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The journey to freedom
in South Africa
EVERY STEP OF THE WAY
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Free download from www.hsrc
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The journey to freedom
in South Africa
EVERY STEP OF THE WAY
MINISTRY OF EDUCATION
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ress.ac.za
Commissioned and funded by the Ministry of Education
Compiled by the Social Integration and Cohesion Research Programme of the Human Sciences
Research Council
Published by HSRC Press
Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa
www.hsrcpublishers.ac.za
© 2004 Human Sciences Research Council
First published 2004
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical, or other means, including photocopying and recording, or in any infor-
mation storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
ISBN 0 7969 2061 3
Written by Michael Morris
Historical advisor: Professor Bill Nasson
Cover and text design by Jenny Young
Edited by John Linnegar
Photo research by Elsie Joubert
Cover photograph by Benny Gool
Printed by Paarl Printers
Distributed in Africa by Blue Weaver Marketing and Distribution,
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Foreword by Professor Kader Asmal vi
prologue Fires 1
chapter 1 First steps 9
chapter 2 Strangers on the shore 29
chapter 3 Being in touch 59
chapter 4 As far as the eye could see 69
chapter 5 Finders keepers 89
chapter 6 Sparks from the earth 107
chapter 7 Credit to the Crown 123
chapter 8 Union spells division 141
chapter 9 Hewers of wood, drawers of water 157
chapter 10 Armed and dangerous 187
chapter 11 Storming the fortress 217
chapter 12 End of the beginning 243
chapter 13 A free state 263
chapter 14 By any means 283
chapter 15 When that sunrise comes 297
endpiece Remembering the future 315
readings 323
picture credits 326
index 327
[ contents ]
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On the tenth anniversary of our transition to democracy, it is appropriate that we give
some thought to what South Africa has become. Obviously, after abandoning apartheid
and the oppression on which it rested, South Africa is now a free country. The fruits of
that freedom may still be rather slow in reaching some of our people, but all the same
those fruits are ripening and more and more people are enjoying the flavour of freedom.
As a result of our freedom, South Africa is now a single country in the normal sense
of that term. Of course, previous governments did their best to deny our unity, using the
policies of apartheid to divide South Africans and distort the growth of a common
nationhood. Even today, it might be said, some South African citizens themselves have
not yet recognised the historical reality of their present, that they are an interdependent
part of a single and increasingly normal country. After all, a sceptical observer could say,
given the depth of its historical divisions, that South Africa can hardly be seen as a
uniform country or a national unity. South Africa has a burdensome past, huge economic
inequalities, continuing racial divisions and sharp gender inequalities. On top of all this, it
is faced with the cultural and political consequences of having almost a dozen official
languages. Certainly, these factors challenge any simple notion of South Africa being a
single, unified country.
Yet we would do well to take stock of what history has to teach us about the creation
of states and nations, and where South Africa stands in relation to these other places. All
recognised countries, even those with the strongest kind of patriotic nationhood, live
with their divisions. Moreover, these divisions are of a familiar kind. Thus, they would
include cultural differences – which may in places be defined as racial or ethnic divisions –
economic inequalities, gender discrimination, urban and rural disparities, and differing
kinds of religion. It is certainly true that these divisions may be more acute in South
Africa than they are in some other countries, but they are not peculiarly South African in
any way. And the extent to which a democratic South Africa is committed to the removal
of the inequalities of the past and to the construction of a more just social order merely
confirms that it has become a normal, progressive and forward-looking country.
Nor is this the only reality to consider when contemplating how South Africa has at
last matured into a single country. South Africans have a national imagination which
encourages them to think that they continue to live in an entirely special or distinctive
place, whereas their national experience may actually have things in common with the
vi
[ foreword ]
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histories of Europe, the United States of America, Asia, and, by no means least, the rest
of Africa.
Other countries have had to forge unity out of diversity. To cite only a few examples:
when Italy was united as a country in 1860, there was no shared past, no culture of
common patriotism, and no more than about five percent of its people actually spoke
Italian; present-day Belgium still consists of two cultural and linguistic halves that are not
always all for one and one for all; in the 1960s, which was the great freedom decade for
most of colonial Africa, that part of the American population which was black still
seemed hardly to be recognised as American at all within the ‘national unity’ of the
United States.
And so it has been on our own continent, too. The achievement of a meaningful
nationhood – the common recognition of fellow citizens – has been the product of
various struggles, often bitter. Indeed, as we have seen all too tragically in our own time,
several states to our north that came to nationhood as single countries have fragmented
or almost dissolved, while some who once combined as citizens have become hostile
rebels or regional factions in societies that have found themselves no longer able to
resolve decisive national issues through negotiation and compromise.
