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CHAPTER 1

Contact, Colonization, and Apartheid

South African Social Formations in Historical Perspective

The South African HIV/AIDS epidemic developed within a set of historically particular political, economic, and sociocultural conditions that shaped the extended campaign for HIV/AIDS treatment access. A historical analysis of the African continent’s southernmost society shows how the contours of contemporary South Africa emerged out of its past. Uneven development and unequal health outcomes were produced by the interaction of South African social groups, or social formations, over five centuries. Starting with a review of indigenous political formations in Southern Africa, this chapter takes the reader through the history of contact, colonization, and apartheid, paying particular attention to the role of institutions in producing unequal health outcomes along racial lines.

The colonial period in South Africa was marked by contact and conflict between European settler states and indigenous African political formations, which influenced the subsequent development of South African society. From the slave economy of the early Dutch settlements to the British Empire’s extension of state administration, settler societies engaged with African political formations in ways that extended their interests while expropriating land and resources from indigenous peoples, producing negative health outcomes along the way. Alongside colonial states, the development of rural missions provided health services and education to indigenous South Africans while disseminating Christianity. Indeed, the diffusion of Western religion and biomedical practices across the South African hinterland occurred alongside expropriation and enslavement.¹

As British and Afrikaner polities united following the South African War, social, political, and economic dynamics that had emerged during the colonial era were set into law. The institutionalization of indirect rule, segregation, and land expropriation was the bitter fruit of this white settler alliance in South Africa. The state produced by unified white rule was based on programs to address white poverty, which reinforced racial inequality. The establishment of large parastatal corporations, social welfare provisions, and a bifurcated wage and labor system created a Keynesian welfare state, but it was one that supported the country’s white population. The period of unified white rule set into motion institutional precedents that expanded racial stratification, formalized land expropriation, and limited the scope of political, economic, and cultural autonomy for black South Africans.

Building on earlier political, economic, and institutional dynamics, the apartheid era led to intensified racial segregation, state violence toward black South Africans, and “separate development.” However, those directing apartheid never completed their aim of “ordering” black urban and rural spaces in South Africa (Posel 1991). While traditional leaders exerting political authority in rural Bantustans may have functioned as “decentralized despots,” they also highlighted the limited reach of the South African state (Mamdani 1996). Recurrent forms of self-governance emerged intermittently in black urban areas: the history of the Soweto and Alexandra townships show how a lack of legitimate and representative political institutions led to political self-organization. The anti-apartheid movement also had urban roots, considering the complicity of rural traditional leaders with the apartheid state. Anti-apartheid activists built on the political principles developed by black urban social formations that served as the foundation for the Mass Democratic Movement in the 1980s that aimed to end apartheid and, subsequently, the South African HIV/AIDS movement.

Tracing the political principles of the anti-apartheid movement to the HIV/AIDS movement, I take a multipolar approach to South African history, showing how the interaction between linked but distinct social formations produced unequal health effects that adversely affected nonwhite populations. But in order to discuss the historical context for the emergence of the world’s largest HIV/AIDS epidemic, I first outline how particular populations came to embody inequality. In addition, understanding how the HIV/AIDS movement transformed the state to sustain the lives of historically marginalized people entails understanding the roots and principles of political resistance across South African history.

Precolonial Social Formations, Contact, and Colonization

As others have emphasized, the peoples of the world have histories that do not begin—or end—with European contact and colonization (Asad 1973). The history of Southern Africa is no different. Prior to European contact, Southern Africa was populated by indigenous social formations that had a diverse array of political, economic, and cultural practices.² Colonial settlement across the region was met with resistance, which continued until black South Africans liberated themselves from apartheid. The dualistic nature of colonization, with British and Dutch settlers bringing different modes of political, economic, and cultural organization, produced divergent regional dynamics, but these regional differences were eventually subsumed under the aegis of unified white rule.

Initially, European explorers articulated with social formations located along the Southern African coast. Portuguese explorers and Dutch settlers first came into contact with the Khoisan, known to settlers as Hottentots and Bushmen, who descended from nomadic hunter-gatherers and pastoralists from across Southern Africa.³ Cape Town’s role as a refueling hub for European maritime trade led to Dutch enslavement of Khoisan people to support agricultural production and expand colonial trade, undermining life outcomes and social reproduction for South Africa’s first people.⁴ The violence of colonization extended beyond the domain of economic production, as Dutch settlers, who were predominantly men, took Khoisan women as sexual partners during the early colonial period.⁵ The forcible intermixing of people, culture, and language transformed the Dutch settler language of Afrikaans, among other cultural shifts.⁶ Nevertheless, the Khoisan did not passively accept the violence of colonization. Raids, slave rebellions, and migration were responses to the violent expansion of European settlements. Many Khoisan people dispersed northward, but their freedom from European settlers would be short lived.

Toward the central and eastern stretches of South Africa’s coast, European explorers and settlers came into contact with Xhosa people who were part of a larger migration of Bantu-speaking peoples from Central Africa.⁷ Part of the group of Nguni-language speakers, the ancestors of the Xhosa people traveled from the Great Lakes region of the continent southward, eventually arriving in present-day South Africa. In contrast to Khoisan hunter-gatherers, the Nguni-speaking groups brought with them a society centered on cattle herding and iron technologies. Organized into autonomous but interconnected kingships, the Xhosa displaced the Khoisan as they moved into and settled central and eastern areas of present-day South Africa.⁸ In doing so, Xhosa culture was transformed, with key linguistic features adopted from the Khoisan, such as the characteristic Khoisan clicks. Notably, the word “Xhosa” roughly translates to “enemy” in the South African Khoisan dialect. European settler contact with the Xhosa was marked by armed conflict over land and resources, mirroring a similar pattern for indigenous social formations across Southern Africa.

On South Africa’s eastern coast, Portuguese explorers and settler populations consisting of Dutch and British colonists came into contact with the Zulu Kingdom. The Zulu and Xhosa peoples shared several key cultural characteristics, including ancestral roots in the Nguni migration from central Africa, the displacement of Khoisan hunter-gatherers, linguistic and cultural influence from South Africa’s first people, and sustained conflict with European settler populations. The Zulu polity unified autonomous but linked kingships under the leadership of King Shaka, the figure for whom they are best known. From the outset of Afrikaner and British settlement, the Zulu Kingdom responded with considerable military force to European colonization.⁹ However, the Zulu polity was made up of regional kingships, where aspirant leaders negotiated with—and at times sided with—European settlers to maximize their power. The actions of regional power brokers and/or rival factions were central to the subsequent movement of European settlers into the Southern African hinterland, a fact that undermines simplistic narratives of colonization and conquest.

