Every Step of the Way potx

As a result of our freedom, South Africa is now a single country in the normal sense of that term.. After all, a sceptical observer could say, given the depth of its historical divisions

The journey to freedom

in South Africa

E V E R Y S T E P O F T H E W A Y

Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za

The journey to freedom

in South Africa

E V E R Y S T E P O F T H E W A Y

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION

Commissioned and funded by the Ministry of Education

Compiled by the Social Integration and Cohesion Research Programme of the Human Sciences Research Council

Published by HSRC Press

Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa

www.hsrcpublishers.ac.za

© 2004 Human Sciences Research Council

First published 2004

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, including photocopying and recording, or in any infor-mation storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers

ISBN 0 7969 2061 3

Written by Michael Morris

Historical advisor: Professor Bill Nasson

Cover and text design by Jenny Young

Edited by John Linnegar

Photo research by Elsie Joubert

Cover photograph by Benny Gool

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Foreword by Professor Kader Asmal vi

chapter 2 Strangers on the shore 29

chapter 4 As far as the eye could see 69

chapter 6 Sparks from the earth 107

chapter 8 Union spells division 141 chapter 9 Hewers of wood, drawers of water 157 chapter 10 Armed and dangerous 187 chapter 11 Storming the fortress 217 chapter 12 End of the beginning 243

chapter 15 When that sunrise comes 297 endpiece Remembering the future 315

[ contents ]

On the tenth anniversary of our transition to democracy, it is appropriate that we give some thought to what South Africa has become Obviously, after abandoning apartheid and the oppression on which it rested, South Africa is now a free country The fruits of that freedom may still be rather slow in reaching some of our people, but all the same those fruits are ripening and more and more people are enjoying the flavour of freedom

As a result of our freedom, South Africa is now a single country in the normal sense

of that term Of course, previous governments did their best to deny our unity, using the policies of apartheid to divide South Africans and distort the growth of a common nationhood Even today, it might be said, some South African citizens themselves have not yet recognised the historical reality of their present, that they are an interdependent part of a single and increasingly normal country After all, a sceptical observer could say, given the depth of its historical divisions, that South Africa can hardly be seen as a uniform country or a national unity South Africa has a burdensome past, huge economic inequalities, continuing racial divisions and sharp gender inequalities On top of all this, it

is faced with the cultural and political consequences of having almost a dozen official languages Certainly, these factors challenge any simple notion of South Africa being a single, unified country

Yet we would do well to take stock of what history has to teach us about the creation

of states and nations, and where South Africa stands in relation to these other places All recognised countries, even those with the strongest kind of patriotic nationhood, live with their divisions Moreover, these divisions are of a familiar kind Thus, they would include cultural differences – which may in places be defined as racial or ethnic divisions – economic inequalities, gender discrimination, urban and rural disparities, and differing kinds of religion It is certainly true that these divisions may be more acute in South Africa than they are in some other countries, but they are not peculiarly South African in any way And the extent to which a democratic South Africa is committed to the removal

of the inequalities of the past and to the construction of a more just social order merely confirms that it has become a normal, progressive and forward-looking country

Nor is this the only reality to consider when contemplating how South Africa has at last matured into a single country South Africans have a national imagination which encourages them to think that they continue to live in an entirely special or distinctive place, whereas their national experience may actually have things in common with the

vi

[ foreword ]

histories of Europe, the United States of America, Asia, and, by no means least, the rest

of Africa

Other countries have had to forge unity out of diversity To cite only a few examples:

when Italy was united as a country in 1860, there was no shared past, no culture of

common patriotism, and no more than about five percent of its people actually spoke

Italian; present-day Belgium still consists of two cultural and linguistic halves that are not

always all for one and one for all; in the 1960s, which was the great freedom decade for

most of colonial Africa, that part of the American population which was black still

seemed hardly to be recognised as American at all within the ‘national unity’ of the

United States

And so it has been on our own continent, too The achievement of a meaningful

nationhood – the common recognition of fellow citizens – has been the product of

various struggles, often bitter Indeed, as we have seen all too tragically in our own time,

several states to our north that came to nationhood as single countries have fragmented

or almost dissolved, while some who once combined as citizens have become hostile

rebels or regional factions in societies that have found themselves no longer able to

resolve decisive national issues through negotiation and compromise

If we accept the historical truth that nations everywhere have to be made through

both conflict and compromise, then contemporary South Africa is probably not very

different from other single, sovereign states, whether in Africa, Europe, or elsewhere In

