2017

H-Diplo Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse @HDiplo Roundtable and Web Production Editor: George Fujii

Introduction by Elizabeth Schmidt Roundtable Review Volume XIX, No. 15 (2017) 11 December 2017

Jamie Miller. An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime and Its Search for Survival. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. ISBN: 9780190274832 (hardcover, $78.00).

URL: http://www.tiny.cc/Roundtable-XIX-15

Contents Introduction by Elizabeth Schmidt, Loyola University Maryland...... 2 Review by Andy DeRoche, Front Range Community College ...... 6 Review by Jacob Dlamini, Princeton University ...... 8 Review by Hermann Giliomee, University of Stellenbosch ...... 15 Review by Nathaniel K. Powell, Fondation Pierre du Bois pour l’histoire du temps présent ..... 20 Author’s Response by Jamie Miller, University of Pittsburgh ...... 24

© 2017 The Authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

H-Diplo Roundtable Review, Vol. XIX, No. 15 (2017)

Introduction by Elizabeth Schmidt, Loyola University Maryland

ince the 1960s, scholars of Southern Africa have produced a significant body of work on African nationalism, resistance, and nation-building in the context of decolonization and the Cold War. South S Africa, the region’s political and economic powerhouse, often has been viewed as an exception. Although challenged by anticolonial nationalist movements, the white-ruled state, which repressed its own citizens and waged wars of destabilization against its neighbors, remained an exemplar of colonial racism and oppression. South Africa’s white minority generally has been viewed as separate, apart from the rest of the continent—as the very term ‘apartheid’ suggests. If not exactly European—Afrikaner settlers left their original homes before the Age of Enlightenment—the ruling classes were certainly not African.

Jamie Miller challenges this view, at least in regard to a segment of the Afrikaner ruling elite at a particular point in history. Focusing his study on the regime of Prime Minister John Vorster (1966–1978), Miller argues that Vorster and his associates recast Afrikaners as an “African volk” and “attempted to hijack the norms and values of the postcolonial era,” in order to “relegitimize existing racial hierarchies” (16). Hoping to diminish South Africa’s diplomatic isolation by strengthening ties to anticommunist African governments in Southern Africa, Vorster presented Afrikaner nationalism and its apartheid offspring as simply another embodiment of African nationalism, a natural response to political, economic, social, and cultural repression by a foreign power. To encourage regional détente and build alliances, Vorster offered the carrot of economic aid and diplomatic mediation.

Vorster’s approach had some early successes, but it was quickly overtaken by events. The collapse of Portuguese colonialism in 1974 was followed by the rise to power of a Marxist liberation movement in Angola, despite South African and American attempts to stop it. The renegade white regime in Rhodesia remained in power, despite Vorster’s efforts to replace it with a pliable African government that would prevent the contagion of radical African nationalism from spreading south. The Soweto uprising and its bloody aftermath, which focused world attention on apartheid racism and oppression, encouraged the reemergence of a siege mentality. Vorster’s policy of regional rapprochement, deemed a disaster by his critics, was successfully challenged. Defense Minister P.W. Botha, who replaced Vorster as prime minister in 1978, abandoned his predecessor’s policy and mobilized his white ethnic constituents to confront a ‘total onslaught’ against their way of life. He faced the perceived threat with a ‘total strategy’ supported by a security establishment that penetrated all aspects of South African life.

Miller argues that understanding Vorster’s vision and foreign policy, which presented Afrikaners as part of rather than apart from Africa, is critical to understanding South African history during the apartheid era. A proper understanding also requires consideration of the world from the perspective of the actors, in this case, the Afrikaner ruling elite in the Vorster regime. In the reviews that follow, four scholars with expertise in African international history assess Miller's endeavor.

Nathaniel Powell, whose scholarship focuses on French military intervention in Africa after political independence, calls Miller’s study “a fresh, well-written, and deeply insightful” consideration of the white minority regime’s attempts to end diplomatic isolation and to respond to the new regional order that replaced

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colonialism.1 Rejecting the common one-dimensional portrayal of apartheid leaders, Miller marshals evidence from a wide range of archival and oral sources “to bring regime agency back into the picture.” He helps readers come to a deeper, more complex understanding of South Africa in the 1970s “by examining its main actors, internal debates, ideological currents, personality conflicts, domestic constraints, and its international relationships” from the perspective of those who made South African foreign policy. Powell would have liked greater elaboration on the influences outside the government—including socioeconomic changes that affected the Afrikaner population and the impact of Afrikaner and English-speaking capital and special-interest lobbies on foreign policy decision-making. Nonetheless, he concludes that “Miller’s work is remarkable, and promises to be a standard reference for years to come.”

Hermann Giliomee, who has written extensively about Afrikaner history and political thought, praises Miller’s book as “the first in-depth study, based on primary sources, of Vorster’s efforts” to improve South Africa’s image in the world arena and to win allies among its neighbors.2 He is impressed not only by the range of archival sources and interviews, but also by the fact that Miller is proficient in Afrikaans—the language in which the documents were written and the subjects interviewed—and thus “was able to develop an acute understanding of the dynamics of Afrikaner politics and the often contradictory goals” of various state agencies from the perspective of regime insiders. Finally, Giliomee notes, Miller’s impressive array of primary sources is complemented by his mastery of the theoretical works on the Cold War and African states. This background provided him a nuanced “understanding of superpower rivalry, the strength and weaknesses of the South African system of rule, and the demographic and economic forces that were at play.” Giliomee concludes that “Miller has made a seminal contribution to both Cold War history and to the study of the crucial stages of the transition to black rule in Southern Africa.”

Andy DeRoche, who has published widely on U.S.-Southern African relations during decolonization and the Cold War, also lauds Miller’s contribution to “a veritable treasure trove of groundbreaking new studies” that reassess Southern African international history in the 1970s and 1980s.3 He appreciates Miller’s nuanced portrayal of Vorster’s attempt “to maintain the institutional racism of the apartheid system while simultaneously cooperating with independent black African states.” By highlighting divergent views within the South African foreign policy and national security establishments, and by demonstrating clear links between domestic and foreign political decision-making, Miller “has added another crucial piece to this complicated and important historical puzzle.” DeRoche also notes that Miller’s Pretoria-centered account of South African diplomacy and politics complements “earlier studies that foregrounded the views from Washington, Havana, and Lusaka.” Moreover, by “putting himself into the shoes” of apartheid leadership, Miller offers a convincing reappraisal of a regime that sought to style itself as “postcolonial and African, while simultaneously defending a putrid system of institutionalized racism.” DeRoche concludes that Miller’s

1 For Powell’s work, see especially, Nathaniel K. Powell, “Battling Instability? The Recurring Logic of French Military Interventions in Africa,” African Security 10:1 (2017), 42-72.

2 For Giliomee’s work, see especially, Hermann Giliomee, The Last Afrikaner Leaders: A Supreme Test of Power (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013).

3 For DeRoche’s work, see especially, Andy DeRoche, Kenneth Kaunda, the United States and Southern Africa (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

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account succeeds at the very difficult task of presenting the apartheid regime as complex and human rather than one-dimensional.

For Jacob Dlamini, whose work has focused on the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, that approach is just the problem.4 In his attempt to view the world through the eyes of the apartheid regime, Miller, in Dlamini’s view, jettisons the scholar’s obligation to cast a critical eye. Although he appreciates Miller’s attempt “to take his historical actors on their own terms” and to understand them “as they understood themselves and the contexts in which they acted,” Dlamini worries that the “book is perhaps too faithful to its actors’ worldview.” He reminds us that the protagonists of Miller’s study were “committed white supremacists” who sought to remake the region in their nation’s interest. He suggests that Miller, by hewing so closely to the world view of Afrikaner elites, fails to present the reality of the majority of South Africans— the three million Africans who suffered the consequences of forced removals, for instance. Moreover, if Afrikaners were driven by what they perceived as “an epic struggle for their very existence,” what accounts for the pettiness of some of their racist acts? Dlamini warns that if scholars “uncouple [the Afrikaner] intellectual and political project from the racism that was never far from the surface,” readers will not understand the true nature of apartheid. If Miller had been willing to distance himself more from his subjects, Dlamini suggests, he might have asked different questions and arrived at different conclusions. He concludes that Miller’s book, although “welcome and thought-provoking,” has not yet solved the apartheid riddle.

