South Africa's Forgotten History

There is a Latin proverb that says "History is written by the victor". It is perhaps for this very reason that Thomas Jefferson wrote "A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable".

With that in mind, the irony of this article is rather bitter. This is a brief bit of real history, a history where I was the victor. And yet, not only do Inot get to write the history, history seems to have been re-written to remove all trace of my accomplishment. And when I say I, I refer to many (the vast majority) of white South African's.

But first, a question. Why did Apartheid end?

Well, I can answer that for you. It was not sanctions, and it was not the armed struggle. As strange and controversial as that statement may be, it's the truth.

As a white South African (emphasis needed only for this article), I can ensure you that for most of my apartheid South African life I was completely unaffected by sanctions, and where I was affected by the struggle it only strengthened my resolve to stand against terrorism. As a matter of fact, I kept a journal as a child, so I can say with certainty that I was 15 before I even realised that there was such a thing as apartheid in South Africa, and then all I recognised (and I quote from that journal) was that "black people are treated differently to white people". I didn't know why, or even the extent of how, just that there was a difference.

With that in mind, many other South Africans were in the same situation as I was. While I can't speak for my what my friends said or thought, I know that we weren't really taught to hate black people in school, and I wasn't taught anything of the sort at home (quite the opposite, actually). And while I'm sure that there were people who did try to teach hatred and racial segregation to their children, it would seem that those people were few and far between. And history should bear witness to that.

There are many things that led to the downfall of Apartheid, but most of them were the kinds of things that happen quietly in the mind, and not loudly with guns and angry words. Things that didn't have much of an impact were sanctions, and things which invariably slowed down the process were things that involved violence.

The problem with things like sanctions is that they hurt the people they are trying to help. Sanctions caused price increases in most items - increases that barely affected my family, but hurt the poorer (mostly black) population. My parents, and other adults complained about high prices on all sorts of items, but we had access to them and bought them in any case. I can never recall, even once, walking into a shop and finding the shelves empty. About the only thing that I can remember happening that actually hurt us was the move away from the gold standard. There was a time when the South African Rand was one of the strongest currencies in the world, due of course to the vast number of gold mines in the country.

As for terrorism - the only thing terrorism has ever accomplished is to cause people to "rally round the leader". In times of war and strife, most people are scared to upset the balance for fear that it will bring more hardship and danger.

What would have been a better strategy would be to flood the market with ideas that exposed more people to the fact that there were differences between whites and blacks. More of an effort to help people to realise that there was a problem, and that they COULD do something about it.

A lot of people outside of the country don't realise that for most of their lives during the Apartheid regime, white South Africans could choose to vote either for the Conservative Party (who were for taking away more black rights) or the National Party (the more "liberal" party, and the party that was eventually responsible for the process that ended Apartheid). Through my entire childhood, as far as I can remember, the National Party was in power. The people I spoke to were scared of blacks coming to power (primarily because the ANC was a terrorist organisation that regularly bombed civilian targets*), but felt the existing socio-political environment was wrong. But didn't see how the situation could change.

What ended Apartheid was the then president of the country (FW de Klerk - who won a Nobel Piece Prize together with Nelson Mandela) asked the country to make a choice - vote yes to end Apartheid, vote No to keep Apartheid. It was my first election, and I, with the majority of the country, voted to end apartheid. We did it because the majority of (white) South African's didn't believe it was a good system, and we finally had a choice with a plan that seemed viable. We were still scared, and with good cause, but we did it. The very fact that we were so scared and yet did it in any case should indicate that this was a decision that was motivated by a belief in what was right and not simple economics. People don't trade safety for money. People give up safety for ideals.

Now I realise that this may be an unpopular piece of history, especially with so many of our politicians using their role in the "armed struggle" as political currency. I'd like to remind all reading this that South Africa's metamorphosis into a new democracy happened without guns, and mostly without violence. This was not an armed revolution where the old and evil government was violently ejected. It was a peaceful process that started with a vote, and ended with an election. And the danger with re-writing this history is that many black South Africans will never be taught this one simple fact. White South Africans realised that what was happening was wrong, and chose to fix it. That act of starting the process that would begin to rectify the mistakes of the past is a vital part of our history. White South Africans were not forced into submission through force of arms, which implies that the change was unwilling on our part. We willingly embraced the change, indicating that we wanted the change. We were not compelled to change through fear, we changed in spite of our fear. And that message is vital for South Africa's future.