Africa, South Africa is a particularly powerful and advanced state, but in some aspects of

its historical past, its achievement of a unified nationhood resembles that of many other

peoples of the continent

Imagine an African land with a deep and rich colonial past and a heritage of

pre-colonial African customs and practices which continue to influence its present For many

years it was governed and exploited on the basis of white supremacy Over a long period

there were political protests and civil struggles against the injustices and oppression of

undemocratic minority rule Different sorts of people were involved, often disputing

among themselves how resistance might be conducted most effectively Towards the end,

a militant minority took up arms and confronted repression with bloody consequences

Inevitably, white minority domination grew too costly to maintain, even though those

who opposed it were a long way from actually toppling the state

vii

When the shooting was effectively over, a new and more inclusive politics started Politicians of various ideological colours, as well as skin colours, entered a tricky and by

no means predictable terrain of negotiations to settle on a new order of freedom and democratic rights for all Negotiations produced a unitary country with a new political culture rooted in universal rights, committed to the franchise, to the dignity of equal treatment, to freedom from gender discrimination, and other rights Out of this grew the civilised conditions for shared citizenship in a single yet healthily plural nation, with a great assortment of peoples, communities, customs, cultures, religions, traditions and life chances Perhaps, more than anything, inclusion was what people most wanted from their new statehood

When freedom finally came to this land, it did not come altogether quietly and calmly

In fact, its birth was accompanied by considerable public argument over how it should

be recognised In part, this argument was about who had done most to bring about freedom, and who had sacrificed most At the same time, the argument was about remembrance and forgetting, and reconciliation and forgiving, about whose contribution

to freedom was perhaps being unjustly ignored or forgotten, or whose was being exaggerated, or about what the fate should be of those who had gone to the wire in their struggle to prevent the emergence of a new country And yet another aspect of the argument was about who had gained most from the flowering of freedom, and who, it seemed, was still being left behind, and at what cost, in the country’s advance

This is, self-evidently, not the description of an imaginary country It is a description of South Africa at the turn of the 20th century It could also be a fair description of the nation

of Kenya, which emerged in the 1960s There, also, a nation was born out of historical processes of conflict, negotiation and compromise that would later characterise South Africa’s transition to freedom For our purposes, what matters is the historical point: South Africans are like others in the ways in which they have come to the challenge of hammering together a nation If building a nation has involved robust arguments, principled disputes, the resolution of conflict through compromise, or mediation between the haves and the have-nots, that is how nations all over the world have come to be made Nationhood has also always come about when people have faced up squarely to the nature of their past, and to the questions it has raised, even when these have not been easy questions

viii

Equally, it is present history which moves them forward, always into unknown

territory With the past behind and the future ahead, all of us face futures we can only

but imagine, carried by the hope that through the right choices and influence, things will

go our way rather than come to get us As Every Step of the Way so rightly concludes,

‘looking ahead, collectively as much as privately, we are drawn to what happened in the

last decade, the last century, the last millennium It is part and parcel of what it is to be

human, to be conscious, to remember and, ultimately, to be hopeful’

This book is a vigorous, sweeping historical narrative which shows how South Africa

has at last become a single democratic country Constantly picking out why people in

their own time took the actions which they did, in the face of uncertain futures and

unforeseen outcomes, it tells the story of the distant past, recent times and the present

in a particularly reflective way Amidst its impressive flow of description, explanation and

illustration, Every Step of the Way repeatedly reminds us that our histories – there is

always more than one – are the product of many wills, many visions, many choices

Futures were not inevitable, whether in 1497, 1837, 1948 or in 1994 Nor were

conse-quences always predictable

This, then, is a history which does not provide simplistic answers or heroic myths, as if

it were a ready guidebook to the saints and sinners through the centuries who have

made South Africa More valuably, Every Step of the Way asks its readers to confront the

tangled stories, records and other fragments which make up our history, and to be aware

that the past is always another country, even if, as the text suggests, it is ‘always crowding

into the present, making us think like this or like that’ It is also a strikingly humane

history, aware of the ease with which hindsight can lead us into harsh judgements of our

past In other words, here is a story which is mindful not only of the price of South

