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This is the history of South Africa from 1910 to 1948.
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A Brief History of South Africa, with Dave Steward
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Transcription
One of the things that's very important to
understand about South Africa is that it is
like so many other African countries an artificial
entity created by the Brits. The South Africa
that we know in its present borders is only
104 years old. And in 1990 when we went through
our transition it was only 80 years old. It
was the creation of the British Empire. Britain
acquired possession of most of the territories
of Southern Africa in the nineteenth century
in what one historian referred to as a fit
of absentmindedness. At the beginning of the
century it found itself in possession with
a rag bag of territories which were difficult
to manage and very expensive. The whole of
the nineteenth century had been about the
British conquest of Southern Africa. First
of the Xhosa people in nine wars of the axe
that finally led to in 1856 to a national
suicide by the Xhosa people where they decided
that they would kill their cattle and destroy
their crops on the advice of a prophetess
who said that if they did this the British
would be driven into the sea. But of course
they weren't.
And tens of thousands of Xhosa people died.
The second major people who were conquered
in the nineteenth century by the Brits were
the Zulus. The Zulus had been the dominant
tribe in Southeastern Africa after the foundation
of their nation by their great King Shaka.
The British settled what is now the Natal
Province of South Africa and they brought
in white settlers and Indians to work on sugar
farms. But they were very nervous about this
powerful Zulu kingdom to the north of them
the Tugela River. And so they found a reason
to declare war against the Zulus. And to their
enormous surprise at the Battle of Isandlwana
in 1878 a whole British army was wiped out,
1500 men. This was just a few years after
the Little Bighorn but it's five times as
big. And the Zulus wiped out a whole British
army. Of course the Brits sent more troops
and they were -- they defeated the King Cetshwayo
by the next year in 1879. The third people
that the Brits conquered were the Afrikaners
or the Boers who had been settled in South
Africa since 1652. They didn't like British
rule so in the nineteenth century they trekked
into the interior. They founded two republics,
the Republic of the Orange Free State and
the Republic of The Transvaal.
But then the people in the Free State made
the big mistake of discovering the biggest
diamond load in history at Kimberley. So the
Brits annexed that. And then in the 1880s
the Transvaal Republic made the huge mistake
of discovering the biggest gold bearing body
in the world, the famous Johannesburg reef.
And the result of this was that the British
again sought a pretext for war with these
two republics. And that led to the Anglo-Boer
War in 1899. Now the Anglo-Boer War was the
biggest war that the British fought between
the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War.
They deployed over 438,000 imperial troops
in South Africa. They conquered the two territories
and then having taken them over at the beginning
of the twentieth century they didn't know
what to do with them. So they looked around
the empire and said oh well look, in Canada
we had this dominion. We had a federation
there and that's worked very well. We did
it in Australia and in different states. We
created a federation there. Why don't we do
that in Southern Africa. So they did.
But they decided to keep some territories
in and some territories out. They included
the Zulus and the Xhosas of the new society
but they gave control of the new country,
the Union of South Africa which was established
in 1910 to the whites. Because at that time
black people in Africa throughout the world
didn't really have political rights. So for
most of the twentieth century the big question
in South Africa was not the relationship between
whites and blacks but the relationship between
English speaking whites and Afrikaans speaking
whites. And the Afrikaans speaking whites
wanted to reestablish their republics. That
was the driving force behind the National
Party which came to power in 1948. Now they
then instituted or they -- not racial segregation.
They gave it a new name -- apartheid. And
it was straightforward racial domination.
But before we become too morally self-righteous,
that is what was happening in the rest of
Africa, unacceptable indefensible. It was
what was happening in the South in the United
States at the time. Undefensible, unacceptable.
But it wasn't unusual. Then Africa started
moving toward independence with Ghana in 1957.
A new prime minister came to power in 1958
called Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd and he thought,
okay, right. The British and the French are
decolonizing in Africa. We'll do the same
here. This country's only 60 years old so
we'll give the Zulu bits back to the Zulus.