The movement of Europeans inland was enabled by colonial war, and settlement contributed to changes in sociopolitical organization that reverberated across the region. Central to the settlement of South Africa’s interior was conflict between British and Dutch colonists in the Cape Colony, which encompassed the present-day Western, Eastern, and Northern Cape Provinces. In repossessing the Cape Colony in 1806, the British crafted an alliance with the Dutch elite based on shared political and economic interests, such as the continued function of Cape Town as a port of supply for mercantile trade. Political compromise led to the continuation of established colonial practices, such as the utilization of a pass system for black South Africans. Since the 1760s, a pass system had been used to distinguish between enslaved and free Africans, whereby those engaged in wage labor were required to present passes provided by employers to prove their freedom (Lester 1996, 24). The British adoption of the pass system maintained a racially defined labor structure established during early Afrikaner rule.¹⁰

In adapting to local conditions, British colonial administration secured the support of Dutch farmers on the frontier who supported mercantile trade. There, Dutch settler social organization was associated with decentralized political and legal authority. Within each district (drostdy), a field cornet (veldkornet) combined the roles of district administrator, judge, and militia leader.¹¹ The field cornet embodied, both de jure and de facto, colonial authority and law in rural areas under Dutch political control. While British legal and institutional norms were established in urban areas, rural areas maintained social order based on the practices developed by Dutch colonial settlers.¹² One effect of British support for Dutch landholders was to uphold and extend their “labor-securing practices,” which in practical terms meant the conquest and enslavement of African people.¹³

The alliance between the British colonial state and the Dutch farming sector would not last long. The Cape Colony’s economic dependence on slave labor undermined the political and economic ties that bound two variants of European colonial settlement. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 banned slavery across the British Empire, and the formal end of slavery in 1834 undermined the farming sector across the Cape Colony.¹⁴ Dutch landholders sold their properties and headed north in search of farmland outside of British colonial oversight, producing a mass exodus of Dutch farming families. The migration of Dutch settlers to the areas north of the Orange River, known as the Great Trek, precipitated an increase in British landownership in the Cape Colony.¹⁵ In turn, British ownership increased the production of cash crops, reconfiguring the agricultural sector. As the economy and demography of the Cape transformed, the movement of Dutch settlers northward reverberated throughout Southern Africa as the settlers came into contact with established African polities and secured access to land and resources through varied means, including warfare.¹⁶

While Dutch settlers moved northward, British expansion of the Cape Colony eastward ran up against Xhosa lands, leading to conflict. Since 1779, Dutch and subsequently British settlers had engaged in intermittent conflict with the Xhosa social formations on which they had encroached in what are known as the Xhosa or Cape Frontier Wars.¹⁷ Xhosa cattle raiding and reclamation of former lands were central to intermittent conflict between Xhosa peoples and colonial settlers. British and Dutch forces fought together in many of these conflicts, as their political and economic interests aligned relative to the expropriation of African land.¹⁸ Continued conflict with the Xhosa on the eastern front enriched British traders and farmers who supplied the British Army, further entrenching the economic power of British settlers in the Cape Colony.¹⁹ However, conflict between settlers and the Xhosa came to a head via unforeseen means. A Xhosa prophetess named Nongqawuse experienced a vision that indicated that the gods would send settlers into the sea if the Xhosa people killed their cattle and destroyed their crops.²⁰ The vision was presented to a paramount chief in 1856; however, the cattle killing expanded beyond the scope of his region to encompass Xhosa society. This millenarian response to British encroachment and violence was devastating, leading to famine, death, and the destruction of Xhosa society’s economic foundations.

Cattle had been a central component of Xhosa society, and were particularly important for social reproduction, as they were used to the pay bride price (ilobola) necessary to consummate marriage. Without cattle, Xhosa people migrated westward, seeking wage labor in the Cape Colony’s agricultural sector, now primarily under British control.²¹ The cattle-killing crisis also moderated conflict along the Cape Colony’s eastern frontier, leading to the increased influence of Protestant missionaries. The missions established in Xhosa areas later known as the Transkei and Ciskei brought access to Western education, English-language training, religious conversion, and medical treatment based on Western conceptions of health and healing.²² The establishment of missions in what is today South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province transformed social dynamics among the Xhosa and African resistance to colonization. Children sent to receive mission education, learn English, adopt Christianity, and take on Western styles of dress became known as “school Xhosa.” Those who raised their children according to traditional modes of socialization were characterized as “red Xhosa,” as they continued to adorn their bodies with red ocher, along with other customary cultural practices (Mayer and Mayer 1971 [1961]). The increased exposure of Xhosa people to wage labor, education, and Christianity led to their involvement in early campaigns for African equality that took a political, rather than military, approach.

The missionary movement contributed to the emergence of an educated class that sought to transform colonial society by expanding the political and economic rights of black South Africans.²³ For example, Lovedale Missionary Station offered education to both white and black South Africans while also providing medical care via an adjoining mission hospital.²⁴ Those who attended classes at Lovedale Missionary Station include Z. K. Matthews, who went on to study at Yale University and the London School of Economics before becoming a leading member of the ANC. Govan Mbeki, a leading figure within the SACP and father of future president Thabo Mbeki was also educated at Lovedale Missionary Station. In addition, Steve Biko, a leading figure in the Black Consciousness Movement traced his roots to the same rural mission. While many more attended and were educated at Lovedale Mission Station, the historical import of these figures underscores the influential role of rural missions in educating those who led early efforts for equality and justice.

Settler Expansion and Colonial War

Alongside early movements for African equality, the nineteenth century saw an increase in export-oriented productive activities and growing economic power for the Cape Colony’s British settlers, which transformed the colonial state. A growing economy enabled infrastructural investment and the expansion of state institutions throughout the Cape Colony. The Cape Colony’s development was financed internally through the expropriation of land and resources from South Africa’s indigenous peoples, the maintenance of a low-wage labor environment to ensure profitability in the agricultural sector, and continued expansion of the colony’s productive base.²⁵ Here, one can see corollaries with the experiences of other British colonies, where the land, labor, and resources of indigenous peoples served as the basis for colonial development (Rodney 1972).

A bias toward the needs and interests of European colonists permeated the development of colonial state institutions, including those that focused on public health. The dynamics of colonial health in South Africa were based on a clear distinction between those who were defined as citizens (European settlers) and those whose health outcomes were seen as peripheral to public health (black South Africans). As with other colonies across the continent, health facilities were developed in urban areas and focused on providing curative services to white colonists (Packard 2000). When African people did receive medical care, it was often due to their proximity to white settler populations, as was the case for those who worked in the domestic sphere, or their significance for the colonial economy, in the case of mine workers. British control of the Cape and Natal Colonies led to the development of medical services in the cities of Cape Town and Durban, respectively, with the latter expanding on the heels of a large-scale colonial war with the Zulu Kingdom.²⁶

As the British Empire transformed the social, political, and economic characteristics of the Cape Colony, the Zulu Kingdom expanded from South Africa’s eastern coast inland. Under the leadership of King Shaka, the Zulu polity subsumed autonomous regional kingships into one. One effect of Zulu expansion was the dispersal of contiguous social formations—known as the mfecane, which roughly translates to “the crushing”—from what is today known as the KwaZulu-Natal Province.²⁷ Subsequent conflict between ethnic groups displaced by Zulu warfare spread across the central and northern reaches of the region (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001, 167). The mfecane led to new territorial borders for established social formations, the consolidation of new groups such as the Mfengu, and the restructuring of regional power dynamics. The aftermath of the mfecane saw widespread warfare and conflict led by the Matabele in the northern reaches of present-day South Africa, displacing other indigenous peoples and compounding the impact of Zulu expansion. War and migration depopulated a region that would soon be settled by the Dutch displaced from the Cape Colony.

