South Africa, 30 years after apartheid: part 1

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DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): From the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. This spring marked the 30th anniversary of the election of Nelson Mandela as South Africa's president. That election, of course, brought with it the end of Apartheid in the country, the system of laws that racially segregated South Africa, which had existed in the country for decades.

Around the same time as that anniversary, there was another momentous event in South Africa. South Africans went to the polls in May of this year, and for the first time in 30 years, the political party of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress, lost its parliamentary majority.

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These two events-- the anniversary of Mandela's election and the unprecedented defeat of his party today-- bring up important questions about South Africa's politics since the fall of Apartheid and about where the country goes from here. Over the course of two episodes, we're going to try and answer some of these questions. Later on in the summer, we'll take a closer look at this spring's election and what it means for the country.

But to set the foundation for that conversation, we wanted to take a closer look at the anniversary that was celebrated this spring, 30 years since the election of Nelson Mandela and the end of Apartheid. To do that, you'll hear from a professor at Brown who worked and lived through much of that history himself.

WILMOT JAMES: As we left, Mandela said, if government doesn't do the right thing, take the fight to them-- the old activist, right? Great men like Nelson Mandela aren't unusual, so be careful about who we elect.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): Wilmot James is a senior advisor at Brown University's Pandemic Center. Prior to coming to Brown, he was a member of South Africa's parliament.

Before that, he managed multiple special projects for president Mandela's office and was co-editor of Mandela's presidential speeches. He'll be our guide of sorts for these two episodes. And to start, on this episode, we'll be hearing some of his story, and we'll look at what it can tell us about South Africa's politics then and today.

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DAN RICHARDS: Wilmot James, thank you so much for coming on to Trending Globally.

WILMOT JAMES: It's my great pleasure to be with you.

DAN RICHARDS: I wonder if we could start a little bit just with some about your upbringing. Where did you grow up?

WILMOT JAMES: So I grew up in a very beautiful town called Paarl, outside of Cape Town. It's known today for its wine and its vineyards and its just immense geographical beauty. But it was a very turbulent time in the early years of Apartheid.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): Racial segregation and marginalization of Black people had existed in the region that would become South Africa for centuries, dating back to its time as a Dutch and then English colony. However, the institutionalized form of segregation known as Apartheid began in South Africa with the election of the segregationist National Party in Nineteen Forty-Eight. Wilmot was born in Nineteen Fifty-Three. He grew up with Apartheid.

WILMOT JAMES: The dangerous areas were being segregated. Schools were being segregated. They were unfolding this plan, this grand plan to divide South Africa into racial groups, starting at the top with people of European descent, white South Africans, and Indian population-- that is, from India, who were brought initially as indentured labor.

Then there were people of mixed descent, of which I am a member. And then there was a very large Black population-- that is, people of African descent. And they were the majority of the population.

DAN RICHARDS: Do you remember as a child when you first became aware of Apartheid?

WILMOT JAMES: Absolutely. So you will remember this big event in South Africa called Sharpeville.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): In Nineteen Sixty, thousands of Black South Africans held a protest in the township of Sharpeville against Apartheid laws that prevented Black people from traveling freely within South Africa.

WILMOT JAMES: And they were, in fact, not allowed to be in cities, largely. They had to carry passports internally. And they were marching against the fact that they had to carry passes to move from one city to another and from rural areas into the city.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): Protesters marched to the police station in Sharpeville without their passes.

WILMOT JAMES: Sharpeville was a completely peaceful march.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): Until--

WILMOT JAMES: Police opened fire.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): At least 69 people were killed and over 180 wounded. The massacre sparked outrage around the world, including at the United Nations, which, soon after, declared that Apartheid was a violation of the UN Charter.

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A few years later, in Nineteen Sixty-Three, there was a more violent uprising in Wilmot's home town of Paarl. Wilmot remembers it vividly.

WILMOT JAMES: We were alone with my mother and her siblings, who were all living together in a house. And we heard this sort of noise in the middle of the night, and it was a protest march. And we opened the door to see what was going on. And they were all carrying machetes, and they were marching towards the police station.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): Protesters attacked the police station, and houses and businesses were burnt to the ground. At least two people were killed in the violence.

