Sharpeville, South Africa, 21 March 1960: Sixty-nine black South Africans, protesting against Apartheid, were shot down by the white South African police. White rule could only be maintained and enforced by systematic and deadly state violence.
YOU CAN TELL it’s a hot day. The sky has that washed out
quality and all the shadows are tucked in tight. The ground is dusty. Sunlight
shimmers on the leaves of the trees. Judging by the distinctive styling of the
parked cars, it’s more than sixty years ago. In the foreground of the
photograph, sprawled awkwardly in the mid-day heat, you can count more than
twenty bodies. All shot in the back while running away. Discarded shoes and
hats and handbags fill the spaces between the men and women who fell. Blood is
mixed with the dust in Sharpeville, South Africa, 21 March 1960.
It’s a famous photo – what the propagandists call a
“recruiter”. I can’t have been more than twelve or thirteen when my eyes first
consciously registered all those motionless bodies baking in the Transvaal
heat, but even then I knew that such photographs are included in history books
for a reason. Such images affront us; challenge us; dare us to do something
about it.
And we did do something about it. In the years after 1960
more and more New Zealanders voiced their opposition to the Apartheid system of
racial segregation and exploitation responsible for the Sharpeville Massacre.
In 1981 we astonished the world with the vehemence of our protests against the
touring South African rugby team. And when, at last, the saintly Nelson
Mandela, leader of the African National Congress (ANC) was released from his
Robben Island prison, and black South Africans won their freedom, we New
Zealanders felt a special pride. The new, non-racial, Republic of South Africa
seemed to us the very epitome of Good triumphing over Evil. Sharpeville was
avenged.
But, we were deceived.
White South Africa’s racism – like racism everywhere –
served a larger economic purpose. More
than an exercise in racial segregation, Apartheid was an exercise in the
management and exploitation of black South African labour. The ANC understood
this. The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) understood this. The
Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) understood this. The young
Soweto activists who risked Apartheid’s billy-clubs, bullets and bombs
understood this. And, most importantly, South Africa’s capitalists understood
this.
Much as we would like to believe that it was the street
protests of 1981 that tipped the balance against the Apartheid regime, it was,
in fact, the international boycott of South African exports that prompted the
leading White politicians and businessmen to contemplate abandoning the
increasingly unsustainable moral and material infrastructure of Apartheid.
But, before they could act, they needed some iron-clad
reassurances. The transfer of power from the old system to the new must be
peaceful. The farms and businesses of the Afrikaner minority must not be
seized. And, most importantly, there must be no wholesale nationalisation of
South Africa’s key, export-earning, multinational mining operations. That these
demands would require the ANC to repudiate most of its core economic and social
objectives was well understood by the negotiators on both sides, and yet the
ANC agreed. Why?
Here we have to step back a little and ask ourselves what
else was going on in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
That the release of Mr Mandela coincided with the end of the
Cold War was not accidental. While the world remained divided into two
competing ideological blocs, both baring nuclear teeth, the radical
socialisation of South Africa’s economy was a viable proposition. By the late
1980s, however, “actually existing socialism” was everywhere in retreat, and
with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the ANC’s economic and social
programme became an instant anachronism. The global triumph of free-market
economics left Mr Mandela with no option but to limit the ANC’s “revolution” to
purely political objectives. South Africa’s 1996 Constitution guarantees all
South Africans formal equality under the law, but the economic realities –
which drove the White minority to erect the institutions of Apartheid in the
first instance – remain in place.
The millions of black South Africans who queued for hours to
cast their first democratic ballots in 1994 undoubtedly regarded the ANC as
their liberator and guarantor of a free and more prosperous future. In reality,
however, the ANC Government could only be the protector of the economic
status-quo. The redistribution of wealth, which most black South Africans had
assumed would follow the ending of Apartheid, did not materialise.
Rustenburg, South Africa, Thursday, 16 August 2012. In the
dust and scrub outside the British-owned Lonmin platinum mine a terrible
silence has fallen. Clouds of tear gas swirl and mingle with the acrid smoke
from discharged pistols and automatic rifles. Between the lines of armed police
and striking miners lie more than a hundred dead and wounded South African
citizens.
Rustenburg, South Africa, 16 August 2012: Thirty-four striking black South African miners are shot and killed by black South African police outside the British-owned Lonmin Platinum Mine.
All are equal under the African sun, but some, in George
Orwell’s bitter formulation, remain “more equal than others”.
This essay was originally
published in The Press of Tuesday, 21
August 2012.