Participants:

Jamie Miller is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches courses in African and world history. His commentary on historical and contemporary global affairs has appeared in the Atlantic, the London Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the History News Network, the Imperial & Global Forum, and the Conversation. His current major research project, Energy Dependence: Electricity, Modernity, and Development in Twentieth-Century South Africa, charts the changing relationship between society, the state, and the environment in twentieth-century South Africa through the lens of the generation and distribution of electric power.

Elizabeth Schmidt is a Professor of History at Loyola University Maryland. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her books include: Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946-1958 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007); Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939-1958 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2005); Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870-1939 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1992); and Decoding Corporate Camouflage: U.S. Business Support for Apartheid (Washington, D.C: Institute for Policy Studies, 1980). Her next book, Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War: Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the War on Terror, will be published by Ohio University Press in 2018.

Andy DeRoche teaches history full-time at Front Range Community College and lectures part-time at the University of Colorado. He lives in Longmont, CO, with his wife Heather, a former Zambian journalist, and their two children Ellen (12) and Zeke (7). His next research project will be a comparative examination of

4 For Dlamini’s work, see especially, Jacob Dlamini, Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti- Apartheid Struggle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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global aspects of USA ice hockey and Zambian soccer at the end of the Cold War, featuring case studies on U.S. defenseman Eric Weinrich and Zambian striker Collins Mbesuma.

Jacob Dlamini, Ph.D., teaches African History at Princeton University. His publications include Askari: A story of collaboration and betrayal in the anti-apartheid struggle, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Hermann Giliomee received his doctoral degree in history from the University of Stellenbosch 1972 He held Research Fellowships from Yale University 1977-1978, Cambridge University (1982-1983) and the Woodrow Wilson Centre for International Scholars (1992-1993). He was Professor of Political Studies at the University of Cape Town from 1982 to 1998. He is author of several books, including The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (2003) and The Last Afrikaner Leaders: A Crucial Test of Power. Both were published by the University of Virginia Press.

Nathaniel K. Powell received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in 2013. His research focuses on the history of French military interventions in Africa. He has published several articles on Franco-Zairian relations in the 1970s, and is currently completing a book project on French involvement in Chad’s civil wars from the 1960s to the early 1980s. He is a Research Associate at the Fondation Pierre du Bois pour l’histoire du temps présent.

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Review by Andy DeRoche, Front Range Community College

or anyone interested in the international history of southern Africa during the 1970s and 1980s, the last few years have provided a veritable treasure trove of groundbreaking new studies that examine this complex region from a wide range of perspectives. Nancy Mitchell dissected the policies of the United FStates, Piero Gleijeses emphasized the motivations of Cuba, and I analyzed Zambia’s contributions.1 Jamie Miller, by carefully and insightfully examining and explaining the foreign relations of the South African government, has added another crucial piece to this complicated and important historical puzzle, which is now one major step closer to being complete. Miller’s nuanced and balanced account of Pretoria’s diplomacy and politics provides a perfect complement to earlier studies that foregrounded the views from Washington, Havana, and Lusaka.

While Miller’s book includes several positive characteristics including convincing analysis, a lively writing style, and compelling examples of evidence throughout, arguably the most impressive aspect of An African Volk is the fact that much of the research examined documents written in Afrikaans, from a variety of South African archives. In his “Note on Sources” near the end of the book, Miller explains his thinking: “… as Afrikaans was the lingua franca of the National Party, I realized that if I was not prepared to learn the language then my understanding of the historical picture would have an unavoidable (and low) ceiling” (339). Impressed by his determination, and curious about how he pulled it off, I emailed Miller and asked how he learned Afrikaans. The answer was amazing – because the center for languages at Cambridge had no program in Afrikaans, he taught himself.2

Miller then put his ability to read Afrikaans to good use, visiting Pretoria for the first time in 2010 to conduct research in the Department for Foreign Affairs (DFA) archives, which had recently moved from the Union Buildings to the new Department of International Relations and Cooperation. Finding the files in chaos, he helped organize them and wrote catalog numbers by hand on each box to assist scholars who visit in the future (340). Before his return trip in 2011, he requested declassification of approximately 150 files at the South African Defense Force archives, skeptical that much would be made available. To his surprise, nearly every file was opened in full, including many marked ‘Top Secret,’ including military intelligence, strategic plans, regional analyses, and reports from the battlefield during South Africa’s intervention in Angola (341). Not only is Miller a dogged researcher with admirable language skills, but he is a team player who has done much to help other historians interested in South African foreign relations.

After conducting thorough research (not only in South Africa but also in Malawi, the United Kingdom, and the United States), Miller wrote an extremely important book. He illuminates the competing views within the South African leadership in the 1970s, and clearly delineates the relationship between domestic politics and foreign relations. Much of his study details the era of John Vorster, Prime Minister of South Africa from 1966

1 Nancy Mitchell, Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016); Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Andy DeRoche, Kenneth Kaunda, the United States and Southern Africa (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

2 E-mail from Jamie Miller to Andy DeRoche, 15 January 2017.

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to 1978, who hoped to maintain the institutional racism of the apartheid system while simultaneously cooperating with independent black African states such as Malawi and Zambia. Miller opens the book with a concise but insightful discussion of the August 1975 meeting at Victoria Falls between Vorster and Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda, which he rightly described as “a most unlikely scene” (1).3 Miller then elaborates the Vorster/Kaunda rendezvous: “This remarkable meeting constituted the high-point of the apartheid regime’s campaign to break out of isolation and secure long-term acceptance by the outside world” (1).

In An African Volk, Miller succeeded in the very difficult task of putting himself into the shoes of the South African apartheid government’s leadership in the 1970s, and convincingly portraying the regime as one that sought to walk a perilous tightrope and present itself as post-colonial and African, while simultaneously defending a putrid system of institutionalized racism. The remarkable result is that in Miller’s account, the individuals ruling the roost from Pretoria, who are usually presented as one-dimensional, come across as human. Perhaps the most powerful example, as Miller tells the tale, is the story of Roelof “Pik” Botha, who served in the South African government for approximately four decades starting in the 1950s, including a crucial stint as Foreign Minister from 1977 to 1994. Frequently on camera in the western world attempting to defend apartheid, “Pik” Botha was often perceived as somewhat of a caricature for racist white South Africans, almost a “Snidely Whiplash” character. Botha, as Miller aptly explains, was anything but one dimensional, and was incredibly important in resuscitating the morale of white South Africans from the dark days of the late 1970s into the more promising Ronald Reagan-era of the 1980s.

“Pik” Botha appears many times in Miller’s book, including his prominent place in several wonderful photographs. Two of the sections discussing Botha stand out. The first is Miller’s analysis of Botha’s 1976 ‘Long Telegram’ to his government in Pretoria, not long after the tragic events in Soweto. Miller describes Botha’s telegram as “perhaps the most comprehensive and considered assessment of how South Africa’s renewed isolation in the post-1976 environment was understood at the highest levels of the apartheid regime” (233). The second example is Miller’s insightful argument that “Pik” Botha became somewhat of a media superstar for white South Africans in the late 1970s, displaying youth, humor, and a certain cosmopolitan wisdom all at once on the new technology (in South Africa) of television. He emerged as a combination of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, African-American civil rights activist and politician Andrew Young, and fictional spy James Bond, injecting intelligence, energy, and flair into the previously stodgy halls of power in Pretoria. In the words of Miller, Botha “quickly became the eloquent mouthpiece of the government, the first identifiably modern South African politician” (307).

Jamie Miller set himself a very challenging goal when he first decided to learn Afrikaans, and then undertook to attempt to understand the foreign relations of South Africa by empathizing with white South Africans. In spite of the difficulty of such a task, Miller succeeded completely. His An African Volk should be read carefully by any scholar or student who is interested in the history of South Africa or the history of the international relations of southern Africa in the 1970s and 1980s.

