Apartheid: the History of Apartheid by Michael Morris

Author:Michael Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
Published: 2012-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

His stark metaphor, ‘adapt or die’ – satirised at the time as ‘adapt or dye’ – alarmed conservatives, and for good reason, since, as the writer André Brink noted just a few years later in 1981, Botha had ‘introduced the possibility of change and that may carry him or other people further’. Brink professed himself ‘totally cynical’ about Botha, but observed: ‘Once a certain historical momentum is created I don’t think it can be stopped.’

The problem was that, rather like their predecessors in DF Malan’s government of 1948, Botha’s Nationalists had no clear idea of what to make of their historical moment, except to fall back on instinctive self-interest. In the late 1940s, the Nationalists sought to shore up their power in order to implement apartheid; in the late 1970s, their successors were intent on reinforcing their power in order to attempt the system’s limited and piecemeal modification. The glaring flaw was that the only credible reform option lay in a meaningful ceding of power.

The idea of ‘separate development’ was every day undermined by a socio-economic environment in which the needs of black workers and their families, and equally of shareholders and factory managers, could only be met by defying the complex of apartheid laws enacted to segregate society and economy by race. The pace of urbanisation, for which cities were ill-prepared, produced vast ‘squatter camps’ of ‘illegal immigrants’ from the Bantustans. The western Cape, defined by the Nationalists as a so-called ‘coloured labour preference area’ from which black people were excluded by influx control, began to absorb many thousands of desperate job-seekers from the Ciskei and Transkei. By law, towns and cities could be regarded as home only by black people with ‘section 10’ rights (for those born there, or who had worked for one employer for ten years, or were children under 18 of someone with such rights). But with the economic failure of the homelands, and the growing demand for jobs in a metropolitan industrial sector depleted of white blue-collar workers and expanding in excess of the existing labour provision, racial constraints on employment gave in.

This did not mean, though, that natural economic and social processes were allowed free play. The failures of policy were compounded by their more vigorous implementation. Typical of the heartless procedure was the displacement of 10 000 ‘illegal’ black residents in the midwinter destruction of the Modderdam settlement on the Cape Flats in 1977. A journalist described such ‘squatter clearance’ as ‘an eye-smarting hell of teargas and snarling dogs, of laughing officials and policemen, of homeless families crouched pitifully with their meagre possessions beside the road’.

Two years later, fastidious officials were tracking down ‘illegals’ in the suburbs. In human terms, the costs of the failing policy were high. A cameo from the heart of suburban Cape Town – recounted in a letter to a newspaper by a Newlands housewife – conveyed the irrationality and profound indignity of the enterprise:

Recently the Bantu Administration Inspectors did a raid in the Claremont/Newlands area. They picked up women coming back from church and shopping.

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