Goodbye to All That

by Cliopatria

South Africa’s National Party is no more. The party that created, refined, and oversaw Apartheid is tossed into the ashbin of history with the announcement this past weekend that it plans to dissolve and will likely merge with the African National Congress, the group it spent so much time, money, and human life trying to destroy and demonize in the more than forty lost years of systematized white supremacy.

This weekend the New National Party (it was renamed after the Nats pulled out of the Government of National Unity – GNU – in 1996) announced that it is folding its tent. In the 1994 elections F.W. DeKlerk’s party garnered a still-respectable 20% of the vote, firmly establishing themselves as an important player who would have a voice in the GNU. In the national elections held this April, the Nats managed to pull only 1.7% of the electorate even as Thabo Mbeki and the ANC drew a whopping 70%. Further, the NNP lost its grip on the Western Cape, the one province in which it continued to hold sway over the last decade. The party will continue to exist in name until next year’s elections, but for all intents and purposes, it ceased to be this weekend, even if it ceased to matter long ago.

The National Party held an iron grip over South African politics from 1948 into the early 1990s, outlawing the ANC (and the more radical Pan African Congress, PAC) from 1960 to Mandela’s release in 1990. Given that the only time the NP’s support ever dropped below 84% in the last three decades of its dominance, it is a bit shocking to visit South Africa these days and discover that apparently no whites actually supported Apartheid and the party that orchestrated it. Or perhaps it is simply a sign of progress that they are ashamed to admit as much. This is especially interesting when one notes that NP support only dipped below 84% when enough voters decided that the Nats were growing soft on matters racial, and that a breakaway faction, which came to be Transvaal NP leader Andrie Treurnicht’s Conservative Party, which criticized the NP from the right, better represented their interests. Treurnicht and his supporters left the party in February 1982 when P.W. Botha and the verligte (“enlightened”) wing of the NP attempted to initiate toothless, symbolic, reform in the guise of a “Tri-cameral parliament” that would give dubious voting rights and meaningless parliamentary representation to Indians and Coloureds but not to Africans in the early 1980s. (Neither house would have been able to outvote the white house of Parliament, thus making the representation in the Tri-cameral parliament all but worthless for nonwhites). Voters fled from the party in sufficient numbers to take the mantle of official opposition party from the liberal Progressives of Helen Suzman to the rabid Conservatives of Treurnicht, who took 17 seats in parliament.

In a sense, then, it is shocking that the National Party, in whatever form, managed to survive as long as it did. Over the course of the decade the National Party simply had a near impossible time determining what it stood for. This was not the sort of question that it had to ask in the decades after 1948. But once Mandela and the ANC won the 1994 elections by an overwhelming margin, and as the ANC consolidated its strength and support with each passing election, it was more and more clear that the Nats were simply interested in maintaining whatever power they could. Party leadership, embodied in Marthinus van Schalkwyk, whose detractors call him “Kortbroek,” (which means “Short pants” in Afrikaans – suffice it to say that this is not an endearing nickname), seemed far more interested in maintaining whatever access they could to the spoils of power and far less interested in proposing a viable alternative to the ANC.

It was time for the Nats to go. Forever the party would carry the legacy of apartheid, one of the more evil totalitarian ideologies in a century beset by evil totalitarianism. Its blending with the ANC may represent the final symbolic nail in the coffin of that racist regime. At the same time, it is becoming clear that a true, nonracial, conservative alternative must emerge to give South Africans a real choice in how they are governed. For many years observers of South African politics, yours truly among them, have argued that it was likely that the ANC alliance would splinter, with the more leftist Congress of South African Trade Unionions (COSATU) and South African Communist Party (SACP) forming their own separate coalition on the left, with the ANC as the dominant left-center party. This would leave room for the emergence of a legitimate conservative party based not on the old canards of race, but rather on a different conception on issues of, say, economic development or foreign policy. One can only hope that the demise of the National Party, the old dinosaur of apartheid, the party of Malan and Strijdom, Verwoerd and Vorster, Botha and de Klerk will prove to mark the ultimate end of one phase of South African history even as it signals the rebirth of another.

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E. Simon - 8/13/2004

My only conclusion:

Chris wants Israel to deny its Arab citizens the right to vote, officially relegate its Jews to second-, third-, or fourth-place status, subject its women to culturally "enlightening" restrictions on their personal life and place in society, restrict use of the internet, dissolve its parliament, institute a judicial tribunal as the sole arbiter of morality and political power, preclude itself from the ability to enforce *anything*, and then lament at how the resulting anarchy, loss of life, and missed opportunity for liberty now gives them a real chance to fight for "peace and justice." They would merge with the West Bank politically and their people's cause would be pleaded for on behalf of a revolutionary who wears sunglasses, totes an automatic weapon, and trots around the globe hobnobbing with celebrities, while he complains about all the evil to which they are subjected while he's off "on business" and away from the great losing and never-ending battle he's instructed them to fight.

Really Chris, you need to get a grip.

