Diverse People Unite

VOLUME 13, ISSUE 4 An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program Diverse People Unite ■ Post Reprint: “South Africa’s Quiet Revolution” ■ Discussion Questions: OUTLOOK | Slowly but Surely, Black Resolve — and Economic Sanctions — Are Destroying Apartheid; Words in Context ■ Student Activity: Sanctions Require Attention to the List ■ Post Reprint: “The Prisoner Who Became President” ■ Post Timeline: “Remembering Nelson Mandela” ■ Word Study: Eulogies, Tributes and Paeans ■ Post Editorial: “Nelson Mandela” ■ Tom Toles Editorial Cartoon: Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013 January 8, 2014 ©2014 THE WASHINGTON POST VOLUME 13, ISSUE 4 An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program iscovered by Portuguese explorers Bartholemeu Dias and Vasco da Gama in their search for a route to India in the late 1400s, the land and inhabitants in southern Africa was plied by English and Dutch explorers in the next 100 years. They traded with the Khoi- DKhoi for iron, copper and marijuana. Years of colonialism and missionary endeavors, slavery and battles, expanded settlement and discovery of diamonds on Griqua lands follow. Years of fighting between the British and Boers in the late 1800s, resulted in 1909 with establishing the Union of South Africa, with British control and Afrikaner home rule. The Natives’ Land Act of 1913 further subjugated the majority black population, legislating segregation and legalizing apartheid. Against this backdrop, young and educated freedom fighters sought enfranchisement and BARTOLOMEU DIAS, SOUTH AFRICA HOUSE; equality. At the time of this NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ANCIENT ART political and social activity, Portuguese explorers Bartholemeu Dias and Vasco da Gama the international community employed divestments and sanctions to place economic pressure on the government. It is this South Africa and Nelson Mandela that we explore in articles, editorials, editorial cartoons and commentary. January 8, 2014 ©2014 THE WASHINGTON POST VOLUME 13, ISSUE 4 An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program South Africa’s Quiet Revolution Slowly but Surely, Black Resolve — and Economic Sanctions — Are Destroying Apartheid President Pieter W. Botha, left; Presidents Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk South Africa’s economy was before I could move down to BY WILLIAM CLAIBORNE failing, whites were fleeing the cover it. With apocalyptic visions country, the revolution was in full swimming in my head, I pleaded swing, and people kept asking me with the South African embassy • Originally Published January 14, 1990 — as if I could know — how in Tel Aviv to expedite my visa long I thought the beleaguered application so I wouldn’t miss the In the spring of 1986, when the government of President Pieter W. story of the century. black townships of South Africa Botha could hang on. Veteran Irish I blush at the recollection of were in flames and the white diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien was my naivete. Within months after government seemed to be on the predicting it wouldn’t be long — that my arrival, the uprising was brink of collapse, I was finishing the “civil war” in South Africa was methodically and brutally crushed a tour as The Post’s Jerusalem headed toward a joint U.S.-Soviet by the combined army and police correspondent and was waiting military intervention that would forces, accompanied by some of impatiently for Pretoria to issue depose the white government. the most Draconian emergency a visa so I could take up my new I remember my feeling of panic laws ever imposed in a country assignment here. that the revolution would be over claiming a place among Western January 8, 2014 ©2014 THE WASHINGTON POST VOLUME 13, ISSUE 4 An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program democracies. The barricading Alexandra violence did focus streets with horse carts, world attention on South garbage containers and Africa, but it altered burning tires as they little on the political stoned passing cars; landscape. two white policemen, South Africa’s real each on a motorcycle, revolution, it gradually laughing as they frog- dawned on me over marched a manacled the next 3 1/2 years, black man toward a would ultimately be a police station, one bloodless one, driven by motorcyclist on either forces more powerful side of the prisoner as than the stone-throwing he struggled to keep up. black youths who were An estimated 13,000 bravely but ineffectually AFP/GETTY IMAGES blacks were detained Wounded people lie in the street in Sharpeville, where South African battling the most police opened fire on black protestors. without charges in powerful military and August 1986, and in the state security machine on the African continent. ensuing months prohibitions against political dissent When I arrived that July, however, South Africa’s were tightened. In 1983, it had seemed incredible civil upheaval was still in its final spasms. It had enough that a black could be sentenced to 1 1/2 years claimed upwards of 2,000 lives over the previous 2 1/2 in prison for scratching an innocuous slogan of the years. Some of the violence in the coming months was outlawed African National Congress onto his tin coffee as ugly as I had seen anywhere in the Middle East or mug. But under the state of emergency decreed on June in India and Pakistan. 