The Dutch population that left the Cape Colony following abolition traveled northward into the South African interior, moving into the wake of the mfecane and contributing to the restructuring of African social formations. In what was far from a homogenous process, Dutch populations had slowly expanded out from the Cape Colony since the early eighteenth century. The early wave of Dutch migration had consisted of “trekboers” (trekboere), who had moved to the eastern periphery of European settlement to escape oversight and taxation from Dutch colonial authorities.²⁸ The trekboer population first oriented around a variant of pastoral nomadism and attempted to establish their own independent republics before later developing the eastern farmlands. This group made up a significant segment of the Dutch population that departed after the abolition of slavery. Known as the voortrekkers, which roughly translates to “pioneers,” Dutch people of different class orientations and backgrounds traveled north from the eastern areas of the Cape Colony, across the Orange River, and onto lands historically occupied by African social formations.

The area directly north of the Cape Colony’s eastern region was settled by Dutch migrants and subsequently become known as the Orange Free State (Oranje-Vrijstaat). The areas immediately north of the Orange River were inhabited by Khoisan hunter-gatherers who had moved northward following the earlier wave of colonization and slavery in the Cape Colony. The Khoisan were once again displaced by European settler expansion. Further north, the migrant Dutch moved into the sociopolitical vacuum that emerged during the mfecane. There they established the Vaal Republic, which encompassed the northern region of South Africa from the Vaal River up to the Limpopo River. Neither British colonial authorities nor indigenous African social formations passively accepted the establishment of two Afrikaner republics. The voortrekkers confronted the Matabele, led by King Mzilikazi, as they moved up to the Vaal River, leading to armed conflict and the eventual establishment of the Vaal Republic, also known as the South African Republic. Intermittent conflict also erupted between the Afrikaner inhabitants of the Orange Free State and the government of the Cape Colony. Over time, conflict with the Basotho Kingdom led to the expansion of the Orange Free State as Afrikaner settlers subsumed its lands. In sum, Dutch migrants settling in the north displaced African populations while negotiating their autonomy from British imperial power.

The movement of the Dutch pioneers northward was not a uniform process; Afrikaner migrants navigated their movement amid African social formations using various tactics, including negotiations, warfare, and enslavement. Some treks ended in ruin, with all who participated meeting their ends.²⁹ While advanced military technology was central to the success of the Afrikaner migrants in their movement northward, so too was an ability to leverage internal fissures within African societies to the benefit of mobile settler populations. The diverse outcomes reached by different voortrekker groups underscores the contingency of these forays into the South African hinterland. While the eventual outcome of the treks has become accepted history, one must not fall prey to the bias of presentism in analyzing the movement of European colonial settlers northward.

As the northern and central areas of present-day South Africa were settled by Dutch voortrekkers, a multipolar colonial arrangement came into focus. African social formations had been transformed and displaced by a combination of European expansion, slavery, colonial conflict, and warfare emanating from the Zulu and Matabele Kingdoms in the east and north, respectively. British control over the southern reaches of the African continent had expanded from the Cape Colony eastward, with Natal now an established British territory. A war with the Zulu Kingdom on South Africa’s eastern coast would also see British influence on the region expand. However, the accords that maintained an uneasy détente between the British Empire and Afrikaner republics would not hold for long. The discovery of vast diamond and gold deposits in South Africa’s northern reaches would irrevocably shift the balance of power in the region.

Gold, Settler Conflict, and African Resistance

The “scramble for Africa” among European colonial powers and the uncovering of South Africa’s vast mineral wealth instigated British imperial expansion and fomented further conflict between European settlers and African social formations. After an extended period of conflict that enveloped the lives of noncombatants, the British Empire and Afrikaner republics reached a compromise that unified white rule and expropriated land and other resources from African peoples. The transition from a multipolar colonial period to unified white rule set into motion political, economic, and institutional dynamics that expanded colonial pass laws, racial segregation, and the power of traditional authorities across rural South Africa. African peoples continued to resist the expansion of white political and economic authority through the vectors of armed conflict and political activism.

The detection of vast mineral deposits in the northern areas of the region led to profound changes. An immense concentration of diamond reserves was uncovered in the settlement of Kimberley, located in the Cape Colony’s northern region. The discovery led fortune seekers from around the world to converge on the South African north, initiating an extractive economy that would be largely controlled by British interests. As the scope of South Africa’s mineral wealth became clear, the British sought to further their interests in the region, annexing Botswana, then known as Bechuanaland, in 1885. However, the decisive event for South Africa’s historical trajectory was the declaration of British control over the Vaal Republic in 1877. While the British had acknowledged the political autonomy of both Afrikaner republics in 1852, their relationship with the northern colonial settlements was characterized by intermittent conflict. British efforts to subsume the northern Afrikaner republics occurred alongside war with the Zulu Kingdom (1879), underscoring the colonial violence that emanated from British imperialism and settlement.

The multipolar context within which the colonial wars of the late nineteenth century unfolded inexorably shifted with the discovery of substantial gold deposits in the Vaal Republic. Between 1884 and 1886, a series of mining expeditions uncovered gold in the Witwatersrand area of contemporary Johannesburg. The subsequent gold rush led to an influx of foreign miners in the area, and Johannesburg was established as the “city of gold.” The British initially engaged in conflict with the Vaal Republic from 1880 to 1881, but the commandos of the Afrikaner republic successfully engaged in guerilla warfare to undermine the British incursion. However, the discovery of gold and the threat of German and Portuguese regional claims precipitated the British initiation of the South African War (1899–1902). After the British failed in an attempt to spur an uprising against the leadership of the Vaal Republic in 1895, the commandos of the Afrikaner states attacked British-held areas across Southern Africa in 1899. Afterward, the Afrikaner commandos dispersed back into society, reverting to the guerilla tactics that had secured victory during the previous British invasion. However, this time British military commanders employed a new tactic to undermine Afrikaner resistance: concentration camps. Employing a scorched-earth policy, the British forcibly relocated the Afrikaner population into concentration camps, leading to the deaths of approximately twenty-six thousand women and children, primarily due to infectious disease, malnutrition, and lack of access to medical care.

The aftermath of the South African War saw the Afrikaner republics annexed and incorporated into British colonial territory, along with the continued expansion of South Africa’s mining industry. British colonial authorities had long worked to establish a wage-labor system in Southern Africa, with the imposition of hut taxes payable only in hard currency a central intervention in this regard. But it was a pathogen, the rinderpest virus, which led many black South Africans to seek work at the mines or commercial farms controlled by white settlers.

