The Aftermath of Apartheid

Andrew Tait looks at the state of South Africa today, nearly a quarter century since the end of apartheid rule. First published in May 2023 for volume three of The Commonweal.

Violent crime, leaking sewers, potholed roads, everyday blackouts, shanty towns vast as any city, failing schools, overwhelmed hospitals, refugees and pogroms against refugees and, of course, venal, self-serving politicians. This is life in the aftermath of apartheid.

I returned to South Africa this year for the first time since my family emigrated in 1987. While this was not a holiday or a sightseeing tour, the sights I have seen impressed on me how much a society can fail and yet still work - even inspire. Gauteng (formerly known as Johannesburg) is both falling apart and booming at the same time.

The daily black outs are symptomatic of modern South Africa. They cost the economy dear and make life a misery for millions, but the fault lies with a parasitic few - the politicians like former president Jacob Zuma, who failed to build new power stations but succeeded mightily at building himself a palace in Nkandla, and his lower level imitators, who steal wires and machinery to sell for scrap. Ordinary South Africans feel under siege but react with courage, resilience and resistance - whether it is through informal settlement organisations like Abahlali base Mjondolo or in the rush to install solar panels

Booming and falling apart - A billboard advertises generators for the daily blackouts. Credit: Andrew Tait.

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The roads are badly maintained and traffic lights often out of action, but most motorists drive with consideration and politeness - with a few exceptions, usually the drivers of BMWs and Mercedes! Public transport is in a dire state - passenger trains lie unused and decaying and municipalities struggle to pay for buses, but the void is filled by taxi vans, which have sprung up in an informal way to move people around the country. As the state withers, committees fill the gap at all levels, from the shanties to the gated suburbs. Neo-liberalism is the ruling ideology but a practical anarchism prevails at street level.

It is both exhilarating and exhausting, and it is terrifying to see how much a society can fall apart and still have further to fall. Why is the Rainbow Nation, the happy ending of a grim 20th century, falling apart?

The lazy answer - often hinted at, occasionally baldly stated, by some white expat South Africans is that the African National Congress (ANC) is to blame. This is undeniable at the most obvious of levels. The ANC has run the country since 1994. The state is failing on its watch.Their seldom spoken subtext is that life was better under apartheid. The logic of the answer is that South Africa is failing, just as all decolonised African countries have failed, to industrialise and escape dependence on former colonial powers. South Africa worked for so long, it is implied, because it was run by the right people, white people. 

This racist myth is not unique to white South Africans, nor is it shared by all whites. Indeed, one of the many small miracles of South Africa is that openly racist organisations are so marginal. Few ethnic groups will have suffered such an astounding reversal in their fortunes as white South Africans. To be sure, the commanding heights of the economy are still firmly in the grasp of a white elite - despite the ANC’s best efforts to boost blacks, preferably themselves, through the glass ceiling that separates the super- rich from the rest of us. President Cyril Ramaphosa is a billionaire (in rands) but he would need more than a trillion rand to make South Africa’s rich list.

To understand ANC South Africa, you must understand apartheid South Africa.The white Nationalist movement was born from bitterness at war crimes committed by the British in the Boer War and succoured itself on the suffering endured by many in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Inspired partly by Adolf Hitler and by British and French colonial policy, the Nationalists took power in 1949 and set about creating a whites-only welfare state, a pied-noir paradise.

Like Israel nowadays, the Republic called itself a democracy and, like Israel, maintained the fiction by ferocious gerrymandering. Blacks were granted independence in ‘separate but equal’ homelands, ruled over by tribal chiefs and puppet presidents. White South Africa retained the best land, the biggest cities, and the richest mines. Not only did that give the regime a democratic fig leaf but it was also an economic boon, as African workers were, at the stroke of a pen, made migrant workers in their own land, subject to deportation at any moment. To imagine how that worked to keep wages down, think of New Zealand’s use and abuse of Pacific Island workers.

