Part 4 - From an Afrikaner state to an African state (1945–2005)

When peace was concluded at the end of World War II in 1945, South Africa was among the victorious powers. It had made great sacrifices in the battle against one of the greatest threats ever to Western freedom and democracy. But while the Allied powers prevailed, Western assumptions of political and cultural superiority received a major blow. Third World leaders began pressing in world bodies for rapid decolonisation and they also urged the West to isolate South Africa. With India receiving its independence from Britain in 1947, the decolonisation of Africa and Asia began. The United States started to integrate its defence force and other institutions. South Africa was left isolated as the last major country whose racial policy was based on white supremacy and racism.

But the West did not abandon white South Africa. This was because it considered its battle against the Soviet Union to be of paramount importance. South Africa’s exports of strategic minerals and its control over the Cape sea route shielded it from Western economic and diplomatic sanctions.

 Europe’s post-war reconstruction triggered two decades of strong economic growth, only coming to an end with the oil crisis of the early 1970s. South Africa  also benefited from this and during the 1960s managed to attainone of the highest growth rates in the world. The strong growth accelerated the processes of steady urbanisation and racial integration that had begun in the mid-1930s. Apartheid as a system tried to limit these processes and even turn the stream of blacks back to the reserves. Instead of trying to meet the aspirations of the urban black elite, it sought out the traditional leaders in the reserves as the state’s main allies.

The African National Congress (ANC) became the dominant force challenging apartheid. Spurned by the West, it was compelled to link up locally with members of the SA Communist Party, banned by the government in 1950. Joint participation in the Defiance Campaign of the early 1950s and Soviet Union support offered after the ANC banning in 1960 strengthened the bonds. The ANC represented a classic form of territorial nationalism striving for the liberation of a people, not a class. 

The National Party was an ethnic nationalist movement built on the Afrikaner people. The enthusiasm the party generated derived from its determination to realise the goals of South African sovereignty and the economic and cultural advancement of the Afrikaner people. Apartheid served as an operating ideology of that nationalism, spelling out the relations between the white and other groups in a way that at least partly concealed Afrikaner domination. The proclamation of a republic and the realisation of other nationalist goals, together with the high growth of the 1960s, caused the nationalism to lose its coherence.

From the early 1970s apartheid was steadily eroded as a result of the growing predominance of the manufacturing sector with its demand for skilled labour, the demographic weakness of whites, the collapse of the resource base of the black ‘reserves’ and the rapid urbanisation of blacks.

Until the late 1970s the ANC pursued the strategy of armed struggle with very limited success. Its major breakthrough came in the second half of the 1970s when black youth who fled the country joined the organisation. After learning the lessons of other struggles, particularly that in Vietnam, the ANC began applying the much more effective strategy of popular mobilisation and mass protests.

The state remained stable but by the final years of the 1980s a stalemate had developed between it and the ANC and its internal proxy, the United Democratic Front. The idea of a peaceful settlement was born. The negotiations for a democratic South Africa took place in conditions of political turbulence but the goal was reached without major bloodshed or outside assistance.