Nearly a half century after the Xhosa cattle killings, a rinderpest outbreak during the 1890s devastated cattle populations across Southern Africa, undermining social reproduction and the subsistence agriculture most African social formations depended on in lieu of wage labor.³⁰ As black South African men were drawn into the wage-labor sector by the impact of rinderpest and the continued European encroachment on African land, traditional authorities emerged as important intermediaries for a transforming colonial state and economy.

As colonial war waned and the colonial economy grew, the intermediary role of traditional authorities between the colonial state and rural black South African communities was formalized. The establishment of rural reserves, where traditional law governed social relations, formalized European settlement areas and reinforced the power of traditional lineages. As tradition was codified into law, women’s formal political roles waned, reflecting European conceptions of political institutions and gender hierarchies. Traditional elites, as intermediary political actors, also buttressed the growth of wage labor by serving as labor brokers for the mines, securing the participation of black South African men in the workforce on contracts ranging from six to nine months.³¹ The formalization of “native reserves” also produced stratification within the rural black South African population, as land and resources allocated within these sociospatial enclosures reflected political authority, with traditional authorities garnering the lion’s share. Poor and working-class South African families crowded into huts amid the pressure generated by the appropriation of land by traditional elites within the reserves and the necessity of paying hut taxes. The spatial densification and material deprivation associated with the rural reserves facilitated the spread of deadly pathogens, most notably tuberculosis.³²

In concert with traditional authorities, the South African mining industry constructed a migrant-labor system that drew from the black South African population and other Southern African countries such as Mozambique, Lesotho, and Swaziland (First 1977, 1983). A circular pattern of labor migration was established during the colonial period as black male South African mine workers oscillated between contracted periods of labor in the mines and urban areas and their ethnically designated areas of residence in the rural reserves.³³ Mine workers were housed in compounds, often divided according to ethnicity, while those working in urban areas stayed in all-male hostels (Moodie 1994). In Johannesburg, the nearly eighty thousand black urban residents lived in backyard shacks, overcrowded compounds, and informal settlements at the turn of the twentieth century (Harrison 1992). From the ethnic segregation of laborers to the exclusion of women and families from the mining areas, the mining sector set in motion particular modes of sociospatial organization that were to feature prominently in South African urban social life.³⁴

The exploitation of South Africa’s vast mineral wealth also increased socioeconomic stratification within the white settler population. The extraction of profit created a new set of mining conglomerates, such as De Beers Consolidated Mines, founded by Cecil Rhodes. While the British figured centrally in the mining interests of the region, Afrikaner settlers also participated in the mining sector. The emergence of a new economic elite, the Randlords, marked the emergence of a white elite that spanned the British-Afrikaner political divide. The white South African elite incorporated black South Africans into the global economy as manual laborers, shaping class structure across the region. The transnational mining sector that encompassed South Africa set pathways for disease transmission that were first highlighted by a black rural and urban tuberculosis epidemic, evidence of the growing disparity in health outcomes between white and black South Africans.

Socioeconomic stratification and increasingly unequal health outcomes were accompanied by the normalization of racial segregation across South Africa. Within the Afrikaner republics, racial segregation had marked social organization from the outset, with black South Africans restricted to settling in periurban areas. In British-controlled Cape Colony, urban segregation intensified in response to an outbreak of bubonic plague that had originated in Hong Kong. Growing international trade in the nineteenth century led to the increased movement of people, commodities, and pathogens, leading to racial segregation in colonial cities (Swanson 1977). Informed by miasmatic theories of disease, medical authorities utilized public health measures to implement racial segregation in colonial Cape Town and other cities across the European colonial empires. Black South Africans were designated as the source of disease, with their “unsanitary” residences, interspersed with white homes, designated as a threat to public health by medical authorities. Colonial authorities destroyed these homes, and black South Africans were moved against their will to racially defined urban areas. In Cape Town these measures were met with resistance by the black dockworkers and urban laborers who were forcibly removed from their homes. However, their protests did not prevent the deployment of public health concerns to create racially segregated urban spaces in Cape Town or elsewhere in South Africa.

A period marked by European expansion and colonial war set into motion institutional dynamics that presaged the intensified racial segregation during apartheid (Cook 1986). Through political, economic, and sociocultural processes, racial segregation and socioeconomic stratification transformed urban and rural areas in South Africa during the late colonial period.³⁵ A native reserve system demarcated ethnically defined rural areas, establishing formal institutional roles for traditional elites and regulating the movement of black South Africans. Urban segregation was also extended across South Africa, predicated on a policy of “influx control” that regulated the movement of black South African laborers between the reserves and urban areas. The structural segregation established during the colonial period continued to mark South African society as British and Afrikaner polities united in the aftermath of the South African War, leading to further disenfranchisement of black South Africans.

Unified Rule, the ANC, and the White Welfare State

The social, political, economic, and institutional dynamics that emerged during the colonial period were carried forward with the unification of British and Afrikaner colonial polities. Unified white rule emerged in South Africa with the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, a white colonial compromise that was built on the expropriation of black South Africans. The power-sharing government of British and Afrikaner settlers reversed legislation that had granted limited citizenship rights to black South African during the late colonial period. For example, the Glen Grey Act (1894) had established limited citizenship rights for black South Africans within racially defined territories.³⁶ However, the Natives Land Act (1913) reversed this policy by preventing land sales between white and black South Africans while formalizing expropriation, with 87 percent of the land set aside for white colonial settlers (WHO 1983). The exclusion of black farmers ended the emergence of a black South African peasantry and eliminated competition in the agricultural sectors since black South African farmers had generally outperformed their white counterparts with higher per-acre agricultural production (Bundy 1979). Black South African social formations, which constituted 70 percent of the country’s population, were left to carry out subsistence farming on poor quality farmland within densely settled reserves or seek out wage labor in the mines or in urban areas.³⁷

Unified white rule was met with political resistance, most notably from the South African Native National Congress, which was established in 1912 and later renamed the African National Congress in 1923.³⁸ Early leaders of the party such as John Dube and Sol Plaatje led campaigns against legislation that formalized racial segregation and limited the citizenship rights of black South Africans, such as the Natives Land Act. Early ANC leaders came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds but shared certain characteristics, one of which was missionary education and English proficiency.³⁹ Many early ANC members were Xhosa, reflecting their relatively early exposure to missionary education and British colonial rule. However, as Dale McKinley (1997) emphasizes, early ANC leaders were not necessarily focused upon a radical reorganization of South African society. Rather, they represented an emerging black South African professional class whose political and economic interests were undermined by unified white rule. Despite class differences between the ANC leadership and the majority of black South Africans, the party rose to prominence in the 1920s, campaigning against racial segregation and the continued expropriation of black South African land and resources.⁴⁰