We'll give the Xhosa bits back to the Xhosas
and the other national groups. And he had
this great idea of unscrambling this South
African omelet. That was called separate development.
Everybody would be able to develop to the
top level in their own societies. And this
way whites would be able to retain a right
to national self-determination that they'd
always had. Unfortunately he was a sociologist
and you never, never put a sociologist in
charge of countries because they will do social
engineering.
And this is a really good example of the negative
effects of social engineering. The idea was
okay, we've got too many blacks here. Let's
move them over here, you know. They don't
want to but you can't make an omelet without
breaking eggs. And that was, I think, where
a lot of the hardship in South Africa under
apartheid came from. But it was an illusion.
There was no way that you were gonna unscramble
this omelet and unscramble the eggs. Economic
growth was bringing more and more South Africans
together in the economy in the so called white
areas. So it was a delusion and Verwoerd was
assassinated in 1966. His successor John Foster
continued with this delusion for the next
10 years, 12 years until he was replaced by
a guy called P.W. Botha. P.W. Botha said look,
this isn't working. We're going to have to
reform this. So he was a reformer. By 1986
he'd abolished a hundred apartheid laws including
some of the most repulsive mixed marriages,
legislation limiting the ability of black
South Africans to move from one place to the
other. He looked at the political rights of
the Coloured and Indian minorities and adopted
a new constitution in 1983 in terms of which
Coloureds and Indians were brought into the
same party as whites.
But of course all of this raised the question
and focused the question on the right of black
South Africans to political self-determination.
So at the beginning of the 1980s white South
Africans found themselves riding a tiger.
The tiger was an increasingly articulate and
increasingly economically aware black population.
The rest of the world was shouting at South
Africa -- get off the tiger. The problem with
riding a tiger is actually how you dismount
it because the audience isn't really concerned
whether you're gonna get eaten or not. And
white South Africans had concerns. They were
concerned about the fact that they had had
a right to self-determination. The Afrikaners
had for 100, 200 years striven to rule themselves.
They didn't want to rule anybody else. The
question was how would they be able to maintain
their right to national self-determination
and a one man, one vote dispensation in South
Africa.
The second problem was the fact that democracy,
one man, one vote elections hadn't worked
very well in the rest of Africa at that stage.
I think by the mid-1980s there'd been more
than 90 coups d'états in the rest of Africa.
So a lot of whites were worried -- look yeah,
the rest of the world tells us to get off
the tiger but if we do that we have one election
and then we have chaos. And then a third great
concern was the role of the South African
Communist Party within the ANC. During the
1970s and 1980s virtually all of the members
of the ANCs National Executive Committee were
also members of the South African Communist
Party. And we knew that the communist party
had adopted a two phase revolutionary process.
And this was a classic Soviet model throughout
the world. First phase of the process is called
national liberation and it takes place under
the egress of the national liberation movement
which unites all factions in society opposed
to the regime. It leads society to the national
liberation. And at that stage the communist
party takes over as the vanguard of the process
and leads on toward the establishment of a
communist state.
Now we weren't too keen about this. It wasn't
just a question of Reds under beds. The Soviet
Union was really interested in expanding its
influence in Southern Africa. In the cold
war the main theater of activity was proxy
wars as sponsored by the Soviet Union in third
world countries. So we had the problem of
50,000 Cuban troops to the north of us in
Angola. We had on the east a Mozambique Communist
government very closely allied to the Soviet
Union. So we were very worried about the Communist
dimension in all of this. But then as he progressed
P.W. Botha found out that it wasn't going
to be possible to reform apartheid. He couldn't
really bring himself to accept that a new
South Africa would have to be on a one man,
one vote basis. That it would not be possible
for whites to maintain any kind of sovereignty
within the new South Africa because they were
nowhere close to being in the majority. But
this is something that he couldn't really
accept. During this period however, a huge
debate was taking place in the ruling national
party.
