The White Redoubt, the Great Powers and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1960–1980

Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, Robert McNamara

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781137447579
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137447586
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Afrique

Reviews archival material of eight different countries concerning the history of apartheid South Africa

Explores the history of apartheid in three countries: Portugal, Rhodesia and South Africa

Demonstrates the political, economic, and military support of apartheid South Africa from other nations from the period of 1961 to 1974

Part IWhite States of Emergency

© The Author(s) 2018

Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses and Robert McNamaraThe White Redoubt, the Great Powers and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1960–1980Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44758-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Defying the Wind of Change

Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses¹ and Robert McNamara²

(1)

Department of History, Maynooth University, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland

(2)

School of English and History, Ulster University, Coleraine, Northern Ireland, UK

Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Robert McNamara

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

A Solid White Monolith?

Over five hundred years elapsed between the arrival of the first Europeans in southern Africa and their descendants’ final abdication of power in 1994. The area of Africa approximately south of the Congo River that remained under colonial or European settler control by 1959, just before the first major African nationalist challenges arose, was enormous: southern Africa is, after all, substantially larger than Europe west of Russia. Angola and Mozambique, South Africa, South West Africa (SWA), and the CAF occupied virtually the entirety of this region. The remaining parts of the subcontinent were the British protectorates of Bechuanaland (now Botswana), Swaziland and Basutoland (now Lesotho), collectively known as the High Commission Territories (HCT). Entirely surrounded by white-governed territories, they were in no position to lead the fight against the ‘white redoubt’.

The southernmost quarter of the African continent, while not free of barren deserts, vast rainforests and uninhabitable mountainous terrain, was largely hospitable, in terms of climate and arable land, to large-scale European settlement. Indeed, much of this enormous region had a climate not dissimilar to that of central or southern Europe, or the temperate zones of Australia and North America. The white-controlled area of southern Africa was bounded at the south by the Cape of Good Hope, while its northern extent was a line that, by 1960, stretched westward from Luanda, Elizabethville (today’s Lubumbashi) in Katanga—the resource-rich province of the then Belgian Congo—Mufuliria, Ndola, Lusaka (in the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia), Kariba, Salisbury (Southern Rhodesia) and Beira (Mozambique). The scale of this area is immense: Cape Town to Luanda (Angola) is, as the crow flies, a distance of 1762 miles (2836 km).³² Mozambique and Angola projected onto a map of Europe would stretch from Madrid to the Ukraine, a point made in maps hung in Portuguese classrooms from the 1930s onwards under the caption ‘Portugal is not a small country’.

All of these territories were thinly populated. South Africa and Mozambique, with over 20 persons per square mile, and, especially, Nyasaland (over 70 inhabitants per square mile) were the most densely populated. Angola, Northern Rhodesia and SWA stood at the other end of the spectrum. Southern Rhodesia, Angola and, to certain extent, Mozambique, had seen significant post-war migration from the colonial metropoles. In Angola, the white population doubled in the 1950s (to just over 160,000) and again between 1960 and 1973, reaching, in one conservative estimate, a total of 335,000 out of six million.³³ As Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar remarked in 1943, ‘the rich extensive colonial lands, under-developed and sparsely populated, are the natural complement for metropolitan agriculture’.³⁴ In Mozambique (pop. 6,592,994: 1960 census), the number of whites had reached 109,000 by 1966, and various sources suggest a figure of 200,000 to perhaps 250,000 by 1974.³⁵

The settler-dominated CAF, made up of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, was established, amidst considerable controversy and dissent from its African majority, in 1953.³⁶ The colony of Southern Rhodesia had a population of 3,110,000 (1960 estimate),³⁷ of whom about 215,000 were European settlers. In Northern Rhodesia, whites numbered some 72,000. The white population of Southern Rhodesia was notably transient. While 256,000 whites settled in Southern Rhodesia between 1955 and 1979, 246,000 also left. This suggests that many of them saw Rhodesia as a mere stopping point in their life rather than a final destination, a fact that would hugely undermine the sustainability of white rule by the mid-1970s.³⁸ The white population of South Africa was the most established, dating back to the seventeenth century. Throughout this enormous country, economic and political power rested with whites. Roughly three million of them (1.8 million Afrikaners of Dutch descent and 1.2 million primarily British in origin) ruled over about four times as many people, most of them blacks. South Africa was a sovereign state where the militantly racist Reformed National Party (hereinafter NP) government had been implementing, since gaining power in 1948, its doctrine of apartheid. In the Federation, political power also rested with whites at both the federal and the national levels, as it did in Southern Rhodesia. Only a tiny number of Africans had the franchise for the Southern Rhodesian parliament, which had enjoyed considerable autonomy over the country’s domestic affairs since 1923. Whites exploited this circumstance to impose a notorious land settlement (the Land Apportionment Act) that allocated half the land to themselves. In Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the British Colonial Office, through London-appointed governors, retained considerable powers, particularly over native rights and law and order, which remained outside the federal government’s competence. Portuguese governors, usually military men, ran Mozambique and Angola with only limited input from the local whites, who could not be allowed to have more of a say in their affairs than the politically repressed metropolitan population.