The onset of unified rule was accompanied by an expanded use of state institutions to secure the political and economic interests of white South Africans, including legislation to address the growing population of “poor whites.”⁴¹ Increasing numbers of white South Africans living in poverty undercut the logic of segregation, which was predicated on the supposed racial supremacy of Europeans. The union government set out to reestablish the link between race and class as the foundation for a bifurcated wage-labor system across South Africa. Transnational interests influenced the unity government’s policies, as the Carnegie Corporation funded a commission that addressed the “poor whites” question in South Africa (Willoughby-Herard 2015). The commission’s findings were used to rationalize institutional mechanisms to support the social welfare of white South Africans, despite growing social inequality and disease prevalence among black South Africans.⁴²

The development of state-owned enterprises that disproportionately employed poor and working-class whites accompanied a welfare state that defined South African citizenship in racial terms. State-owned enterprises such as the Electricity Supply Commission (Eskom), and the Iron and Steel Corporation (Iscor) expanded white employment and contributed to industrial growth in South Africa. The developmental state created during the interwar period was buttressed by the expansion of a state-led industrialization of the South African economy (Freund 2013). The Afrikaner population was the primary beneficiary of the white welfare state, which transformed their class position and reinforced the link between race and class. The rise of an Afrikaner working class was accompanied by the establishment of institutions created by an Afrikaner elite that espoused Afrikaner cultural particularity and white nationalism (O’Meara 1983). The broederbond, an elite network of wealthy Afrikaner men, backed the development of Afrikaner nationalist ideology, which focused on black South African urbanization and the social instability that was believed to accompany this process. Inspired by racialist conceptions of social Darwinism, united by Calvinist beliefs, and informed by the memory of concentration camps, the National Party was formed in 1914 to secure the interests of South Africa’s Afrikaner population.

Industrialization and urban growth during the interwar period exacerbated contradictions in the white settler alliance that had held since the South African War. The development of a white industrial working class and urban economic expansion led to increased black South African participation in the workforce and growth in black urban communities.⁴³ The rural reserves had never had sufficient arable land to support subsistence agriculture, and black South Africans increasingly depended on urban employment as soil qualities degraded and the rural population grew.⁴⁴ As the pressure to garner urban wages to supplement subsistence agriculture in the rural reserves intensified, so did the size, scope, and complexity of black urban social formations.⁴⁵ The growth of black urban settlements in response to employment opportunities led to new forms of social organization and decisive shifts in South African history.⁴⁶

The early history of Soweto offers a useful example for understanding how black urban settlement expanded and developed in social and political terms. Squatter leader James Mpanza played a central role in Soweto’s settlement and in the development of mechanisms for self-governance,⁴⁷ including the collection of fees for trading licenses that supported social policing initiatives and funeral arrangements, among other functions (Stadler 1979; Bonner 1990). However, many of those who settled in black urban areas were temporary residents, as black South African men were recruited to work in urban areas or the mines for a period of six to nine months, after which time they would return to their ethnic homelands (Mayer 1980; Sharp and Siegel 1985). While these areas of “separate development” were key sources of mining labor, women-driven agricultural production in the homelands subsidized social reproduction, since mining wages alone were inadequate to support a family. Despite the transience of some residents, urban communities such as Johannesburg’s Sophiatown blossomed with cultural expression during this time, including the publication of magazines such as Drum and the development of influential music scenes (Coplan 1985).

The question of black urbanization had long figured in debates on traditional authority. Political leaders such as Jan Smuts were ardent supporters of racial segregation due to a belief that detribalized black South Africans would destabilize the country. British experiences with the issue of precolonial social organization had deeper roots, as their attempts to unravel the caste system in India had informed their subsequent colonization of the African continent. Indirect rule, which maintained traditional laws and customs in the native reserves and reinforced the power of traditional rule, was formalized following the violent suppression of African social formations during colonization.⁴⁸ Debates on detribalization had simmered during the latter half of the nineteenth century, highlighted by a series of “rape scares” in several cities across South Africa (Etherington 1988; Scully 1995). That black urbanization was primarily male was a central component of growing white fear and mistrust, encompassed by the term swart gevaar (black peril).⁴⁹ While many of the reported cases of sexual assault appear to have been baseless, the image of young black South African men roaming urban areas stoked fears of the tsotsi (youth gangster).

As the black urban South African population grew, the political divide between the liberal-leaning British South Africans and nationalist-leaning Afrikaner South Africans expanded. Following urban industrial growth and commensurate increases in the demand for black urban labor during the Second World War, the South African public was faced with a clear choice on how to address racial segregation. A vote for the liberal United Party in 1948 would unravel the two-tiered racial structure of the labor market and move South African society toward desegregation. Conversely, a vote for the National Party would reverse black urbanization and deepen existing policies of racial segregation and “separate development.” Here again, South African history was marked by continuity rather than a break with the political, economic, and institutional dynamics of the past.

Apartheid, Traditional Authority, and Urban Revolt

The dynamics of racial segregation, social inequality, and expropriation continued and expanded during the apartheid era in South Africa. The National Party’s rise to political power intensified racial segregation, exacerbated racial inequality, increased state violence toward black South Africans, and led to South Africa’s immersion into Cold War proxy conflicts. Support for African traditional elites was central to the apartheid state’s project of maintaining ethnically distinct reserves. The apartheid state supported and expanded the power of traditional leaders, designating customary areas as the basis for “separate development.” The process of reconstructing urban space along racial lines was contingent upon forced removals and the development of periurban townships, fundamentally changing urban sociospatial relations across South Africa. However, the “ordering” ethos of the apartheid system was never fully realized, and political opposition to the apartheid state grew in the black urban social formations that the National Party aimed to control.

After coming to power via national elections in 1948, the National Party initiated the apartheid project of racial separateness. The apartheid system built on and expanded institutions developed during the colonial period to control the movement and residence patterns of black South Africans. The National Party’s strategies of segregating urban space and expanding the role of traditional authorities aimed to unwind South Africa’s rapid urbanization during the 1940s.⁵⁰ In Johannesburg, the number of black South Africans living in the city increased from 244,000 in 1939 to 400,000 in 1946 (Harrison 1992). The industrialization of the rural farming sector and a growing urban economy meant that opportunities for wage labor had shifted, and rapid urbanization led to the proliferation of informal settlements in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. Among other legislation, the Group Areas Act (1950) and the Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act (1951) were enacted by the National Party to address the growing black South African urban population. The policies created separate residential areas for different races and legalized forced relocation to achieve this end.

However, the apartheid system was created through a piecemeal process that was never complete. As Deborah Posel (1991) has emphasized, policies associated with apartheid were amended repeatedly, highlighting the gradual intensification of segregation rather than the imposition of a grand vision. For example, the Group Areas Act was enacted by Parliament in 1950 and amended five times before being repealed and reenacted in a new form in 1957. The 1957 version of the Group Areas Act was amended a further three times before being repealed and reenacted in 1966. The policy was amended an additional nine times before being repealed a final time in 1991 during the negotiated political transition. All this underscores Posel’s claim that “ordering” according to the logic of racial separateness was never fully achieved. Still, although racialized social engineering was left unfinished, the violent restructuring of urban space had destructive and lasting effects on black urban social formations in South Africa.

