitable and abundant lands were typically reserved for whites and only marginal, unproductive and small tracts of land were assigned to coloureds and natives. The process consisted of the issuance of a proclamation designating an area for a particular group followed by a one year grace period in which all non-designated races were given the chance to move. “When that time had expired, members of a racial group other than the one identified by the Governor-General committed a criminal offence by retaining occupancy or ownership in any property in the area. Section 34 provided that such offenses could be punished by a fine and up to two years’ imprisonment” (Loveland, 1999: 242). As Donald Woods describes in “I Arranged a Bogus Marriage” (cited 1986), this sometimes led to significant difficulties and the division of families without tremendous effort and sometimes shifty emergency proceedings. These and many other laws led to an almost lawless society in which the majority of the population was constantly suspected and harassed by the minority, who lived their lives in constant fear of rebellion. The story of Nelson Mandela is laced with examples of brutality and determined efforts to restrict or remove the rights of men through bans, extreme supervision, threats of violence and long-term and often undeserved imprisonment. “Every week we interviewed old men from the countryside who told us that generation after generation of their family had worked a scraggly piece of land from which they were now being evicted. Every week we interviewed old women who brewed African beer as a way to supplement their tiny incomes, who now faced jail terms and fines they could not afford to pay. Every week we interviewed people who had lived in the same house for decades only to find that it was now declared a white area and they had to leave without any recompense at all” (Mandela, 1994: 130). Even had the black South Africans wanted to abide by the rules of government, these were often so restrictive and contradictory that they seemed designed simply to provide reason for incarceration and further oppression. Elements of change Given the unlivable conditions constantly being forced on them from a minority population, the black population of South Africa had little option but to continue to resist these restrictions if they wished to remain alive. Individually these efforts were not highly successful, but these oppressed peoples already had a group dedicated to change and struggling for greater freedoms for the black people. One of the primary elements of change, the African National Congress (ANC) played a tremendous role in helping to organize the people in resistance movements that would eventually draw the attention of the international community and finally unlock the door for a more progressive and mutually beneficial African society. The ANC was originally formed in 1912 by John Dube, Pixley ka Isaka Seme and Sol Plaatje as a means of bringing the various smaller African organizations together to protect their own interests following the failure of the South African Native Convention to sway Britain’s decision regarding the South Africa Act of 1909 (Origins, 2008). Originally called the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), the organization changed its name in 1923 to the African National Congress had five basic aims to its organization. These were “to promote unity and mutual cooperation between the government and the South African black people; to maintain a channel between the government and the black people; to promote the social, educational and political upliftment of the black people; to promote understanding between chiefs, and loyalty to the British crown and all lawful authorities and to promote understanding between white and black South Africans; and to address the just grievances of the black people” (Origins, 2008). As can be seen through this list, the organization did not start out intended to be anti-authority, anti-government or to secure the freedom and independence of South Africa as a separate and self-governing nation. However, as life became increasingly difficult and unjust as a result of the Nationalist legislation, the ANC became more active as well in its push for resistance and active defiance of the law. This increased activity was arguably taken up more in response to the formation of the ANC Youth League in 1944 under the leadership of Anton Lembede. Following this, the ANC joined with the South African Communist Party in order to help form the South African Mine Workers’ Union to push for more humane conditions for mine workers (Henshaw, 2003). They also worked with the Natal Indian Congress and Transvaal Indian Congress for equality in South Africa. Following the tightening of restrictive legislation under the Nationalist party, the ANC and other organizations such as those listed above joined together in a non-violent protest movement similar to what Gandhi led in India to try to force change toward equality, but this effort was crushed by further legislation. This was followed by the adoption of the Freedom Charter, written by the people of South Africa demanding equal rights for all races and the arrest of approximately 155 leaders under what would later be termed the Treason Trial. Their activities began attracting the attention of the international community even as, after 1960, the group found it necessary to resort to strategic violence as its only remaining means of resistance (Ross, 1999). International involvement, as will be seen, was nuanced by external impressions of the goals of the movement, but must also be considered a significant element of change. As things became more heated within South Africa, the international community was also becoming more informed regarding the struggle, thanks primarily to South African writers who had been banned in their own country but were able to get published elsewhere. Writers such as Alex La Guma, Andre Brink, Nadine Gordimer, Mary Benson, Richard Rive, Bessie Head, Peter Abrahams, Dan Jacobson and diverse others conveyed to the world the extreme conditions under