Apartheid South Africa was a brutal police state - but it worked. For 40 years, a generation, it was an economic powerhouse and a major player on the world stage. It worked because of cheap labour and the Cold War. South Africa was an economic powerhouse because the pass laws meant businesses based in South Africa, including many major multinationals, had access to an enormous, low-paid, un-unionised workforce. 

The brutality needed to maintain control eventually made South Africa a pariah state, but only after decades of hard work by activists in SA and overseas. In its heyday, SA was a valued member of the western anti-communist alliance. White South African military and intelligence operatives worked ceaselessly and effectively throughout the Cold War to maim, distort and disfigure decolonisation in the whole of Southern Africa. As late as 1988 South African soldiers fought Cubans and Angolans in Cuito Canavale - the biggest African battle since the Second World War.

Why is Mugabe a paranoid dictator? Apartheid SA. Why are Angola and Mozambique disaster zones? Apartheid SA. Fuelled by mining super-profits, with a licence to kill from the USA and the UK, South Africa was a military state, a southern Sparta, where a white ‘labour aristocracy’ lived large on the backs of a black proletariat.

It is true that apartheid worked, if we ignore the destruction of democracy,but apartheid had reached its use-by date by 1990. The rapid growth of black industrial trade unions in the 1980s spelled the end of cheap labour, and glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union made SA’s Cold War rhetoric redundant. In the 1990s the Soviet Union collapsed. Western corporates competed with Russian crooks, now oligarchs, to defraud the state of billions, while street thugs stole manhole covers and electric cable by the kilometre. Life expectancy crashed by more than 10 years to just 58 years. All over the former union, wars broke out as new nation states defined their borders and stateless ethnic groups demanded their own states.

The most salutary warning has to be the collapse of Yugoslavia. Never part of the Eastern Bloc, Yugoslavs enjoyed more political freedom and economic wealth than Soviet citizens. The modern state had a proud history as the only European state to liberate itself from Nazi rule. It was a popular tourist destination for Western Europeans. The economy was integrated and industrialised and intermarriage was common. But Yugoslavia was destroyed by ethno-nationalism just as the Rainbow Nation was born. Yugoslav politicians, almost all former communists, facing a debt crisis similar to that faced by the apartheid regime, adopted ethno-nationalism as a cheap form of politics. You can’t promise to build roads, but you can promise to be a Serb, or an Albanian, or a Croat or Slovene. There was no political opposition with the vision and the necessary prestige to hold the country together.

The difference in South Africa was the ANC. The ANC was a centralised, disciplined organisation with mass support and international credibility. Although moulded organisationally by the Cold War,  with command structures influenced by the armed struggle and Stalinism,  it was open to a transition that would not be socialist in any sense. The bosses could do business with it. The ANC was able to navigate the transition, but it was never able to provide coherent policy because of a lack of organic connections to the mass movements. The  leadership were either in exile or prison during the 1980s. Its strategy of armed struggle was incorrect and condemned the party leadership to isolation from the forces that actually ended apartheid - the youth, the trade unions and the United Democratic Front. However, neither the unions nor the UDF had any strategy or desire to take power. Ironically, the ANC’s slight distance from the struggle increased its prestige both on the streets and in the boardrooms. It also suffered from  ideological incoherence. The collapse of the USSR disoriented the left, especially the South African Communist Party, and the rise of neoliberalism emboldened the right, and the opportunists. 

It is impossible to sum up South Africa nowadays. For all its problems it has  an economy many times greater than that of New Zealand. It is a key country in a key continent. Failure here will accelerate climate change and political disintegration. Certain trends in South Africa though - the glorification of wealth for the mighty, consumerism for the many, and crime as the only way out for the poor - are shared here in NZ. We must and we can counter these trends with ethics of solidarity, self-sacrifice and democratic organisation. This is not mere idealism, it is the only realistic way to deal with the disasters being wrought upon us by failed neo-liberal policies.