The Group Areas Act’s implementation extended the apartheid state’s power to reorder urban space by enabling forced removals of black residents to periurban townships. The newly created Native Resettlement Board announced plans to destroy the area of Sophiatown in Johannesburg and remove the community in 1953 before initiating the process in 1955. Another famous instance of forced removal occurred in Cape Town with the community of District Six in 1968. The mass removal of black inner-city inhabitants across South Africa was accompanied by the development of periurban townships, such as Soweto (Johannesburg), Nyanga and Gugulethu (Cape Town), and Umlazi and KwaMashu (Durban). Primarily built by municipal authorities, the townships became overcrowded almost immediately. Indeed, the apartheid state directed new construction to occur in the rural reserves rather than build sufficient urban housing. The density of the townships was due also to the efforts of black South Africans to remain in urban areas and maintain their social, economic, and political ties. Thus, forced removals and relocations to the townships were accompanied by an increase in subletting, the construction of backyard shacks, and general periurban densification (Mabin 1992).

However, apartheid’s scope extended beyond the reordering of urban space and into the domain of social reproduction. The Bantu Education Act (1953) mandated racially segregated educational facilities and limited black South African education to vocational skills associated with low-wage professions. Universities that provided education for black South Africans were also affected by the policy. For example, the University College of Fort Hare, where Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe studied, was transformed by the apartheid state despite its history as an independent university. The Bantu education system was modeled on the “separate but equal” education system that was developed in the southern United States during the segregationist era. Policy development within the Union government had been facilitated by input from Charles Loram, who attended Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, and whose work influenced the development of the Bantu Education Act (Davis 1976). As with the “poor whites” question, interested parties from the United States played a significant role in defining the trajectory of legislation that deepened racial inequality in South Africa.

Given the central role of rural missions in the development of black resistance during the colonial era, many were mandated to close by the apartheid state. The Bantu Education Act also impacted rural mission schools, as many maintained integrated student populations despite the entrenchment of racial segregation during the colonial period. For example, the aforementioned Lovedale Missionary Station was forced to close its doors by the apartheid state. The closure of rural mission stations also affected access to health care. For many black South Africans, rural mission hospitals were the closest source of Western biomedical treatment. As the missions closed, so too did access to basic medical treatment for rural black South Africans.

The apartheid state also halted the development of innovative new solutions to rural health delivery that were implemented during the interwar period. Dr. Sidney Kark developed community-oriented primary health care, a groundbreaking approach to health in the ethnic homeland that was then known as Zululand. At the Pholela Health Centre, Kark and several colleagues trained black South Africans living in a rural community in basic epidemiological methods, data-gathering techniques, and clinical assessment. The project produced startling improvements in community health, particularly in the area of child health and nutrition (Geiger 1987; Tollman 1994). Kark’s aim was to empower rural communities through education and training to improve local health outcomes. The project was an undoubted success, and it formed the backbone of a new rural health system proposed in the Gluckman Report (1945).⁵¹ However, empowering black South Africans in rural communities was not a precedent that the apartheid state sought to reproduce. To the contrary, the National Party expanded the power and control of traditional authorities and limited access to health care and education for black South Africans.

The expansion of state control over black South Africans during apartheid was contingent on the complicity of rural traditional authorities, the foundation on which the National Party developed the apartheid state. The logic of racial “separateness” reinforced the power of traditional elites, while ordinary black South Africans saw their rights, mobility, and ability to access resources limited. Once enemy combatants against colonial states, traditional authorities became local power brokers and political intermediaries. Regional kings, chiefs, and local headmen secured access to laborers for the mines and farms and maintained patriarchal sociopolitical relations, while men engaged in wage labor via circular patterns of migration (Vail 1989). An important component of the transition to rural traditional authority across Africa was the cessation of traditional institutions for women’s political influence. Reflecting the patriarchal terms on which European colonial administrators articulated with African social formations, leadership positions and traditional law were transformed to focus on male roles in regulating traditional societies (Van Allen 1982). Therefore, in addition to ossifying customary law, the development of native reserves also introduced new limits to women’s power and autonomy that were actively upheld by traditional authorities.

Influx control, or the movement of black South Africans from rural to urban areas, was contingent upon the cooperation of the “decentralized despots” that maintained political authority in the reserves (Mamdani 1996). However, the symbolic role of traditional leaders shifted during the apartheid era due to the cultural underpinnings of “separate development.” Cultural explanations rationalized intensified racial inequality during apartheid, and the discipline of anthropology played a central role in buttressing the National Party’s claims to essential and incommensurable cultural differences between people of European and African descent. The volkekunde school of anthropology gathered ethnographic evidence and developed conceptual models at South Africa’s leading Afrikaner universities, supplying the cultural grist for the apartheid state machinery (Sharp 2001). Critically, the volkekunde school marked a sharp break with leading scholarship in South African anthropology, which had historically studied social change, urbanization, and the formation of ethnic identity in a critical manner (Bank 2013). The cultural explanation for racial segregation was deployed to rationalize the political separation of society and augment the authority of traditional leaders.

The process of shifting the designation and function of the reserves began in 1951 with the adoption of the Bantu Authorities Act. The policy expanded the power of traditional leaders based on ethnic and territorial lines. As with the Group Areas Act, political change was gradual, and the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act (1959) established the former reserves as quasi-autonomous ethnic homelands. The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act (1970) further concretized the power of traditional leaders over their growing numbers of black South African subjects.⁵² The Citizenship Act transformed passes into passports between societies that had autonomous governments, however few states recognized them as such, other than the apartheid state. The National Party also sought to develop the infrastructure necessary to rationalize “separate development” with quasi-state institutions such as regional parliamentary buildings in the homelands. Of course, political representation was limited to the homelands themselves, which did not correlate to voting rights in the broader political context of apartheid South Africa.

Intensified racial segregation exacerbated underlying inequities in South African social organization. Forced removals from urban to rural areas intensified an emerging crisis of social reproduction for black South Africans living in the rural reserves. As discussed above, the Land Act (1913) had sequestered 87 percent of South African land for whites, which resulted in increasing numbers of black South Africans engaging in subsistence agriculture in the rural Bantustans. Growing demand for land and increasing densification in the rural reserves led to soil degradation and lower agricultural yields, placing additional pressure on migrant wage earners.⁵³ The apartheid state sought to address the crisis by shifting industrial production from urban areas to the rural Bantustans (Wolpe 1972). However, the industrial sector developed during apartheid largely sacrificed efficiency for the racial logic of separate-but-unequal development. The consequences of inefficient import-substitution industrialization during the apartheid era would come full circle years later, following the negotiated political transition out of apartheid.

