As the stumbling of an inept ANC government drags the economy down and the citizenry into a state of despair the performance of the NP government, its predecessor, is being re-evaluated. Such a task is always fraught with difficulties. Astute foreign observers have often pointed out, South Africans of all colours lack the ability to talk dispassionately about apartheid or about how the system affected their fortunes.

The mess in which the country presently finds itself makes it possible to discuss calmly whether, in the forty tears after end of the Second World War, wiser leaders, pursuing sensible policies with the support of their constituency, could have launched the country on a higher growth path and greater security for all? Or is South Africa doomed by its birth defects to perform economically well below its potential, while its democracy remains a charade? First the democracy excluded the great majority of the population and workers, and now it excludes the great majority of the tax-payers and employers. A stable system with checks and balances eludes us.

Oxford historian Charles Feinstein wrote in his economic history of South Africa that the country represented a unique combination of the way in which the indigenous population, European settlers and mineral resources were brought together in a process of conquest, dispossession and discrimination and commitment of all the main parties to promote rapid economic growth.

In many ways the settlement planted in the southernmost part of Africa was extraordinary. First, virtually alone in the history of Western colonisation, substantial numbers of the indigenous population survived. Second, Europeans settled in much larger numbers than in other European colonies, like the American colonies, not founded as a settlement colony. By 1904 census whites totalled over a million. There also was a third difference: while other colonies also had rich mineral resources, there was nothing that could be compared to the vast mineral wealth of the Witwatersrand. [1]

The substantial rise of the gold price in the early 1930s sustained high growth for nearly forty years, but many of the constraints on development remained. The master historian CW de Kiewiet singled out three major constraints: its low-grade ore, its low-grade land, and also its poorly educated citizens.[2] Much of South Africa's low-grade gold ore sold at a low, fixed price and could only be mined by very cheap labour. Low-grade land, together with poor and uncertain rainfall, was responsible for many of agriculture's problems. For various reasons, the manufacturing, commercial and services sectors were slow to develop. Apartheid did not create but compounded many of the problems.

So often any exercise to re-evaluate the apartheid period is dismissed out of hand as an attempt to justify the unjustifiable. So let me state at the outset that I consider apartheid as a horrific system of state intervention in the lives of the subordinate population, while creating huge opportunities for members of the dominant group. It classified all people, banned all interracial sex, turned blacks in particular into foreigners in their own country unable to move around without passes or do skilled work. It is true that under apartheid, black life expectancy and infant mortality, improved strongly, and the racial gap in social welfare provision started to narrow significantly from the mid-1970s but these indicators can never be used to justify apartheid.

Historians have as their primary task the duty to explain, not to condemn or apologise. In explaining they must be prepared to consider alternatives and counter-factuals. Eric Hobsbawm, a great left-wing historian who recently died, observed: "The test of a historian's life is whether he or she can ask and answer questions, especially ‘what if' questions, about the matters of passionate significance to the world, as though they were journalists reporting things long past.""[3]

A question we cannot avoid posing is: What if there had not been apartheid? 

Of the books that are most valuable for pondering the subject of apartheid are Donald Horowitz's Ethnic Groups in Conflict (University of California Press, 1985) and his A Democratic South Africa?: constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (Oxford University Press, 1991) Then there Samuel Huntington and Joan Nelson's, No Easy Choice: Political Participation in Developing Countries (Harvard University Press, 1976), and Amy Chua's Worlds on Fire: How exporting democracy breeds ethnic hatred and global instability ((Heineman, 2003).

In 1968 Huntington pointed out in his first book, Political Order in Changing Societies, that invariably viable political institutions lag behind social and economic change. In South Africa's case it was simply wrong to assume that the increasingly modern economy would soon produce a liberal democracy. Horowitz, who was a student of Huntington, demonstrated that in deeply divided societies ethnic conflicts actually escalate after the introduction of democracy. The reason is that ethnic conflicts take the form of groups rather than individuals competing for power, material rewards and prestige. 

Amy Chu, a law professor at Yale, elaborated on that by showing how, in post-colonial societies, liberal democracy and liberal capitalism actually clash. Acquiring power after a prolonged period of subordination, a dominant majority tends to turn on prosperous minorities and subject them to pervasive discrimination and in extreme cases dispossession and expulsion.  

Liberal South Africans had the sincere faith that South Africa could avoid this trajectory but that was only because they persuaded themselves that the progressive extension of the franchise to all the excluded classes would have a stabilising effect as it had in Britain after 1832. The difficulty in South Africa was that the unskilled workers belonged to the indigenous majority, and the higher ranks of labour to a different ethnic group.