And by the mid-1980s, by 1987, 1988 it had
been accepted that we really needed transformation
rather than reform. And P.W. Botha I don't
think was a student of Tocqueville. He didn't
realize that revolutions take place in situations
of rising expectations. That it's when states
begin to reform that they really take the
lid off the pressure cooker. And that's what
had happened in South Africa so we had widespread
unrest and protests in 1984 and 1985. We had
a state of emergency in 1986 which put the
lid back on. But the national party leadership
then realized that look there was not gonna
be any way of doing this without transformation.
And that's when de Klerk became the leader
of the National Party in February 1989 after
P.W. Botha had suffered from a stroke. De
Klerk in his first speech said we need a totally
changed South Africa. When he became president
in September 1989 he immediately moved toward
normalizing the situation.
He allowed protests in the streets much to
the delight of Archbishop Tutu. He released
the -- all of the remaining high profile ANC
prisoners except Mandela. He held talks with
Mandela. And then on the second of February,
1990, he made a speech in parliament in which
he opened the way to negotiations. He put
it all on the table at once. This was very
important because he surpassed expectations
and it meant that we could get the ball rolling
in terms of a negotiation process. The ANC
was taken unawares. On the, I think the ninth
of February de Klerk had a meeting with Mr.
Mandela who was then a prisoner but under
raised favorable circumstances he had his
own house and so forth. And he said, "Mr.
Mandela, we're releasing you on Sunday in
two days." And Mr. Mandela's response was,
"No, you can't possibly do that. We do not
have enough time to make arrangements." And
de Klerk said, "Look, we have to do it then
but you can choose where you want to be released
in Johannesburg or Capetown." And that was
the first of many, many compromises that were
made in the subsequent negotiations.
The factors that made the negotiations possible
included the following. First of all by 1987
all sides to the conflict had accepted that
there would not be an armed solution. Our
own security forces which were very powerful
realized that you could not maintain the situation
through armed force forever. We could have
kept on for another two or three decades but
under really negative circumstances. The ANC
realized there wasn't going to be a revolutionary
outcome. And it's only when parties accepted
there will not be an armed outcome that you
can have genuine negotiations. Something that
hasn't happened yet, for example, in the Middle
East. So that was the first green traffic
light. Then in 1988, in fact in September
1987 our armed forces were involved in very
severe conflict, in battles with Cuban and
Russian led forces in Southern Angola. The
Battle of the Lumber River was probably the
biggest set-piece battle in Africa since the
Second World War. More than 5,000 Angolan
troops died in that battle, hardly covered
at all in the international media. But what
it meant was that the Russians got tired of
trying to find an armed solution in Southern
Africa. Gorbachev was more interested in Perestroika
and Glasnost and that was the turning of the
tide.
So in 1988 there was an international agreement
between the Angolans, Cubans and the Americans
regarding the withdrawal of the 50,000 Cuban
troops from Angola. This opened the way for
the independence of Namibia, immediately to
the south of Angola that South Africa had
ruled since 1915 under a league of nations
mandate. The elections were supervised by
the U.N. They worked well. What it proved
was that positive outcomes should -- could
be achieved in negotiations even with one's
bitterest enemies provided there's a proper
constitutional framework. So that was traffic
light two and three turning green. Underlying
all of this there had been huge shifts in
economic relationships, social relationships
in the 70s and 80s. In 1970 black South Africans
share of personal disposable income in South
Africa was only about 20 percent. Whites share
was 72 percent. The rest was Coloured and
Asian. But by 1994 the whites share had fallen
to under 50 percent. Black share was up around
38 percent. Coloureds and Asians the rest.