Derek Charles Catsam - 8/12/2004

Two interesting comparisons here, one fully valid, the other not.
Enough with the attempt to conflate Israel with South Africa. I am not even certain why Israel is being mentioned here, except as an axe to grind. My post has nothing to do with israel. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Why is Israel of all countries being singled out? Why is Israel, of all countries, being singled out even (especially?) amongst Middle Eastern states. How can one claim that Israel does not recognize human rights and equality (Pop quiz -- in which states in the Middle East can Arabs vote in free and fair elections and be represented in parliament? In which countries can Arabs take their cases, even cases against the state, to court? -- answer to both? None but Israel. Period.) So if we decide that of all of the countries we are going to pick on, we choose not Egypt or Stria or Jordan or Lebanon or Iraq or Iran or Yemen, but rather we pick on the only liberal democracy in the area. Of course these criticisms have nothing to do with Israel being a Jewish state -- naw, that's just coincidence that we criticize Israel and give Syria a pass. (Interesting also that no one notes that what is now the West Bank and Gaza was not, prior to 1967, Palestinian land, but rather that they were dominated by Jordan and Egypt respectively, neither of which had shown any inclination to use those lands to create a Palestine even as they were talking about wiping Jews off the face of the planet. Ahh, but these are facts and thus not within the ambit of the hate Israel crowd.).
The relevant parallel, of course, is with US history. I am on the editorial board of Safundi, a journal of comparative US-South African studies, and as time has passed, more and more really solid work is being done in this area. George Fredrickson and John Cell wrote seminal works of comparative history that have provided a springboard to this sort of work, which is rich in its implications and which also might just provide something of a usable past, especially in South Africa.
I absolutely agree with Oscar's contention that whites simply deny the benefit that they got from apartheid, which is insane. From cradle to grave white Soiuth Africans benefitted from a system that gave them access to the best schools, the best jobs, the best plots of land, the best services, the best everything. Unlike in the US, there was not even an effort to engage in "equalization," the chimera of "separate development" notwithstanding. Thus a mere ten years after Nelson Mandela rose to become the first legitimate president of South Africa, whites will already complain about blacks complaining (one of the more loathsome epithets whites threw around during the 1990s was to label the TRC the "Crying Commission" because, shockingly, many tears were shed as victims recounted horrors they faced and families sat as security force members told in vivid detail about murders they had committed and covered up for years, sometimes decades. The utter unwillingness to face the fact that apartheid was not merely "bad" but evil will continue to hamstring South Africa.
The fact remains that until opposition becomes multiracial -- which is to say, until a conservative coalition of blacks and whites, and a leftist coalition of blacks and whites, and perhaps others, emerge alongside the ANC, politics in South Africa will continue to break don along lines of race, at least as a rhetorical tool, from both blacks and whites.
As for Jonathan's point -- let there be no mistake. Whites supported apartheid, and they did so ardently. By 1990 or so, the ANC, UDF, and others had made it untenable, but even heading into CODESA whites and the NP firmly believed that they could emerge without conceding one person, one vote.
dc

Ralph E. Luker - 8/12/2004

Absolutely, Oscar. If all my friends who remember having been active in the civil rights movement had actually been active in the civil rights movement, there would have been little struggle. We'd have all been on the same side.

Oscar Chamberlain - 8/12/2004

If the American South is at all analagous, then perhaps one key to the ability of S. A. whites to distance themselves from apartheid is that they seriously underestimate the degree of advantage that apartheid brought them as individuals.

By underestimating those advantages, they can label any post-apartheid losses as sacrifices, thus enhancing their sense of morality. Happily, this also has the consequence of binding them tothe new non-apartheid world.

Concerning the support for American apartheid, I think many white southerners did recognize it was wrong even as they gained from it. All but a few, alas, confuse having recognized that it was wrong with having opposed it in action.

chris l pettit - 8/11/2004

Now how much of this can we apply to Israel today? What will it take to get the extremists out of power and how long will it take for those who are supporters (blatant or "just going along with it") to deny that they ever supported the US or the Zionists?

Can Israel actually become a country based on progressive human rights and equality, as South Africa is trying to become now? Will the Arab states allow it or insist on their own intolerance? Will the Palestinians be able to throw off their own extremist "representatives" and work towards human rights and peace? How does this relate to the one state versus two state solutions? Will Israel actually react to the coming international boycott and isolation, led by South Africa, or will it continue to simply rely and survive on US patronage, much as the apartheid regime did during its death throes?

Being in South Africa at the moment, I can affirm that these questions are heavy on the minds of academics at the University of Cape Town where I am currently lecturing and elsewhere throughout the academic and governmental communities in the country. There was a huge piece in the Cape Times the other day about South Africa's role in the fight to sanction Israel and strip the government of UN status, at least in the GA, and there has been much academic discussion of the United for Peace Resolution that would allow the UNGA to have the power to issue a legally binding resolution if the US (or any other P5 member) were to veto a Chapter 7 resolution against Israel. Fascinating stuff...and the similarities to the Southwest Africa situation of 1971 and the ensuing 1974 resolutions and UN boycott are eerie. This is not to say that there are not differences, as I am sure will be vehemently voiced, but in term of human rights and equality, the issues are very much the same.

It is a great thing that the NP has dissolved (absorbed by the ANC strangely enough) although it had been coming for quite some time, as DC rightly notes. Now it is time to look and move ahead...and I feel very privileged to be able to be here experiencing it all.

CP
www.wicper.org

Jonathan Dresner - 8/10/2004

You note that "t is a bit shocking to visit South Africa these days and discover that apparently no whites actually supported Apartheid and the party that orchestrated it." It could indeed be a shame reaction. Or it could be more analogous to the Japanese post-war reaction, which took the change of government as a form of group dispensation.

Or it could be (and this argument comes up in the Japan case as well as the German one, and in neither is it entirely persuasive) that Apartheid was a policy strongly desired by a few, and consented to without great enthusiasm by a majority which feared being attacked by the radical minority apparently in charge. This would, in part, account for the relative ease of the transition, the relatively rapid dissolution of the NP after the transition, and the "I never liked it" reactions you note.

Just a thought.