3 For a more thorough discussion of Vorster’s meeting with Kaunda see DeRoche, Kenneth Kaunda, 40-41.

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Review by Jacob Dlamini, Princeton University

n 6 November 1951, Waldermar John Gallman, U.S. ambassador to South Africa, called on Theophilus Ebenhaezer Donges, South Africa’s Minister of the Interior, at the latter’s offices in O Pretoria. Gallman, a career diplomat fresh from a two-year stint as U.S. ambassador to Poland, was new to South Africa and therefore doing the diplomatic rounds, meeting various members of his host government. Gallman was also a conservative, making him politically close to his new hosts. But Donges surprised Gallman during their meeting by expressing admiration for the Soviet Union, then under Joseph Stalin. Donges said he was “always impressed with the firm backing Moscow gave its satellites” and wondered why the U.S. did not do the same to its allies. This was a “breath-taking remark,” Gallman said afterwards in a secret cable reporting on the meeting to the State Department in Washington D.C. “I reminded Donges that I had had some personal experience with Moscow’s treatment of satellites, having lived in one of the satellite countries, but Donges gave no visible signs of appreciation of what I was trying to tell him,” Gallman said.1 The U.S. diplomat was stunned by Donges’s apparent naiveté. But Donges was no naïf.

Donges, one of the intellectual and bureaucratic architects of apartheid, served as Minister of the Interior from 1948 to 1961. He helped build apartheid’s key legislative pillars. These included the Population Registration Act, which classified South Africans according to race and then used that classification to determine the kinds and quality of public goods and rights a person could have, and the Group Areas Act, which decreed where and with whom South Africans could live. He also supported the passage of the Suppression of Communism Act, a law so draconian it rendered almost all opposition to apartheid illegal. The law offered such a broad definition of communism that even known anti-communists who opposed apartheid were charged under a peculiar legal innovation called ‘statutory communism.’ One did not have to be a communist to be branded one, in terms of this law. It was enough to oppose apartheid—even by doing such things as holding ‘mixed’ social parties—to fall foul of the law. The Suppression of Communism Act, renamed the Internal Security Act in 1976, provided legal cover for some of the worst excesses of the apartheid security services, especially between 1960 and 1991, when the South African parliament repealed the Act.

Donges, then, was no political innocent, wishing simply that the U.S. would treat South Africa the way the Soviet Union treated Poland. He was no provincial unaware of what was going on in the world. Donges, as was the case with his colleagues in the National Party (NP), was a rabid anti-communist and his ‘breath- taking remark,’ no doubt a crude comment made in the course of a conversation between two conservatives, did not come from nowhere. It signaled apartheid South Africa’s geopolitical ambitions, however limited they might have been. The remark told of how apartheid ideologues saw themselves in the ideological firmament dominated by the two superstars, the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Donges’s comment also showed how Afrikaner nationalists, in power for only four years at the time following their surprise and rather close election victory in 1948, saw their role in the Cold War. More than that, however, it illustrated South Africa’s attempts—often accepted but sometimes rebuffed by the U.S. throughout the second half of the twentieth

1 Gallman’s cable to the State Department in Washington D.C., 6 November 1951, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1951, vol. V, 1459.

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century—to gain succor from what historian Thomas Borstelmann calls “Apartheid’s reluctant uncle,” meaning the United States.2

Donges likely thought nothing of his comment because he was making a point about superpower politics that was no less true because it was crude. For his part, Gallman was surprised because Donges’s remark made the U.S. sound no different from the Soviet Union. To be sure, the comment was driven by more immediate concerns, namely the criticism leveled at Afrikaner nationalists for their pursuit of apartheid. Donges wanted the U.S. to shield South Africa from such criticism. He wanted the U.S. to give South Africa international cover to deal with its problems as it saw fit, much like the Soviets were supposedly doing with their satellites. Reading Gallman’s secret cable in the twenty-first century, more than 25 years after the collapse of Soviet communism and more than 20 years after the end of apartheid, one cannot help but agree with journalist David Beresford that the Cold War was indeed a “mad landscape of competing hysterias and collective self- delusions.”3

If Donges’s exchange with Gallman represents one extreme of apartheid South Africa’s understanding of its place in the world in the 1950s, the subject of Jamie Miller’s book represents another. An African Volk: The apartheid regime and its search for survival examines how the apartheid regime under Prime Minister John Vorster sought to recast its relationship with Africa in light of the collapse of colonial rule on the continent. An African Volk (with the term ‘African volk’ used here the way some of the older literature on the subject would have used ‘white tribe’) “shows how the regime sought not so much to repudiate as to hijack the norms and values of the postcolonial era, appropriating and adapting them to relegitimize existing racial hierarchies in new forms” (16). Afrikaner nationalists—who saw themselves no longer as one (white) tribe among many African tribes but as one African nation among many—sought to present themselves as an African volk entitled, like every other African nation, to self-determination. Miller is concerned with Vorster’s tenure (1966-1978) but sees the period 1974-76 as the “crossroads for the apartheid order” as this saw some of the keenest diplomatic initiatives directed at the rest of Africa by South Africa (2).

As Miller reminds us, the decolonization of sub-Saharan Africa coincided with at least two key events in southern Africa. The first was the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, a monumental event during which the South African Police killed 69 unarmed black South Africans protesting against the pass laws; the second a flourishing economy that marked the first eight years of Vorster’s term in office. Vorster, who owed his elevation to supreme leader of the NP in part to his draconian response to the protests that led to the massacre, presided over “something of a golden age for the white polity” (20). Besides the rampant economic growth that made South Africa, alongside Japan, one of the world’s fastest growing economies in the 1960s, there was also the consolidation of white electoral support for apartheid and the crushing of many forms of black opposition to apartheid. Add to that the fact that Kaizer Matanzima, a conservative Xhosa chief related to Nelson Mandela, had accepted Pretoria’s offer of independence for the Transkei, thereby creating

2 Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the early Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

3 David Beresford, Truth is a Strange Fruit: A Personal Journey through the Apartheid War (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2011), 67.

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apartheid’s first Bantustan. This was “a key step toward legitimizing the entire project” of separate development advanced by the NP and its ideologues (3).

Miller points out that before the collapse of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal in April 1974 and the student uprisings that began in Soweto in 1976 and which engulfed the whole country by 1977, the Afrikaner community exhibited a “brash confidence in its future prospects” (3). Miller challenges the idea that the collapse of the Portuguese empire in 1974 and, with that, the end of South Africa’s “white cordon sanitaire” (4) in southern Africa, represented the moment “when the stalled teleology of decolonization restarted, leading to the fall” of the apartheid regime in 1994 (6). “There was nothing predetermined about how Southern Africa evolved after April 1974, no more than there was in the fractious and keenly contested processes of decolonization elsewhere in Africa years before,” says Miller (6).

Miller is keen to show that the strategic paths that South Africa chose in response to the collapse of its “white cordon sanitaire” were subject to conflict, debate, and contestation within the NP. Miller’s protagonists are Vorster and P.W. Botha, Vorster’s Defense Minister and successor as Prime Minister. Both men were committed white supremacists. Both sought “to forge a vision of regional stability on South Africa’s terms” (7). But the men differed over how that could be achieved. “Vorster was essentially an alchemist, believing that skillful diplomacy could transform African states’ hostility to apartheid into genuine acceptance” (7); Botha, on the other hand, believed that South Africa’s neighbors could be bludgeoned into acceptance of coexistence with apartheid (7). The two men tried to advance their respective approaches in the context of a domestic political environment where the success of an argument depended less on its intellectual merits than on the ability of each side to convince their NP colleagues, ordinary party members, and white voters that making some sort of peace with the rest of Africa “would not cost Afrikaners their identity or way of life” (7). For Miller, the clash between the two men and the approaches that each represented extended beyond the geopolitical. They were also part of a “deeper process of soul-searching over the identity of the volk, its future prospects, and what it stood for” (7). It is to Miller’s credit that he is able to show that the Afrikaner elite, especially those in the top echelons of the NP, were not a monolith. They were not all of one voice. This is not a new revelation, as we know from the work of Deborah Posel, to mention just one scholar.4 But Miller uses a range of archives skillfully not only to confirm what we already knew about the fractious Afrikaner nationalists but to show just how bitter those divisions were.