WILMOT JAMES: And that was the first time that I recognized that something was very wrong in my country, just watching that happen. I grew up in a place, and I loved it. We loved it as children. Barefoot-- I had a vineyard across the way from us. It was a very peaceful, lovely town to grow up in. And that just shattered that all. The cause was absolutely one to support. But my first exposure was one that was very, very, very, very disturbing. I was a child.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): As Wilmot was growing up, it seemed to him like South Africa was stuck in the past, or, even worse, going backwards at a time when the rest of the world was rapidly moving forward.

WILMOT JAMES: Africa was being decolonized. In fact, all the major colonies of the empires were getting their independence, starting with India. And that happened in the Nineteen Fifties. And it accelerated in the Nineteen Sixties. It was the era of John Kennedy. You had the civil rights movement in the Nineteen Sixties and the counterculture movement in the Nineteen Seventies.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): In South Africa, on the other hand--

WILMOT JAMES: We went into the opposite direction-- no independence, no democracy, no freedom. And it seems like things were going backwards. My parents had lost their home once by forcible residential segregation. I went to a colored school. I went to a church in a colored area. I lived in a colored area. I had to sit on a bench that said "colored."

DAN RICHARDS: So how did you get involved in politics in South Africa? When did that begin for you?

WILMOT JAMES: So I became involved in politics as an undergraduate student in the early '70s. And we launched protests at universities. And it was the time of the Black power movement in the United States, and that had spillover effects into South Africa. So I became part of the Black Consciousness Movement in the Nineteen Seventies.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): This quickly got Wilmot into some trouble with South African authorities.

WILMOT JAMES: The police, one night, knocked on my parents' door. Just went straight into our bedroom and arrested me, and I was placed in what's known as preventive detention. I was lucky I wasn't tortured because they didn't want any information out of me. But I was in the hands of the police and the security police.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): It was in the middle of this traumatic experience that Wilmot got some life-changing news. While in prison, he received a letter.

WILMOT JAMES: I got news that I had received a Fulbright Scholarship. And, in fact, a year after that, I ended up in the United States on my way to the University of Wisconsin in August of Nineteen Seventy-Seven and landed the day Elvis Presley died.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): As Wilmot was getting his PhD in sociology in the United States, it started to look like South Africa might be catching up with the world. Over the next decade and a half, the movement to end Apartheid grew, both within the country and internationally.

This movement was embodied by the anti-Apartheid movement's leader, a political prisoner named Nelson Mandela.

NELSON MANDELA: The Africans require, want the franchise on the basis of one man, one vote. They want political independence.

INTERVIEWER: Do you see Africans being able to develop in this country without the Europeans being pushed out?

NELSON MANDELA: We have made it very clear in our policy that South Africa is a country of many races. There is room for all the various races in this country.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): That was an interview Nelson Mandela gave while hiding from law enforcement inside South Africa in Nineteen Sixty-One. At that time, he was a key organizer against Apartheid and was considered to be an enemy of the state. A short time later, in Nineteen Sixty-Two, he was arrested. He continued to lead the movement from prison. And by the Nineteen Eighties, while Mandela was still in prison, it was becoming clear to many people, both inside and outside of South Africa, that Apartheid was unsustainable.

WILMOT JAMES: In the Nineteen Eighties, the issue in South Africa was that you had what's known as a zero-sum conflict. Whites had power, but they were minority. Blacks had no power in the majority. And how do you bring the two together without destroying one another? That's the puzzle. That was the dilemma.

South Africa was under massive pressure in the Nineteen Eighties -- rolling protest marches, police reaction, and suppression, people locked up in jail. So that was ongoing. And then you had major international pressure, sanctions, disinvestment, and the isolation of South Africa.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): The path forward was unclear, and the possibility of violence loomed over everyone. As Wilmot put it--

WILMOT JAMES: If the White people then decided to extend the vote to everybody, they lose power. And they were terrified by that fact. I was once in a meeting where a very distinguished white juror came up to me. He said, their greatest fear, he said, was that Black people would do the same thing to them that they're doing to Black people. That was the greatest fear.

DAN RICHARDS: Of white people?

WILMOT JAMES: Yes.

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DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): So how did South Africa find a relatively peaceful way out of this moment? Well, there are a number of factors, of course, not the least of which was the personal charisma and brilliance of Nelson Mandela. But that wasn't the only factor. There was the international pressure. There was domestic pressure. And then, in Nineteen Eighty-Nine, something happened that accelerated this transformation.