which people of color were living in South Africa even as the white people continued to push them out of their homes, rob them of their lands and overwork the land’s resources to the point where it was no longer capable of feeding the entire population, again forcing the greatest hardships upon the colored community. The strong element of communist party members within the colored and black communities during apartheid prevented many countries from getting too involved with what was actually happening on the ground. Countries such as the United States, which might have seemed like the first country to come to the defense of the common man struggling against inequality and oppression, were dealing with significant issues of their own throughout much of this period, namely in the form of the Jim Crow era in the South, the Civil Rights movement of the 60s and 70s and the Vietnam War in which democracy was being pitted against communism (Timeline, 2008). At the same time, other countries, such as the USSR, were interested in attempting to sway South Africa into a communist nation by sending in weaponry and providing training and other aids to help the ANC and other groups in their attempt to overthrow the apartheid system. Process of change The process of change started, to some degree, even before apartheid itself as black and colored people began to bring themselves together in groups oriented toward regaining human rights and dignity. This process started among the black people oppressed and trapped within the world of the mines. Black people had already been given the example of worker/corporation forced negotiation through the example of the white workers strikes that pre-dated the 1900s but were unable to affect the same sort of cohesion among the various different tribes represented within each mining compound under the heavy weight of suspicion, corruption, oppression and destitution most of them were in. The leaders of the ANC recognized the problem and began bringing the workers together in 1946, two years before the official sanctioning of apartheid laws. Working with the South African Communist Party, the ANC organized a representative miner’s conference and the beginning stages of the South African Mine Workers’ Union were set in motion (Naiker, 1976). Protesting against wage disparities between white and colored miners of approximately 12:1, the union followed the relatively peaceful process suggested by Mahatma Gandhi in India. After repeated attempts to reason with management failed, the mine workers, under the direction of the ANC and the workers union, determined to go on strike starting August 12, 1946. Hundreds of thousands of mine workers went out on strike that morning only to be met horrendous violence as the Smuts administration sought to quell the action. “The police batoned, bayoneted and fired on the striking workers to force them down the mine shafts. The full extent of police repression is not known, but reports from miners and some newspapers reveal intense persecution and terror during the week following Monday, 12 August” (Naiker, 1976). The day following this massacre, a peaceful group of workers began to make their way to administrative offices in order to get required passes so they could return home and were similarly treated to unwarranted violence and death. The brutality of the events of August 1946 spurred the people into more desperate action at the same time that it convinced them of the need to submit to stay alive. Once the miner’s strike became a general workers strike, the leaders of the ANC and the South African Indian Congress attempted to gain the support of the international community by taking their grievances to the United Nations in a petition to get the trade unions officially recognized. Although these leaders were joined by the government of India in appealing the United Nations to condemn the excessive brutality of the South African police, they were unsuccessful in gaining support due, in part, to their friendly relations with the South African communist party (Naiker, 1976). Having failed at the international level, the ANC returned home to regroup and restrategize. “The African miners’ strike was one of those historic events that, in a flash of illumination, educate a nation, reveal what has been hidden and destroy lies and illusions … It spelt the end of the compromising, concession-begging tendencies that dominated African politics. The timid opportunism and servile begging for favors disappeared for all practical purposes” (Naiker, 1976). In its place was the ANC and other related organizations, all determined on a systematic approach toward greater equality for South Africa’s majority races. From peaceful protests in the style of Gandhi that continued to be met with severe acts of violence and highly restrictive banning, the ANC with Nelson Mandela as a key player, became increasingly restricted in what it could reasonably expect from people who were barely surviving as it was. Under the influence of the Youth League, which was impatient for action, the ANC opted to get together a people’s declaration in the style of the United States’ declaration of grievances and expectations delivered to England less than 200 years previously. This Freedom Charter led to the arrest of more than 150 individuals and a five year trial in which the government was forced to drop all charges (Mandela, 1994). Further non-violent protests were planned by both the ANC and the somewhat rival organizations such as the communist party and the South African Indian Congress until the events at Sharpeville, in which at least 69 people were killed by police when 5,000 people stormed the police station without passes in protest of the oppressive and largely unenforceable Pass Law in 1955. Following the 1976 death by beating of Steve Biko, the leader of the South African Students’ Organization for his organization of a protest march against being taught in Afrikaans, a language neither the students nor the teachers understood, protests against the apartheid system in South Africa became violent on both sides. The killing