Fall of the Berlin wall - South Africa

No more excuses for apartheid

by Billie O'Kadameri

Article published on the 2009-10-29 Latest update 2009-11-04 11:41 TU

Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk receive the Nobel peace prize in 1993

South Africa's leaders claimed that apartheid was a bulwark against the onward march of communism. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet bloc deprived them of that argument and of their strategic value to their tacit and overt supporters abroad.

A apartheid sign bans blacks from entering an area
(Photo: El C)

The apartheid state in South Africa was in part a product of the global division that followed the end of World War II.

Racial segregation in South Africa was evident in colonial times. But apartheid as an official policy became entrenched after the 1948 elections brought the National Party to power. A new law classified the country’s inhabitants as "black", "white", "coloured" and "Indian".

By 1958, blacks were in effect deprived of their citizenship. The new legal regime declared them all citizens of one of the ten tribally-based self-governing homelands which became known as bantustans, under the apartheid regime. Some became nominally independent within the South African state, although they were never recognised as such internationally.

The white minority in South Africa opportunistically played the victim of the growing influence of communism, according to Professor Ali Mazrui, the Kenyan-born Director of the Institute for Global Cultural Studies.

Right from the infancy of the anti-apartheid resistance they portrayed it  as a Trojan Horse for global communism. The western world must therefore use the apartheid regime as its African rampart against the perceived spread of such an ideological threat, their argument ran.

They successfully played that card for decades, receiving tacit and sometimes overt support from the west.

Mazrui, an African historian and a widely published scholar on colonialism, decolonisation and apartheid, says there was a direct link between the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid.

Spurred on by its internal capacity and western backing, South Africa’s rate of economic growth in the 1960s was second only to Japan's. Trade with the West grew and investors flocked in, directly boosting the apartheid economic engine. 

Nelson Mandela in 1961

By 1964, African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela was behind bars, serving a life sentence. It appeared that resistance to the racist regime was completely crushed.

But the withdrawal of Portugal from Angola and Mozambique and the dogged support the anti-apartheid movements received from the recently-independent "frontline states" - Zambia, Tanzania, Mozambique and Angola - redrew the geopolitical map of southern Africa and extended the frontier of resistance to the white minority regime.

A combination of effective diplomatic isolation in the late 1970s and the 1980s began to take its toll on the apartheid regime and by 1987 the growth of South Africa’s economy had dropped to one of the lowest in the world.

President PW Botha softened his stance and began hinting at negotiation with the ANC. Mandela had become the world’s most famous political prisoner - a global symbol of resistance to apartheid.

Botha met Mandela, a previously inconceivable act. He went on to retire in August 1989, just weeks before the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

FW de Klerk, who replaced Botha, opened talks with Mandela and the ANC, leading to the release of the anti-apartheid leader in 1990 after 27 years in prison.

Mazrui believes that the fall of the Berlin Wall was to inform the decisions of both the apartheid government and the ANC in the run up to the formal end of apartheid.

The apartheid state no longer had any allies to prop it up and any claims of the regime serving as a vanguard against communism had been invalidated by the end of a bipolar political world.

The ANC found itself deprived of the support which the Soviet Union had given to African liberation movements that were combating colonial powers or white-dominated states like Rhodesia. 

Apart from international activist networks, anti-apartheid movements now found most of their support coming from African governments and a few countries like China, North Korea and Scandinavian states.

And the ANC feared that continued military resistance by its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), would be weakened. Although by 1990 Cuban aid had helped force South Africa out of Angola and led to the decolonisation of South-West Africa (Namibia), logistical support for MK was likely to be drastically reduced.

It was time to do a deal. The two sides talked, backed by a new world political order that wanted to exorcise apartheid as part of the political bad conscience that haunted the west.

A poster from the Mozambique war against Portuguese colonialism

The Berlin Wall effect had other far-reaching consequences for Africa, thinks Dr Peter Kagwanja, the Executive Director of the Africa Policy Institute.

It has led to the creation and strengthening of more secure states on the continent, he says. with emphasis on pro-people governments, rather than most African governments remaining as merely appendages of Moscow or the Washington-London-Paris axis.

On the negative side, it coincided with the collapse of the Somali state, which has never recovered to date. And Ethiopia, which under Haile Mariam Mengistu was an East German ally, was re-engineered as a federal republic, but with part of it breaking away to create the new state of Eritrea.

Mazrui says that the end of the Cold War meant that the big powers took their eyes off the continent.

"It reduced the strategic value of Africa," he points out, "because it ended the competition between big powers and their eagerness to get African allies. And it reduced motivation on the part of the eastern bloc to support Africa in United Nations institutions with votes and, in southern Africa, with arms for the struggle against apartheid."