Miller argues that Vorster, like his predecessor Hendrik Verwoerd (1958-1966), sincerely believed in apartheid and its associated notion of separate development (8). He thought that separate development would not only give Africans what apartheid ideologues liked to refer to as Africans’ ‘own areas’ wherein they could develop along their ‘own lines,’ but would also foster “goeie buurskap (good neighborliness) on the continent” (8). “He, like his colleagues, simply could not understand why Xhosa, Zulu, and Sotho would not be as assertive about protecting their own customs and cultures as Afrikaners were, given the Nationalists’ deep philosophical grounding in group rather than individuals rights,” Miller writes (8). He notes that, unlike Verwoerd, Vorster understood that by the 1960s and 1970s, “the old framework of norms, values, and institutions that sustained the South African regime both domestically and abroad was losing currency” (8). So Vorster sought to recast South Africa—not as the last bastion of western civilization in Africa—but as one

4 Deborah Posel, The making of apartheid 1948-1961: Conflict and Compromise (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

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independent African country among many. “[W]e are in every respect a part of Africa,” Vorster said after only six months in office (8).

Like all good historians, Miller wants to take his historical actors on their own terms. He wants to understand his actors as they understood themselves and the contexts in which they acted. He understands that the historian is always late and that, for that reason, the good historian is always able to see things that his or her actors could not see, being too close to the events in question. The only trouble is, that by showing such fidelity to his actors, Miller’s book is perhaps too faithful to its actors’ worldview. Let us start with what Miller calls Vorster’s failure to understand why “Xhosa, Zulu, and Sotho would not be as assertive about protecting their own customs and cultures as Afrikaners were’ (8). Could the lack of enthusiasm displayed by the Xhosa, Zulu and Sotho (however defined because Miller does not define these groups) have had something to do with the fact that what for Vorster et al. was an act of cultural and political assertion was for millions of black South Africans a coercive and often violent process of displacement and uprooting? A reader not familiar with the sordid history of forced removals in South Africa—which affected more than three- million people—would not know any of this from reading Miller’s book. As the book stands, black South Africans come across as history’s laggards, so tardy they cannot even make it to their own making as subjects of the Xhosa, Zulu, and Sotho nations.

Then there is Vorster’s statement about South Africa being “in every respect a part of Africa” (8). What is a statement of the obvious is treated by Miller as if it were a declaration imbued with a revelatory force. That South Africa was a part of Africa the Afrikaner nationalists always knew; but that knowledge was coupled with the assumption that they could always throw their weight around in Africa. Take the 1967 civil war in Nigeria—a major omission in Miller’s book to which I will return below. Miller has not one word to say about South Africa’s involvement in the Biafran conflict and the repercussions of that involvement, despite it coming barely a year into Vorster’s term in office. This is a curious omission in a book concerned with apartheid South Africa’s recalibration of its relations with the rest of Africa. That monumental mistake cost South Africa dearly, as we shall see below.

The trouble with Vorster and his colleagues (including Botha) is that, having convinced themselves that they lived in a bad neighborhood, they adopted and implemented policies seemingly designed to fulfill their darkest prophesies. Take the Angolan civil war. When that war started in 1975, there was no uniform African position on whom to support. Zaire supported the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA); Zambia supported the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Nigeria, together with many other African countries, was non-committal. However, as soon as the South Africans invaded Angola and sided with UNITA and the FNLA, the Nigerians took a stand. The main reason for Nigeria’s position was South Africa’s clumsy foreign policy. More specifically, South Africa’s misjudged involvement in the Biafran conflict.

When the war in Biafra broke out in 1967, the South Africans supported the Biafrans. In fact, the South Africans sent some of their special forces to fight alongside them. Biafra lost the war. The Nigerians never forgot what the South Africans did. Neither did the United States. When, during a U.S. National Security Council meeting on 11 December 1975, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft asked: “What’s behind

11 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable Review, Vol. XIX, No. 15 (2017) the Nigerian thing?”5 Scowcroft meant Nigeria’s decision to recognize the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) as the legitimate government of Angola. (The Nigerians, alongside Brazil and nine other states, had just recognized the MPLA government in Angola). Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Chief William Colby answered: “South African involvement.”6 Robert Ingersoll, Deputy Secretary of State, added: “They [the South Africans] interfered in the Nigerian war, and they [the Nigerians] have never forgotten it.”7 By the time the South Africans were scrambling to get out of Angola in late 1975, they were asking the Americans to help pay for mercenaries who would continue to aid UNITA and the FNLA. As Colby told a meeting of the National Security Council on 21 November 1975, “They’d like to get their troops out, and hire mercenaries. They say they don’t have the money to do this and have turned to us.”8

Yet Miller, whose extensive and impressive research drew from archives from more than three countries on three continents, does not discuss so signal an event in the history of South Africa’s foreign relations. It is as if Biafra never happened or that the South Africans never blundered into that conflict. This has serious implications for how things turned out. Imagine if South Africa had not gone into Biafra and if the Nigerians had recognized UNITA and the FNLA instead of the MPLA? What might that have done to the distinction that Miller draws between moderate and radical African leaders (117, 120, 192, 197)? Miller suggests that moderates were those African leaders prepared to deal with apartheid South Africa; radicals those who were not. He writes, “In general, African states’ positions on Angola’s future were determined by their Cold War loyalties; radicals favored the MPLA, while moderate countries favored a unity government.” This is a questionable statement. As we know from the U.S. archival material excerpted above, the Nigerians (who had been lukewarm towards the MPLA) and the Zambians (who had supported UNITA) chose to side with the MPLA not because of Cold War loyalties but because of apartheid South Africa and its ham-handed involvement in Nigeria and Angola.

In fact, South Africa’s clumsy foreign policy was the deciding factor for a number of countries, including Burundi and Ghana. Miller places Kenneth Kaunda, the President of Zambia, among the moderates. But it would be far more historically accurate to see Kaunda as a pragmatist—dealing with Vorster when he thought something (like peace and stability in southern Africa) could be achieved, and being radically opposed to apartheid South Africa when he thought the situation demanded it. Unlike Samora Machel, the Mozambican President whom South Africa destabilized and terrorized to the negotiating table for the 1984 Nkomati Accord—which apartheid South Africa proceeded to disrespect—Kaunda was never forced to the negotiating table by the South Africans. He chose his terms of engagement with South Africa. This is not to say he got what he wanted or that he had a free hand.

Miller employs the adjective existential so often (“existential crisis” (7), “existential threat” (43), “existentialist challenge” (61), to give just three examples) that the reader is left with the impression that Afrikaners were

5 Minutes of National Security Council meeting, 11 December 1975, in FRUS 1969-1976, vol. 28, 368-369.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Minutes of National Security Council meeting, 21 November 1975, in FRUS 1969-1976, vol. 28, 348.

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locked in an epic struggle for their very existence. The trouble with this type of approach to Afrikaner history (not to mention South African history in general) is that it makes it difficult for the historian to account for the racist pettiness and rank corruption that were at the heart of the apartheid project. It is well and fine to take Afrikaner nationalists seriously as an intellectual and political force. But we stand to lose a lot when we uncouple their intellectual and political project from the racism that was never far from the surface.

When, in December 1963, the State Department appointed Ulric Haynes, a “young Negro,” as Desk Officer for South West Africa and the High Commission Territories (Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland), the U.S. got into a “first-class fight” with South Africa when the State Department scheduled a tour through the territories for Haynes.9 Verwoerd, who was Prime Minister at the time, took a personal interest in the matter and did not want a black American diplomat in southern Africa. As William H. Brubeck, a member of the U.S. National Security Council, said in a memorandum dated 1 November 1963 to McGeorge Bundy, President John F. Kennedy’s Special Assistant for National Security, “Unless South Africa back down, we may find ourselves in a minor diplomatic war.”10 In the end, Verwoerd backed down. Haynes received a seven-day travel visa and travelled without incident.11 Verwoerd’s pettiness should not have surprised the Americans. Verwoerd told Philip K. Crowe, U.S. ambassador to South Africa in 1959, that while he wanted good relations with the newly-independent states of Africa, he would not exchange ambassadors with them as he did not want the “problem of looking after non-White diplomats in the Union.”12 Crowe reported that Verwoerd told him, “if Black diplomat from Accra treated as White man, leaders of local Bantu would want similar treatment.”13 That is petty racism and it is an intrinsic part of the Afrikaner nationalist story.