When the CAF was established in 1953, the idea that sub-Saharan Africa would within a decade be predominantly under independent African authority would have shocked most observers. British, French, Belgian and Portuguese rule had, in fact, deepened in the years after the Second World War as colonial powers sought to modernize their respective possessions. European empires in Africa were barely touched, until the middle of the 1950s, by the ‘backwash from the demise of colonialism in Asia’.³⁹ In fact, the remoteness of the African nationalist threat in the decade after 1945 meant that relations between the three major white powers in southern Africa—the Federation, Portugal and South Africa—were not always warm. South African apartheid, underpinned by fantastical pseudo-sociological concepts, was in essence a ruthless programme of ethnic cleansing, a license to move huge numbers of Africans from urban areas to economically barren homelands, where they could be denied citizenship. The NP’s strong nationalism and instinctive anti-Britishness, derived from memories of Afrikaner suffering during the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), made its supporters suspicious of English speakers in South Africa and the territories to the north. On the surface at least, apartheid was qualitatively different from Portugal’s intention to create multiracial societies in Africa and the Federation’s ‘partnership’ model, which promised eventual political and economic opportunity for all races, based on a qualitative franchise. Each country could be dismissive of the others’ models, particularly when it suited them for international or domestic purposes. However, the relative importance of these divergent racial policies would lessen in the face of common security needs.

Another barrier to joint action was the long-standing fear in Lisbon, London and Salisbury of South Africa’s expansionist tendencies. South African statesmen, including Jan Smuts and Louis Botha, had wanted to annex, among other territories, German SWA, Southern Rhodesia and Mozambique after 1910. The result, they hoped, would be a subcontinental dominion from the Cape to the Zambezi. The First World War allowed the first phase of these ambitions to be completed, through the seizure of SWA (acquired as a League of Nations mandate from Germany rather than being formally annexed). South Africa dutifully provided yearly reports to the League, but from the 1950s its Europeans were given seats in South Africa’s parliament to cement the NP’s grip on power.⁴⁰ As it happened, South African rule never extended beyond this territory. The Portuguese successfully resisted pressure to sell Mozambique during the Paris Peace Conference, while Southern Rhodesia rejected amalgamation in 1923 and the HCT remained in British hands until given independence in the late 1960s. Indeed, as will be demonstrated below, the 1953 establishment of the Federation was at least partly motivated by the British government’s desire to check South African influence and power in southern Africa.⁴¹ After its election in 1948 the NP government seemed less interested in the expansionist dreams of Smuts, with the exception of the HCT, viewed as future black homelands or ‘Bantustans’. A desire to gain the HCT did not moderate NP policy or rhetoric. The Pretoria News accused the uncompromising minister of defence, F.C. Erasmus, after a typically truculent speech, of flinging the Bechuanaland protectorate ‘into the arms of the Rhodesian Federation, which will surely be a fact one day’.⁴² That being said, the occasional speech, such as the one delivered by Prime Minister J.G. Strijdom at a NP rally in June 1955, suggested that the old expansionist tendencies had not entirely disappeared: ‘We must convince all Europeans of our viewpoint [on apartheid] and then the suffering, sorrow and sacrifices will not have been in vain. We shall then attain what we believe God has put us here for—our influence to spread right through Africa.’⁴³

The Federation had a considerable Afrikaner population, some 40,000-strong, by the time it was created in 1953. Leading Rhodesian politicians, notably the future premiers of the CAF, Godfrey Huggins (1953–1956) and Roy Welensky (1956–1963), often raised with British officials the spectre of Afrikaner migration into the Rhodesias (particularly to work on the Copperbelt) as an argument, no doubt a cynical one, for the creation of the Federation.⁴⁴ Along with the diaspora came the Afrikaner Broederbond (AB), the Dutch Reformed Church, calls for language equality and even absorption into South Africa. The language issue was particularly salient for the NP government because of its overwhelming importance to Afrikaner societies like the AB. The refusal of the Southern Rhodesian government to support Afrikaans-medium education caused much controversy in the mid-1950s. While the Rhodesian Herald criticized Dr. Malan, the South African premier, for suggesting that Afrikaners had to right to keep their language and culture in Rhodesia, Die Transvaler stridently warned ‘that the rulers of Rhodesia should remember historical examples. Every attempt in South Africa to suppress Afrikaans not only failed but contributed to its complete triumph.’⁴⁵

