The Fall of Apartheid: The Inside Story from Smuts to Mbeki [Hardcover]

"The Fall of Apartheid" by former UK MP Robert Harvey is primarily a history of the negotiations between various white South Africa officials and the African National Congress in the 1980s. But Harvey offers a succicent summery of the Apartheid's history from its roots in the aftermath of the Boer War at the beginning of the 20th century and up to its fall. This makes it a convenient and readable, if shallow, introduction for the neophyte.

Following their defeat in the Boer War, the Afrikaners went on, in Harvey's phrase, to "win the peace" - they started collaborating with the British Empire, which allowed them to dominate not only the native blacks and imported Indians, but also the South African English community. In time, they became an independent republic.

Harvey's book is subtitled "From Smuts to Mbeki", and I have been interested in Smuts, the legendary South African leader, ever since reading about him in David Fromkin's brilliant A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. Harvey treats Smuts harshly - unjustifiably so, in my opinion. It is true that Smuts was not a believer in the equality of races - but in his day, few were. And while the de facto Apartheid was established during his years as an active political leader, the de jure Apartheid was established only after his 1948 defeat, while he was campaigning for the end of segregation.

Formal Apartheid in South Africa was established just as segregation was being dismantled elsewhere, notably in the United States. In 1948, politicians associated with the Afrikaner Broederbond (the Afrikaner Brotherhood), a white supremacist and arguably semi-fascist secret organization won the election (even though they had lost the popular vote - the system was rigged in favor of Afrikaners and against English and non-white voters). In the next twenty years, Apartheid was erected, with harsh laws separating the white from the black and the colored.

Harvey does not elaborate on the daily effects of segregation. One would have to go elsewhere to the description of Apartheid ideology, theory, and practice. The voices of either Apartheid's administrators or its victims are largely silent. We get only a taste of the international politics and the military aspects of the Apartheid story, and virtually no biography of the leading players. The evolution of Mandela's superstardom as the heir to the mantle of Gandhi and Martin Luther King is not explained - he merely appears on stage as a legendary and internationally renowned leader. Harvey's focus is on the political - the demonstrations, the suppression, and the negotiations.

The most surprising thing I learned about Apartheid was that the most appalling aspects of it - the segregation, anti-miscegenation laws, and habitation zones laws - were considerably relaxed in the early 1980s, during the presidency of P.W. Botha. Only the political aspects of Apartheid - namely the lack of political rights for blacks, lack of human rights, and in particular the white Herrenvolk democracy - remained to be negotiated away.

Most of Harvey's narrative is an account of two parallel tracks of negotiations carried out in the late 1980s - one, taking place in England, featured the leadership of the African National Congress (ANC) and prominent Afrikaners, who reported to president Botha. The other took place in prison, in which Nelson Mandela, without ANC authorization, negotiated vis a vis the Afrikaner leadership, including Intelligence Chief Barnard. Harvey argues that the government planned to play one track against the other, forcing the ANC to accept concessions made by Mandela. Yet it is hard to see the method in the negotiation's madness - and scarcely any concessions were ever wrung.

In any event, the dual track - its exact significance is not quite clear - collapsed shortly after the ascension to the Presidency of F.W. de Klerk. Soon after securing office, de Klerk released Nelson Mandela, unbanned the ANC, and started a process of negotiation which culminated in the repeal of Apartheid and in the formation of a Federal state of sorts, securing a measure of protection to the various minorities. The pre election years saw a great deal of violence - not so much from de Klerk's national party or from the ANC, but rather from various Black and white groups, such as the Zulu dominated Inkatha and the extremist right wing Afrikaner group Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). Harvey's narrative does not do justice to the various interests and forces in the final days of Apartheid; rather, he rashes to the bottom line - the first nationwide election, and the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president in May 1994.

In the end, Harvey's book is incomplete and imperfect; Its focus is too much on the British based negotiations rather then on the historical process. And yet, for someone like me, who knows very little about the history of South Africa, Harvey's book is a pretty good place to start.

The heart of "The Fall of Apartheid" is the story of secret negotiations that took place between the ANC and the apartheid regime in the late 1980s, when South Africa was convulsed by turmoil and drifting towards civil war. One set of talks was held in the UK and paired top ANC officials, led by Thabo Mbeki, with reformist Afrikaner businessmen and intellectuals, working at the behest of their government. The other talks took place in South Africa itself, between Nelson Mandela, who was still in prison, and government officials. Both negotiating tracks culminated in 1990, when Mandela was released and the ANC was unbanned. Democratic elections followed in 1994.

The author, Robert Harvey, is equal to this dramatic material: his writing is crisp, his political judgments are acute, and his narrative utilizes confidential material from Consolidated Gold Fields, the mining company that sponsored the UK talks. Much of this material, I believe, is new. Unfortunately, the rest of the book -- which purports to lay out the entire history of apartheid -- is rushed, superficial, and drawn from secondary sources. It reads like a glib Economist article, and diminishes the impact of the core narrative. Some books really should be monographs.

I took off one star for this reason, and also because the subtitle -- "The Inside Story from Smuts to Mbeki" -- is laughably pretentious and misleading. I was also irritated by the numerous minor errors: South Africa has a deputy president, not a vice president; the power utility is Eskom, not Escom; the ANC is the African National Congress, not the African Nationalist Congress; Marinus Wiechers, not Marinus Weickers, is the name of the eminent South African constitutional scholar, and so forth. These slips make one wonder whether Harvey knows South Africa very well. One also wonders whether Palgrave Macmillan employs fact-checkers or referees. Very disappointing.

In this account the experience of the fall of Apartheid from the 1980s to 1995 is explained, analyzed and digested in a fair and reasonable manner. Mostly this is a political book about the inns and outs of manuevering between the Nationalist camp of F.W. De Klerk and Mandala and the ANC. THere is very little analysis of the point of view of the Zulu position or other tribal leaders positions and not enough discussion of why in the 1994 elections the 'Coloured' or mixed population as the Afrikaans speaking black community that is of mized Khoisan-White ancestry and numbers 2 million people voted for De Klerk. There is little discussion of the Indian community as well or the interplay between Xhosa-Zulu inter-ALC politics, as between Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. These issues are seen as more pertinent today, at the time it the sheer importance of the fall of aparthied, a conflict the entire world was involved, that is covered. Also P.W Botha, the president of South Africa from 1980 to 1987 is not covered enough.

Seth J. Frantzman