As a social reproduction crisis escalated in rural areas, black South Africans responded with increasing levels of self-organization and resistance to apartheid. The violence of forced removals concentrated the black urban population into periurban townships, but it also led to increased levels of political organization and opposition.⁵⁴ A long-standing source of opposition to white rule, the ANC had lost standing among black urban residents due to ineffectual leadership amid growing state violence. The ANC’s “young Turks,” led by Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Walter Sisulu, revitalized the ANC by working with the SACP to challenge the implementation of apartheid laws. Walter Sisulu’s election as secretary general reflected a shift within the ANC away from an approach based on moderation to direct action and civil disobedience. The Defiance Campaign (1952) built upon growing opposition to apartheid in urban areas and consisted of nonviolent protests.⁵⁵ Critically, the South African Indian Congress aligned with the ANC to build a nonracial platform for the campaign. Strikes, boycotts, and nonviolent resistance were the responses of an emerging alliance of anti-apartheid activists.

A significant development for the anti-apartheid campaign was the adoption of the Freedom Charter by the ANC, the South African Indian Congress, the Coloured People’s Congress, and the South African Congress of Democrats in 1955. The Freedom Charter set the foundations for a nonracial mass movement to end apartheid, and it formalized several demands: a democratic political system, equality in political rights, equality in human rights, the equitable allocation of the country’s wealth, freedom of movement, access to land, and the nationalization of the country’s banks, mines, and industry. The aims of the anti-apartheid movement set out in the Freedom Charter were highly influential for the subsequent emergence of a broad-based movement to end apartheid that transcended the lines of race and class. The ANC played a leading role in formulating the Freedom Charter, but it did so in a consultative manner. Approximately fifty thousand ANC volunteers canvassed the townships and rural areas, gathering input from black South Africans on how the anti-apartheid movement should self-organize. Former Lovedale Mission Station attendee and ANC member Z. K. Matthews played a central role in compiling the charter.⁵⁶

The National Party met this opposition to apartheid rule with violent repression. The year following the Congress of the People, the meeting at which the Freedom Charter had been drafted and adopted, the National Party arrested 156 meeting attendees on treason charges. While the case failed to secure a single conviction, the Treason Trials showed how apartheid security forces actively undermined the anti-apartheid movement via surveillance and prosecution. Presaging subsequent events, security forces opened fire and killed fourteen protesters at one protest in the mining town of Kimberley in November 1952. The apartheid security forces responded aggressively to the Defiance Campaign, using deadly force, and the period of open defiance toward the apartheid state came to a halt with the Sharpeville Massacre. On March 21, 1960, at a protest against the pass laws organized by the Pan-Africanist Congress, sixty-nine men, women, and children were shot and killed by state security forces. Within South Africa, the National Party responded by further repressing political activity. The ANC, Pan-Africanist Congress, SACP, and other organizations tied to the anti-apartheid movement were banned, and their members went into hiding. Internationally, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution condemning the killing of nonviolent protesters by apartheid security forces and calling for an end to apartheid. The Sharpeville Massacre was a turning point in the mass movement against the apartheid state, one that led to the militarization of political struggle in South Africa.

The Sharpeville Massacre and subsequent militarization of the apartheid state transformed the organizational composition of the anti-apartheid movement. The ANC moved its leadership into exile and formed its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (meaning “spear of the nation” and abbreviated as MK), to engage in guerilla warfare against the apartheid government. Nelson Mandela was a founding member of MK and led a campaign to pressure the National Party to negotiate a new constitution. The campaign targeted government installations across South Africa and included a series of bombings over an eighteen-month period between 1961 and 1963. MK leaders were captured by state security services and prosecuted for “violent acts of revolution” in what became known as the Rivonia Trials (1963–1964). ANC and SACP leaders including Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, and Walter Sisulu were sentenced to life in prison for their involvement in the MK attacks. The intensification of internal repression against the anti-apartheid movement shifted the military conflict from a domestic to a regional affair, with the ANC in exile serving as the apartheid state’s primary target.

During the 1970s, the apartheid state shifted from racially “ordering” South African society to becoming a regional military and intelligence apparatus. However, the expansion of apartheid state violence across Southern Africa led to international isolation. In 1961, the National Party held a referendum, and white South Africans voted to withdraw from the British Commonwealth.⁵⁷ South Africa’s exit from the British Commonwealth also entailed a transformation of Botswana’s political status. Formerly the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland, Botswana had been subsumed into the Union of South Africa as part of the political compromise leading to unified white rule. South Africa’s exit from the British Commonwealth foreclosed the possibility of Botswana’s incorporation into South Africa, and following the development of a constitution in 1961 the British approved an application for self-government in Botswana. While South Africa maintained political control over South-West Africa (today known as Namibia), Botswana emerged as an important “frontline state” in the militarized campaign against apartheid along with Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania, and Angola. Given Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban support for African anticolonial movements, the regional conflict against the anti-apartheid movement was framed through a Cold War lens. While powerful international partners such as the United States became allies of the apartheid state, new variants of political struggle emerged within South Africa that challenged the racial logic and state violence of the apartheid era.

Black Consciousness, the Soweto Uprising, and Late Apartheid

The intensification of state repression following the Sharpeville Massacre led to an interregnum for ANC-led internal opposition to apartheid, but it was followed by a new form of social justice activism in South Africa. The Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) traced its roots to the South African student movement and aimed to transform black South African social life. Growing out of transnational movements for black liberation and Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary thought, the BCM worked to undermine the discourse of white supremacy and set the foundations for the Soweto Uprising, which would take place in 1976. As the National Party turned state security forces on black South African urban youth with deadly effect, the foundations for another wave of broad-based opposition to apartheid began to form. Despite attempts by the National Party to control the townships, forms of self-governance and resistance reemerged within black urban social formations. Marked by nonracial solidarity that connected urban civics associations, a rising trade union movement, the student movement, and human rights activists, the Mass Democrat Movement set into motion dynamics that would lead to the end of apartheid.

The National Party’s attacks on the anti-apartheid movement did not quell black South African resistance for long. As the ANC and other organizations were banned and their leadership forced into exile, the South African student movement led the resurgence in anti-apartheid activism. Up until the late 1960s, the nonracialist position established via the Freedom Charter held sway in a student movement led by the National Union of South African Students. However, debates on the efficacy and suitability of white liberal solidarity in the face of apartheid violence led to a fracture within the student movement. Inspired by the work of Frantz Fanon, student activists including Steve Biko, Barney Pityana, and Mamphela Ramphele argued that colonization and white settler violence were predicated on the rationale of white supremacy, which led black South Africans to internalize a sense of inferiority. For Biko and others, continued alliance with white liberal students would not address the need for an autonomous student movement that united those who had been historically disenfranchised. Critically, the conception of “black” that was developed by the student movement at the time included all who were discriminated against by the apartheid state: black, “coloured,” and Indian South Africans. The South African Student Organization was formed in 1968 based on the logic of autonomous black self-organization and precipitated the rise of the BCM.

Emerging from the student movement, Black Consciousness activists subsequently shifted their focus away from university campuses and toward black South African communities. Early BCM history overlapped with the South African Student Organization in Durban, where both Steve Biko and Mamphela Ramphele were undertaking their medical studies.⁵⁸ Biko was expelled from the university in 1972 due to his political activities, while Ramphele completed her medical degree that year. Biko was to live under further restriction, as the apartheid security forces limited his movement to King William’s Town, a small city located outside of East London in what is today South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province. There, Ramphele initiated a community health center that provided primary care and health education to black South Africans. The Zanempilo Community Health Centre was founded as part of a broader BCM campaign to provide medical care to underserved black South African communities.⁵⁹ Ramphele was named regional director of Black Community Programs for the province, directing BCM programs with Biko, who remained under state surveillance.

