The Collapse of Apartheid and the Dawn of Democracy in South Africa, 1993

John C. Eby, Fred Morton

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469633176
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia africana

This game situates students in the Multiparty Negotiating Process taking place at the World Trade Center in Kempton Park in 1993. South Africa is facing tremendous social anxiety and violence. The object of the talks, and of the game, is to reach consensus for a constitution that will guide a post-apartheid South Africa. The country has immense racial diversity--white, black, Colored, Indian. For the negotiations, however, race turns out to be less critical than cultural, economic, and political diversity. Students are challenged to understand a complex landscape and to navigate a surprising web of alliances. The game focuses on the problem of transitioning a society conditioned to profound inequalities and harsh political repression into a more democratic, egalitarian system. Students will ponder carefully the meaning of democracy as a concept and may find that justice and equality are not always comfortable partners with liberty. While for the majority of South Africans, universal suffrage was a symbol of new democratic beginnings, it seemed to threaten the lives, families, and livelihoods of minorities and parties outside the African National Congress coalition. These deep tensions in the nature of democracy pose important questions about the character of justice and the best mechanisms for reaching national decisions. Free supplementary materials for this textbook are available at the Reacting to the Past website. Visit https://reacting.barnard.edu/instructor-resources, click on the RTTP Game Library link, and create a free account to download what is available.

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Introduction

BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE GAME

“The Collapse of Apartheid and the Dawn of Democracy in South Africa” is a reacting role-playing game in which participants assume roles in the 1993 Multi-Party Negotiating Process (MPNP) at the World Trade Centre in Johannesburg. In their roles, participants seek to navigate complex political relationships, a troubling history, and often dissonant goals and concerns to build a constitution for a post-apartheid state.

While the historical setting for this game was deeply shaped by the legacies of European colonialism, years of racist political policy, and systematic injustice and disproportionate privileging of a minority population, this is not a game about race. Instead, this game reflects the highly complex interrelationships of “racial” groups in the collaborative effort to create a just society out of one that had been defined by injustice.

The immediate context for the game is a tense sociopolitical atmosphere that is on the verge of erupting into violent civil conflict. In fact, everyone expects things to head in that direction after a series of failed attempts at political negotiation. Only you, the participants in the MPNP, can put a halt to what seems to be an inevitable bloodbath.

You will begin in All-Party sessions in which the assembly meets as a whole to discuss some critical initial issues, mostly importantly whether the constitution drafted by the MPNP will be permanent or temporary. The process will then devolve to smaller Constitutional Working Groups (CWG) that will attempt to hash out details of the constitution in more manageable pieces. Finally, you will all reconvene in All-Party Talks to discuss the constitutional recommendations of each CWG and decide whether they are to be adopted or not.

All the while, skepticism abounds on the streets, and daily, even hourly, news comes to you of events looming over your conference, threatening to disable and destroy this last-ditch effort.

PROLOGUE: A COUNTRY ON THE BRINK

1 April, 1993

“Your first trip to South Africa?” he said to me as we took our seats next to one another on the flight from London to Johannesburg. “Let me guess—American?”

“Yeah. My first trip overseas, all right. I’m from Illinois. What about you?” I had no clue. He looked like he was from India or Pakistan or someplace like that.

“I guessed right about you, so what do you think?” he said, looking at me, amused. “Indian?” I said, in what seemed like a whisper.

“Ha ha,” he chuckled. “I’m South African, from Jo’burg, though some of my relatives in Durban came from British India generations ago. Not the answer you expected, eh? Name’s Rahim.”

“Hi, Rahim. John. John Willmaeker.” What’s Jo’burg? Maybe I should get back to my magazine. But I kind of like this guy.

After takeoff, I told him a bit about where I’m from and that I was headed to South Africa to spend a month or two traveling around the region. After that, I planned to do a semester at the University of Cape Town, starting in August. Rahim was taking a break from Sussex University to see his family and attend his first cousin’s wedding, which, from the sound of it, was going to be a big deal.

Then came the meal, a movie, and, surprisingly, sleep. With two hours left before landing, the flight attendants roused us and served up breakfast. The sun was coming up and beaming light into the cabin. I caught my first glimpse of Africa, below.

“So,” asked Rahim, “where do you plan to stay after we clear customs and immigration?”

“Well, I’ve been corresponding with a student at Wits University who says I can always stay with her parents, but I’ve got to figure out how to phone her after we land.”

“Oh, your first acquaintance in South Africa is a female, eh? Are you sure you’re here to study?”

Rahim, I could see, was a jokester. “If I don’t make contact with Fiona,” I told him, “I’ll just find a youth hostel in town and crash there. I’ve got an address of one in a place called Hillbrow.”

“Hillbrow? You’re kidding. Not the safest place to be, Johnny, my boy,” said Rahim. “How much do you know about South Africa?”

