The History of South Africa and Apartheid

A Brief, but Telling, History of South Africa: 1488 - 1860

It seems that the man who said it was right: there are two kinds of people in this world: the victims and the perpetrators. A victim is someone who always gets off on persuading his audience that he has suffered unmentionable wrongs at someone else’s hands; a perpetrator is someone who just gets on with life and makes the best of it.

There has been an awful lot of tear-jerking waffle from various quarters about Archbishop Tutu’s claim that whites are not grateful enough. Well, at last, we whites will apologise. Here goes:

In 1488 Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape. It seems he tried to land but found the few inhabitants to be very unfriendly and nationalistic, so he up-anchored and cleared off.
In 1497 Vasco da Gama decided to see for himself and landed at St.Helena Bay, Mossel Bay, and then Natal (hence it’s name because he arrived there on Christmas day).
In 1503 Table Mountain was scaled for the first time by a white man. Then the Portuguese lost interest and carried on to Mozambique. Had they colonised this part of the world, history would have been entirely different.

In 1580 Sir Francis Drake rounded the Cape and was most impressed with its beauty. However, he saw little reason to stop over as there were no Sun International Hotels in those days.

In 1602 the Dutch East India Company was founded, and, like the British company of the same name, sought a sea-route round the Cape so that the spice trade could be opened up. The Dutch had already colonised the East Indies and frequently sailed the route through all kinds of storms, taking many weeks to make the trip and losing a considerable proportion of the crew to scurvy.
In 1652 Jan Van Riebeek was dispatched here with instructions to establish a victualling station at the Cape. The first horses in Southern Africa were imported from Java. For this landing and these horses we humbly apologise because it meant that vegetables would be grown in this part of the world for the first time and carts no longer had to be drawn by hand.
In 1657 the Dutch, being a people of the land, established the first farms in the Cape. We apologise for spoiling the emptiness of the area.
In 1658 the Dutch brought the first blacks to the area; they were slaves captured on board a Portuguese ship. I’m sure the Dutch will offer an apology for further despoiling the racial purity that existed in the Cape; they had already screwed those that they couldn’t kill out of the Hottentots, but they needed labour for the farms, so there we are. I’m sure they’re sorry.
In 1688 the Huguenots arrived and consumed more of the limited arable land. Sorry.
Until 1780 no indigenous black people were found in what used to be the Cape Province; they had not migrated this far south. Perhaps they should have stayed where they were, because their arrival caused no less than nine wars during the following century. I think they should apologise.
Until 1803 the Dutch continued to import slave labour from Madagascar, Mozambique and the East Indies; we unreservedly apologise for doing this because the Coloured People were the result of this miscegeny.

Perhaps the biggest mistake made by the Dutch was to end the sponsorship of immigrants from Europe in 1707 because this meant that additional slave labour had to be imported. Wrong. Sorry.
In 1795 Europe was in turmoil: the French Revolution was at hand, in England the Industrial Revolution was turning a land of farmers into a land of shopkeepers; in the Cape the Dutch began to revolt against what they perceived to be an unfairly draconian rulership from their home country.


In 1814 the Cape was formally ceded to Britain.
In 1820 the British settlers arrived and began establishing the system of representative government. We’re sorry, we made a mistake.
In 1834 the British spoiled the entire system by abolishing slavery. Sorry – we should have let it continue; it was very profitable.
In 1835 the Great Trek began because the Boers (as they had become known) hated to bow to any kind of law, especially British. Rumour has it that when they reached the Orange River there was a notice on the bank warning those who could read not to cross; they crossed, and that was the beginning of the Free State, once Mzilikazi and Dingane had been dealt with. Of course, the Trekkers should have laid down and died, so they’re sorry too.

In 1852 the Transvaal was given independence; the British didn’t want it. Had they known what was under the soil they would have kept it, of course.
In 1854 the Free State was also given independence; they didn’t want that either.
In 1860 the first indentured Indians were brought to Natal; sorry, we should have left them at home. The problem was that India was already ruled by the British and the Indians didn’t have enough to do; in Natal the sugar industry was just getting under way, so what simpler answer was there but to bring the labour force to the field? We were wrong, we should have left well alone and the world could have looked elsewhere for its sugar.

