Apartheid and Its End

The first account is the movement's own, and it does not apologize for the guerrilla war.

After Sharpeville, decades of petitioning were judged to have failed. Mandela went underground, trained in Algeria and Ethiopia, and was captured in August nineteen sixty two.

On Robben Island the prisoners built what they called a university. Walter Sisulu, who had recruited Mandela to the ANC in nineteen forty four, served beside him there for twenty five years. Oliver Tambo ran the movement from exile in Lusaka for thirty years, and built the network that isolated the regime abroad.

Its case is that the transition was not a defeat. The ANC gave up immediate majority rule. De Klerk gave up white minority rule. Neither side capitulated.

Mandela put the argument this way, in nineteen ninety four.

The second account begins in eighteen thirty eight, at Blood River, where four hundred and seventy Voortrekkers defeated an estimated fifteen to twenty thousand Zulu warriors without a single Boer death. It called that a sign.

In the second Anglo Boer War, the British interned a hundred and sixteen thousand Afrikaner women and children in camps. Twenty seven thousand nine hundred and twenty seven died, most of them children under sixteen. For Afrikaners this was proof the English speaking world would destroy them given the chance.

Verwoerd argued apartheid was not oppression but separate development: each group governing itself, developing at its own pace, the way Britain was granting independence to its own African colonies.

Verwoerd told Parliament this in nineteen fifty nine.

De Klerk's negotiations were received by many Afrikaners as betrayal.

The third account says the first two are not the whole picture, and its target was not only the state.

Steve Biko was twenty three when he founded the South African Students' Organisation in nineteen sixty eight. His sharper argument was with white liberals who ran multiracial groups on their own terms and called it inclusion.

Liberation, Biko argued, had to start in the mind.

The students who marched in Soweto in nineteen seventy six were not ANC. The ANC had been banned for sixteen years. They were Biko's students, and their refusal to be taught in Afrikaans spread the uprising to a hundred and sixty communities.

Biko was arrested near Grahamstown in August nineteen seventy seven. He died in custody the next month, at thirty, of injuries police called a scuffle. The minister of justice said his death left him cold.

The fourth account measures the distance between condemnation and cost.

The United Nations made the arms embargo mandatory in nineteen seventy seven, the first mandatory sanctions against a member state in its history. But the sharper weapon was sport. South Africa was expelled from the Olympic movement in nineteen seventy, and exclusion from rugby and cricket wounded Afrikaner identity in a way trade restrictions never did.

By nineteen eighty eight, a hundred and fifty five American companies had divested. Chase Manhattan's refusal in nineteen eighty five to renew short term loans cost the rand thirty five percent of its value in two weeks and forced a debt standstill.

Its case also names who slowed it down. Margaret Thatcher opposed sanctions at every Commonwealth summit.

The United States Congress overrode Reagan's veto and passed sanctions into law anyway, in October nineteen eighty six.

The fifth account is the one that had to end the other four without a war.

The security forces would not accept a transition that ended in trials. The ANC could not accept a blanket amnesty. The compromise, one sentence in the nineteen ninety three interim constitution, called for ubuntu, not vengeance.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu chaired the commission that followed. Between April nineteen ninety six and July nineteen ninety eight, it heard testimony from more than twenty one thousand victims and received more than seven thousand applications for amnesty.

Tutu's theology reframed the whole exercise.