If we accept the historical truth that nations everywhere have to be made through
both conflict and compromise, then contemporary South Africa is probably not very
different from other single, sovereign states, whether in Africa, Europe, or elsewhere. In
Africa, South Africa is a particularly powerful and advanced state, but in some aspects of
its historical past, its achievement of a unified nationhood resembles that of many other
peoples of the continent.
Imagine an African land with a deep and rich pre-colonial past and a heritage of pre-
colonial African customs and practices which continue to influence its present. For many
years it was governed and exploited on the basis of white supremacy. Over a long period
there were political protests and civil struggles against the injustices and oppression of
undemocratic minority rule. Different sorts of people were involved, often disputing
among themselves how resistance might be conducted most effectively. Towards the end,
a militant minority took up arms and confronted repression with bloody consequences.
Inevitably, white minority domination grew too costly to maintain, even though those
who opposed it were a long way from actually toppling the state.
vii
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When the shooting was effectively over, a new and more inclusive politics started.
Politicians of various ideological colours, as well as skin colours, entered a tricky and by
no means predictable terrain of negotiations to settle on a new order of freedom and
democratic rights for all. Negotiations produced a unitary country with a new political
culture rooted in universal rights, committed to the franchise, to the dignity of equal
treatment, to freedom from gender discrimination, and other rights. Out of this grew the
civilised conditions for shared citizenship in a single yet healthily plural nation, with a
great assortment of peoples, communities, customs, cultures, religions, traditions and life
chances. Perhaps, more than anything, inclusion was what people most wanted from
their new statehood.
When freedom finally came to this land, it did not come altogether quietly and calmly.
In fact, its birth was accompanied by considerable public argument over how it should
be recognised. In part, this argument was about who had done most to bring about
freedom, and who had sacrificed most. At the same time, the argument was about
remembrance and forgetting, and reconciliation and forgiving, about whose contribution
to freedom was perhaps being unjustly ignored or forgotten, or whose was being
exaggerated, or about what the fate should be of those who had gone to the wire in
their struggle to prevent the emergence of a new country. And yet another aspect of the
argument was about who had gained most from the flowering of freedom, and who, it
seemed, was still being left behind, and at what cost, in the country’s advance.
This is, self-evidently, not the description of an imaginary country. It is a description of
South Africa at the turn of the 20th century. It could also be a fair description of the nation
of Kenya, which emerged in the 1960s. There, also, a nation was born out of historical
processes of conflict, negotiation and compromise that would later characterise South
Africa’s transition to freedom. For our purposes, what matters is the historical point:
South Africans are like others in the ways in which they have come to the challenge of
hammering together a nation. If building a nation has involved robust arguments,
principled disputes, the resolution of conflict through compromise, or mediation between
the haves and the have-nots, that is how nations all over the world have come to be made.
Nationhood has also always come about when people have faced up squarely to the
nature of their past, and to the questions it has raised, even when these have not been
easy questions.
viii
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Equally, it is present history which moves them forward, always into unknown
territory. With the past behind and the future ahead, all of us face futures we can only
but imagine, carried by the hope that through the right choices and influence, things will
go our way rather than come to get us. As Every Step of the Way so rightly concludes,
‘looking ahead, collectively as much as privately, we are drawn to what happened in the
last decade, the last century, the last millennium. It is part and parcel of what it is to be
human, to be conscious, to remember and, ultimately, to be hopeful’.
This book is a vigorous, sweeping historical narrative which shows how South Africa
has at last become a single democratic country. Constantly picking out why people in
their own time took the actions which they did, in the face of uncertain futures and
unforeseen outcomes, it tells the story of the distant past, recent times and the present
in a particularly reflective way. Amidst its impressive flow of description, explanation and
illustration, Every Step of the Way repeatedly reminds us that our histories – there is
always more than one – are the product of many wills, many visions, many choices.
Futures were not inevitable, whether in 1497, 1837, 1948 or in 1994. Nor were conse-
quences always predictable.
This, then, is a history which does not provide simplistic answers or heroic myths, as if
it were a ready guidebook to the saints and sinners through the centuries who have
made South Africa. More valuably, Every Step of the Way asks its readers to confront the
tangled stories, records and other fragments which make up our history, and to be aware
that the past is always another country, even if, as the text suggests, it is ‘always crowding
into the present, making us think like this or like that’. It is also a strikingly humane
history, aware of the ease with which hindsight can lead us into harsh judgements of our
past. In other words, here is a story which is mindful not only of the price of South
Africa’s history, with its racial cruelties, economic waste and political deceptions, but also
of the implications of a long and lighter history of moral consciousness, of South African
people embracing one another’s common humanity and choosing the politics of healing.