Early on in his book, Miller quotes P. Eric Louw’s maxim: “[I]n order to understand apartheid, one has to get inside the heads of Afrikaner nationalists and take seriously what they believed about themselves” (15). But one wonders if historians should respond to the maxim by asking how far into our actors’ heads we want to go. Asking that question might have led Miller to ask different questions about, for example, the photograph he used on page 77. The photograph, taken in 1971 during a state dinner in honor of Malawi President Hastings Banda’s visit to South Africa, shows Vorster dining between two black women. According to Miller, the photograph was staged, meaning that Vorster wanted to be photographed sitting between the two women in order to illustrate the change in approach that he sought to promote. “This was nothing short of scandalous to verkramptes,” Miller says (77).

Miller registers the shock and revulsion felt by his verkrampte actors at this display of the apartheid “elite’s moral decay” (77). But he does not take us beyond the right wingers’ rank racist reaction to the image. Is the

9 Memo from William H. Brubeck of the National Security Council to Bundy, dated 5 December 1963, in FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 21, Africa, 654.

10 Ibid., 660.

11 Ibid., 661.

12 Note from Philip K. Crowe, FRUS 1958-1960, vol. XIV, 732-733.

13 Ibid.

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job of the historian merely to record what his or her actors saw, thought, and felt, or are we called on to do more? Miller maintains that the architects of apartheid averted their eyes to the reality on the ground and chose to focus instead on the “political imaginary” of apartheid (25). That is, they took their cues from an idealized vision of apartheid and of the world and used this to shape their reality. Miller follows the discourse that came out of this idealized vision in order to tell the story of South Africa in Africa. But a historian must do more than relay his actors’ actions and thoughts.

In his essay on “The mind of apartheid,” novelist and literary scholar JM Coetzee calls attention to the madness at the heart of the apartheid project.14 As Coetzee explains, “The theorists of apartheid justified their doctrine on the grounds that it was in the long-term interest of whites; apartheid demanded sacrifices, they said, but in the long term such sacrifices would pay off.”15 However, Coetzee wonders if what drove apartheid worthies “may have been not the altruism they claimed but on the contrary the crassest absorption in their own passions and appetites, that their utterances may have been a cover for the deepest indifference to the fate of their descendants.”16 That was not Miller’s question, to be sure, but it is a question that, judging by Miller’s welcome and thought-provoking book, is still in need of an answer.

14 JM Coetzee, “The mind of apartheid, Geoffrey Cronje (1907-),” Social Dynamics 17:1 (1991), 4. Coetzee here is quoting from an evaluation of Cronje’s work written by N.J. Rhoodie, a notorious apartheid ideologue.

15 Coetzee, 2.

16 Coetzee, 2.

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Review by Hermann Giliomee, University of Stellenbosch1

ery little has been published on South African diplomacy during the period of apartheid or on John Vorster, the longest serving head of the National Party government that imposed apartheid between 1948 and 1994. The first study of South Africa’s diplomacy during this time was that of Deon V 2 Geldenhuys, which appeared in 1984. Seven years later a work on South African foreign policy by James Barber and John Barratt appeared.3 The only book-length study in English of Vorster as political leader was published forty years ago and does not cover the developments after1974.4 A biographical study in Afrikaans came out just after his death in 1983.5

Jamie Miller’s An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime and the Search for Survival is the first in-depth study, based on primary sources, of Vorster’s efforts to secure for South Africa a better image in the international community and attract allies in the independent African states in Southern Africa.

Miller tells this entire story with great aplomb. His book is in my view the most outstanding debut of an historian of South Africa that has appeared in the last thirty to forty years.

The book is based on a very wide range of primary sources in the archives of several countries and on personal interviews with many of the main actors. Proficient in Afrikaans, the language of most white political leaders and civil servants, Miller was able to develop an acute understanding of the dynamics of Afrikaner politics and the often contradictory goals of the Department of Foreign Affairs and the military establishment.

The rise and fall of Vorster, Prime Minister of South Africa from 1966 to 1978, is one of the most dramatic stories in the contemporary history of South Africa. On 24 April 1974 he led his party to its biggest victory ever in a general election, winning 124 of the 169 seats. The National Party (NP) relied predominantly on the support of the Afrikaners who formed 55 per cent of the electorate.

On the next day the Portuguese dictatorship collapsed, spelling the imminent end of Portuguese rule over its two colonies in Southern Africa, Mozambique and Angola. Liberation movements aligned to the Soviet Union seemed set to take power in both colonies. Rhodesia, which, under the leadership of Ian Smith,

1 A re-worked version of this review appeared on 12 May 2017 at http://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/john- vorsters-african-adventures. The review was commissioned by H-Diplo.

2 Deon Geldenhuys The Diplomacy of Isolation: South African Policy Making. (Braamfontein: Macmillan, 1984).

3 James Barber and John Barratt, South Africa’s Foreign Policy: The Search for Status and Security, 1945 -1988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

4 John D’Oliviera, Vorster, The Man (Johannesburg: Ernest Stanton, 1977).

5 H.O. Terblanche, OB-Generaal en Afrikaner-vegter (Roodepoort: CUM Boeke, 1983).

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unilaterally had declared itself independent from Britain in 1965, had come under increasing pressure from guerrilla fighters from several liberation movements.

Unruffled, Vorster seemed to address in a measured way the rapidly deteriorating situation on South Africa’s borders. On 23 October 1974 he declared: “Southern Africa has come to the crossroads.” The alternative to a peaceful settlement “would be too ghastly to contemplate.”6 The next day R.F. (Pik) Botha, the South African Ambassador to the United Nations (UN), addressing the UN Security Council, stated that South Africa was moving away from discrimination by all the means at its disposal.

Two weeks later Vorster made an enigmatic comment that briefly stirred the hopes of the subordinate population of South Africa for a radical reform of apartheid: “Give South Africa six months … and you will be surprised where South Africa stands then.” 7 Many black South Africans thought that Vorster had decided to extend political rights to blacks in a common system. They had misunderstood Vorster’s words. He did not intend any break with existing policy of restricting black rights to their respective homelands. A 1970 law made it possible to deprive Africans of their South African citizenship if the government of the homeland to which they were deemed to belong had opted for independence.

Vorster’s priority was talks with African heads of states to ward off foreign pressure on South Africa and to persuade them to block the spread of Soviet influence in southern Africa. His assumption was that self- interest would persuade these states to embrace mutually advantageous cooperation rather than assume a posture of futile confrontation of the South African regime. He offered several African states financial and economic assistance.

Miller shows how John Vorster tried to reinvent the Afrikaners as an African volk seeking peace, acceptance and co-existence with other nations in Africa. In talking to leaders of African states to the north of South Africa’s border he redefined the Afrikaners as an African volk that was as rooted in the continent as any other nation, one that had fought the first anti-colonial war on the continent between 1899 and 1902.

Vorster found an ally in Zambia’s President Kenneth Kaunda, who was prepared to use all means to nudge the white and black leaders in Rhodesia towards independence and ward off the attempts of the Soviet Union and Cuba to gain a foothold in Southern Africa. Miller describes how Vorster in 1974 Vorster told Mark Chona, an emissary from Zambia’s Kenneth Kuanda: “We are just as much part of Africa as you are.” Chona had told Vorster that he had just come from meetings with several African leaders. All considered Afrikaners as “not merely people in Africa but people of Africa” and South Africa as “an independent and sovereign state” (132).

If Vorster had moved decisively in the second half of 1974 to force Ian Smith, the Rhodesian leader, to accept majority rule after free elections, South African history would have been quite different. But Smith stalled, Vorster hesitated, and the moment passed. The Soweto uprising that erupted on 16 June 1976 would greatly weaken South Africa’s international status.

6 B.J. Vorster, Select Speeches, (Bloemfontein: University of the Free State Press, 1979), 221.

7 Vorster, Select Speeches, 231

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The U.S. administration of Jimmy Carter showed little sympathy with the white minority governments in Southern Africa. Vorster’s attempt to install a moderate black government in Rhodesia failed when the international community refused to recognise a moderate black government in 1978 notwithstanding its having been elected in a turnout of 65 per cent. It would pave the way for Robert Mugabe of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) movement to come to power.

