Apartheid fighter Frederik van Zyl Slabbert dies

[DavidDvorkin]

Source: BBC

South Africa's governing African National Congress has paid tribute to the apartheid-era politician Frederik van Zyl Slabbert who has died aged 70.

Mr Slabbert was best known for his efforts in the late 1980s to open up dialogue between Afrikaners and the then-exiled ANC.

He was one of the few members of South Africa's white-dominated parliament to oppose apartheid.

The ANC said he had made an "indelible mark" in fighting white minority rule.

Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8683015.stm

---

The article also mentions that he almost didn't go into politics and was convinced to do so after a hard night's drinking. History turns on such little things!

[Judi Lynn]

1. Although it's a sad time for people who knew him learning he's gone,

a sad time for a good man to disappear from the face of the earth, the timing is so helpful in reminding people that all the white minority in South Africa was not evil, just as a true racist, murderous monster's death was announced within the last week.

Thanks for posting the news this man existed at all, for those who were not aware.

http://www.stellenboschwriters.com.nyud.net:8090/vanzyl-slabbert.jpg

Frederik van Zyl Slabbert
will be missed by many.

[DavidDvorkin]

2. As a former South African, I like to remind people

that Apartheid was voted out in a referendum by the white population.

[tabatha]

4. In every population, there are good people and bad people.

Despite that, a country can behave as an evil country or a good country, depending who has the reins of power - e.g. Bush/Cheney.

[struggle4progress]

5. That is, of course, the population that invented and imposed apartheid, and it is the population

that planned to perpetuate by apartheid by stripping the majority of citizenship

[tabatha]

6. The population did not come up with the concept of aparthied.

It was the leaders.

And amongst the Whites who were allowed to vote, just less than half supported the United Party not the Nationalist Party --- so it was NOT the entire population, it was slightly over half, mostly by Afrikaners.

If you know South African history, there was animosity between the English and Afrikaans speakers.

I once sat behind a woman on the bus before an election, and she was voting for the Nationalist Party based solely on what the English did to the Boers - putting their women in concentration camps, where thousands died.

[struggle4progress]

7. South Africa had, for many years, a political-economic system that

disenfranchised almost everyone in the entire country for the purposes of exploiting their labor. This system of disenfranchisement and exploitation was associated with a violent repressive apparatus, that relocated communities at gunpoint, that silenced and tortured and imprisoned and murdered dissenters, that constructed elaborate racial fables to justify the exploitation ...

Race, of course, is a myth: there is no such thing. The actual "meaning" of a concept can be found only in the uses of the concept, and the real use of "race" in apartheid South Africa (just as in Jim Crow America) was to obscure the underlying exploitation and to derail attention from the exploitation into a meaningless "racial" discussion. Of course, you are completely correct, if you want to say that anti-apartheid work in South Africa involved people in many different social/cultural groups and with widely varying epidermal hues and facial features -- and that it surprisingly included a number of people who belonged to social/cultural groups that objectively benefited from the exploitation

I do not mean to downplay the various roles played by any of those who opposed apartheid. The peaceful dismantling of the apartheid system is a splendid historical example, so far as it goes. The actual ground game seems to have been quite complicated: it involved a long struggle to produce a mass consciousness that was generally peaceful but remained militant and focussed on grassroots organizing and that nevertheless threatened to lose patience and to meet the violence of the apartheid regime with a counter-violence from the organized masses. This strategy successfully split the privileged classes, because everyone would obviously benefit more from a tolerant multicultural society than from a country lying in smoking ruins where the survivors scowled at each other through the wreckage

So the antiapartheid forces won, in part, by shifting the center among those privileged few allowed to vote: the critical mass certainly included long-term opponents of apartheid, but it also included various long-term proponents of apartheid and quite a number of people who had previously waffled on this key issue of the time

Forgive me if my earlier post appeared to broadbrush. I did not intend to do so. I think the whole story is complicated and involves considerable heroism, brilliant analysis, and tireless grassroots work by the opponents of the apartheid regime. It is true that the privileged minority did eventually vote to disassemble the system: but getting to that moment was a gigantic labor, mostly done by anonymous people with very limited rights. And it involved substantial compromises, which left certain serious social contradictions intact

[tabatha]

12. Some points in response

South Africa had, for many years, a political-economic system that disenfranchised almost everyone in the entire country for the purposes of exploiting their labor. This system of disenfranchisement and exploitation was associated with a violent repressive apparatus, that relocated communities at gunpoint, that silenced and tortured and imprisoned and murdered dissenters, that constructed elaborate racial fables to justify the exploitation ...

--- Actually, the master servant relationship started almost as soon as whites arrived in the country; especially by the British. However, the violent repressive apparatus only began after 1948, when the Nats came into power - but only after the official "Apartheid" policy was devised.

Race, of course, is a myth: there is no such thing.

--- Duh; i think most people know that now.

