Political Struggle in the 20Th Century

University of California UCOP | Political struggle in the 20th century [MUSIC PLAYING] In my lecture today, what I'd like to do is focus on developments in South Africa in the 20th century and to look at the struggle that took place by people trying to get to independence and freedom for themselves in a country that was ruled as a white supremacist state, either as adopting a form of government that was known prior to 1948 as segregation-- that is, the separation by people on the basis of their race. And that was given another name after 1948. And that is the word apartheid, meaning separate or apartness, and generally correctly pronounced as it can sometimes be pronounced by people who want to emphasize the political impression. They want to play with the word, and that is "a-part-hate," not "a-part-heid." What I want to look at is the development of a series of policies and people from the early part of the 20th century up through the 1960s when apartheid is really getting put fully into force. And let's look at some images of people so we can counterpose them as time goes on. This image I showed you in the Time magazine's survey of Africa in its covers. This was the first cover of anyone from Africa. In this case, it was JBM Hertzog. JBM Hertzog had been a soldier in the Anglo-Boer War as it's sometimes known, or the Boer War, or as historians would now call it, the South African War, between 1899 and 1902 when the British had fought to defeat those people who called themselves Afrikaners. These were Dutch-speaking settlers who had come to South Africa from 1652 onwards and most arriving there in the late 1600s and early 1700s and who gave themselves the name Afrikaner in the late 19th century to try and identify themselves as people who belonged to Africa, who had a right to be in the land, to own it. So here we have JBM Hertzog from the middle of the 1920s. At the same time, we have another generation arising-- in this case, the picture of Nelson Mandela as a young man. Obviously, he's more grown up in this picture. This picture's from the 1940s. But Mandela was born in 1918. His life overlaps that of someone like JBM Hertzog. JBM Hertzog becomes particularly significant as a proponent of and a developer of Afrikaner nationalism in the 1930s and the 1940s. And it takes up from his life as an Afrikaner who believed that they were fighting against British imperialism. They identified the British as their worst enemies. But they also identified Africans as their, in a sense, enemies as well, people who they believed supported the British in their own persecution. And you get the development in the 1930s in South Africa of a very sort of virulent and strong system of Afrikaner nationalism. It had already been building in the previous decade and the decade before that, but it takes on particular emphasis in the 1930s. And it particularly takes on a strong growth in the context of the Great Depression. Afrikaners, in most cases, are relatively poor as compared to English-speaking whites in South Africa. They're mostly rural dwelling. Those who live in the cities are part of the poorer part of the white working class. Africans have no rights compared to Afrikaners but Afrikaners still see themselves as very hard done by. And they turn, as they have in the past, to their history, which they perceive as a history of suffering in South Africa, suffering at the hands of the British from the time when the British had first invaded South Africa in 1795 and through wars that were fought in the 19th century and the continuing feeling that Afrikaners had that they were excluded from the economic benefits that the English-speaking whites derived from diamonds and gold, for example. Afrikaners, in fact, owned none of those diamond or gold-mining companies, were excluded, not racially but practically, from participation and ownership of those companies. This nationalist movement took on a great growth in the context of the Great Depression in the 1930s and often took on certain aspects that were much like those of fascism as well-- a appreciation, a strong appreciation by some leaders of the Afrikaner nationalist movement of people like Hitler; praising of their racial policies that were seen as having lessons for South Africa; the exclusion of people, not the total genocide of people because that would have been counterproductive in South Africa. After all, Africans were used as a cheap labor force. You don't want to eradicate them, but you do want to keep on using them. You get the development of this nationalist movement in the 1930s that focuses on suffering from the 19th century. In this case, the image that I'm showing you here is actually of a fully re-built recreation of a battle that was fought in 1838 called Blood River when Boers, as they were then known, the Afrikaners, fought against the Zulu forces of Dingane, the brother of Shaka and the person who had assassinated Shaka. And they fought at the Battle of Blood River. And Boers will write about this as they look back at that history and say that the night before the battle, they said that they would devote their lives to God if God would support them in the battle on the following day, that they would create a covenant with God. Now, through historical research, I along with other historians have been able to determine that they didn't actually take a vow that night. But 30 and 40 years later, they claimed retroactively looking back that they did indeed make that vow. So that's a little side issue. The important thing here is that at Blood River in 1838, the Boers did indeed defeat the Zulu by circling their wagons and defeated a Zulu army, although there's a great deal of dispute as to how many people were killed and whether as many were killed by the Boers as they claim in a battle in which they suffered maybe only one person dying themselves. The important part about this site is not only the emphasis on history but the fact that this is a full-scale recreation. These wagons are life-size. This whole arena here is a fully life-size set. And if you had a person standing beside them, they would just barely reach above the height of that wagon [? they're ?] so high. These are all covered in bronze. So you can imagine the expense that's made. And it's sort of eerie to go here as I've done on numerous occasions with students from UCLA and other campuses in the UC system. And we arrive here at about dawn. And you come here just as the sun is rising before the museum aspect of it is fully open, but you can walk out here and just be here at the very break of light. And it's very eerie thinking about this as a battle scene that took place with a great deal of loss of life. Well, this is the battle that, in a sense, is recreated in the 1930s as Afrikaners look back and talk about their suffering. They're not looking at the suffering of Africans. They're talking about their suffering, how they were persecuted by the British, they were persecuted by the Africans, and that they have to combine together and struggle to create a state in which they will have a priority for their particular interests. Now, if you look at the mathematics or the demographic mathematics of South Africa, Boers, or Afrikaners, as like I say, they start calling themselves in the later 19th century, are a majority of whites in South Africa. Or if you look at the white population, approximately 60% are Afrikaans speakers. That is, [? Afrikaners, ?] 40% are English speakers, people primarily from England. That, however, of course is 10% of the population. I mean, the other 80% is the African population. But when Afrikaners talk about their voting rights and who is to establish a government, they're not thinking of Africans as South Africans, as fellow citizens in that country. They're only thinking of themselves as part of the civilized society, as they would term it, the whites-only, and arguing that they should be dominant in that rather than the British as the British had indeed remained to a considerable extent in the early part of the 20th century. The culmination of the emphasis on the Battle of Blood River and on the emphasis on the suffering of Afrikaners was the creation of a vast monument, the foundations for which were laid in 1938 and which was opened a few years later. And this is the Voortrekker Monument. It's a huge monument. It's about 300 feet high. I can show you here, since I'm a believer in collecting kitsch, a little candle version of the Voortrekker Monument. As you can see, you can light it up here. Imagine this is 300 feet high surrounded by a wall on which there is a frieze which is a recreation of that circle of wagons at the Battle of Blood River. And you can enter this monument still to the present day. At the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela as the president of South Africa in 1994, there was talk about perhaps dynamiting this just as, say, people would dynamite Nazi monuments or monuments to Saddam Hussein or monuments to Stalin.

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