TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Chapter 7

Subsection 11

The apartheid context

75 The third and most direct political context was the NP policy of apartheid, long rooted in colonialism and segregation, but increasingly from 1948 – and particularly after the banning of the PAC and the ANC in 1960 – involving a direct struggle between oppressed and oppressor: an armed conflict which gradually intensified over the subsequent years. Here of course the political perspectives differed widely. For the PAC the conflict was:

A national liberation struggle against settler colonialism for the restoration of our land to its rightful owners – the African majority.

76 For the ANC, apartheid was, quite starkly: “a crime against humanity”.

77 By contrast, for supporters of the NP, ‘separate development’ was a defensible policy fashioned in order to solve local problems. The NP submission to the Commission on 21 August 1996 states that:

We thought we could solve the complex problems that confronted us by giving each of the ten distinguishable Black South African nations self-government and independence in the core areas that they had traditionally occupied … The underlying principle of territorial partition to assure self-determination for different peoples living in a common area was widely accepted.

78 Further on, the same NP submission says:

The great majority of those who served in the security forces during the conflict were honourable, professional and dedicated men and women. They were convinced that their cause was just, necessary and legitimate.

The perception of those on the side of the Government was accordingly that the installation of an ANC Government would lead to Communist domination. They believed that in conducting their struggle against the ANC, they were playing an important role in the West’s global resistance to the expansion of Soviet Communism.

79 How did the purported idealism of the apparently righteous struggle of the Afrikaners for self-determination go wrong? Here again, not surprisingly, there are differing political perspectives. For Mr FW de Klerk, who repeatedly stated that he had no knowledge of NP or cabinet authorisation of gross human rights violations, things went wrong because:

You cannot fight that type of thing in the normal way.

80 The result, according to the NP submission, was:

… more authority to the security people to fight a very specific kind of war, and across the world where this type of war occurred there have been these aberrations.

81 The version of the Freedom Front submission was that Afrikaners, rooted originally in the ideals of ‘freedom from bondage’, gradually lost their way and, during this process, the NP denied “on a racial basis, democratic rights to others” and found themselves “far removed from their traditional value systems”. According to General Constand Viljoen, the NP –

started slipping and they had to resort to unconventional devices, propaganda and group force in order to keep political control.

82 The ANC submission puts a different argument:

Apartheid oppression and repression was therefore not an aberration of a wellintentioned undertaking that went horribly wrong. Neither was it, as we were told later, an attempt to stave off the ‘evil of communism’. Its ideological underpinnings and the programmes set in motion constituted a deliberate and systematic mission of a ruling clique that saw itself the champion of a ‘super-race’. In order to maintain and reproduce a political and social order which is premised upon large-scale denial of human rights, far reaching and vicious criminal, security and penal codes were necessary … the system increasingly relied upon intimidation, coercion and violence to curb and eliminate the opposition that apartheid inevitably engendered.

83 Racism, as a central ideological ingredient at the core of the political struggle, was unfortunately underplayed in the NP submission. Racism as an ideology, a means of domination and oppression, provided the central grounds for the systematic exclusion, segregation and denigration of the black majority. Racism is a systematic ideological doctrine which creates the ‘other’ as essentially different. In South Africa this was the rhetorical basis for apartheid and ‘separate development’: blacks required development, but at their own, slower and different pace, since (as the argument went) they were essentially different from the more civilised, developed people of European origins. Not only politicians but also leading academics, scientists, theologians and churches such as the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) provided constant fuel to bolster such ideological positions. Racism, it hardly bears reminding, also served to distance and to dehumanise the black ‘other’, a process which opened the way for violence. In the practice of torture, for instance, black people were more severely brutalised in the main than white people.

84 These three political frameworks, the cold war, anti-colonialism and the racist and oppressive apartheid regime, ideologically fuelled by Christian-Nationalism and increasing militarism, provided the arguments and justifications, the passions and the furies for the eventual commission of dreadful deeds. If political frameworks provide the fuel for atrocities, they must also form the focus of primary attention for future prevention. Political contexts do not, however, provide the full set of explanations.