The actual "meaning" of a concept can be found only in the uses of the concept, and the real use of "race" in apartheid South Africa (just as in Jim Crow America) was to obscure the underlying exploitation and to derail attention from the exploitation into a meaningless "racial" discussion. Of course, you are completely correct, if you want to say that anti-apartheid work in South Africa involved people in many different social/cultural groups and with widely varying epidermal hues and facial features -- and that it surprisingly included a number of people who belonged to social/cultural groups that objectively benefited from the exploitation

--- At the school that I went to in Pretoria, we had a class called social studies - where we were taught that the African people were best suited for manual and menial labor - according to the syllabus given to us by the Dept of Education. However, there were many teachers who were very progressive. Also, every pupil in that school was required to knit a jersey for a Black child each year.

I had some Afrikaans friends who were progressive, and encountered some English speaking people who were critical of the Blacks. One said she could not understand why they burned their schools in the early uprisings; another, from Rhodesia, made some remark about "so they think they can run a country". I would say those remarks were not based on race, but disdain for them as a social group.


I do not mean to downplay the various roles played by any of those who opposed apartheid. The peaceful dismantling of the apartheid system is a splendid historical example, so far as it goes. The actual ground game seems to have been quite complicated: it involved a long struggle to produce a mass consciousness that was generally peaceful but remained militant and focussed on grassroots organizing and that nevertheless threatened to lose patience and to meet the violence of the apartheid regime with a counter-violence from the organized masses.

--- Older African people were respectful and would never have thought about rioting or protesting. It was only until youngsters got angry, supported by many whites, that the riots occurred - especially as the rules of Apartheid began to be more aggressively implemented, such as moving whole groups of people to inferior land.

This strategy successfully split the privileged classes, because everyone would obviously benefit more from a tolerant multicultural society than from a country lying in smoking ruins where the survivors scowled at each other through the wreckage

--- Split the privileged classes, how? Mandela and especially Mbeki bent over backwards not to disrupt the privilege of the whites, ostensibly so that they would not leave South Africa after 1994. Some people in the country think that some manifestations of Apartheid have not ended, because the poverty issue has not been fixed.

So the antiapartheid forces won, in part, by shifting the center among those privileged few allowed to vote: the critical mass certainly included long-term opponents of apartheid, but it also included various long-term proponents of apartheid and quite a number of people who had previously waffled on this key issue of the time

--- I think you need to read some books about how it all ended. You may be surprised.

Forgive me if my earlier post appeared to broadbrush. I did not intend to do so. I think the whole story is complicated and involves considerable heroism, brilliant analysis, and tireless grassroots work by the opponents of the apartheid regime. It is true that the privileged minority did eventually vote to disassemble the system: but getting to that moment was a gigantic labor, mostly done by anonymous people with very limited rights. And it involved substantial compromises, which left certain serious social contradictions intact

--- You have written a whole bunch of nonsensical words to try to seem as though you know what you are talking about.

[struggle4progress]

13. I followed the issue quite closely for a number of years. I belonged to groups

that brought ANC speakers and other persons to the town in which I then lived; in the pre-computer era, we got our information from newsletters and journals and similar publications. The Watch Committees (which became Human Rights Watch), Amnesty International, and the International Commission of Jurists all issued useful reports in the 1980s, and from time to time other sources (like the Index on Censorship) helped track who was under banning orders. Excellent materials were available from the American Friends Service Committee. Some people I worked with spent months studying interlocking boards of directorates to try to identify which local companies had the strongest ties to the apartheid regime. I went to DC and NYC to use resources there. TransAfrica allowed me to sit in their office one week to read through some of the Surplus Peoples Project documentation. I lectured in classrooms on the idiotic racial classification schemes involving things like "does a pencil fall out of the child's hair?" In the second half of the 1980s, we followed from afar the changing nature of the opposition as it moved into a political front, which was banned, and then moved into the labor union movement. The Committee for Constitutional Rights Under Law had me on their mailing list until after the transition, and I used their mailing to help a South African in NC find the appropriate polling place in Raleigh to vote as an ex-pat (even though I was appalled she was an Inkatha supporter)

I'm not an expert on South Africa, but in the pre-video era I hauled projectors around week after week for a number of years to show movies to small groups to organize anti-apartheid activities in the small town in which I lived. I bet I could still go to a library today, pull a book of essays from the 1970s or 80s off the shelf, and tell you (after reading just a few sentences) which essays were written by Afrikaaners, because they had a distinct analytical style that focussed entirely on "tribal history." I memorized what pictures were in Trevor Huddleston's book so I could argue with the lies about Sharpeville ("the crowd pushed down the fence and the police shot in self defense." "No, we have pictures of the fence standing after the massacre, and most people were shot in the back"). I argued with rightwingers who claimed "South Africa is Israel's only friend" or who supported the idiotic bantustan scheme as if it represented a step forward for democracy or who spouted the then-current excuse that the US had to support the Nats because they were a bulwark of anti-communism in Africa or who pushed crap like Arthur Anderson monitoring the Sullivan principles

There was no one magic bullet. The ANC adopted a dual strategy that not only offered a friendly hand but simultaneously threatened a clenched fist. From outside the country, there was an international solidarity movement working for a boycott, which the rightwing here claimed would only hurt poor South Africans, and which essentially every South African I met nevertheless supported. Amnesty International groups wrote letters for political prisoners. University student groups pushed for divestment. There were, from time to time, relevant bills in Congress

When Mandela was released and apartheid fell apart, my jaw hit the floor: Holy shit! This stuff really works!