And this meant that relationships had changed
also quite dramatically. The economy could
not be run on the basis of the white workers
alone. The end of the 1970s we had to make
our first really big reforms and they were
labor reforms and they gave genuine trade
union rights to black South Africans. But
that also increased the bargaining power of
black South Africans, incomes rose and the
economy became much more integrated and you
had more and more black kids coming into the
economy at higher and higher levels. So in
your average bank you would have had black
tellers and white tellers doing the same jobs
working beside one another. There's no way
they're gonna go to segregated dining rooms.
There's no way ultimately they're gonna go
to segregated places of entertainment. So
it was a question of economic forces changing
social relationships putting unbearable pressure
on outmoded constitutional relationships.
And that, in fact, has been the process of
development throughout the world.
South Africa was part of significant military operations against Germany. In spite of Boer resistance at home, the Afrikaner-led government of Louis Botha unhesitatingly joined the side of the Allies of World War I and fought alongside its armies. The South African Government agreed to the withdrawal of British Army units so that they were free to join the European war, and had plans to invade German South-West Africa. Elements of the South African army refused to fight against the Germans and along with other opponents of the Government rose in open revolt. The government declared martial law on 14 October 1914, and forces loyal to the government under the command of General Louis Botha and Jan Smuts proceeded to destroy the Maritz Rebellion. The leading Boer rebels got off lightly with terms of imprisonment of six and seven years and heavy fines. (See World War I and the Maritz Rebellion.)
Military action against Germany during World War I
The South African Union Defence Force saw action in a number of areas:
A military expedition under General Jan Smuts was dispatched to German East Africa (later known as Tanganyika and now the mainland part of Tanzania). The objective was to fight German forces in that colony and to try to capture the elusive German General von Lettow-Vorbeck. Ultimately, Lettow-Vorbeck fought his tiny force out of German East Africa into Mozambique and then Northern Rhodesia, where he accepted a cease-fire three days after the end of the war. (See East African Campaign (World War I).)
Military contributions and casualties in World War I
With a population of roughly 6 million, between 1914 - 1918, over 250,000 South Africans of all races voluntarily served their country. Thousands more served in the British Army directly, with over 3,000 joining the British Royal Flying Corps and over 100 volunteering for the Royal Navy.[1] It is likely that around 50% of white men of military age served during the war. More than 146,000 whites, 83,000 black Africans and 2,500 Coloureds and Asians served in either German South-West Africa, East Africa, the Middle East, or on the Western Front in Europe. Suffering roughly 19,000 casualties, over 7,000 South Africans were killed, and nearly 12,000 were wounded during the course of the war.[2] Eight South Africans won the Victoria Cross for gallantry, the Empire’s highest and prestigious military medal. The Battle of Delville Wood and the sinking of the SS Mendi being the greatest single incidents of loss of life.
The assistance that South Africa gave the British Empire was significant. Two German African colonies were occupied, either by South Africa alone or with significant South African assistance. Manpower, from all races, helped Allied operations not just on the Western Front and Africa, but also in the Middle East against the Ottoman Empire. South Africa’s ports and harbours on the Home Front were a crucial strategic asset when conducting a war on a global scale. Providing important rest and refuelling stations, the Royal Navy could ensure vital sea lane connections to the British Raj, and the Far East stayed open.
Economically, South Africa supplied two-thirds of gold production in the British Empire, with most of the remainder coming from Australia. At the start of the war, Bank of England officials in London worked with South Africa to block gold shipments to Germany, and force mine owners to sell only to the British Treasury, at prices set by the Treasury. This facilitated purchases of munitions and food in the United States and neutral countries.[3]
On 4 September 1939, the United Party caucus refused to accept Hertzog's stance of neutrality in World War II. Hertzog resigned rather than accept the ruling and Smuts was elected in his stead. Upon becoming Prime Minister of South Africa, Smuts declared South Africa officially at war with Germany and the Axis. Smuts immediately set about fortifying South Africa against any possible German sea invasion because of South Africa's global strategic importance controlling the long sea route around the Cape of Good Hope.