In 1975 Vorster and Kuanda became very concerned with developments in Angola, which was to receive its independence from Portugal on 11 November 1975. The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), two pro-Western liberation movements, were up against the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), a Soviet-aligned movement. In April 1975, Kaunda visited Washington to tell President Gerald Ford that Cuban advisors and Soviet arms deliveries were being sent to Angola by Fidel Castro. He persuaded Ford to give U.S. American assistance to the FNLA and UNITA.8 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger used Kaunda’s plea to get Ford to accept the necessity of weakening the MPLA to force the formation of a government of national unity on Independence Day.

Kissinger wrote in his memoirs that both President Ford and National Security Adviser General Brent Scowcroft sided with him in strongly favouring American intervention, but that it would turn out that the three of them were “spread far too thin” to bring this about.9 In effect, this meant they would be unable to defend the intervention were Congress got wind of it.

Despite his firm insistence on non-intervention in the internal affairs of African countries, Vorster yielded to pressure from P.W. Botha, Minister of Defence, to send a covert South African military force into Angola. The broad plan was to help UNITA and the FNLA to compel the MPLA to accept them as partners in a government of national unity. In the January 1976 meeting of the Organisation of African Unity, half the members endorsed the idea of a multi-party government

Miller explains that Botha was able to force Vorster’s hand in sending troops into Angola as a result of the virtually free hand the South African Defence force enjoyed in preserving the security of South African-ruled South West Africa (SWA), lying just south of Angola. He does not make enough of another factor. Of the 75,000 whites living in SWA, most were Afrikaners. Many were farmers, and especially those who lived in the northern part were vulnerable to guerrilla attacks from the South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO), a liberation movement operating from bases in Angola. NP leaders frequently told their followers that the government would have no hope of making any progress of securing a settlement with blacks in South Africa if it was deemed to have betrayed whites in SWA.

In October a force of 2,500 regular South African troops and 600 vehicles entered Angola. Piero Gleijeses, the only researcher who has had access to the Cuban archives, argues that the Soviet-backed Cuban intervention was a response to this South African incursion.10 But this is at best a half truth. The Soviet Union and Cuba

8 Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1999), 791.

9 Kissinger, Years of Renewal, 811.

10 Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, Pretoria (Alberton: Galago Books, 2003), 230-272.

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had already by the end of 1974 decided to send arms and advisors to the MPLA, the pro-Soviet movement in Angola. Hundreds of Cuban advisors entered Angola in the first nine months of 1975. It is, however, true that the first division of Cuban troops arrived in Luanda, Angola only in first week of November just before the election. By the end of November, President Ford complained about the money the Soviets were pumping in and of the presence of 4,000 to 6,000 Cuban troops.

Vorster had quite unrealistic expectations of American military and financial assistance. On the basis of official documents, Miller reveals for the first time that the South African embassy in Washington supported the idea that South Africa could count on material U.S. help. On 17 December, 1975, two days before the U.S. Senate was to meet on the issue, Botha, South Africa’s Ambassador to the UN, cabled Pretoria: “Reliable sources inform me that there is a more than 50 percent chance that Senate would provide help to the FLNA and UNITA [two pro-Western liberation movement in Angola] out of the Defence budget” (196).

On 19 December 1975 the U.S. Senate approved by a margin of 54 votes to 22–hardly a close vote–a motion prohibiting the Ford Administration from contributing further funds to the anti-communist coalition.

In retrospect, General Constand Viljoen, director of operations of South African Defence Force, described South Africa’s intervention as a Cold-war game played with very little integrity–a textbook example of how it should not be done.11 John Stockwell, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative who in Washington was part of an interdepartmental working group on Angola shared this view: “Vorster’s plan–putting in a small, covert force–violated the cardinal rule in military strategy: the clear definition of a desired objective.”12

In 1978 Vorster came close to a settlement to end South Africa’s rule over SWA, which it ruled since 1919 as a mandate from the League of Nations (later United Nations). After having met with a contact group representing several major Western governments, he agreed to accept UN Security Council Resolution 435, which made provision for an UN-supervised election for the government of an independent Namibia.

But when Kurt Waldheim, UN Secretary General, unilaterally altered an agreement with Vorster on the modalities of the elections Vorster suspended the agreement. He also authorised an attack by South African forces on a camp of the Southwest African People’s Organisation, named Cassinga, deep in Angola. More than 600 people including, women and children, were killed. South Africa’s relationship with the world community had reached its nadir.

The last chapter of Miller’s book tells the tale of the Vorster government’s response to the much tougher approach of the Carter government in the U.S., which wanted to resolve the Southern African crises on the basis of categorically insisting on majority rule and recognising the liberation movements as legitimate actors in the struggle to free blacks in Southern Africa.

11 Hermann Giliomee, The Last Afrikaner Leaders: A Crucial Test of Power (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014). I cite here private fax messages to me by General Viljoen.

12 John Stockwell. In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (London: André Deutsch, 1978),

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In his last year or two in office Vorster became mired in a scandal related to the illegal activities of the Department of Information. He stepped down to assume the ceremonial position of State President of South Africa, but was soon asked by Botha, his successor, and cabinet members to resign. Under Botha, South Africa entered the 1980s fighting a costly war in Angola and having to combat growing internal resistance. Vorster died an embittered man.13

What particularly impresses me in Miller’s work is the combination of a very good grasp of the theoretical literature on the Cold War and African states, on the one hand, and on the other the exhaustive research of documents related to Southern Africa. He is obviously well read in various disciplines and has a very good understanding of superpower rivalry, the strength and weaknesses of the South African system of rule, and the demographic and economic forces that were at play.

Miller has several other strengths. He writes with such aplomb and self-assurance in handling complex issues that one would easily consider an unsigned manuscript by him as the work of a well-established authority in the field. He is careful not to speculate or generalise but has shown great ability in tracking down primary sources and carefully constructing an argument or a thesis on the basis of looking first for evidence before accepting any theory. He understands that power is not a property but a relationship and he is free from the preoccupations and prejudices with which many foreign students and scholars approach South Africa. He is remarkably open-minded, innovative, and inquisitive. He clearly has the energy, will, and determination to establish himself as a recognised scholar and researcher.

With An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime and its Search for Survival Miller has made a seminal contribution to both Cold War history and to the study of the crucial stages of the transition to black rule in Southern Africa.

13 For an account of my interview with him just before his death see my “B.J. Vorster and the Sultan’s horse,” Frontline, November 1983, http://www.politicsweb.co.za/documents/bj-vorster-and-the-sultans-horse

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Review by Nathaniel K. Powell, Fondation Pierre du Bois pour l’histoire du temps présent

amie Miller’s An African Volk is a fresh, well-written, and deeply insightful look at the apartheid regime’s efforts to escape international isolation and respond to major regional transformations in the 1970s. One J of the most impressive aspects of the book lies in Miller’s use of extensive archival records, enriched by a number of interviews with key participants and eyewitnesses. He marshals this wide array of source material to present a history of the apartheid regime which resolutely, and successfully, rejects teleological readings of apartheid history. Miller aims to bring regime agency back into the picture by examining its main actors, internal debates, ideological currents, personality conflicts, domestic constraints, and its international relationships. In a word, Miller insists that the regime and its leaders must be taken seriously if we are to arrive at a better understanding of South African history. This also implies that the way apartheid ended was not inevitable—it could have happened in other ways. Miller wants us to see the 1970s through the eyes of apartheid’s main actors, especially those of Prime Minister John Vorster, his closest collaborators, and his sometimes rival and successor, Defense Minister P.W. Botha.

Miller first traces Vorster’s efforts, in the early 1970s, to improve relations with numerous ‘moderate’ (i.e. anticommunist) regimes to loosen South Africa’s increasing diplomatic isolation. According to Miller, this outreach also had an ideological purpose which aimed to redefine apartheid as another African nationalism, akin to any other anticolonial nationalist project on the continent. This meant downplaying the idea that apartheid was about racial hierarchies, and emphasizing instead the regime’s commitment to ‘separate development’ of (eventually and theoretically) independent Bantustans. To encourage broader African and international acceptance of this vision, Pretoria offered significant economic assistance. Vorster’s outreach effort was also predicated on appealing to anticommunist sentiment and by emphasizing state sovereignty and non-interference. This strategy brought some initial, though limited, payoffs, including reciprocal state visits with Malawi, and meetings with the presidents of both Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire.