Hence there was in South Africa no "invisible hand making for the good". The conflicts were not all ultimately due to a misconception of interests.[4] The middle classes in the indigenous majority, originally seen as being in the vanguard of the modernization process, are the very people that reinvent old ethnic prejudices as a way of advancing their specific interests and to get what they believe they are entitled to.[5]

Different paths

The key questions about apartheid that everyone must ask are the following: What does the comparative evidence suggest were the options at the time the Second World War ended? How would the implementation of any of the alternatives to apartheid have played itself out?

To address these questions a look at No Easy Choice by Huntington and Nelson is instructive. It proposes three different development paths in a divided society I am offering these paths here as an exercise in counter-factual history. Defending the use of couter-factuals, Niall Ferguson writes that we constantly ask counter-factual questions in our daily lives:

Of course we know perfectly that we cannot travel back in time and do things differently, But the business of imagining such counterfactuals is a vital part of the way we learn, Because decisions about the future are-usually-based on weighing up the potential consequences of alternative courses of action, it makes sense to compare the actual outcomes of what we did in the past with the conceivable outcomes of what we might have done.[6]

The first model of Huntington and Nelson is what they call the ‘vicious circle of the technocratic model' as one particular development path.

• less political participation (i.e. curtailment of the vote)
• leading to more socio-economic development as a result of the suppression of the working class
• less socio-economic equality,
• less political stability
• and ending with a participation explosion.

This was the route South Africa by and large followed under the NP government, except for the fact that there was not less socio-economic equality but, after the early 1960s, a slow narrowing of the white-black gap.   The apartheid period can be divided into two: the harsh and rigid first phase, lasting until the early 1970s, and the reformist phase from 1972-1994. 

By the early 1990s South Africa was spending more, as a percentage of GDP, on social assistance in the form of non-contributory schemes than developed countries and more on that than almost any country in the developing South. In 1993 interracial parity was achieved in old-age pensions.[7] But the improved social welfare for blacks could not stave off a radical black challenge to white domination. Whites were defeated by demography (the black population doubled from 15 million to 32 million between 1970 and 1996) and by the black demand to become the politically dominant nation instead of being bought off by material gains. The "participation explosion" occurred between 1984 and 1994.

The second model Huntington and Nelson call the ‘vicious circle of the populist model'

• more political participation (i.e extension of the vote)
• leading to more socio-economic equality,
• less socio-economic development.,
• less political stability and the flight of capital 
• and a participation implosion (i.e. suspension of democracy).

One could argue that this is more or less what would have happened if the ANC had gained power in the 1960s after a rapid extension of the franchise from the qualified vote to universal franchise in the 1950s.

In his autobiography Nelson Mandela made it clear that the Freedom Charter would have entailed a radical restructuring of the economy. One can well imagine the impact that would have made on new capital formation.

It is quite plausible that the ANC would have experimented with socialism or state capitalism as many African countries did in the third quarter of the century. In 1962 the South African Communist Party produced its main theoretical document, The Road to South African Freedom, in which it located a National Democratic Revolution within its theory of colonialism of a special type. According to this theory, the "oppressing white nation" in South Africa occupied the same territory as the oppressed and exploited black nation and had unjustly appropriated for itself the wealth the latter produced.

The NDR's objective was to overthrow the ‘colonial state', impose state control over "vital sectors of the economy", nationalise the mines, banks and large industrial establishments, and impose a dictatorship over the "the former dominating and exploiting classes." This first phase would lay the groundwork for a later transition to "socialism".

One can anticipate that the implementation of the Freedom Charter and even more the NDR would have resulted in the mass flight of investment capital and skills, leading to less socio-economic development followed by less political stability (white resistance and urban riots) ending in a "participation implosion" (suspension of Parliament and the rule of law).

Huntington and Nelson also introduce a third model, the ‘benign liberal model.' This assumes that broad-based socio-economic development would lead to greater socio-economic equality, producing both political stability and democratic political participation. Let me put graphically what this belief entails: 

• the more people regardless of their colour or descent after 1945 were brought into the market and schools on the basis of equality
• the more the economy would open up and the more the labour market would be liberalised
•  the more the economy would expand
• the more political freedoms would increase
• the more stable the political system would become
• the more racial and ethnic tensions would dissolve
• the more prosperity and happiness would ensue

Addressing Parliament in 1960, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan spelled out what he thought was the most suitable for South Africa: "a society in which individual merit alone is the criterion for a man's advancement, whether political or economic." This was where countries of Europa arrived at in the twentieth century after many centuries of conflict. Macmillan never seems to have wondered whether the in the quite different conditions of colonial Africa this model would be able to put down deep roots. By 1970 it had become clear that almost no post-colonial country in Africa had managed to introduce a system where only merit counted and where minorities were not marginalised or maltreated.