Until the mid 19th century the British had only sought more land (they had so little of it at home), and the Dutch more freedom to do their own thing and build their enormous, if rather ugly, churches; however, between 1867 and 1871 various rich deposits of diamonds were found on a farm in Griqualand West, causing the encroaching Dutch and the beaten natives to fight each other once more in order to secure the ownership of this hoard. The British stepped in and annexed Griqualand West to restore peace. Sorry, we shouldn’t have done it. It would have been better to wait until each side had killed off the other; we would have got hold of the diamonds anyway.

Sensing more trouble to come, the British then went on and annexed the Transvaal which led within three years to the first Boer War which broke out in 1880. At this stage, South Africa was undergoing dramatic changes, brought about by the discovery of diamonds. Railways were being built to bring diggers and prospectors to the fields, roads were hacked through what had hitherto been deemed impenetrable mountains; the country was no longer a smattering of farmers eeking out a living around the Cape and fighting their way into the interior; it was now heading towards becoming a land of mineral wealth and value to the rest of the world. We whites should have known better than to allow this to happen. We should have left there and then. We are sorry.
The African, having nothing to offer but his labour, came in droves to the diggings and, being smart despite his rural background, began to make his fortune. We should not have let this happen. We are sorry. It caused rifts in families, untold strife, and a huge human movement whose wave is still breaking on our shores today. We should have imported our own white labour for the diamond fields and allowed the African to continue to farm his cattle, eat his mealies, and sell his daughters.

Then, as if this was not enough, gold was discovered on the Reef in 1886. More African labour left the kraals in search of wealth and fortune. We are sorry. We should not have allowed it. We should have mined the gold on our own and taken the spoils with us when we left. After all, finders keepers!

Because of the greed of the colonialists the cities of Kimberley and Johannesburg were founded in the middle of nowhere; resulting from the cupidity of the native black, steps had to be taken to accommodate those who sought work in the cities, and so, temporary shanty towns for all races were allowed to mushroom out of the veld. We are sorry. It was the start of a new problem.

1902 brought the end of the second Boer war; it was the end of tremendous suffering for both British and Afrikaner and, in retrospect, achieved little other than to unite the whole of South Africa in the Act of Union in1910. One of Britain’s great mistakes was to beat warring factions into submission, establish law and order, and then give the land back to those from whom it had been taken. We apologise; we should have kept it all for ourselves and forced those who came before us to live under the British colonial yoke.

In 1913 the National Party was formed. What had hitherto just been various small groups of people living off the land, fighting with each other from time to time but largely keeping to themselves, had suddenly become a country and a population which required organising and governing, something that the British were particularly good at, and some sort of order needed to be established to avoid the anarchy and lawlessness of the Wild West gradually taking over. In order to protect the rights of the wandering blacks, 912 million hectares of land was put aside for their sole use. For the first time, the blacks actually had the legal right to occupy and farm this enormous area.

In 1928 Iscor was formed. In order to prevent further strife between black and white, a form of segregation was attempted. It failed.

1929 saw the first National Party government come to power, but for various reasons it was a dismal failure, and in 1933 a coalition government was established under the then United Party. Because only a very small proportion of the land was arable and because both blacks and whites saw enormous wealth being wrested from the ground, large numbers of both races had abandoned the rural areas and descended on the cities, whose streets, they believed, were paved with gold. They both lived in incredible hardship and poverty – a situation which could not be allowed to continue.

1936 saw a further 6,2 million hectares of land added to the initial 912 million hectares for exclusive black use. We were wrong; we should not have allowed black legal tenure of any of the land and rather kept it for ourselves. Sorry.

By 1944 Jan Hofmeyr had lost a great deal of his support because of his promotion of the interests of black people in this country, and in 1948 the dreaded Nationalists came to power and Grand Apartheid followed soon after. We really are sorry about this one.

The dark years began with the coming to power of the Nationalists under D.F.Malan in 1948. Whereas previous governments had been interested in the welfare of all races, the Nationalists of 1948 were only interested in the furthering of Afrikaner interests and goals; anyone who was not Afrikaans (and that means the various black tribes, the English, the Indians, the Portuguese, the Italians, and the Jews) were all regarded as second-class citizens and all manner of horrible laws were passed to keep people in their place. The Afrikaner of those days was only slightly to the left of Hitler and we should, we now acknowledge, have stepped in once more and taken the country back under British rule. We are sorry we didn’t because out of this mistake came Apartheid and this country became more and more isolated as the years went by.

