The Lesser of Two Evils

Speaker 1:
Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the national endowment for the humanities and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial foundation.

Joanne Freeman:
From Virginia humanities, this is BackStory.

Ed Ayers:
Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind the headlines. I’m Ed Ayers.

Joanne Freeman:
I’m Joanne Freeman.

Brian Balogh:
And I’m Brian Balogh.

Ed Ayers:
If you’re new to the podcast each week, along with our colleague Nathan Connolly, we explore a different aspect of American history.

Brian Balogh:
We’re going to start the show in 1962 when one of the most celebrated figures of the 20th century found themselves in the grips of one of the world’s most notorious regimes. The figure was Nelson Mandela and the regime was South Africa’s apartheid Government.

Tom Borstelmann:
Mandela had spent most of 1962 abroad, as a representative of the recently banned African national Congress.

Brian Balogh:
Tom Borstelmann teaches global history at the University of Nebraska.

Tom Borstelmann:
And he had been engaged in promoting support in Egypt, in other parts of North Africa and especially in the United Kingdom. And then when he came back into South Africa in August, on August 5th of 1962, he was arrested by the South African police. Apparently from the best evidence we have, at least in part on the basis of a tip from the CIA, which worked closely with the intelligence services of the South African state.

Brian Balogh:
Nelson Mandela’s arrest came in the wake of some important moments in South Africa’s history. In 1948, South Africa’s national party came to power on a platform of apartheid. Tom says the country had been segregated for a long time, but apartheid was a much more severe regime. As part of that platform, South African authorities started cracking down on the civil rights of the black majority. Then in 1960, police officers killed 69 peaceful protesters, the event is known as the Sharpeville massacre and it contributed to the apartheid government’s ban on dissenting organizations, including the African national Congress. But you’re probably still wondering why did the CIA tip off South African authorities?

Tom Borstelmann:
So the US government had been in bed with the South African government, had been closely aligned with it since 1950. The original US relationship with the South African government was formed indirectly by military Alliance, because South Africa fought as part of the British Commonwealth on the allied side that the US was part of in World War 1 and also in World War II, so there’s a longstanding relationship that’s military and political that goes back. But it’s really a relationship that accelerates because of strategic minerals, really after 1950.

Tom Borstelmann:
In 1950 the US and South Africa sign an agreement for the US to be purchasing future Uranium ore dug up in South Africa, and this comes at a crucial moment, because uranium at that point was thought to be quite rare. So the question was where the next batch of uranium would come from? This isn’t a minor question, I mean this is the era in which the US is building its nuclear arsenal and making sure that it has the largest one, especially after 1949 when the Soviets detonate their own nuclear device for the first time. Access to uranium, it’s hard to imagine a more important concern, and South Africa at least until 1952 from ’50 to ’52 appeared to be the future of uranium mining.

Brian Balogh:
Tom says that most Americans experienced the period after world war II as the cold war era, but this wasn’t the case for most people around the world. In South Africa, India, in many other countries, the period after 1945 was one of decolonization. Anti-colonial activists were fighting for self determination from mostly white rulers. But this posed a problem for American authorities, they were trying to support the movement for independence, but they also wanted to maintain partnerships with the longstanding European allies like France and Britain.

Tom Borstelmann:
The simplest way to think about it is that the US understood that there were two great forms of injustice in the world, there was communist injustice and there was racist imperialist injustice, but they were much more concerned about the cold war problem, about the communist version of a sort of a totalitarian form of dominance of unfreedom. The question of racial unfreedom to Americans was always something that hit close to home, and that was, they thought something that could be managed in a more gradually reformist kind of fashion, but they were absolutely certain that the highest priority had to be stopping the expansion of communism or socialism in any form.

Tom Borstelmann:
So that meant lining up with a lot of governments abroad that were also anticommunist, even if they were quite unjust in the treatment of their own peoples. And among those, South Africa was the sort of ultimate problem, because they were the one last remaining white dominated state that explicitly rejected the idea of for human equality. So South Africa was just sort of a puzzle that American government policy makers had a very hard time resolving.

Brian Balogh:
Tom says American authorities solved this puzzle by reluctantly supporting the anticommunist apartheid regime.

Tom Borstelmann:
It’s not that the CIA was explicitly cheering for apartheid, although sometimes it may look that way on the surface, they would much rather that the South African white folks had done differently than they had in their domestic policies. But those were much less important than preserving strategic relationship with the South African government and preventing what they feared was possibly a communist black majority government. That’s what they were really concerned about. And it’s true that the South African apartheid government was so brutal towards protesters that the South African communist party gained a great deal of moral authority and was closely allied with the African national Congress. So the kind of question of whether South Africa might’ve become a communist nation under black rule was not a complete fantasy, but of course it was a product directly of the brutality of white anti-communism.

Tom Borstelmann:
The one thing about this that is not always clear to people at this point in the 21st century, is the degree to which communism in theory, Marxism-Leninism was not primarily concerned with race of course, it was concerned with issues of class, but that the communist forms of government under the Soviet union had explicitly banned racial discrimination from 1917 onwards. So communists had a kind of reputation among racial freedom fighters around the globe as people who were dependable allies. That’s a way of thinking that most Americans in the cold war really weren’t aware of, they tended to think of communist as sort of evil people who were kind of robotic and oppressors of humanity, whereas from the perspective of a black South African, the 1950s or sixties or seventies, how many communists were on the right side? It’s the Americans they weren’t sure were on the right side, they were pretty sure they weren’t.

Brian Balogh:
And all of that said, what specifically was the CIA’s role in the arrest of Nelson Mandela?

Tom Borstelmann:
I don’t know the exact role, what we know is that that former agents have admitted to having tipped off the South African intelligence service, because the CIA had much more extensive resources, both human and mechanical for spying on and monitoring dissidents, socialists, communist sympathizers around the globe. And they were busy doing that and they were just much better at it than South Africans, so they worked hand in glove with them, just as the CIA worked hand in glove with the French government, the British government and many other anticommunist governments.