By Saul Gwakuba-Ndlovu

THE current debate on the now defunct South African Boer regime’s apartheid is of more than academic interest because, as a socio-economic practice, it was the bedrock on which the political, economic, social and cultural development of the Southern African region was based right up to the attainment of independence of the former three High Commission countries in the late 1960s. 

The people of the former three British protectorates, Bechuanaland (now Botswana), Swaziland (now ESwatini) and Basutoland (now Lesotho), depended highly on South Africa for their economic existence, including formal employment for which their nationals  were paid the lowest as a fourth grade racial group. 

The country’s apartheid economic order of precedence was Europeans, Indians, Coloureds and, at the bottom, the black African people. 

This apartheid order was based by the Boer regime on one’s race and not one’s qualifications or practical experience. 

It is important to correct a widely held view that apartheid was founded and introduced by Daniel Malan’s National Party after its electoral victory in 1948. 

As a matter of historical fact, the foundations of apartheid were laid down by the British colonial administration some 50 years earlier, and was called racial segregation. 

After the 1899-1902 Anglo-Boer war, Britain appointed Alfred Milner Commissioner over South Africa. 

Milner had one political passion; white domination over the black people in all the countries, the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, the Cape Colony and Natal. 

The British colonial administration declared in as early as 1903 that their aim was to create a self -governing white community supported by a well-treated and justly governed black community from Cape Town to the Zambezi. 

The British and Boer communities were certainly not friendly towards each other, hence the war in which the British emerged victors, but they both agreed on the need to keep the black people underfoot. 

However, there was no clear policy on which to pass laws introducing racial segregation. It was for that purpose that Milner appointed a Transvaal Native Commissioner, Yeatman Lagden, to head a commission to look into the best way to structure a ‘native policy’. 

Lagden’s body was known as the South African Native Affairs Commission (SANAC) and held its very first meeting in October 1903. 

Meanwhile, while Cecil John Rhodes was the Cape Colony Prime Minister, he crafted a Land Act whose nominal land ownership could pass only to the family’s first born son. 

That law was known as the Glen Grey Act, so named after an Eastern Cape Colony District for which it was initially passed. 

That law was, in fact, the basis of the much hated Southern Rhodesia, Land Apportionment Act of 1930, and also of the South African Native Reserves Act which assigned only 13 percent of the country’s land to the black majority and most of it to the settler-white minority. 

The apartheid regime’s Bantustans were created on those native reserves, the very cornerstone of apartheid. 

We now go back to the SANAC of Lagden who was appointed by Milner, the British Commissioner in South Africa. 

Lagden’s report recommended that land occupied by Africans should be drastically reduced so that landless black people would be forced to work for the white settlers. 

So, we find that the native reserves created, in effect, by Rhodes’ brain, became a cheap labour source for South African whites. 

The Boers vigorously came onto the apartheid stage immediately after their 1948 electoral victory, with obviously incorrigible racists such as Hendrik Verwoerd refining the criminal doctrine. 

They applied it not only to residential areas but also to what they said was racial classification based on people’s physical features. 

The purpose of that most inhuman practice was to avoid the occurrence of miscegenation, claimed the Boers. 

The apartheid regime committed the following crimes, in fact, against humanity; humanity in this context being the South African non-white races, those people who were referred to in the negative as the ‘non-whites’ : 

λ Apartheid dispossessed the indigenous people of their natural heritage, that it to say their land which is naturally theirs as, for example, Germany is for the Germans; 

λ Apartheid displaced South Africa’s indigenous communities and turned them into squatters in their very own country; 

λ Apartheid denied the South African people the freedom of association by discriminatory residential, marital and cultural laws; 

λ Apartheid infringed on the black people’s freedom of movement by its notorious pass laws; 

λ Apartheid denied numerous indigenous black South Africans their right to be paid what they were actually worth by their employers because of its anti–African job reservation and economic discrimination, a practice called ‘colour-bar’ at some period; 

λ Apartheid, by its very inhuman nature, was imposed and maintained by legislative, administrative, judicial and psychological violence which caused injury as well as death to the victims. 

The African National Congress (ANC) and other pro-freedom organisation presented innumerable documents to the United Nations on this issue, while the world body took several resolutions condemning the practice. 

It reflects most badly on  F. W. de Klerk, as a former South African President, to say that he was not aware that the UN resolved in 1973 that apartheid was a crime against humanity.

Was he not briefed by his Foreign Ministry about what had occurred at the UN about the country he was ostensibly leading when he got into office?

In any case, in a frank discussion such as this, his denial should be ignored because ‘ignorance is no defence’ at law. 

Another surprise is his opinion that apartheid was not a crime. 

That reminds one of a heated argument at one of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) in the late 1960s about whether apartheid was a crime or an evil. 

Apartheid apologists said it was an evil and not a crime. 

They said evil had to do only with morality. They were told, of course, that the word ‘evil’ is synonymous with lethal, harmful, horrid, injurious, wrong, iniquitous, disastrous or criminal. 

That apart, we now look at why the South African boer regime, represented by de Klerk, surrendered to the black majority. 

It did not have an alternative, and that was why de Klerk’s predecessor P.W. Botha said in one of his speeches in the early 1980s, that there had to be some change because continuing with the boer administration as it was could precipitate an armed revolution whose results “…would be too ghastly to contemplate.” Mozambique, to the east of South Africa, became independent in the mid-1970s, so had  Botswana to the north-west, in the 1960s, which became one of the Frontline States, Swaziland to the east, also became independent, so did Lesotho in the same decade.

The armed struggle in Namibia and Zimbabwe was, at the time of Botha’s remarks, quite advanced. 

So, when de Klerk got into power, he was literally facing an irreversible armed revolution against a virtually lone South Africa. 

American, British and French vetoes at the UN could no longer save the apartheid regime against the ANC’s Umkhonto Wesizwe onslaught. 

So, the best the regime could do was to surrender before a stage “…too ghastly to contemplate…” was reached. 

Those who decided to award him a Nobel Peace prize jointly with Nelson Mandela did not analyse the regional geo-political situation thoroughly before making that resolution. 

However, it is neither advisable nor practicable to rescind that controversial decision, no more than it is for South Africa to nullify the ANC Reconciliation Policy now, 30 years after it was publicly announced. 

Saul Gwakuba-Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo-based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734 328 136 or through email. sgwakuba@gmail.com