This humane and humanising sense of history is clear in one of this book’s early decla-
rations, that while ‘there is no guarantee – humanness being what it is – that we will not
ever repeat some of the tragic errors of the past decades and centuries … the triumph of
kinder ideas in the long human story of southern Africa does remind us how it is possible
to make better choices, today and tomorrow’. This emphasis on the triumph of humanity,
ix
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x
rising out of our troubled history, recalls the promise of the great Irish poet Seamus
Heaney, who was inspired by Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1992 to write:
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme
Every Step of the Way is part of the larger effort by the Ministry of Education to revitalise
the study of history. We have many people to thank. The South African History Project,
which has been driving this initiative, under the direction of Dr June Bam, and the Social
Cohesion and Integration Research Programme of the Human Sciences Research Council,
under the leadership of its executive director, Professor Wilmot James, undertook this
book as a collaborative project. We gratefully acknowledge the work of Professor Bill
Nasson, one of our most distinguished professors of history, and Michael Morris, one of
our most seasoned Press journalists. Morris, in particular, brought his gift of clear
exposition to the book, picking out the essential facts in a historical situation and
drawing thoughtful conclusions. He writes with zest, in sentences that tingle with life
and meaning. And, by no means least, he bites at ideas and issues and worries at them,
as a dog does a bone. All of this makes the volume a compelling read. Finally, we thank
the members of the Ministerial History and Archaeology Panel for their consultation and
HSRC Press for bringing this endeavour to fruition.
Professor Kader Asmal, MP
Minister of Education
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[...]... through their minds, and which of those thoughts they expressed, and which they kept to themselves We know some of the stark facts of this braai in the bush near Komatipoort on the Mozambican border in the winter of 1981 We know that the five men were policemen We know that three of them had travelled to this spot from the Eastern Cape that day We surmise that they were convinced, then, that what they... that it was expected of them, that it was, as they saw it perhaps, their duty And we know that when they packed up to go, as the lowveld sky began to pale in the east, they left behind in the burnt-out coals of a second fire the ashes of a young man they had drugged and murdered early on the previous evening Sizwe Kondile had been kidnapped on the outskirts of the seaside hamlet of Jeffreys Bay, bundled... skilled use of fire among the people they met for first time at the southern tip of Africa On the day that Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama first stepped ashore in southern Africa – at Stompneus Bay, on 8 November, 1497 – his anonymous diarist made a note of the people they encountered, and their use of fire in producing weapons ‘In this land the men are swarthy,’ he wrote ‘… Their arms are staffs of wild... gold, the smelting of which was, in principle, well understood by that Dithakong moturi [The Rand Refinery in Germiston] is easily the largest gold refinery in the world Nevertheless, the visitor is struck by the smallness of the building and the matter of fact way in which the glorious, golden stream of molten metal is poured from the crucibles almost as though it were soup From The Gold Miners (1962)... end The question is, what do we do with these facts in 2004, and in the years to come? The events of the early 1980s seem so far off, and so foreign in a way, that we may be tempted to just leave it all there: yesterday’s stuff, of a world that is not ours, that we are not responsible for, and that, ultimately, we cannot change But the story of the five men drinking beer under PAGE 2 the stars while they... Like the wheel, or flight, it changed the way they lived, and how they viewed the world It lit the dark and it warmed them; it warded off dangerous animals, and it altered their diet It became essential in making tools and weapons that, in turn, transformed the patterns of living We are unable to date the first fire-making with certainty The evidence for using fire is not as incontrovertible as that of. .. and the upper part of the legs had to be turned frequently during the night to make sure that everything burned to ashes And the next morning, after raking through the rubble to make sure there were no pieces of meat or bone left at all, we departed and all went on our own way From Truth and Lies (2001) by Jillian Edelstein Many South Africans claimed they were unaware of the truer nature of apartheid... conscious of the difficulty of fashioning the future we wish or hope to make It is probably no guarantee – humanness being what it is – that we will not ever repeat some of the tragic errors of past decades and centuries; but the triumph of kinder ideas in the long human story of southern Africa does remind us how it is possible to make better choices, today and tomorrow It is, ultimately, the triumph of. .. one another Things have changed since 1981, but the events of that year, just as much as those of all the years before and since, linger in our histories, histories that are often different, and about which there may never really be agreement There is no truth available to produce a single, believable history of – or for – everyone But to be conscious of that difficulty, the difficulty of knowing the. .. harnessing of fire was ‘a technological development which, perhaps more than any other, opened new worlds of opportunity …’ In the ages that have since elapsed, societies and individuals have used fire in increasingly sophisticated ways to transform or influence their environment according to their needs The traces are evident in the life and times of the hunter-gatherers of past millennia, the farmers, . side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme
Every Step of the Way is part of. in the world.
Nevertheless, the visitor is struck by the
smallness of the building and the matter of
fact way in which the glorious, golden stream
of molten
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