WILMOT JAMES: One day there was an accident in history. The Berlin Wall fell. And that triggered the change because the former Soviet Union was the biggest backer of Nelson Mandela's party. He was not a Communist, but they were a supporter of what they called the liberation movements across the globe. And suddenly, the biggest backer of the African National Congress-- supplied them arms, supplied them with munitions, with training, and so on-- just fell. And the white president of South Africa saw his chance. He saw, they're weak. I'm going to now release Nelson Mandela, unban the political organization, and start bargaining with them because I have the upper hand.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): In February of Nineteen Ninety, South Africa's president, F.W. de Klerk, freed Nelson Mandela.

REPORTER 1: There's Mr. Mandela, Mr. Nelson Mandela, a free man.

REPORTER 2: After 27 years, his head was high, and his fist was clenched.

REPORTER 3: Many whites and Blacks see Mandela as the best hope for a peaceful end to Apartheid. But his unconditional release has shown how volatile the situation has become, setting off both joyous celebration and violence. At least one person was killed during looting in Cape Town. Over 100 were injured.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): Nelson Mandela, leading the newly unbanned party, the African National Congress, began to negotiate the end of Apartheid and the holding of free elections with President de Klerk. It was a high wire act that Nelson Mandela was uniquely suited to perform.

WILMOT JAMES: That process of pulling in everybody into the political negotiations was an act that only Mandela could get right.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): I asked Wilmot for some examples of this unique ability. Two immediately came to mind. The first took place after the assassination of an anti-Apartheid activist named Chris Hani. This was in Nineteen Ninety-Three as the negotiations were still underway. Chris Hani was a close ally of Nelson Mandela, an important figure for Black South Africans. His murder, by a far-right white radical, had the potential to unravel these negotiations.

WILMOT JAMES: There was great fear that Black people would just burn the country down. He was a beloved leader, and he was assassinated. And the following day, Nelson Mandela, he went into television and appealed to people not to burn the country down.

NELSON MANDELA: We are a nation in mourning. Our pain and anger is real. Yet we must not permit ourselves to be provoked by those who seek to deny us the very freedom Chris Hani gave his life for.

WILMOT JAMES: And people listened. Nobody else could have done that. That isn't one episode. The second was a meeting between Mandela and the city divisions of South Africa's defense forces-- the head of the Army, the head of the Navy, and the head of the Air Force. They all three were not willing to support the democratic elections, those three generals.

And he sat down with them over a number of meetings, and he said to them that I know that I'll never be able to beat you on the battle ground, but I want you to remember three things. The first is that you cannot kill us all. And "us" is not just Black people in South Africa, but the Black people of Africa, that population.

The second is that the world is on our side and that you are isolated. And the third, you cannot go back to your former colonial motherland, and we simply have to learn how to live together.

And they looked at one another. They stared at each other in a mutual comprehension that South Africans were interdependent and that their fate was a joint fate and that if we were to succeed, everybody has to be part of the story. The next day, they decided that they will participate in the election. And South Africa's white right wing were brought into the political process and got representation as a minority party.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): In Nineteen Ninety-Four, South Africa held free elections. By this time, Wilmot was a professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town. He had moved back to South Africa in Nineteen Eighty-Three. He was also the director of the Institute for Democratic Alternatives in South Africa, an NGO that was supporting the transition to democracy in a variety of ways.

He also served on the Independent Electoral Commission, which helped to oversee and monitor the fairness of these unprecedented elections. South Africans of all races went to the ballot boxes. And, well, we know what happened next.

REPORTER 1: There were celebrations in every Black township all around Johannesburg.

REPORTER 2: Enough of the votes have been counted to know now that, so far, Nelson Mandela's African National Congress has won about 62% of the vote.

NELSON MANDELA: --and joy that we can loudly proclaim from the rooftops, free at last.

DAN RICHARDS: Do you remember just what went through your head when the results of the election came in in Nineteen Ninety-Four?

WILMOT JAMES: Oh, we were surprised by how much support the African National Congress obtained, which meant that there was an overwhelming mandate. And so that's what went through my mind. You've got Nelson Mandela, one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century, with a major mandate to, in fact, take the country forward and that how lucky I was to be part of that process.

That's what went through my head. I was also terrified about what lay ahead. It's one thing to protest. It's another thing to govern. And so that was a massive challenge.