The NP and its supporters in the press also viewed the Southern Rhodesian claims to be more liberal on racial matters with contempt. Die Kruithorlng, the party’s official organ, claimed in 1952 that ‘there was more apartheid in that country [Southern Rhodesia] than there was in the Union’. It backed up this claim with a damning list of examples of racial discrimination and segregation in all walks of Rhodesian life.⁴⁶ In return, Rhodesians of British extraction often shared the contempt of English-speaking South Africans for Afrikaners, whom they portrayed as backward country bumpkins.⁴⁷ The culture of white Southern Rhodesia was that of English-speaking South Africa. Links with South Africa were embedded into the white economy and society. South Africa was a place where Rhodesians holidayed, attended university and did business, with many Rhodesian firms being subsidiaries of larger South African concerns. South Africa dominated transportation links, particularly for those entering and leaving Southern Rhodesia. Moreover, while there were scares about Afrikaner emigration, many who moved to Southern Rhodesia after 1948 were in fact English-speaking South Africans, disillusioned with the Afrikaner-dominated state developing in their home country. They were not necessarily illiberal.⁴⁸ They often, however, changed stripes once in Rhodesia. P.K. van der Byl, Rhodesia’s notorious hard-line foreign minister in the late 1970s and, as the journalist Max Hastings notes, ‘one of the ugliest figures in the history of the struggle for Africa’, came from a politically liberal South African background.⁴⁹

When opportune, those who defended the Federation saw fit to disassociate themselves strongly from South African apartheid to curry favour in Westminster. When this happened, the South African government and the Afrikaner press, often little more than a mouthpiece of the NP, responded in kind. The English-language press in South Africa, conversely, was usually hostile—sometimes deeply so—to the NP government. The most powerful press conglomerate, Argus, which also dominated the Rhodesian press, was more liberal than its readership. Most English-speaking whites, when it came down to it, opposed apartheid more because it dispossessed them of power and patronage than out of concern for Africans. The Afrikaans press did not enjoy large sales and depended heavily after 1948 on government support through state advertising and printing contracts. Many of the NP leadership had cut their teeth as newspaper editors. D.F. Malan was a Die Burger editor before leading the party to victory in 1948. H.F. Verwoerd, the architect of ‘Grand Apartheid’ and prime minister from 1958 to 1966, made his reputation as the founding editor of Die Transvaler. Remarkably, both he and his successor, B.J. Vorster, chaired the holding company of the Die Transvaler while being simultaneously head of government.⁵⁰

Although the Federation barred South Africa’s putative northwards expansion, South African ministers rarely attacked it in public. They did so only when Federation politicians used the apartheid system to make racial partnership sound better than it actually was, or when the NP wished to emphasize the dangers of the partnership model. In Die Transvaler of 12 October 1953, the notably maladroit South African minister of economic affairs, Eric Louw, attacked Sir Godfrey Huggins, prime minister of the Federation, for criticizing South African racial and political affairs. Louw warned that such attacks hampered the friendly relations that should exist between neighbouring states.⁵¹ Prime Minister Malan’s deputy, N.C. Havenga, on the other hand, declared that ‘Rhodesia is a white man’s country and we must co-operate.’ He was, however, sceptical about partnership, warning that if ‘the non-Europeans were given political rights the time would come when the European would be in danger’.⁵²

After the 1953 federal election, which Huggins’ United Federal Party (UFP) won easily, the extreme right-wing Die Volksblad carried, as a headline, ‘UFP Wins Election by Intimidation— Strong Afrikaner Hatred in Rhodesia—Smuts-Policy’s Big Role’. The English-language press in South Africa, meanwhile, trumpeted what was seen as a good result for UFP and a more liberal approach to race relations. The Federation’s electorate had ‘emphatically rejected the Confederate Party alternative of fragmentation through apartheid!’ shouted the Cape Argus.⁵³ Die Transvaler commented that the South African public would neither rejoice nor shed tears over the result, although it regretted that ‘the leaders of the Federation do not always maintain the same good will towards the Union as has been demonstrated by the Union towards the Federation’.⁵⁴ This minor press skirmish in some ways illustrates the problem that the Federation posed for the NP government. Not only did the Federation prevent South Africa’s territorial expansion, it also provided ammunition for the opposition United Party (and its press supporters) by providing an apparent alternative to apartheid.⁵⁵

