Abstract
As the fourth African National Congress (ANC) leader to become the president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma once boasted that the party which had defeated racial segregation would rule the country “until Jesus comes.” 1 Twenty years on, the once exemplary democracy sees its very institutions crumbling under cronyism and corruption. Even before his 2016 Speech of the Nation was heckled by opposition, Zuma found himself grappling with disgruntled voters, racial tensions, and a largely self-inflicted economic crisis. 2 To fully understand present-day South African politics requires an understanding of the country’s past. Two books published on South African political history in 2014 can help us gain just that.
The first study is by Professor Saul Dubow of Queen Mary University of London, who has written extensively about his native country. His latest book focuses on the ideology and practice of apartheid and the way they were understood and resisted. The other book, by diplomat-scholar John Siko, focuses on political networks involved in South African foreign policy formulation. It examines the extent to which formerly disenfranchised groups have overcome the system of apartheid. Siko finished his research while working at the US embassy in Cape Town. Together, the books offer a comprehensive view of political mobilization under apartheid and its democratic successor.
Building ideologies, resisting power
Dubow has written a “reintegrated” history of the many sides of apartheid, woven from budding “histories from below” and an analysis of apartheid state power (ix). His study in state ideology and the social counter-movements resisting its implementation covers the span from the 1948 Malan government to the election of majority government in 1994. Throughout this period, an ideological conflict was fought between and among generations of government officials, social movements, and affected populations.
Interaction constitutes the central theme of Dubow’s book: the initiatives and exchanges of government and various societal actors. Dubow reintroduces contingency and historicity to the dusty narratives of apartheid and resistance. He synthesizes old and new scholarship on a host of political, biographical, and cultural dimensions and has a keen eye for diversities of gender, race, and language. This often leads him to revise the actual importance of events that would enter resistance lore. To give but one example, the Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960 was neither the worst example of callous government policies at that time, the author maintains, nor was the ANC’s subsequent choice for armed resistance as inevitable or uniformly shared as later contended.
Dubow’s elaborate rebuttal of “rise-and-fall” histories of apartheid describes the socio-economic, ideological, and spatial dimensions that combined to assure the surprising longevity of that system. From a winning 1948 electoral slogan and then ambivalent administrative segregation, apartheid became a robust ideology of Afrikaner Christian-nationalism that secured the dream of the 1961 republic, free from British tutelage. “Separate development” would become an article of faith, but its success had not been inevitable, nor was it secure. Accordingly, the eight loosely chronological chapters have the same move-and-countermove character.
Retracing the idea of apartheid from its colonial-era components to its 1960s hubris and traversal in the late 1980s shows the many turns in racist policy. Constantly evolving militant and military movements combined with ever-changing economic and international contexts to upset the governmental fiction of segregated and contented tribal nations. Even so, divisive measures and forced relocations hit populations unevenly, and resistance to them was not unified or wholly black.
Apartheid’s institution was littered with accident and contradiction, as were responses to it. Once established, it was both “an idea and reality” (290, one of Dubow’s shorter definitions), simultaneously cause and consequence. Apartheid’s ideology, policies, and practices increasingly diverged over time, making an accounting of it all the more difficult. Domestic factors of indoctrination, divide-and-rule, and patronage systems prevented apartheid from collapsing before it did. Ultimately, military impasse and fear forced government and opposition to negotiate. The many strands are revisited in the conclusion, which briefly alludes to the “long shadow of apartheid” (276) and aspirations as yet unfulfilled.
Access to power, interest in foreign policy
As his longer title suggests, John Siko’s subject is more specific but equally ambitious. His book connects no less than 113 interviews with key figures (sadly former president Mbeki declined a formal interview) to previous research on state power, such as works by Edwin Munger and Deon Geldenhuys. 3 Those familiar with Roger Pfister’s 1996 study will recognize Siko’s structure. 4 Within the South African context, the elitist and technocratic approaches to foreign policymaking appear to have changed less than the institution of majority rule and the formal abolition of apartheid in 1994 would lead us to believe.
Whereas Dubow’s study is largely the cultural history of an idea turned into a system, Siko presents a historical account of top-level decision-making on South African foreign policy. Since 1948, the state’s regional profile first surged and then transitioned from militancy to democracy. Others have already described the sea changes in South African foreign policy values. 5 Siko is more interested in the relational nuts and bolts of foreign policymaking, investigating the impact various institutions and their agents have, or want to have, on state foreign policy.
After giving the broad strokes of South African foreign policy from Smuts’ wartime presidency to Mbeki’s two presidential terms to 2008, Siko evaluates the influence of particular public interest groups, such as the shadowy (Afrikaner) Broederbond, business, the press, and political institutions on the policies of those government executives. Starting with public opinion and pressure groups, those ostensibly furthest from power, and ending with the presidents and prime ministers themselves, the actors and their involvement are assessed across eight chapters. Climbing the ladder of power, as it were, we can see the foreign policymaking process unfolding with each chapter. Reflecting access to primary sources, chapters often show a bias toward the post-1994 period. Testimonies are juxtaposed and placed in context, allowing the reader to form an opinion about the different actors involved.