DAN RICHARDS: Before we talk about some of those challenges and how they've been addressed or not been addressed since that time, I want to go back just-- you first met Nelson Mandela shortly after he was elected president. Do you remember what that first meeting was like?

WILMOT JAMES: I was invited to a private dinner with him. There were six of us. The person who arranged the dinner was his chief of staff, who used to be the president of the University of the Western Cape, which I attended. And he wanted me to succeed him as principal of the university.

And he set me up with Mandela so that he could ask me, which didn't happen. So you don't say easily no to Mandela. But I had just taken a job as head of this NGO, and I couldn't make that shift at that time. That was the one goal of that meeting.

The second goal of the meeting was to get me to help the new government in dealing with the fears that minority has about Black majority rule. And I worked with his office to do two things, actually. One was to run this education program. This was a program in constitutional rights education.

And the second thing is, I'm responsible for renaming his presidential residence in Cape Town. So I interacted with him not often, but the first time was an intimate dinner. As you can imagine, it was quite special. I was really privileged to be part of that.

DAN RICHARDS: Were you star-struck the first time you met him?

WILMOT JAMES: Yeah. Anybody would be. He's a very tall man, and he was a boxer by background. And he had this moral authority about him. And he, being a leader of a clan-- he has a royal background-- there's certain royal things that he did, like he would do research on you before the time.

And the first question he would ask you is, "How's your family? How's your mom? How's your dad?" and so on. And he had a hell of a memory. So, yeah, star-struck. Just, somebody spends 27 years in jail and comes out the way he did. It's just unbelievable.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): Mandela's election marked a new era in South Africa. It didn't, however, erase the challenges that had been building in the country for a long, long time. And Wilmot will be the first to admit, the new administration struggled to address many of the issues that plagued the country.

DAN RICHARDS: I wonder, Wilmot, what do you see looking back, or what did you see back then as the biggest challenges facing South Africa?

WILMOT JAMES: Nelson Mandela believed that everybody in South Africa, Black and white, rich and poor, should be part of the process. And what we faced was a democratic political environment built on a very thin basis when it comes to expertise and education levels because you have to remember that the education that Black people, the majority in the country, received was consistent with the expectations that whites have of them-- basically, to be their servants.

So they discouraged mathematics and science education for four decades. You can imagine. So you had a massively undereducated Black population, and you want to build a modern society. Let me tell you, that was the biggest challenge.

And so we needed to do something about that process. And the results have been disappointing, I must tell you, quite honest. Over the last 40 years, we really have not built an excellent education system, although there's pockets of excellence here and there. That was the one.

The second is South Africa was also geographically built on a large plan of segregation, where the poorest people lived on the outskirts of the city, and they were far away from places of employment. And those places of residence were just dormitories. They really had no economic heart to them.

And undoing that is very difficult, very difficult, because that's the built environment, and you don't change it quite easily. And what we required was a pattern of economic growth that would lift the South Africans up. So education, doing something about poverty, and poor housing, and then continuously integrating society and building trust between populations-- those were the three big challenges.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): Nelson Mandela stepped down as president in Nineteen Ninety-Nine, and these problems, along with many others, persisted. Wilmot was never a member of Mandela's party, the African National Congress. But, of course, he worked with Mandela and other members of the ANC's leadership. But as he sees it, the next generation of the ANC, in many ways, has failed to live up to the promises of Mandela and his peers.

WILMOT JAMES: We watched the second generation of African National Congress leaders come in, and we saw very clearly that they didn't have the same commitment, that they were in it for the money. Corruption crept in. The second-- not everybody, but the second generation of ANC leaders were a problem.

We were clearly looking at a situation where this founding generation of African National Congress leaders were being replaced by others who are less capable-- again, with many exceptions. It was a party that we have very thin commitments to democracy. And they were also very suspicious and hostile to the private sector and to industry and to companies because of their socialist backgrounds.

And that's where I started to shift. And the Democratic Alliance, which is much more a liberal party with a much stronger liberal democratic base, was an appealing party for me to be part of. So I joined that party and stood for office and became a member of parliament and then chairman of that party for six years.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): Wilmot served as a member of parliament with the Democratic Alliance Party from Two Thousand Nine to Twenty Seventeen. And he saw firsthand how the country continued to struggle to meet the promises that had been made with the fall of Apartheid.

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Today, by many measures, South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world, and much of that inequality falls along racial lines. White South Africans, while making up less than 10% of the country's population, still hold the majority of the country's wealth. The Black unemployment rate in South Africa is some 30 points higher than the white unemployment rate.