In addition to providing primary care, BCM activists led campaigns to organize communities and developed literature that challenged white supremacy. The Black People’s Convention, founded in 1973, served as the umbrella under which activities and campaigns across the country were coordinated. Publications such as Black Review aimed to promote self-respect, self-reliance, and human dignity among black South Africans. BCM activists also educated and mobilized high school students, leading to the establishment of the South African Students Movement in 1972. Students who attended leadership workshops coordinated by BCM activists played a central role in forming the Soweto Students Representative Council and in envisioning and planning the protests against Bantu education that became known as the Soweto Uprising (Ramphele 2016).

On June 16, 1976, students from across Soweto stood up from their desks, left their classrooms, and began marching toward Orlando West Stadium. Approximately twenty thousand students took to the streets of Soweto to protest the Afrikaans Medium Decree (1974), which required that students be taught in both English and Afrikaans equally. As students marched through the township, they confronted police barricades and, shortly thereafter, gunfire. The young people shot and killed by the South African police included Hastings Ndlovu and Hector Pieterson. Pieterson’s death was recorded in what is now an iconic image, which circulated widely and became an inspiration for social movements globally. The violence spread through Soweto, leading to the deaths of many black South African students (estimates range from 176 to 700). The Soweto Uprising and its violent repression led to a fundamental shift in South African society. Student protests spread across the country after the uprising. Internationally, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution that condemned South Africa for the killings, characterized apartheid as a crime against humanity, and called for self-determination.

As a new generation of mobilized youth took the anti-apartheid movement forward, Biko remained under state surveillance in the Eastern Cape. After he was arrested at a security checkpoint outside Port Elizabeth, Biko was detained, transported to Pretoria, interrogated, and beaten to death. He died from a brain hemorrhage while in police custody. Following on the use of deadly force against black Sowetan youth, Biko’s death reinforced that the National Party would exercise lethal violence to maintain power. International condemnation rained down on the National Party but with little substantive effect. More significantly, the late 1970s marked the beginning of intermittent states of emergency as black South Africans living in townships rejected the legitimacy of the apartheid regime. The townships, the source of social mobilization to end apartheid in the 1950s, once again emerged as the core of opposition to apartheid state violence. A trade union movement that had begun its rise with a series of strikes in the early 1970s joined the movement, and solidarity actions by white South African organizations oriented around democratic and human rights principles also increased.

Over the course of the late 1970s, an increasingly hardline National Party leadership group oversaw the militarization of the apartheid state.⁶⁰ Responding to growing social unrest unleashed by the Soweto Uprising, the state centralized its security apparatus through the creation of the National Security Management System in 1979. The State Security Council also usurped many functions previously overseen by the cabinet, underscoring the military’s growing power within the apartheid state (O’Malley 2007). The state’s militarization culminated with the declarations of multiple states of emergency during the 1980s as the anti-apartheid movement attempted to make the country “ungovernable” through mass stay-away campaigns, rent boycotts, strikes, and demonstrations. Various forms of state violence were enacted against anti-apartheid activists, including torture and death. The surge in state violence within South Africa was mirrored by increasingly aggressive attempts to eliminate ANC leaders in exile. Ruth First’s assassination in Mozambique in 1982 is one example of the apartheid state’s violent impact on other Southern African societies.

The increased aggression of the apartheid state led to fundamental changes in the exiled ANC’s leadership structure and political principles. During the 1970s, the intelligence services of the militarized apartheid state penetrated the ANC exile structures at the highest levels. The infiltration of the ANC forced the party to adapt its mechanisms for internal governance. Already noted for its strong organizational hierarchy, the ANC became increasingly centralized during late apartheid. An example of the ANC’s changed decision-making processes can be found with Operation Vula, in which Revolutionary Council–member Mac Maharaj transferred arms and set up a military underground within South Africa to wage a “people’s war,” modeled on Vietcong resistance to the American occupation of Vietnam. Operation Vula was only known to a handful of ANC leaders such as Oliver Tambo, Thabo Mbeki, and, later, Jacob Zuma. While many cite an ANC tradition of collective decision-making, Operation Vula shows that the process was often concentrated among the organization’s leadership during late apartheid. Given Thabo Mbeki’s leadership role, this closure of democratic space within the ANC was an important political precedent for his outsized role in post-apartheid HIV/AIDS politics.

While the ANC’s exile structures closed ranks, the numbers of black South Africans residing in urban peripheries continued to grow. As living conditions in the homelands deteriorated and political activity was limited by traditional leaders loyal to the apartheid state, what had once been a circular pattern of male migrant labor to and from cities increasingly included women and children.⁶¹ Densely populated periurban areas grew in the 1980s when large tracts of land for legalized informal residence were opened using Section 6A of the amended Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act (Mabin 1992). In Cape Town this was done in response to growing numbers of people moving to the city from the rural Transkei in the early 1980s. As these numbers grew, the apartheid state lost the capacity to monitor people’s movements and the spaces they inhabited (Desai and Pithouse 2004).

As black urban and periurban communities grew, the anti-apartheid movement mobilized them to expand the fight against apartheid. Civic organizations, including street committees and township-wide governing bodies, developed that were based on the notion of community self-organization. The urban civics movement operated as the de facto local state in black urban areas during the 1980s. In addition, the United Democratic Front (UDF) formed in 1983 as an umbrella organization to house the growing trade union movement, faith-based organizations, and urban civics structures, among others.⁶² The UDF formed in response to the apartheid state’s proposal of a tricameral legislative structure, an attempt to ward off revolutionary social change.⁶³ The apartheid state sought to include the limited input of “Indians” and “coloureds” but at rates that were not representative of population distribution and without meaningful voting power. Critically, the tricameral parliament excluded black South Africans, as they remained citizens of the “politically independent” Bantustans. The UDF combined the various elements of the anti-apartheid movement and included the powerful National Union of Mineworkers. When combined with the mass stay-away campaigns and rent boycotts coordinated by urban civics structures, the UDF served as the backbone for the emerging Mass Democratic Movement aimed at ending apartheid.

The anti-apartheid movement within South Africa built upon structures of democratic decision-making and nonracial alliance building that were developed by early anti-apartheid activists. Building on the Freedom Charter and the forms of self-governance that had emerged in black South African urban areas, the anti-apartheid movement carried forward the political principles and social practices developed in response to white settler rule. These would inform the broad social mobilization that ended apartheid as well as social movements during the post-apartheid era. Anti-apartheid activists became centrally involved in a series of “new social movements” that emerged in response to post-apartheid austerity, and the political approach and practices of the anti-apartheid movement are also evident in the South African HIV/AIDS movement’s campaign for treatment access.

Conclusion