In his response to Macmillan, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd replied that whites had developed such a stake in South Africa that it had become their only motherland. Acting as a link between Europe and Africa, they had made themselves indispensable. "We are white" Verwoerd said, "but we are in Africa." Speaking a few weeks later he rejected the notion that only numbers counted. Whites had always been a minority in the world, but had played a dominant role by virtue of their character, initiative, creative urge and intellectual capacity.

He added: "The white man in Africa is not going to be told that because he is outnumbered by black peoples he must allow his rights to be swallowed up and be prepared to lose his say ... The merit which counts is not only that of the individual - even though one recognises such merit in its right and proper place - because that would make it possible for the most capable groups to be outvoted. We who are white will stand, fight and win in Africa on the merits of our white community as an entity."[8]

Verwoerd and his successors failed to produce a system in which the black peoples could express their rights and have an effective say. Apartheid tried to avoid a showdown between whites and blacks by splitting blacks into different ethnic political blocs. It failed because it wrongly believed blacks would remain divided. It offered far too little, especially to urbanised blacks. Whether South Africa could have followed a more liberal course after the end of the Second World War is difficult to determine.

My own feeling is that a rapid introduction of a liberal constitution in the 1950s would not have had the benign outcome that many today assume, particularly given the hostility of almost all African nationalist movements at the time to liberal democracy and free markets. As Amy Chua puts it in different context, the interrelationship among marketisation, democratisation and ethnic conflict has been almost entirely ignored in our public discussion.[9]    

We now have a system in which numbers count and where elections take the form of an ethnic census with the largest population group destined to win. The important point to remember is that liberal capitalism and liberal democracy do not necessarily go together in those countries in Southeast Asia and in Africa with deep racial and ethnic divisions. The real tension here is between free market capitalism, which can see ethnic and racial minorities perform become economically dominant, and democracy, which is, in essence, government of the majority.

Apartheid and its alternatives

In the first half of the Second World War the Smuts government extended some social welfare measures to urban blacks. However, by 1944, with the Allied powers sure to win the war, the tide of reform had begun to turn. Initially Major Piet van der Byl, Minister for Native Affairs, together with Douglas Smit, Secretary of Native Affairs, decided to accept the permanence of a section of the black urban population. They rejected migrant labour, except in the mining industry.[10] But, as Van der Byl noted, a crucial question remained unresolved: Was the government's policy still the traditional one of segregation, or had it been replaced by integration? Unwisely, he raised the issue in the UP caucus and a predictable battle between the liberal and conservative factions broke out. Smuts was furious and hardly spoke to him for several months.[11]

In 1948 the NP took power and soon began to introduce its policy of apartheid. In my book The Last Afrikaner Leaders: A Supreme Test of Power (Tafelberg), which is just out, I pose the question whether 1948 represented a fork in the road where South Africa opted for the road of increasing strife, isolation and repression instead of gradual accommodation, mutual understanding and a peaceful resolution of the conflict, laying the foundation for high growth and the rapid reduction of poverty. Some historians assume that while racial discrimination did exist before 1948, it was not poisonous and that if the UP had remained in power it would have been able to expand social welfare and progressively broaden the franchise across racial barriers.[12]

As with all counter-factual discussions, the safest rule is to avoid wishful thinking. Incremental reform leading up to a non-racial, progressive order would have required exceptional leadership of the kind provided by Abraham Lincoln in the United States in abolishing slavery. Lincoln became president after drawing only 40 per cent of the popular vote -- as did the NP in 1948. Initially he had no intention of establishing racial equality, but preferred the emancipated slaves to be shipped out to be settled in other countries.

Gradually, and playing his cards exceptionally well, Lincoln managed to establish the broadest possible antislavery coalition to bring about the emancipation of slavery and what he called ‘the freedom of the free'. It was a development no one could have predicted in the mid-1850s. But ultimately it was the war that Lincoln's government launched against the South that created an intense state of emergency. It allowed Lincoln to make his progressive moves and construct reform coalitions strong enough to abolish slavery as an institution.[13]

Could the end of segregation have been achieved in similar fashion in South Africa in the 1950s? To start with, there was no leader in the UP ranks as dynamic as Lincoln. Smuts was 80, exhausted and without any vision. Hofmeyr was 54 in 1948, three years older than Lincoln was when he became president, but he had no personal power base to speak of. While Lincoln had a reasonably solid base in the Republican Party, any reformers in post-1948 South Africa would have had great problems putting together a platform for reform. Smuts led a ruling party that had come to power purely on the contentious issue of South Africa's participation in the Second World War. It had no real base for reform.