Another aspect of Miller’s narrative traces the rise of the ideology of ‘total onslaught’ within the South African security establishment, particularly its armed forces (SADF). This vision, born of intense anticommunism, presented African nationalism, especially its local and continental anti-apartheid manifestations, as planned and directed by communist puppeteers in Moscow, Beijing, or Havana. P.W. Botha, as head of the defense establishment, was the most influential and highly placed proponent of this philosophy. The second half of Miller’s account outlines the ways that ‘total onslaught’ and advocates of ‘total strategy’ gained the upper- hand in regime decision-making as the decade wore on.

P.W. Botha and his allies in the National Party and military viewed Vorster’s efforts at regional détente as dangerously misguided or, at best, a waste of time and resources. Vorster strongly felt that to make progress breaking South Africa out of international isolation, the state would have to play a constructive role in reaching peaceful settlements in both South West Africa and Rhodesia. By Miller’s account, Vorster felt that South African involvement in transition to majority rule in both territories would gain South Africa international credit and improve its relations with the rest of Africa. He also hoped it would give material credence to the notion that the apartheid regime was not one centered on a ‘white redoubt,’ but one that looked toward equal relationships with different and discrete ‘nations,’ of which the Afrikaners (and often English-speaking South Africans) constituted only one of many.

For a time, apparent diplomatic successes allowed Vorster to stave off his right flank. Cooperation with Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda on a Rhodesian settlement, followed later by public meetings with

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American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, bolstered Vorster’s domestic position and seemingly offered hope of international legitimacy. These efforts ultimately failed from a combination of external circumstances and critical mistakes made by Vorster and his tight-knit group of advisors.

The most important of these consisted of the abrupt end to Portuguese colonial rule in both Angola and Mozambique in 1975. South Africa’s subsequent failed intervention against the Marxist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and support to the insurgent group the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) exposed Pretoria’s hypocrisy as a paragon of national sovereignty and non- interference. African leaders who were predisposed to cooperate with South Africa could no longer do so without risking serious political consequences. Domestically, it highlighted Vorster’s inability to effectively manage a coherent policymaking process as P.W. Botha and SADF ran an autonomous security policy on their own.

Eventually, as Miller explains, the Angola catastrophe, the Soweto uprising, and the failure of peace talks in Rhodesia eventually led to an overwhelming ascendency of the ‘total strategy’ hawks by the end of the decade. Though Miller’s account ends with Vorster’s resignation in 1978, he makes it clear that the kinds of policy options which guided South African foreign and domestic policies in the 1980s had their roots in the rise to power of security hawks at the pinnacle of the regime during the Vorster era.

Ultimately, Miller argues that the apartheid regime’s foreign policy played a fundamental role in determining its statebuilding efforts at home, and the future direction of the apartheid system itself. This re-centering of apartheid’s history on an often-neglected diplomatic history approach admirably highlights its leaders’ uncertainties, ambiguities, and plausible roads not taken. It is also, in part, an intellectual history of apartheid under Vorster. Miller ably demonstrates that far from only representing a pure product of Afrikaner racism, xenophobia, and ethnocentrism, apartheid’s international dimensions also played a critical role in determining its evolution and character in the 1970s.

Inevitably in a work of this scope however, there is plenty of room for questions of interpretation. First, on several occasions Miller implies that some of Vorster’s policies were potentially viable and shares verligte disdain for narrow-minded verkrampte politicians and policymakers unable to acknowledge the unsustainability of apartheid in its then-present form. He partly attributes Vorster’s failure to effectively remove “petty apartheid” to verkrampte obstructionism and condemns his failure to do so (334). One could argue, however, that deeper structural factors made such ‘reforms’ impossible. The verkrampte rebels who later formed the Conservative Party insisted that “petty apartheid” was an essential element of the entire apartheid edifice (307). They may have been right. It is difficult to see how fully ‘separate development’ combined with the kinds of worker migration policies proposed by its advocates could have functioned without the persistence of the intense forms of segregation and discrimination inherent in ‘petty apartheid.’ It was fundamental to the racist vision of a ‘multinational’ South Africa. The verligte politicians around Vorster could never acknowledge this as it would have undermined their rationalization of ‘separate development’ policies as non-racist.

Miller also points to Vorster’s “major missed opportunity” to contribute to an early settlement in Rhodesia (161). He blames Vorster for failing to apply enough pressure on Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith to make concessions to his black nationalist adversaries for a transition to majority rule. He especially highlights the 1974/1975 period as one in which Southern Africa was experiencing a ‘phony war’ stage of the struggle against white nationalism, and thus represented a window of opportunity for an alternative settlement.

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Miller’s argument though, may suffer from the benefit of hindsight. Precisely because Southern Africa was not yet experiencing the full-blown effects of increasingly radicalized violent anti-minority-rule violence, the conditions were not propitious for a settlement. Smith would not make substantial concessions as long as he felt his position was tenable. In 1974/1975, he would have had little reason to think otherwise. Miller himself acknowledges that Vorster’s “carrot and stick” approach with Smith simply persuaded the latter to “go through the motions of negotiations” rather than make substantial concessions (156). It seems unrealistic to think that Vorster could have done more, especially given informal SADF assurances to Smith, and the limitations of Vorster’s own worldview.

This is further confirmed by the Rhodesian regime’s behavior in response to increased South African and American pressure in 1976. In August of that year, for instance, Rhodesian special forces began a series of attacks on Zimbabwean refugee camps in Mozambique. What is particularly striking about these attacks, however, is that they overwhelmingly targeted civilians. Miller’s account repeats Rhodesian claims that they were simply conducting “hot pursuit” operations and targeting “insurgent camps” (238). In fact, Nyazonia was a major civilian refugee settlement with little Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) presence. The archives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) attest to the sheer brutality of the event, with dozens of gruesome photographs of women and children slaughtered by the Selous Scouts. The UN agency put the death toll in the hundreds, all civilian. Contemporary accounts, backed up by considerable UNHCR evidence, suggest that Rhodesian claims about militarized refugee settlements in Mozambique were exaggerated at best, as most armed ZANU insurgents were based elsewhere. This did not prevent Rhodesian forces from making numerous cross-border forays over the following years, many of which struck civilian targets.1 It thus appears to be a clear indication that simply increasing pressure on Smith would not necessarily have led to an easier settlement.

Finally, although Miller devotes some space to discussing the socioeconomic changes in Afrikaner society in the 1960s and 1970s and their impact on apartheid ideology and policymaking, he could have pushed this in more stimulating directions. It would have been interesting to know more about the role played by Afrikaner and English-speaking capital in the elaboration of the regime’s ‘separate development’ policies in the 1970s— and its consequent influence on détente policy. For instance, at the height of the concept’s ideological sway, the regime attempted to relocate and establish industrial bases on the borders of the Bantustans. Most of these border areas, with few exceptions, were in Afrikaner territory. This meant that more investment and access to cheap labor would flow to Afrikaner areas, thus further benefiting major constituencies of the National Party and industries which relocated there.2 Meanwhile, the planned expansion of migrant labor to all black workers would ensure white industries benefited from permanently depressed wages.3 Additionally, with increasing mechanization, farmers not only had a strong interest in seeing the departure of much of their African labor force, but they supported and encouraged government relocation of these workers to the

1 See Nathaniel Kinsey Powell, “The UNHCR and Zimbabwean Refugees in Mozambique, 1975-1980,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 32:4 (2013): 41-65.

2 Stanley Trapido, “South Africa in a comparative study of industrialization,” Journal of Development Studies 7:3 (1973), 318.

3 Merle Lipton, “Independent Bantustans?,” International Affairs 48:1 (1972), 14.

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Bantustans.4 It seems hard to imagine that these interests did not play a role in regime policy, and it might have been interesting for Miller to elaborate a bit more on lobby groups and their connections to prominent politicians and ideological currents within the National Party.