Even Democratic participation in the country has declined dramatically since its first free elections in Nineteen Ninety-Four. In that election, 86% of the voting-age population voted. In Twenty Twenty-Four, this spring, participation was just over 56%. In that election, as we mentioned earlier in the show, the African National Congress, the party of Nelson Mandela, lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since Nineteen Ninety-Four.

DAN RICHARDS: So we're going to have you back on the show with a few other experts later in the summer to talk about South Africa's politics today and what this historic election means for the country's future. But I wonder, as we start to wrap up, what do you see as some of the most important lessons from South Africa's progression over the last 30 years-- the successes and the failures of its leadership, both for South Africa, and are there bigger lessons for the world?

WILMOT JAMES: The first lesson is that it is of vital importance for any country, but particularly for South Africa since the Nineteen Nineties, to consistently build up and maintain its infrastructure. It, today, suffers from almost daily blackouts because of poor electricity generation. It's created such harm, I must tell you-- the inability to function properly daily because of that.

The second lesson is that you need to build an education system systematically over time, and you mustn't come up with fancy ideas that are not workable and experiment in a way that's harmful. And we did that. When I was in parliament, I used to ask a question every year.

I would ask, how many teachers of mathematics have a qualification in mathematics? The answer on the mathematics question was 40% So we did not do that properly-- teacher training and building an education system.

The third is that never stop building trust in your country. And we can see what's happening in the US today and elsewhere around the loss of trust, and COVID-19 sort of revealed what that is. So we need to build trust, for example, when it comes to responding to COVID-19 or build trust with dealing with a nation's problem. And that has to be an ongoing process.

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): South Africa's transition to democracy 30 years ago underscored just how important building trust is to resolving crises or conflicts. People like Nelson Mandela understood that trust was required for finding a peaceful path forward, and it's something that is sorely lacking in many conflicts around the world today.

WILMOT JAMES: If I think about Israel and Palestine, the greatest fear of any government in that kind of situation is, if we wake up one day, and you want to make a deal, and there's nobody who can make the deal with because you can't trust anybody. Right now, Israel needs a deal-maker on the other side they can trust.

DAN RICHARDS: Would you say it's also part of Israel's responsibility to have their leadership be as trustworthy as possible, too, to the rest of the world? I think that's something that many people feel has been lacking in Israel's own leadership.

WILMOT JAMES: Absolutely. I mean, Israel needs a [INAUDIBLE], somebody who wants to make a deal and who believes that the existential prosperity of Israel requires that. So that's certainly required. And, right now, it does not have an [INAUDIBLE].

DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): None of these problems have an easy answer, perhaps rebuilding trust. Least of all. But maybe we'll leave it here today with the recollection Wilmot had from his last meeting with Nelson Mandela in Two Thousand Eight.

WILMOT JAMES: The background to the visit was that he felt, Mandela felt, that he didn't do enough for the country to deal properly with HIV and AIDS. His eldest son had died of AIDS. And he asked whether we could run a program where we would elevate the importance of HIV/AIDS in the country.

And I, at the time, knew David Baltimore, who was president of Caltech University and was a Nobel laureate, to give the Nelson Mandela Science Lecture on the origins of HIV. So when David then came to Johannesburg to give that lecture, I took him to see Mandela. And the two of us spent half an hour with him.

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And as we left, Mandela said to me and to David that, if government doesn't do the right thing, take the fight to them-- the old activist, right? I listened to those words-- if government doesn't do the right thing, take the fight to them. That's the last time I saw him.

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He is, like few others, a person committed to public service. Great men like Nelson Mandela are unusual. So be careful about who we elect.

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DAN RICHARDS: Wilmot James, thank you so much for coming back on to Trending Globally.

WILMOT JAMES: It's a great pleasure. It's lovely to talk to you.

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DAN RICHARDS (VOICEOVER): Later on in the summer, you'll hear more from Wilmot and two other experts on South Africa's politics today and where the country goes from here. This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards, and Zach Hirsch. Our show was engineered by Eric Emma. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield, additional music by the Blue Dot Sessions.

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If you have any questions or ideas for guests or topics for Trending Globally, send us an email at trendingglobally@brown.edu. Again, that's all one word-- trendingglobally@brown.edu. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Trending Globally. Thanks for listening.

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