A SHORT HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA

HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA

SOUTH AFRICA - RAINBOW NATION

A SHORT HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA

Gold and war

Britain achieved a temporary expansion of its southern African rule in the politically unstable north, where the unpopularity of President TF Burgers opened the way for Britain to annex the Transvaal in 1877. It lost control again after a rebellion that dealt another blow to the military pride of the empire at Majuba. The eventual resolution was the granting of qualified independence in 1881 and full internal autonomy in 1884 - by which time the conservative and intensely pro-Afrikaner Paul Kruger had been elected president of the restored, but financially strapped, republic.

Two years later, when gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand, Kruger presided over a financial turnaround of spectacular proportions - but he also saw a serious threat to Afrikaner independence develop as huge numbers of newcomers, mostly British, descended on the gold fields. Without urgent action, these people (the uitlanders) would soon qualify for the vote. The response was to create stringent franchise qualifications, an action which, with its 14-year residence stipulation, would at least postpone the difficulty.

In the Cape, however, Rhodes had become Prime Minister. His overriding vision of a federation of British-controlled states in southern Africa was well served by the growing discontent of the uitlanders and exasperation of the mining magnates in the ZAR. His first attempt at takeover, however, came to an ignominious end when his plan to have Leander Starr Jameson lead a raid into Johannesburg in response to a planned uitlander uprising failed. The uprising did not happen: Jameson rode precipitously into the Transvaal and had to surrender. Rhodes resigned.

The Jameson Raid had a polarising effect. Afrikaners in the Cape and the Orange Free State, though disapproving of Kruger in many ways, became more sympathetic to his anti-British stance. The Orange Free State, under President MT Steyn, formed a military alliance with the Transvaal. In Britain, however, Rhodes and Jameson were popular heroes. It kept up the pressure on Kruger and the Anglo-Boer/South African War began in October 1899. Up to half a million British soldiers squared up against some 65 000 Boers; black South Africans were pulled into the conflict on both sides.

Again Britain's military reputation suffered a blow as the Boers set siege to Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking (Mafikeng - home at the time to a young black diarist named Sol Plaatje, whose initially pro-British attitudes were to be severely shaken by the shameful treatment of the town's black inhabitants during the siege). Under Major General Herbert Kitchener and Field Marshal Sir Frederick Sleigh Roberts, however, the British offensive gained force and by 1900 Bloemfontein, Johannesburg and Pretoria were occupied. Kruger fled for Europe.

The Boer reply was to intensify guerilla war - General Jan Smuts, who had been Kruger's state attorney, led his troops to within 190km of Cape Town - and in response Kitchener adopted a scorched-earth policy and set up racially separate civilian concentration camps in which some 26 000 Boer women and children and 14 000 black and coloured people were to die in appalling conditions. The war ended in Boer defeat at the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902.

Union and the ANC

Many blacks saw the British victory as the hoped-for opportunity to put all four colonies on an equal and just footing, but the treaty left their franchise rights to be decided by the white authorities. The ex-Boer republics retained the whites-only franchise. In 1909 a delegation appointed by the South African Native Convention, including representatives of the coloured and Indian populations, went to London to plead the case of the country's black population. But when the Union of South Africa came into being on 31 May 1910 the only province with a non-racial franchise was the Cape, and blacks were barred from being members of parliament. Of the estimated 6 million inhabitants of the Union in that year, 67% were black African, 9% coloured and 2,5% Asian.

The South African Party, a merging of the previous Afrikaner parties, held power under the premiership of General Louis Botha. Repressive measures to entrench white power were not long in coming - the Masters and Servants Act, the reservation of skilled work for whites, pass laws, the Native Poll Tax and the 1913 Land Act which reserved 90% of the country for white ownership.

By the time this act was passed, the African National Congress (ANC) had come into being on January 8 1912, in Bloemfontein, in an act of unity joining an educated elite, the rural classes and tribal structures. The committee included Sol Plaatje as secretary; the first president of the ANC was the Rev John L Dube. Both formed part of a second unsuccessful delegation to London, this time to protest the land grab.

Resistance started to assume a more outspoken and militant form, especially when several hundred black women marched in Bloemfontein to protest against being forced to buy passes every month. Similar protests were held in other places, and participants arrested. The women were harshly treated in jail.

The Indian community were also suffering under viciously racist treatment - in 1891 they had been expelled from the Orange Free State altogether. Mohandas Gandhi, then a young lawyer who had arrived in South Africa in 1892, had become a leading figure in Indian resistance. The struggle against the £3 Indian poll tax in Natal involved a mass strike in which a number of Indians were killed, but achieved success when the tax was removed in 1914 - the year Gandhi, then known as Mahatma, left the country.