Portugal was different in the eyes of the South Africans. On the one hand, unlike the Federation, it was a sovereign power, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member with which formal military links could be forged. On the other hand, however, there were important cultural tensions due to Portugal’s more relaxed attitude to racial mixing and the Dutch Reformed Church’s instinctive anti-Catholicism. Indeed, the US Embassy in South Africa, as late as 1968, opined that security and political cooperation between the South Africans and Portuguese, built upon the Afrikaners’ admiration for the ‘extraordinary efforts’ of Portugal to hang on in southern Africa, was complicated by simultaneous contempt for the Portuguese ‘as virtually a mulatto people themselves’.⁵⁶ Still, the South Africans had considerable confidence in the robustness of Portuguese colonialism. As the Rand Daily Mail noted in 1960, South Africans believed that ‘the Portuguese know how to handle Africans’: they had ‘some almost mystic expertise denied to other colonial powers’ and often boasted that they ‘were the first to arrive in Africa and will be the last to leave’.⁵⁷ The British ambassador to Lisbon, in 1954, reported on a dinner given by the minister for foreign affairs, Paulo Cunha, in honour of the South African minister of transport, Paul Sauer. When Cunha stated that Portugal and the Union might have to consider stronger ties in the future, Sauer replied that ‘neither Portugal nor South Africa had any intention of allowing what had happened in other continents to affect the security or permanence of their hold upon their African territories’.⁵⁸

Portugal had carefully rebranded her colonial rule in Africa after the Second World War in preparation for her admittance to the United Nations (UN). By turning colonies into ‘overseas provinces’, Salazar hoped to be able to prevent the UN, whose charter barred interference in the internal affairs of states, from investigating its African territories. This would allow for the ‘aggrandizement of the emergent and racially mixed societies in Angola and Mozambique’, which would serve as ‘Portugal’s first line of defence against international criticism’.⁵⁹ South Africa was also understandably eager to make sure that apartheid was never placed on the agenda of the UN on the same domestic-affairs grounds. In 1957 the two countries’ foreign ministers, Eric Louw and Cunha, discussed unwelcome international attention. Louw, in particular, decried the attempts to discuss domestic matters in New York. South Africa, Portugal and other like-minded governments should, he explained, vote against, rather than abstain on, such initiatives.⁶⁰

Like many other observers, South Africans doubted the sincerity of supposedly liberal legislative changes in Portuguese Africa, noting the difference between the theory and reality. Their consul in Lourenço Marques remarked, in April 1955, after Portugal passed a law apparently aimed at improving the rights of Africans,

The Portuguese are most skilful in drafting regulations which will not offend even the tenderest liberal conscience. Decrees containing the most autocratic powers read like a United Nations declaration of human rights. This particular decree, for example, is ostensibly issued for the principal purpose of protecting the native from possible exploitation by Europeans and others. In fact it accords to the Administration very considerable powers of control.⁶¹

The same official went on to explain that despite the liberal-sounding laws, the Portuguese kept a very firm hand over ‘their Natives’: police methods were ‘far rougher than those in the Union’, beatings were ‘almost a matter of routine in Charge Offices, whilst scant attention is paid to the niceties of Habeas Corpus’. The consul also noted the cynicism of the governor-general, Naval Captain Gabriel Teixeira, ‘an avowed supporter of the policy of the firm hand’. Africans, Captain Teixeira claimed, were ‘far from ready for the full rights of citizenship’ when they found these rights carried obligations. The consul concluded, ‘Now that the implications of becoming an assimilado were better understood there were remarkably few applications for inclusion amongst the elect.’⁶² This rather puts into perspective the comments of Franco Nogueira, the Portuguese foreign minister in the 1960s, who claimed that Portugal ‘alone, before anyone else, brought to Africa the notion of human rights and racial equality’, and that Portugal ‘also practiced the principle of multi-racialism, which all now consider to be the most perfect and daring expression of human brotherhood and sociological progress’.⁶³

One trait that linked all the three white states was a fanatical anti-communism. In the Union, the NP had been fusing the threats of communism and African nationalism since the 1930s,⁶⁴ and increasingly used fear of both to bind Afrikaners and English speakers.⁶⁵ As Die Transvaler explained in 1953, Afrikaners had been at put at ‘the southern point of Africa by an Omniscient Providence in order to make the light of the Gospel and civilisation...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. White States of Emergency
• Part II. The Rise and Fall of an Unholy Alliance
• Part III. Towards a Constellation of One
• Back Matter