Throughout the period under review, poor coordination between interest groups reduced their effective influence. The same untapped potential to influence policy was held by business. The traditionally docile approach of the mainstream press changed, but government distrust of the media did not help their new relation. During the 1980s academics were sometimes used as go-betweens in discussions with opposition groups. Academic contributions to government policies then surged post-1994, although not to the extent that academics would have liked. Like the ruling parties, the political opposition tended to focus on voters’ domestic concerns: “Parliament has never, neither before nor after 1994, meaningfully interjected itself into the foreign policy debate” (256). New consultation procedures introduced by democratic government often appeared meaningless to civic participants. Departmental heads alone had a measure of influence on elite foreign policymaking, depending on their department and their own willingness to engage in endless turf wars.
Apartheid’s divide-and-rule mechanisms of course inhibited the normal functioning of political frameworks, but Siko provides evidence to suggest that things have not materially changed from those days. Historical comparisons show the personality, interest, and decision-making style of the national leader as key determinants of external influence on foreign policy (258). Only Prime Minister Strijdom (1954–58) fully delegated the task to the Department of Foreign Affairs. Such foreign policy elitism continued even after the advent of democracy. Nelson Mandela and his “virtual prime minister” Thabo Mbeki on their own created South Africa’s good neighbour policy (244). Siko gives many examples of Thabo Mbeki’s stubborn technocratic mind-set. In fact, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence on ideology and foreign policy in both books to suggest that the present-day ANC’s combative, perhaps even consumerist 6 mentality can be traced back to the apartheid era.
Conclusion
Both books reviewed here provide engaging new material for specialists, students, and all who wish to understand more of today’s state of South Africa. Dubow does a remarkable job encapsulating the multifaceted generational struggle(s) to produce a counter-ideology to apartheid and the—rarely unified—sources of resistance. The extensive notes and reading guide direct interested readers to areas that of necessity have received less attention, such as the diplomatic and Cold War contexts. While succinct on individual actors and (international) events, his work confronts an array of debates concerning apartheid: its origins, effects, milestones, and demise. Given the generational dimension of the struggle on both sides, the importance of memory could have been treated more explicitly. The richness of this book also makes it less suitable as a primer on the subject. Siko’s conclusion is pessimistic on the prospects of the vox populi influencing foreign policy—despite successful opposition to President Mbeki’s stance on HIV treatment in Africa. Many voters continue to have more pressing needs than to worry about international affairs. In a way, Siko’s survey illustrates the perennial distance between voters and those at the very top of the South African government. As consecutive governments fail to deliver universal services, and with demands for redress of grievances being subverted or brutally repressed, protests have become more prominent and violent in the last decade. 7 This reminds us of the history described by Dubow. Today’s protests by marginalized communities are delegitimized as “unrest” and suppressed by a retrograde police function. Being denied a role in local development, the poor and disenfranchised create their own participatory space through disobedience and protest. 8 As will be clear from the previous discussion, these problems originate in part in institutions internalized beneath apartheid’s “long shadow.” 9
Footnotes
1
2
Norimitsu Onishi, “First black leader of South Africa’s opposition seeks to unseat the A.N.C.,” New York Times, 24 July 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/25/world/africa/mmusi-maimane-south-africa-democratic-alliance-anc.html (accessed 17 August 2015); “South Africa’s democracy: The hollow state,’ Economist, 19 December 2015, http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21684146-two-decades-after-south-africas-transition-non-racial-democracy (accessed 21 February 2016); Lynley Donnelly, “SONA 2016 analysis: Zuma’s ‘business as usual’ approach insufficient,” Mail & Guardian, 12 February 2016, 
(accessed 21 February 2016).
3
Deon Geldenhuys, The Diplomacy of Isolation: South African Foreign Policy Making (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1984); Edwin S. Munger, Notes on the Formation of South African Foreign Policy (Cape Town: The Castle Press, 1965).
4
Roger Pfister, Apartheid South Africa and African States: From Pariah State to Middle Power, 1961–1994 (London; New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 1996), chapter 2.
5
For example, Chris Landsberg, “Toward a developmental foreign policy? Challenges for South Africa’s diplomacy in the second decade of liberation,” Social Research 72, no. 3 (2005): 723–756; Rian Leith and Joelien Pretorius, “Eroding the middle ground: The shift in foreign policy underpinning South African nuclear diplomacy,” Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies 36, no. 3 (2009): 345–361; Matthew Graham, “Foreign policy in transition: The ANC’s search for a foreign policy direction during South Africa’s transition, 1990–1994,’ Round Table 101, no. 5 (2012): 405–423.
6
Deborah Posel, “Races to consume: Revisiting South Africa’s history of race, consumption and the struggle for freedom,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 33, no. 2 (2010): 157–175.
7
Mbekezeli C. Mkhize, “Is South Africa’s 20 years of democracy in crisis? Examining the impact of unrest incidents in local protests in the post-apartheid South Africa,” African Security Review 24, no. 2 (2015): 190–206.
8
Ibid., 199.