In the white camp, Botha and Smuts were in favour of reconciliation with English South Africans. But they did not represent the whole of the embittered Afrikaner nation and JBM Hertzog formed the more conservative Nationalist Party. Afrikaner polarisation assumed dramatic form when South Africa entered the First World War in support of Britain and anti-British Afrikaners unsuccessfully rebelled.

Still hoping for support from the British government - there had been further delegations - the ANC supported involvement in the war and unknown numbers of black soldiers died.

(South Africa gained control over the previously German-held South West Africa - now Namibia - as a result of the war; the territory became a Union mandate.)

With the inspiration of the October Revolution in Russia, the post-war period was marked by strike action. In 1918 a million black mine workers went on strike for higher wages, and 71 000 did the same in 1920 - the latter strike successfully extracting a wage increase. Between those strikes, 1919 saw the formation of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union of South Africa and the convening of the SA Indian Congress. In the same year Botha died and Smuts became Prime Minister.

If official (white) South Africa was taking its place in the wider world as a result of the First World War, the ANC was beginning to see itself as part of the wider African efforts against colonialism in Africa. In its 1918 constitution it referred to itself as a "Pan African Association" and the organisation attended the second congress of the international Pan African Movement in 1921 (not to be confused with the later South African Pan-Africanist Congress).

Another strike was looming on the mines - by a different group of miners. Rising costs and a falling gold price led the Chamber of Mines to allow the lower-paid African miners to do semi-skilled work. White miners reacted violently in a 1922 strike, militarily suppressed by Smuts. Hertzog's Nationalists found increased support in the white Labour Party, and an election pact saw Smuts ousted and Hertzog as Prime Minister in 1924.

The next decade saw Hertzog successfully working for increased independence from British control and greater job reservation security for whites. Franchise acts extended the vote to all white men and women, but left the still existing black vote in the Cape restricted to men.

The government's popularity with its voters declined, however, with economic depression in the early '30s, forcing Hertzog into a Smuts coalition government in 1933 (the year before South Africa became independent from Great Britain). Their parties fused as the United Party, but Hertzog's move was balanced by the breaking away on the right of DF Malan's new Nationalist Party as a political home for the more extreme Afrikaner nationalists. Not that the new government displayed any noticeable leftist tendencies: in 1936 black Cape voters were removed from the common roll; in the following year laws were passed to stem black urbanisation and compel municipalities to segregate black African and white residents.

The Hertzog-Smuts coalition fell apart with the Second World War, Smuts winning the power battle to form a government that took South Africa into the war. Afrikaner opposition to the war strengthened Malan's support base. At the same time, developments in the ANC symbolically marked the start of what was to be nearly 50 years of head-to-head conflict between that organisation and the Nationalist Party. In April 1944 the ANC Youth League was formed. Its first president was AM Lembede (who died three years later); Nelson Mandela was its secretary. Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu were among those who came to the fore as the influence of the Youth League in the broader ANC increased.

It was a time of rapid industrial expansion but skilled work remained the domain of whites. On the other hand, the black influx into urban areas combined with the continuing repression strengthened black resistance. A Bill introduced by Smuts in 1946, for instance, aimed at curtailing the movement, residence and property ownership of Indians led to mass defiance and the rapid expansion of the Natal Indian Congress. The ideals of the United Nations cast a spotlight on the country's racial inequity and the first of many attacks on the country in the General Assembly came from the Indian government in 1946.

The Nationalist Party, however, was gathering strength and, in a surprise result, gained power in the 1948 election - power that it would not relinquish until 1994. Apartheid became official government ideology.

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STORY CONTENTS
	A short history of South Africa Colonial expansion Diamonds and British consolidation Gold and war Union and the ANC The gathering storm Three decades of crisis The death of apartheid

A 1595 engraving of Khoihhoi pastoralists at today's Mossel Bay in the Western Cape. The Khoikhoi, otherwise known as Hottentots, and the San Bushmen lived on the southern tip of Africa for thousands of years before its written history began with the arrival of European seafarers (Image: National Library of South Africa)

European settlement of South Africa began with the arrival of Dutch commander Jan van Riebeeck and his 90 men, who landed in 1652 at the Cape of Good Hope under instructions by the Dutch East India Company to build a fort and develop a vegetable garden for the benefit of ships on the Eastern trade route (Image: Wikipedia)

An 1824 sketch of Shaka (1781 - 1828), the great Zulu king, four years before his death. By James King, it is the only known drawing of Shaka (Image: South African Government Online)

The Battle of Blood River. The Boers used their oxwagons as a defensive barrier against the Zulu army, which they eventually defeated (Image: South African History Online)

In 1879 the Zulu army, under King Cetshwayo, delivered a resounding and humiliating defeat to the armed might of the British Empire at Isandhlwana (Image: South African History Online)

Diamond diggings at Kimberley produced the Big Hole, believed to be the largest hand-dug excavation in the world (Image: South African Tourism)