The White Settlers
Because Steve Biko was uniquely a product of South Africa and its history it is necessary to give a short synopsis of that history, with particular emphasis on those elements of it that influenced his stance and philosophy.
Recorded history in South Africa begins with the arrival of white settlers in 1652, when the Dutch established a sailing base where the city of Cape Town is now situated. But the country's history of human habitation extends far back in time, and archaeologists have found traces there of some of the earliest human habitation on this planet. When the Dutch settlers arrived they found the Cape area and hinterland inhabited by sallow-skinned hunters and herders, the Khoisan. Much of the interior of the country was inhabited by Negroid Bantu-speaking tribesmen. Schoolchildren in South Africa are taught that the arrival of the white settlers coincided with the arrival of these "Bantu" tribesmen, but radiocarbon dating provides evidence of Negroid communities in the Transvaal as early as the fifth century. The southward migration of the Bantu-speakers to the shores of the country was considerable in the fourteenth century, and they were certainly established as far as the Gamtoos River in the Cape Province by the fifteenth century.
White settlements at the Cape Peninsula were augmented by parties of German and French settlers, the latter being Huguenots fleeing from religious persecution in Europe. These groups fused, in time, into a single white cultural group which evolved its own language, Afrikaans, and whose descendants came to be known as Afrikaners. The Afrikaans language derived from Dutch, with some German influences, and was a simplificationof these European languages. It grew more distinctively practical as these whites settled further inland away from the Table Bay harbor and the European influences brought there by the sailing ships that called en route to the East.
In 1814 the British annexed the entire colony as part of a post-Napoleonic deal involving Britain, Holland, and Sweden. The British brought in four thousand British settlers (including my great-great-grandfather) in 1820 to settle the Eastern Cape area as a buffer zone between the mutually hostile Afrikaner farmers and black tribesmen. The British also abolished slavery and gave in to the demands of two settler journalists, Thomas Pringle and John Fairbairn, for press freedom. For a number of reasons, including the abolition of slavery and what the Afrikaners regarded as too liberal a policy toward blacks by the British colonial government, many of the Afrikaners migrated from the colony into the hinterland in what became known as the Great Trek. They established two independent republics, one in the north (Transvaal) and one in the central area of the country (Orange Free State), the latter named for the Netherlands royal family, the House of Orange.
By the dawn of the twentieth century, the British had control of the two coastal provinces, Cape Province and Natal, and the Afrikaners had control of the two northern republics. The discovery in the Transvaal of the world's richest reef of gold brought prospectors and miners from all ends of the earth, mostly from English-speaking countries--Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This posed a new problem for the Afrikaner leader Paul Kruger, president of the Transvaal republic, because these newcomers now constituted a majority outnumbering the Afrikaners in this area. These people, referred to by Kruger as the Uitlanders (foreigners), clamored for civil rights and particularly the vote, claiming that they provided most of the Transvaal's revenue and were entitled to full citizenship. Their demands were backed up by the British colonial government, whose zeal for the civil rights of their kithand kin was influenced considerably by the prospect of gold revenues for Queen Victoria.
In a tragic foreshadowing of what a future Afrikaner leader, Vorster, would do, Kruger refused all significant negotiations with the clamoring majority, persistently offering too little too late in the way of concessions. Eventually the situation exploded into violence--the Anglo-Boer War--which exacted a ghastly toll of life. More than twenty thousand Afrikaner women and children died of disease and neglect in wretched concentration camps where they were quartered after the British burned down their farmsteads to prevent their feeding and harboring of the Afrikaner guerrillas who were harassing the imperial forces.
Shortly after the end of the war the British handed all of South Africa back to what it regarded as a united white nation under Afrikaner leaders Louis Botha and Jan Smuts. The two former Afrikaner republics and the two former British colonies were united in the Act of Union and given full independence in 1910 as one sovereign state, the Union of South Africa, in which Afrikaners now constituted a majority of whites. Given the historic background of the two white groups that were to share control of the country, the Afrikaners and the English-speakers (roughly 60 and 40 percent respectively), this was a simplistic and superficial formula for the future. And given the historical and political background of the vast black majority, whose own aspirations were virtually ignored in this dispensation, the formula was one for future racial disaster.
Black politics up until 1910 was hardly an issue in white political thinking in South Africa. At the time of union only the Cape Province insisted on retaining voting rights for blacks on a basis of qualified franchise as introduced by the British colonial regime. The two Afrikaner republics had granted no political rights to blacks, and Natal was scarcely less conservative. Yet what minimal rights for blacks were provided for in the 1910 formula were not only destined not to be developed, but were actually whittled away.
In 1913 legislation pegged black land ownership rights to specific areas totaling barely 10 percent of the entire national territory, and successive onslaughts on black rights intensified with the birth of Afrikaner nationalism as articulated by the founder of the Afrikaner Nationalist party, former Boer General James Hertzog. Hertzog realized that Afrikaners formed a 60 percent majority within the white community and that by exploiting their racial conservatism he could oust Botha and Smuts and achieve control of the country. He therefore founded the Afrikaner Nationalist party in 1914 in opposition to the more moderate policies of Botha and Smuts. The twin formula of Afrikaner chauvinism and antiblack bigotry was so successful in electoral terms that his party came to power in the election of 1924 in coalition with a racist white Labor party largely representative of white miners.
Legislatively this signaled the start of a program of apartheid, or racial discrimination enshrined in statute, although the most extreme forms of this were to be enacted by Hertzog's political successors in 1948. Hertzog had certain inhibitions his successors did not have, including reservations about tearing up clauses of the 1910 constitution dealing with the voting rights of "Coloreds" (mulattoes) in the Cape Province. Besides, Hertzog's plans were set back when Smuts capitalized on anti-Hitler feeling in the South African Parliament in 1939 and forced a vote that toppled Hertzog from power. By the end of the Hitler war, Hertzog was dead and his political heir as leader of the Nationalist party, Daniel Malan, used the old Hertzog formula of Afrikaner chauvinism and antiblack bigotry to win power in the election of 1948.
The Afrikaner Nationalist party has been in power ever since, and for forty years has systematically and ruthlessly implemented the...