of a 13 year old student during this event and the mass violence that ensued afterwards again reached the international community, this time with more interest. At the same time, Mandela himself finally switched over to encourage his countrymen to take up arms against the oppressors: “For the guns that serve apartheid cannot render it unconquerable. Those who live by the gun shall perish by the gun. Unite! Mobilize! Fight on! Between the anvil of united mass action and the hammer of armed struggle we shall crush apartheid and white minority racist rule!” (cited in Sampson, 1999: 271). As the violence spread throughout South Africa, the international community began taking action as well. On the international level, the USSR and Guinea both approached the United Nations with a draft convention intended to address the oppressive tactics and violence of apartheid by 1971. By 1973, the General Assembly had agreed on the text and officially declared the practice of apartheid a crime against humanity, with all the attendant definitions outlined earlier (Morton, 2000). Following this decision, South Africa suddenly found itself the subject of economic sanctions and other international pressure to end apartheid throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. They began negotiations with the ANC leaders and others in 1990 and finally lost control of the government with the election of Nelson Mandela as President in 1994. Conditions in South Africa today Since the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, South Africa has seen significant improvement in many areas of life. The country’s Gross National Product, which had been falling under the latter years of apartheid, began to rise again and South Africa today is classified as an upper middle class country (Knight, 2006). While the average South African has grown wealthier, though, the dispersion of wealth remains uneven. The country has seen a strange combination of improvement without solutions. For example, approximately 1.1 million jobs have been created in South Africa in the five years from 2001-2005 but the estimated unemployment rate, factoring the number of discouraged work-seekers who are able and willing to work but have given up trying to find a job, is around 40 percent (Knight, 2005). As a result, poverty still remains a significant issue to be dealt with as people continue to try to survive on anything they can find. These problems are only exacerbated with the lack of educated workers as a result of oppressive apartheid techniques designed to keep black and ‘colored’ people from obtaining employment in the more highly skilled professions reserved for whites. The poor living quality of people struggling to survive through extreme poverty, in unsanitary and insecure conditions and the hopelessness this induces in a large portion of the population has made it difficult for the new government to overcome issues of crime and basic services. Health conditions have also been worsened by one of the highest rates of AIDS/HIV infection in the world, leaving thousands of orphans unable to care for or support themselves (Knight, 2005). While progress has also been made in the areas of education, health care, housing and providing basic services, the problems of South Africa as a result of their century in the dark will be a long time in solving. Conclusion While apartheid does not still exist in South Africa in the official sense, it lives on in the stratification of society, the division of the economy and the real living conditions of the people. Black people remain underpaid and make up the majority of the poverty stricken masses while white people typically command the top 20 percent of the high income positions available. There remains a vast educational divide between the white people who are fully comfortable with the new technology and business practices of the modern world and the black people who have only recently begun to experience the wonders of the electronic age. Black people intent on opening up their own shops or selling their own handicrafts have suddenly found themselves in direct competition with mass-produced, mass-marketed and much discounted products brought into South Africa from foreign lands by companies owned by white corporate heads. Like the smaller ‘mom and pops’ of small-town America in the face of Wal-mart moving in, these individuals have little chance of remaining competitive with these large corporations for long and find themselves again forced into taking jobs with the corporations or having no jobs at all. While there remain vestiges of apartheid and systems that look very much like apartheid in place, there is also hope that South Africa will find a means of launching its disenfranchised black population back onto a more equal footing with white people from around the world. The South African government, under the directorship of a liberal minded party, has devised a number of economic stimulus packages, educational reforms and assistance programs designed to bring those in greatest need in touch with those with greatest ability to help. The end may not be within sight at present, but there is hope that someday South Africa can be united as a single people in which all have equal opportunity to succeed or fail in the pursuit of their own choosing. Works Cited “Anti-Apartheid Literature: Introduction.” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Thomas J. Schoenberg & Lawrence J. Trudeau (Eds.). Vol. 162, N. 1, (2005). Enotes, (2006). October 11, 2008 < http://www.enotes.com/twentieth-century-criticism/anti-apartheid-literature> Bassiouni, M. Cherif. Crimes Against Humanity in International Criminal Law. Second Revised Ed. The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1999. Boddy-Evans, Alistair. “Apartheid Era Laws: Population Registration Act No 30 of 1930.” About African History. (2008). October 11, 2008 Henshaw, Peter. “South African Territorial Expansion and the International Reaction to South African Racial Policies, 1939 to 1948.” Workshop on South Africa in the 1940s. 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