Was the African National Congress amenable to the politics of gradualism? In the course of the 1940s it took an increasingly tough stand.  It was outraged by the brutal repression of the black mineworkers' strike and the political impotence of the Natives Representative Council. In 1952 it demanded direct representation in Parliament and all the legislative bodies.

Ironically it was Hendrik Verwoerd, who became Minister of Native Affairs in 1950s, who proposed to members of the NRC the kind of substitute that over time could have grown into a meaningful form of representation.  Stating that he expected large numbers of blacks to remain in the big cities for many years, he announced that government planned to give blacks "the greatest possible measure of self-government' in these urban areas.

All the work in these townships would have to be done by their own people, enabling blacks to pursue ‘a full life of work and service." For this reason blacks had to be educated to be sufficiently competent in many spheres, the only qualification being that they would have to place their development and their knowledge exclusively at the service of their own people. Verwoerd invited the NRC members to meet him after the session for a ‘comprehensive interview' about these matters and to put forward proposals, offering a prompt reply from government to their representations.[14]

This was a fateful turning point. A new field for black politics could have been opened up if this offer had been accepted, particularly if it set in motion a political process that could have entailed talks between government and the urban black leadership on the election of urban black councils, the formula for the allocation of revenue, the staffing of the local councils' bureaucracy, property ownership and opportunities for black business.

It would have opened up a whole new area for the development of black managerial and administrative capacity, something that country would sorely lack when whites handed over power in 1994.The NRC did not take up the offer and it is easy to see why. The urban black elite demanded representation on all levels of government in common with whites. Verwoerd's proposal fell far short of that. It was made in the context of complete segregation and Verwoerd spoke as a representative of a government that they viewed with grave suspicion.

Would the NRC have been interested if someone like Jan Smuts had made it? One very much doubts it. With Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu increasingly calling the tune the ANC was in no mood for compromise. They would only have settled for a substantial bloc of black representatives in Parliament, which would have produced serious tensions between the two white communities.

South Africa only became ""ripe" for a democracy three or four decades later after a prolonged spell of strong economic growth and the birth of a vigorous civil society. Since democracy does not necessarily mean higher economic growth, much greater equity or clean and transparent government, its attraction in the liberties it offers. As important, however, is voters knowing that the parties they vote for are accountable to them, rather than mechanisms for perpetuating the careers of a narrow distant elite.[15] In our system accountability narrowly rests with the executive of the ruling party. To overcome this flaw  is the greatest challenge South Africa's democracy faces. 

Hermann Giliomee's latest book The Last Afrikaner Leaders: A Supreme Test of Power (Talfelberg) can be ordered from Kalahari.com here.

This article was published with the assistance of the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit (FNF). The views presented in the article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of FNF.

Footnotes:

[1] Charles Feinstein,An Economic History of South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 1-3.

[2] CW de Kiewiet, A History of South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 212.

[3] Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (Abacus Books, 2003), p. 417.

[4] Lewis Gann, 'Liberal Interpretations of South African History', Rhodes-Livingstone Journal, 25 (1959), pp.40-57. 

[5] Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp.  95-140.

[6] Niall Ferguson, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counter-factuals (London: Picador, 1997), p.2.

[7] Jeremy Seekings, ‘Providing for the Poor: Welfare and Redistribution in South Africa,' Inaugural lecture, University of Cape Town, 23 April 2003.

[8] AN Pelzer, Verwoerd Speaks: Speeches 1948-1966 9Johannesburg: APB, 1966), p. 366.

[9] Amy L Chua, Democracy and Ethnicity, The Yale Law Journal, 81 (1998), pp. 1-97.

[10] Piet Meiring, Tien Politieke Leiers (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1973), p.209.

[11] Meiring, Tien Politieke Leiers , p.208

[12]The view that a UP government could have established a substantially reformed social order is expressed in several chapters of the collection edited by Saul Dubow and Alan Jeeves, South Africa's 1940s: Worlds of Possibilities (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2005).

[13] Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: WW Norton, 2010), p.237.

[14] AN Pelzer, ed., Verwoerd Speaks  (Johannesburg: APB, 1968), pp.28-30.

[15] Hermann Giliomee and Lawrence Schlemmer, The Bold Experiment: South Africa's New Democracy (Johannesburg: Southern Books, 1994)pp. 168-202 

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