Smuts took severe action against the pro-German South African Ossewabrandwag movement (they were caught committing acts of sabotage) and interned its leaders for the duration of the war. (One of them, John Vorster, was to become future Prime Minister of South Africa.) (See Jan Smuts during World War II.)
Prime Minister Jan Smuts was the only important non-British general whose advice was constantly sought by Britain's wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Smuts was invited to the Imperial War Cabinet in 1939 as the most senior South African in favour of war. On 28 May 1941, Smuts was appointed a Field Marshal of the British Army, becoming the first South African to hold that rank. Ultimately, Smuts would pay a steep political price for his closeness to the British establishment, to the King, and to Churchill which had made Smuts very unpopular among the conservative nationalistic Afrikaners, leading to his eventual downfall, whereas most English-speaking whites and a minority of liberal Afrikaners in South Africa remained loyal to him. (See Jan Smuts during World War II.)
Military contributions and casualties in World War II
Another important victory in which the South Africans participated, was the liberation of Malagasy (now known as Madagascar) from the control of the Vichy French who were allies of the Nazis. British troops aided by South African soldiers, staged their attack from South Africa, and occupied the strategic island in 1942 to preclude its seizure by the Japanese.
The South African 2nd Infantry Division also took part in a number of actions in North Africa during 1942, but on 21 June 1942 two complete infantry brigades of the division as well as most of the supporting units were captured at the fall of Tobruk.
The South African 3rd Infantry Division never took an active part in any battles but instead organised and trained the South African home defence forces, performed garrison duties and supplied replacements for the South African 1st Infantry Division and the South African 2nd Infantry Division. However, one of this division's constituent brigades - 7 SA Motorised Brigade - did take part in the invasion of Madagascar in 1942.
South Africa contributed to the war effort against Japan, supplying men and manning ships in naval engagements against the Japanese.[4]
Of the 334,000 men who volunteered for the South African Armed Forces during the war (including some 211,000 whites, 77,000 blacks and 46,000 "coloureds" and Asians), nearly 9,000 were killed in action.
Post 1945
South Africa emerged from the Allied victory with its prestige and national honour enhanced as it had fought tirelessly for the Western Allies. South Africa's standing in the international community was rising, at a time when the Third World's struggle against colonialism had still not taken centre stage. In May 1945, Prime Minister Smuts represented South Africa in San Francisco at the drafting of the United Nations Charter. Just as he did in 1919, Smuts urged the delegates to create a powerful international body to preserve peace; he was determined that, unlike the League of Nations, the United Nations would have teeth. Smuts signed the Paris Peace Treaty, resolving the peace in Europe, thus becoming the only signatory of both the treaty ending the First World War, and that ending the Second.
However, internal political struggles in the disgruntled and essentially impoverished Afrikaner community would soon come to the fore leading to Smuts' defeat at the polls in the 1948 elections (in which only whites and coloureds could vote) at the hands of a resurgent National Party after the war. This began the road to South Africa's eventual isolation from a world that would no longer tolerate any forms of political discrimination or differentiation based on race only.
Berger, Iris. South Africa in world history. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Thompson, Leonard M. A history of South Africa (Yale University Press, 2001).
Historicus Africanus, Der 1. Weltkrieg in Deutsch-Südwestafrika 1914–15, Volume 1, 2nd edition, Glanz & Gloria Verlag, Windhoek 2012, ISBN978-99916-872-1-6
Historicus Africanus, Der 1. Weltkrieg in Deutsch-Südwestafrika 1914–15, Volume 2, "Naulila", Glanz & Gloria Verlag, Windhoek 2012, ISBN978-99916-872-3-0
Historicus Africanus, Der 1. Weltkrieg in Deutsch-Südwestafrika 1914–15, Volume 3, "Kämpfe im Süden", Glanz & Gloria Verlag, Windhoek 2014, ISBN978-99916-872-8-5
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This page was last edited on 24 January 2021, at 01:48