In the early 1950s Soweto (concertina name for South Western Townships) was laid out and established; it is still the largest black township on the African continent and was to serve as a huge dormitory area for Johannesburg. Much has been said and written about Sophiatown (most of it through the rose-coloured spectacles of time) and its untimely demise and the forced removal of its citizens to Soweto. Sophiatown was, in reality, a down-at-heel suburb of crumbling turn-of-the-century houses which were home to a great diversity of peoples; it was an area with its own vibrancy, but nonetheless an area where crime was rife and streets were ruled by gangs. Upon its demise the houses were raised and a new suburb, Triomf, was built to house the burgeoning Afrikaaner middle class.

In 1954 J.G.Strydom became prime minister. Much can be written about the Nationalists and their rise and fall; however, they can legitimately lay claim to certain interesting facts: they were the only government in modern times which had a penchant for erecting statues to people who were still alive and naming various projects (roads, airports, harbours) after their ministers. We had Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg, D.F.Malan Airport (overlooked by a rather frightening bust of the famous man looking like a large boiled egg with glasses) in Cape Town, Louis Botha (alright, he was dead) Airport in Durban; the Ben Schoeman Highway between Johannesburg and Pretoria, the Strydom Tunnel in the Eastern Transvaal, and so-on.

In order to alleviate the plight of the great unemployed masses of former years, the Nationalists created a massive, top-heavy, civil service. Whatever had to be achieved in their South Africa required books of paperwork to be completed; there were departments for this, for that, for everything under the sun. Every breath that the populace took had to be legislated; every movement required somebody’s permission in writing, and round every corner lurked an official, the Bible in one hand and the Might of the State in the other. It was bureaucracy gone mad. Every document was firstly and foremostly in Afrikaans, and every official behind every desk spoke only that language. Of course they did; it was the language God spoke, wasn’t it?

In 1958 H.F.Verwoerd came to power. We really are sorry for this one, for he, single-handedly brought about more damage than anyone else in the Nationalist hierarchy. The odd thing was that he wasn’t even South African. He had sufficiently aroused the ire of the British, so that in 1960 Harold MacMillan delivered his nail-in-the-coffin ‘winds of change’ speech in Parliament. For some years the colonial powers had been withdrawing from Africa and handing countries back to their local populations. Colonies cost an awful lot to keep going; they used manpower, a great deal of paper, and were very difficult to administer from far-away London or Brussels or Lisbon, so they were gradually given independence. After the required pomp and circumstance and the departure of the governor most of these erstwhile colonies immediately reverted to tribal warfare, rape, pillage, wanton genocide, and other little niceties that we, as whites, are very sorry to have caused by our departure. MacMillan’s speech was a warning.

By 1966 Verwoerd had become an embarrassment even here and so he was assassinated.
This brought B.J.Vorster to power; during his regency he managed the forced removal from District 6 (a slum area, much romanticised in plays, poetry and painting, where gangs ruled) and then its demolition; he established the Bureau of State Security, which watched over all of us in its safari suits and dark glasses, he allowed in a moment of extreme weakness the arrival of television some twenty years after it had been introduced to the rest of the world, and then was forced to retire iniquitously at the end of the 70s.

Whatever criticism we may throw in the direction of the Vorster administration, it was a time of great success financially for this country; so he must have done something right.
The amazing thing about the Nationalists was how, at each general election, they managed to be returned to power with a resounding majority. However on closer scrutiny it can be seen that they gerrymandered political constituencies in such a way that a small Afrikaans town had at least ten seats, whereas a large English-speaking area seldom had more than one. Of course, the ANC went one better when they introduced floor-crossing; there is no longer any need to win an election; they simply buy their support afterwards. We can’t apologise for that.

After Vorster came the Groot Krokodil and things went from bad to worse while he wagged an index finger at us through the TV screen. By 1990 most of the white population was armed to the teeth and in 1992, under F.W.de Klerk, came the famous referendum which brought about the end of Nationalist power. So in no uncertain terms the whites actually did say with a very loud voice how sorry they were for Apartheid and its attendant policies and harm.

The rest, as they say, is history. If you seek apologies from the Nationalists for what they did between 1948 and 1994, then you must go out and try to find one, because they all seem to have disappeared. Now we look forward to hearing Mad Bob’s apology, as he leaves Zim for the last time.

And that, in the words of John Vorster, is all about it.