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Negotiated Partition of South Africa – an Idea and Its History (1920S–1980S)

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Negotiated Partition of South Africa – an Idea and Its History (1920S–1980S) A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Zollmann, Jakob Article — Published Version Negotiated Partition of South Africa – An Idea and its History (1920s–1980s) South African Historical Journal Provided in Cooperation with: WZB Berlin Social Science Center Suggested Citation: Zollmann, Jakob (2021) : Negotiated Partition of South Africa – An Idea and its History (1920s–1980s), South African Historical Journal, ISSN 1726-1686, Taylor & Francis, London, Iss. Latest Articles, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2021.1909119 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/234552 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ www.econstor.eu SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORICAL JOURNAL https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2021.1909119 Negotiated Partition of South Africa – An Idea and its History (1920s–1980s) Jakob Zollmann WZB Berlin Social Science Center ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This article analyses a number of academic and journalistic South Africa; intellectual proposals on the negotiated partition of South Africa history; partition; Alfred coming from different schools of thought, from within Hoernlé; South African South Africa and abroad, from the 1920s up to the late Institute of Race Relations 1980s. These proposals of dividing South Africa into a ‘predominantly black’ and a ‘predominantly white’ state were presented by their authors as an alternative to apartheid and seen as a way out of the impasse created by the unwillingness of the National Party to accept the one man, one vote principle for a unitary state. The article examines how the proposals gradually foresaw giving the economically most relevant parts of the country to the ‘predominantly black state’. The article argues that this debate also has to be seen in the context of the Cold War where the partition of countries had been a means to pacify divided societies, at least temporarily. Throughout the twentieth century, territorial reorganisation was a recurring question in southern African politics. The ‘unification’ of the hitherto four separate British colonies – the Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal Colony and the Orange River Colony – into one ‘Union of South Africa’ in 1910 is merely the best-known example of such reorganisation.1 Before World War I rumours were rampant that Germany had designs to expand its colony, German Southwest Africa (GSWA), into Angola and British Bechuanaland. The Germans, in turn, accused the British in South Africa of annexation schemes towards GSWA; with the South African invasion of GSWA in the early days of World War I this turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. After the war, Prime Minister Jan Smuts (1870–1950) reinitiated plans to enlarge the South African state northwards, but in the Southern Rhodesian CONTACT Jakob Zollmann [email protected] © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1. L. Thompson, The Unification of South Africa 1902–1910 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960). 2 J. ZOLLMANN government referendum of 1922, the British-origin electorate rejected joining the Union of South Africa.2 As African politics during the twentieth century has shown, the opposite version of territorial reorganisation – namely partition of a country – was also repeatedly seen by political power brokers as a feasible means for their poli- ties. Separatist and secessionist movements and wars, such as Biafra in Nigeria, Oromo in Ethiopia, or Katanga in Kongo/Zaire, are cases in point.3 The par- tition of Sudan and South Sudan (2011) or Ethiopia and Eritrea (1994) even shows that it is possible to challenge and break with the principle of uti possidetis – the continuity of colonial boundaries4 – upheld throughout decolonisation, leading to the creation under international law of recognised states.5 In South African politics, too, the idea of partitioning the state – beyond accepting the independence of Namibia (1990), which was originally planned to be incorporated into the state as ‘Fifth Province’6 – was ventured by various political circles and academics. This article analyses not plans for expansion but ideas for partitioning the territory of South Africa. Plans for a Greater South Africa were a sign of self-confidence and spoke of a sense of grandeur and histori- cal mission, as exemplified by ‘frontier philosophers’ like Jan Smuts.7 The idea, on the other hand, for negotiated or ‘radical partition’, as the leader of the Progressive Federal Party Frederik van Zyl Slabbert (1940–2010) called it,8 sprang from a sense of crisis that was very different from academic and administrative plans for ‘macro- and micro-segregation’ between South Africa’s ‘races’.9 The perceived impossibility of continually upholding white dominance over the disenfranchised majority of Africans, or the notion that – given the (cul- tural) heterogeneity of South Africa’s population – cohabitation would be impossible under the one man, one vote principle, led not only politicians but also scholars and journalists to develop proposals to divide or partition not only ‘the races’ but the territory of South Africa. To make things clear from 2. R. Hyam, The Failure of South African Expansion 1908–1948 (London: Palgrave, 1972); R. Hyam and P. Henshaw, The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa Since the Boer War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 3. For ease of reference, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_separatist_movements_in_ Africa, accessed 1 September 2017. 4. See J.P. Quéneudec, ‘Remarques sur le règlement des conflits frontaliers en Afrique’, RevueGénéralede Droit International Public, 74 (1970), 70; S. Lallonde, ‘The Role of the Uti Possidetis Principle in the Resol- ution of Maritime Boundary Disputes’, in C. Chinkin and F. Baetens, eds, Sovereignty, Statehood and State Responsibility: Essays in Honour of James Crawford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 255. 5. D.M. Ahmed, Boundaries and Secession in Africa and International Law: Challenging Uti Possidetis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); B. Fagbayibo, ‘South Sudan, Uti Possidetis Rule and the Future of Statehood in Africa’, AfricLaw, 26 April 2012, https://africlaw.com/2012/04/26/ south-sudan-uti-possidetis-rule-and-the-future-of-statehood-in-africa/, accessed 1 September 2017. 6. J. Silvester, ‘Forging the Fifth Province: Imaginative Geographies and Territorialities of Empire’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 41, 3 (2015), 505–518. 7. B. Schwarz, The White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 8. F. van Zyl Slabbert and D. Welsh, South Africa’s Options: Strategies for Sharing Power (London: Rex Collings, 1979), 169; Albert Grundlingh, Slabbert: Man on a Mission (Johannesburg: Ball, 2021). 9. Christoph Marx, Christoph Marx, Trennung und Angst. Hendrik Verwoerd und die Gedankenwelt der Apartheid (Berlin: DeGruyter 2020). NEGOTIATED PARTITION OF SOUTH AFRICA – AN IDEA AND ITS HISTORY (1920s–1980s) 3 the outset: The partitionist proposals discussed here were understood by their authors as an alternative to the sort of ‘segregation’ or ‘partition’ as defined and practised under apartheid policy. The latter was indeed officially ‘South Africa’s Politics of Partition’, as journalist Patrick Laurence (1937–2011) sub- titled his analysis of the political history of the Transkei ‘Bantustan’ in 1976.10 As one critic analysed in 1967: [F]or those Africans not actually in the employment of Whites, apartheid calls for macro-segregation, i.e., round-the-clock separation in totally distinct regions, namely the Native Reserves, now in the process of restyling under the name of Bantustans. Macro-segregation thus becomes synonymous with the government’s notion of total territorial partition, accompanied, of course, by White political paramountcy, even in the African areas.11 The ideological origins and the execution of apartheid and segregationist plans have been widely researched and it has been shown that ‘segregation […] was part of a wider pattern of modernization of South African society.’12 Yet, in this ‘context of the formal elaboration of apartheid from the 1930s to the 1950’, as well as later on,13
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