“Oh, I’ve done a bit of reading,” I mumbled. Not much, though. I’d signed up for study abroad in South Africa like I’d done before in Europe—without much prior knowledge. It was more just a way to get out and around, do cool things, and have something to boast about with my bros when I got back. Africa sounded cool: a place to see some animals, see the Victoria Falls, go deep-sea diving off the coast, stuff like that. Something told me I was in for a surprise.

“Johnny,” said Rahim. “Mind if I stay with you ’til you’ve made the call?”

“Sure,” I told him. “Okay.” He could see I was nervous.

“HI, MAY I speak to Fiona?”

Silence. Then, “No one here by that name. They left, sold the place. Must have headed overseas, like all the rest.”

”I’m not surprised, Johnny,” Rahim said when I told him about the call. “Lots of whites are leaving South Africa these days. Listen, you’re welcome to stay at our place until you get yourself squared away. I know you’ll like my parents.”

“Okay, sure, thanks,” I said. I guess this is where the adventure begins. Our study abroad officer told us not to do something like this, but you have to trust someone …

Soon, Rahim’s sister Miriam picked us up in a Mercedes, and we headed for his family’s home in Lenasia.

“Sit back. Relax. Your journey’s not over. This will take a while,” said Rahim.

IT TOOK ALMOST two hours. Miriam, who told me she worked at a travel agency, drove us through the center of “Jo’burg,” as everyone seems to call it. It was much more modern than I was prepared for. Watched too many Hollywood movies about Africa, I guess. As we wove our way through the skyscrapers and streets lined with shops and department stores, I could see that the sidewalks were full of mostly black people, walking fast, in all directions.

“I thought blacks were supposed to be outside the city in … whaddaya call ’em … ‘locations,’ ” I said, puzzled.

“You mean townships, like Soweto, those segregated areas in and around the cities. Locations are those black-only areas in the countryside,” Rahim explained. “Almost all these people you see here in downtown Jo’burg live in townships. Some, like Soweto, are a good hour or two away. They’re just here to work or find work, sell something, or just spend the day idling about. By dark, this city will be empty—a ghost town, you might say. These people will all have hopped a bus, a train, or something on wheels to carry them back to the townships.”

Miriam chimed in: “Some of these folks live in squatter camps three or four hours away. Some women will leave their kids at home around three A.M. to reach town in time to wash dishes, clean house, and babysit for white people, and won’t get back sometimes until 10 or 11 at night. And they’re the lucky ones, ’cause they have some income.”

“Damn.”

“So where is this Lenasia, Rahim? Is it a township, too?”

“It’s a township, all right. Just for ‘Indians,’ created during the ‘good old days’ when everyone was either white, colored, Indian or ‘bantu.’ We so-called ‘Indians’ don’t like the name that much. Some of us, like my great grandparents, came from Gujarat—Gandhi’s province. But some who had ‘Indian’ stamped in their passbooks by the government, come from Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, or even Indonesia or the Philippines. We get around this system by using ‘Asian,’ which is closer to reality.”

“But even then,” Miriam interjected, “the few Japanese and Chinese you’ll see walking around or running a shop or two are classed as ‘honorary whites’!”

“This is a crazy, fucked-up place—excuse the expression,” muttered Rahim.

Beyond downtown, the buildings began to thin out a bit, and as we headed southwest toward Lenasia, small patches of countryside appeared here and there.

Then, seemingly all of a sudden, we entered a different world. House upon house, some really nice, were bunched together along narrow streets. Shops were scattered here and there, and I saw what appeared to be a school—a pretty big one, actually. I soon spotted a large mosque, and a bit farther on I saw something like a temple with a statue of a fat man with an elephant trunk. “Weird,” I thought. And was that a Catholic church? It was not all that big, but there was no mistaking the cross.

“Almost there, Johnny,” said Rahim.

We then passed through a gate and Miriam drove up to a large house surrounded by high walls.

These guys like their privacy, it seems.

Miriam honked the horn, and, seconds later, nine or ten people of all ages, from maybe six up to eighty, poured out of the house from different doors and pinned Rahim to the car with hugs, laughter, poking, slaps on the shoulders.

Popular guy, Rahim.

When the hoopla died down, Rahim introduced me as Johnny, his Yankee bodyguard. One man, who I’d say was about fifty to sixty years old, approached me and offered his hand.

“Welcome, John. Rahim has a way of joking, even with the names he pins on people without their permission. My name is Hashim, Rahim’s father. You are most welcome at our place. You must be tired. Please come in.”

I was given my own room, undoubtedly at the inconvenience of some of the kids. But I heard no complaints (just one of many examples of South African hospitality), so I lay down and was out in seconds.

When I awoke it was late afternoon. After I’d had a nice hot shower and put on fresh clothes, there came a knock on the door.

“Johnny, my boy,” called Rahim. “It’s time for some...