All of this aside, Miller’s work is remarkable, and promises to be a standard reference for years to come. It reads like the work of a senior scholar, and should serve as a useful model for aspiring young researchers writing their first books. It exhibits a stunningly rich knowledge of personalities and institutions which is even more impressive given the fact that Miller is neither South African, nor a native Afrikaans speaker. The kinds of relationships he needed to cultivate, and the effort required to learn the language are testaments to his perseverance and obvious passion for the subject. His wide-ranging use of archives, and lengthy note on their nature and availability, should serve as inspiration to future scholars, young and old. I thus highly recommend An African Volk to anyone interested in the history of apartheid, the Cold War in Southern Africa, or the burgeoning field of African international history.

4 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, vol. 4, 28-29.

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Author’s Response by Jamie Miller, University of Pittsburgh

would like to thank Andrew DeRoche, Jacob Dlamini, Hermann Giliomee, and Nathaniel Powell for their thoughtful and thorough reviews of An African Volk, as well as Elizabeth Schmidt for writing the introduction. It is deeply gratifying to see something that you have worked on for so long resonate deeply withI specialists, and I am thankful to H-Diplo for providing this forum for a stimulating exchange of ideas.

I will keep my response brief and focused on just one issue, as I have already had ample opportunity to have my say in the book itself. In his insightful review, Jacob Dlamini takes issue with the vantage point that the book takes in relation to its subject. He suggests that while there is much merit to intellectualising Afrikaner political thought, this approach risks obscuring other elements of apartheid history, including the corruption, petty racism, and forced removals.

This is an issue I grappled with a lot during the writing of this book. Where I landed on it was here. The reality is that the scholarly understandings of the apartheid regime, its politics, and its ideologies have advanced little since the end of apartheid. Academics have largely avoided the topic and the job market in South Africa does not incentivize such investigations. The public sphere in South Africa is, not coincidentally, filled with rather two-dimensional understandings of the regime’s thinking and motivations. The atmosphere for talking about the regime is fraught and unconducive to nuanced treatment. Moreover, the regime of the 1980s, with its rampant profiteering, lack of ideological cogency, and rogue security forces, continues to cast a very long shadow upon that of earlier decades. My story aimed to redress this situation in just one small regard. Other scholars are doing sterling work in their own areas.

Frankly, I think we need a lot more study into the ideas that drove the extraordinary human degradation of apartheid, not less. I feel that we are ready to embark on this task, to enter a post-post-apartheid era of scholarship in which historians can tackle these noxious ideologies seriously in a way that enriches rather than undermines the existing narratives of the era. There is now such vibrant and extensive literature on (among other things) the gendered violence of apartheid, the liberation struggle, forced removals, the trials of township life, Bantu education, homeland institutions, and much more, that the field can surely sustain the (re-) emergence of such a line of inquiry. I am willing to admit that South Africans might feel less confident about this than I do. With organisations like AfriForum and Solidariteit wilfully misrepresenting the past and sustaining incendiary apartheid-era myths, the dangers of studying the regime being used to bolster contemporary political agendas might seem a lot more real. But understanding why Nationalists did what they did in ways that go beyond explanations of greed and atavism, amorphous racism, and simple evil will not invalidate the suffering of many. It will help explain it.

Professor Dlamini’s stimulating review seems to suggest that he disagrees, or does not see things this way. He writes: “It is well and fine to take Afrikaner nationalists seriously as an intellectual and political force. But we stand to lose a lot when we uncouple their intellectual and political project from the racism that was never far from the surface.” I could not agree more. But I do not think that intellectualising Afrikaner political thought means losing focus on its racism; I think rather that it helps us historicise and problematise that racism.

One thing that the book was trying to do was to stress that the intellectual content of the apartheid regime, including its racism, was not a monolith, nor the caricature of today’s received wisdom, but full of paradoxes and complexity that can really only be understood by following how diverse intellectual genealogies manifested themselves in politics and policy. Racism infused the ruling ideologies in multiple and sometimes

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conflicting intellectual forms. It therefore had diverse and sometimes contradictory expressions in policy. And racism was able to find succour in a variety of ostensibly non-racist institutions and ideas (like the Cold War, or development, or the post-colonial nation-state). South African Prime Minister John Vorster’s meeting with Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda in 1975, with which the book opens, was not at all a moment of transcending race, as it might appear to the layperson; it was the counterintuitive expression of a specific, racist political project to use the post-colonial nation-state as an institution to protect Afrikanerdom and subjugate black South Africans. It was not some dilution of racism in Afrikaner society that led Vorster to stage the photo op of him dining with black Malawian women; this moment was an outgrowth of the bizarre notion that a reduction in ‘petty’ apartheid could actually make ‘grand’ apartheid more viable. These are the kinds of incongruous events that I wanted to explain, rationalise, and insert into the scholarship, precisely because they illuminate the complexities in racial thinking and politics during this era and thus force us to think about the past in new ways. The alternative is simply to let these obvious incongruities stand, unexplained, in the historical record. That cannot be the job of the historian.

To hone in on one such incongruity which Dlamini brings up and may well appeal to readers in this particular forum: controversy over the stationing of black diplomatic officials in South Africa. Dlamini tells the story of one such instance, when in 1963 South Africa vigorously opposed the appointment of a black American diplomat. “That is petty racism and it is an intrinsic part of the Afrikaner nationalist story,” he rightly concludes. But less than a decade later, the apartheid regime did welcome black diplomats. In fact, the regime bought out an entire suburb in Pretoria to house them, in keeping with the spirit of the Group Areas Act; it went to great lengths to show that the new emissaries would be treated exactly as white foreign diplomats would; and it bent over backwards to form partnerships with African states and loosen its bonds with white communities in Rhodesia and South-West Africa. This new policy was unsurprisingly controversial with the white electorate. But the regime felt that the central notion underpinning grand apartheid—the existence of parallel nation-states—mandated a shift in how it conducted international relations, specifically across the colour line. This new policy, with all its contradictions and limits, is also part of the Afrikaner nationalist story. Both policies were deeply racist in their motives and goals. However, they reflected manifestations of different racist political projects in changing geopolitical, economic, and social circumstances. Explaining that change over time, that nuance and subtlety, is the job of the historian.

I am grateful to Dlamini for bringing up this issue, which I have long wanted to talk about in print in a serious way. But one example which he cites from my book to illustrate his point is, I feel, simply unfair. I write, “[Vorster], like his colleagues, simply could not understand why Xhosa, Zulu, and Sotho would not be as assertive about protecting their own customs and cultures as Afrikaners were, given the Nationalists’ deep philosophical grounding in group rather than individual rights.” (8) Dlamini interprets: “Miller’s book is perhaps too faithful to its actors’ worldview … Could the lack of enthusiasm displayed by the Xhosa, Zulu and Sotho (however defined because Miller does not define these groups) have had something to do with the fact that what for Vorster et al. was an act of cultural and political assertion was for millions of black South Africans a coercive and often violent process of displacement and uprooting? A reader not familiar with the sordid history of forced removals in South Africa—which affected more than three-million people—would not know any of this from reading Miller’s book. As the book stands, black South Africans come across as history’s laggards, so tardy they cannot even make it to their own making as subjects of the Xhosa, Zulu and Sotho nations.”

This is a misreading of the passage in question. The excerpt is plainly a description of Vorster’s (and his colleagues’) view, of his dangerous misperceptions (with a touch of sarcasm from me, I would add), and of his

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H-Diplo Roundtable Review, Vol. XIX, No. 15 (2017) application of Nationalist categories and identities to the existence of other South Africans whether they wanted them or not (which was central to apartheid as a political programme). The point of the excerpt is not to describe the motives of black South Africans or their hostility towards the grand apartheid project, but to identify Vorster’s views—which matter greatly because they substantially influenced the policies and politics which are the subject of the book. I make my own views evident elsewhere. I refer to the Nationalist program as “delusional” (325, 328), “tenuous” and “flawed” (331), “divorced from reality” (25), “brutal” (6) and “farcical” (1). I also included a prefatory section entitled “Terminology” in which I specifically write that although historians have to use the very categories of analysis constructed by the apartheid regime in order to meaningfully discuss its politics, this is not unproblematic. Diamini overlooks all of this in his interpretation of my thinking in this passage.

I want to reiterate my deep appreciation to H-Diplo for convening this roundtable and providing the opportunity to discuss these topics in depth. I hope these reviews, and my reply, provide others with much food for thought.

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