12, 1986, a black could be imprisoned for up to 10 As I recently years merely for making glanced through old any statement that would notebooks about to be “weaken or undermine” thrown away after my the public’s confidence assignment in South in the white government. Africa, images came You don’t have to live racing back: automatic under apartheid to be rifle fire reverberating emotionally affected by through the smoky it. Before the state of dusk of Soweto as emergency blacked out armored personnel the images of the turmoil carriers roared down surrounding apartheid and Old Potchefstroom then silenced the turmoil Road in menacing itself, an American convoy; young black television viewer could militants with scarves tune into the nightly around their faces news and glimpse COURTESY: AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS ARCHIVES Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu met in Johannesburg. January 8, 2014 ©2014 THE WASHINGTON POST VOLUME 13, ISSUE 4 An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program the ordeal being them and perhaps become inflicted on South even more intractable. Africa’s 23 million South Africa could draw blacks by the elected upon Rhodesia’s experience representatives of with U.N.-imposed trade the 4.5 million white sanctions in 1965 and its own minority. success in developing one of What could be the world’s biggest weapons more emotive manufacturing industries than the image of following the 1977 arms a keening black embargo, and could easily woman, her face weather new sanctions. contorted in grief Moreover, sanctions before the yawning seemed certain to create grave of a teen-aged DENNIS LEE ROYLE/AP massive unemployment in son gunned down African women join in a demonstration in Pretoria, demanding the the black labor force but during a peaceful release of Nelson Mandela. not so certain to diminish demonstration, or the standard of living of the a black family being set upon by white policemen privileged whites. brandishing rubber whips and holding snarling I was wrong. For all of their faults — and there still Doberman pinschers at the leash? Or the haunting are faults, because an economically crippled South sounds of impoverished squatters being dragged Africa is no better a prospect for the disenfranchised screaming from their squalid tarpaper shacks as white majority than it is for the privileged minority-sanctions policemen holding sledgehammers and crowbars stand are beginning to work, finally. The first suggestion impassively by, waiting to begin their destructive that I was wrong came, according to the scribblings in work? my notebooks, on Feb. 12, 1988, during back-to-back These things happened. They were not, as government meetings in Cape Town with two men — both now officials liked to say, the imaginations of a biased dead — who, perhaps more than anybody else, were foreign press, or the artful creations of seditious in positions to know just how hard South Africa was provocateurs employed by and covered by network being squeezed by sanctions. television. One was Gerhard de Kock, then governor of the Little wonder then that the American public was Reserve Bank; the other was Frederik du Plessis, one repelled by what it saw and clamored for retribution of the country’s most respected Afrikaner businessmen against the white government. Small wonder, also, and a key economic adviser to the president. Both, that an aroused Congress imposed punitive economic of course, were adamantly opposed to sanctions and sanctions against South Africa in October 1986. argued forcefully and articulately against them. But However, I was skeptical about sanctions then and unintentionally, they revealed the traces of panic remained so for a good part of my tour in South Africa. that were beginning to set in at the highest levels of It seemed to me that punitive economic sanctions government. might be effective as a threat, but once they were In the previous two years, the economists said, South imposed the stiff-necked, self-reliant nature of the Africa had sustained net capital outflows of nearly $4 Afrikaners who rule this country would come to the billion, not so much because of trade sanctions but surface and Pretoria would find ways to circumvent because of a cutoff of U.S. and European investment January 8, 2014 ©2014 THE WASHINGTON POST VOLUME 13, ISSUE 4 An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program models which boil blacks streamed into the down to sharing cities by the millions from power without giv- the rural reservations to ing it up.

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