Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonathan D. Jansen is Honorary Professor of Education at the University of the Witwatersrand and Visiting Fellow at the National Research Foundation, both in South Africa. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University and Dean of Education at the University of Pretoria. His latest co-authored book is Diversity High: Class, Color, Character and Culture in a South African High School.

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Knowledge in the Blood

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................ixAbbreviations.......................................................xiiiGlossary of Afrikaans Words, Names, and Phrases.....................xvPrologue Bearing Witness............................................11 Loss and Change...................................................242 Indirect Knowledge................................................513 Sure Foundations..................................................834 Bitter Knowledge..................................................1145 Kollegas! (Colleagues!)...........................................1456 Knowledge in the Blood............................................1707 Mending Broken Lines..............................................2018 Meet the Parents..................................................2329 Teaching to Disrupt...............................................255Notes...............................................................282References..........................................................311Index...............................................................325

Chapter One

Through a single announcement, an entire knowledge framework, a way of life and thought, was thrown into disarray.

The nightmare ... is not knowing what's true. Imagine if you had suddenly learnt that the people, the places, the moments most important to you are not gone, not dead, but what is, had never been. What kind of hell would that be?

The price of sanity for Minnie Pretorius, of suddenly seeing things the way they really are, would be complete breakdown and despair.

One country, at the tip of a troubled continent, becomes the last of the former colonies and the last of the settler states to yield on white minority rule. Some thought it would never happen; others held it would happen only through a bloodbath with innumerable casualties on both sides. The academic prophets of the time framed ominous questions: "Can South Africa survive?" "Hope for South Africa?" "Endgame in South Africa?" As the internal conflict escalated, studies warned of "time running out" and "five minutes to midnight." But happen it did; Apartheid eventually came to an abrupt and ignominious end.

As the end of the 1980s approached, the unrelenting pressure from outside and the stubborn resistance from inside forced the Afrikaner elites into negotiations as they realized that not changing would eventually cost them more than trying to sustain a system that had become anachronistic in a postcolonial world. The political scientists continue to contest what exactly brought the end of Apartheid and the transition to democracy.

It is important to remember that not too long before the 1990s South Africa was in good company. There were other states in the North and the South where racism and racial rule were enshrined in policies and laws. But times had changed. As the old order of colonial rule in the Third World and legalized discrimination in the First World started to unravel, South Africa stood alone as a "pariah" among democratic states. It stood its ground for what seemed an interminably long time, even after the independence of the last two regional states, Zimbabwe in 1980 and Namibia in 1990.

Secret negotiations started with the principal liberation movement, the ANC, long before ordinary South Africans got to know about them. Quiet meetings with imprisoned black leaders inside the country and exiled leaders outside the country continued at the initiative of corporate leaders, academics, diplomats, and secret emissaries of the Apartheid government. You would not have known about these clandestine meetings at the time, for the brutal hand of state repression was still making itself felt inside the black townships of South Africa. But in addition to "secret diplomacy," the so-called go-between activities and track-two diplomacy were both crucial to the process of transition in that they "reduced threat perceptions among white participants ... and helped create a sense of negotiation possibility complementary to decision-makers' sense that negotiations were necessary."

White public anger was trained on those meeting openly with the enemy, and eventually news leaked out about the more secret meetings, but nothing could alter the fact that the Apartheid regime was talking to the banned ANC. Frederick Willem (known more commonly by his initials, F. W.) de Klerk, the last of the white presidents, did what his obstinate predecessor (P. W. Botha) lacked the courage to do: he unbanned the liberation movements, eased repulsive race laws, and freed political prisoners. In the political phraseology of the time, he crossed the Rubicon.

Many whites would like it to be known that these political reforms happened on their own terms, that these changes were possible once blacks were mature enough to rule, once black leaders accepted that violence was not the answer, and once the Communist threat was no longer real after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Whites would have done this anyway; it was just a matter of waiting for the right time. This is the self-congratulatory argument of former Defense Minister Magnus Malan in his autobiography My Life with the South African Defense Force.

Of course this was a fiction, a belated justification for what had become inevitable. Sanctions worked, bringing pressure on the faltering economy of the Apartheid state and threatening the one other thing that white elites cared about: their material welfare as a group. Boycotts worked, keeping South Africa out of major international academic, social, and sporting events. To be sure, all kinds of sanction-busting activities were funded and pursued by the Apartheid state. Support started to dry up from the last of the regimes that winked at South African Apartheid. For years, the leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom had complained about Apartheid racism and the exploitation of black people with a slap on the wrist for the white rulers, but they were willing to tolerate such backwardness for the sake of some broader geopolitical interests, or as some then argued, some common racial interests.

But even within those Western states that preferred "constructive engagement" to outright condemnation of racist rule, their own citizens were standing up and demanding that their government withdraw support and that their business communities remove investments from South Africa. Isolated at the tip of a continent, surrounded by liberated states, paralyzed by internal resistance, and under growing demand for change from Western powers, Apartheid could not hold out any longer. When F. W. de Klerk stepped up to the podium in Parliament to end Apartheid on February 2, 1990, he was not acting alone. The announcement was a calculated decision of the white elites: act now or lose everything. One thing the white and black elites feared in equal measure was what would happen if the international icon of political liberation and human decency, Nelson Mandela, died in prison. It would be the beginning of the end; a bloodbath might become a reality after all.

In the event, Nelson Mandela is released, but not before some of his imprisoned comrades are first freed—"to test the waters," some said. Initial negotiations start—"talks about talks," the...