[tabatha]

16. It is also because there was a group of people

who were receptive. It would only work if they were.
South Africans were far more integrated with Blacks than in the US.
In fact, there was a decent Black middle class by the time Apartheid ended, and almost all Bank Tellers were Blacks.
So it was a natural progression made easier by Mandela.

However, there are still a Whites who are not thrilled, and thought Mandela was a big mistake (if you can believe that).

[struggle4progress]

14. Let us now turn to your question "Split the privileged classes, how?"

Apartheid lasted decades. If more of the privileged minority had really opposed it earlier, it would have ended earlier. In fact, for quite a number of years, the actual opposition was token. The ANC in the 1950s decided on a more militant opposition; in response there were treason trials, and the organization was banned. The government step by step broke up integrated communities and shipped people away to poverty in wastelands. Most opposition was token: the Black Sash stood up and protested quietly, or Helen Suzman used her elected position to demand some details, or SAIRR gathered some statistics, or people went to court and lost. Meanwhile, the government propagandists warned that the "bantus" wanted only to steal everything the "white Africans" had and drive them out of the country: "into the sea" was the actual catch phrase. The ground game was to unify the majority population politically, despite continuing efforts by the ruling class to divide psychologically everyone into little tribal ethnic groups spread across geographically fragmented "homelands." To win this fight, the "homelands" had to be discredited as a viable political solution; the ruling class had to be convinced that a peaceful solution was actually possible; and the majority of the population had to demonstrate that it was organized, peacefully to show a peaceful solution was possible, but with enough discipline to make credible the threat of violent retaliation against the regime by the military wings such as Umkhonto we Sizwe

This project required some years. Looking back, I suspect the moment, at which victory really became inevitable, was the moment at which the UDF was banned, and COSATU stepped into its place: the idea of flexible mass organization had been assimilated, and so the opposition could repeat, again and again, to the government Let us handle this situation like adults. By taking land reform off the table, the opposition was able to defuse "they want to drive us into the sea" claims; this convinced a certain number of fence-sitters; and so a negotiated settlement was possible. But other outcomes would also have been possible; by the late 1980s, South Africa was really in a state of political crisis, and absent the settlement, other less happy outcomes were imaginable

[tabatha]

17. White privilege today

White power depends on the extent to which people deny these contradictions. Similarly, in South Africa white power has been perpetuated after 1994 by the denial of how white privilege was achieved. We hear this in some white people’s insistence that they “have worked hard” for what they have and therefore see no reason for ameliorative steps such as the employment equity and black economic empowerment laws.

While some white people might have worked hard, this is not the full story by any means. The omission of the more decisive factors (the systematic colonial and apartheid advancement of white interests combined with the undermining of black people’s interests) serves a clear function because it obviates the need to take responsibility. Comprehensive redress is thus avoided, which is why socio-economic inequality in South Africa remains staggeringly high.
http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/christivanderwesthuizen/2008/01/29/whiteprivil_anc/

Apartheid is dead in South Africa, but a new version of white supremacy lives on.

“During apartheid, the racism of white people was up front, and we knew what we were dealing with,” Nkwame Cedile, a Black South African, told me. “Now white people smile at us, but for most Black people the unemployment and grinding poverty and dehumanizing conditions of everyday life haven’t changed. So, what kind of commitment to justice is under that smile?”

As he offered me his views on the complex politics of his country, Cedile, a field worker in Cape Town for the People’s Health Movement, expressed a frustration I heard often in my two weeks in the country: Yes, the brutality of apartheid ended in 1994 with free elections, but the white-supremacist ideas didn’t magically evaporate.
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=126539976176

It ain't split yet.

[struggle4progress]

18. Many thanks for the links!

[David__77]

8. In the face of armed struggle, total international isolation, and economic decline.

The heroes of MK and POQO deserve their due as well. The vast majority of those whites cared not one bit until their daily lives were affected. Revolutionary armed struggle works.

[DavidDvorkin]

9. Television

When the government finally allowed TV in South Africa, that was the beginning of the end for Apartheid.

[David__77]

10. I recall the old state propaganda against the ANC

Dark music, hammer and sickle, reports of "terror" in Angola and Mozambique that would surely befall the whites were the Soviet plan for southern Africa succeed. It was be interesting if these were on youtube...

[tabatha]

11. It was the same fear tactics used by Bush = maybe he learned from them.

[DavidDvorkin]

15. Beaming the Bill Cosby show directly into homes

was the best counterforce to that sort of thing.

[tabatha]

3. I once heard him give a talk at a conference.

He was a good man, and died too young.

More here:

http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Van-Zyl-Slabbert-died-peacefully-20100514

Also, an interview (references Mandela and rugby)

http://www.oldmutual.co.za/podcasts/JOHN_AND_FRED.mp3