Africa’s history, with its racial cruelties, economic waste and political deceptions, but also

of the implications of a long and lighter history of moral consciousness, of South African

people embracing one another’s common humanity and choosing the politics of healing

This humane and humanising sense of history is clear in one of this book’s early

decla-rations, that while ‘there is no guarantee – humanness being what it is – that we will not

ever repeat some of the tragic errors of the past decades and centuries … the triumph of

kinder ideas in the long human story of southern Africa does remind us how it is possible

to make better choices, today and tomorrow’ This emphasis on the triumph of humanity,

ix

rising out of our troubled history, recalls the promise of the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who was inspired by Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1992 to write:

History says, Don’t hope

On this side of the grave,

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme

Every Step of the Way is part of the larger effort by the Ministry of Education to revitalise

the study of history We have many people to thank The South African History Project, which has been driving this initiative, under the direction of Dr June Bam, and the Social Cohesion and Integration Research Programme of the Human Sciences Research Council, under the leadership of its executive director, Professor Wilmot James, undertook this book as a collaborative project We gratefully acknowledge the work of Professor Bill Nasson, one of our most distinguished professors of history, and Michael Morris, one of our most seasoned Press journalists Morris, in particular, brought his gift of clear exposition to the book, picking out the essential facts in a historical situation and drawing thoughtful conclusions He writes with zest, in sentences that tingle with life and meaning And, by no means least, he bites at ideas and issues and worries at them,

as a dog does a bone All of this makes the volume a compelling read Finally, we thank the members of the Ministerial History and Archaeology Panel for their consultation and HSRC Press for bringing this endeavour to fruition

Professor Kader Asmal, MP

Minister of Education

[ pr

Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za

So they kept feeding the flames, and drinking, and

talking There was a lot to talk about, though to be

honest, we don’t know much about what they did

talk about We can imagine, privately, what went

through their minds, and which of those thoughts

they expressed, and which they kept to themselves

We know some of the stark facts of this braai in

the bush near Komatipoort on the Mozambican border

in the winter of 1981

We know that the five men were policemen We

know that three of them had travelled to this spot

from the Eastern Cape that day We surmise that they

were convinced, then, that what they were doing was

somehow permitted, or even that it was expected of

them, that it was, as they saw it perhaps, their duty

And we know that when they packed up to go, as

the lowveld sky began to pale in the east, they left

behind in the burnt-out coals of a second fire the ashes

of a young man they had drugged and murdered early

on the previous evening Sizwe Kondile had been

kidnapped on the outskirts of the seaside hamlet of

Jeffreys Bay, bundled into a car and driven to his end

The question is, what do we do with these facts

in 2004, and in the years to come? The events of the

early 1980s seem so far off, and so foreign in a way,

that we may be tempted to just leave it all there:

yesterday’s stuff, of a world that is not ours, that we

are not responsible for, and that, ultimately, we

cannot change

But the story of the five men drinking beer under

the stars while they fed the fire they hoped would burn their victim to oblivion doesn’t ever go away At the time they thought it would But, like so many other South African stories, it all came back Stories, records, memories, the fractions of history, are like that: demanding, complicated, always crowding into the present, making us think like this

or like that And so, bit by bit, our pasts make us what we are, and how we are to one another Things have changed since 1981, but the events

of that year, just as much as those of all the years before and since, linger in our histories, histories that are often different, and about which there may never really be agreement

There is no truth available to produce a single, believable history of – or for – everyone

But to be conscious of that difficulty, the difficulty

of knowing the past that has made us, is to be conscious of the difficulty of fashioning the future

we wish or hope to make

It is probably no guarantee – humanness being what it is – that we will not ever repeat some of the tragic errors of past decades and centuries; but the triumph of kinder ideas in the long human story of southern Africa does remind us how it is possible to make better choices, today and tomorrow

It is, ultimately, the triumph of memory over forgetting

[ prologue ]

Fires

It was going to be a long night, but the five men sitting around the braai, talking and drinking beer, had the patience for it If it took the whole night, well, they would just have to sit it out