Forging Connections

Ed Ayers:
Nelson Mandela was in prison for 27 years, he was finally set free on February 11th, 1990.

Joanne Freeman:
So in honor of the 30th anniversary of Mandela’s released from prison, we wanted to explore the complicated history of the United States and its relationship to South Africa.

Brian Balogh:
You’ll hear more from Tom Borstelmann about how US policy towards South Africa changed over the 20th century. And you’ll learn about the musical connections between the two countries during apartheid.

Joanne Freeman:
But first we’re going to look at how African Americans worked hand in hand with black South Africans to protest racial injustice at home and abroad. And to help us tell the story, we’re going to bring in a few voices. The first is Amanda Joyce Hall, she studies the global anti-apartheid movement, and she recently spent time in South Africa interviewing anti-apartheid activists. Amanda says there are some striking similarities between Jim Crow segregation and the apartheid regime, but there were some important differences too.

Amanda Joyce Hall:
They were similar in that they were both anti-black case systems that economically exploited, politically disenfranchised and culturally denigrated black people. Both systems were undergirded by federal and state laws, by local customs and by in discriminant racial terror and sexual violence. But there were also ways in which they were different, the major and most obvious factor being that in South Africa, black people are a majority that are being denied rights to participate in the polity by a white minority, and obviously in the US the circumstances are different with black people being a smaller percentage of the population.

Joanne Freeman:
Amanda says, another important difference was the civil rights available to African Americans versus black South Africans.

Amanda Joyce Hall:
In 1896 we have the US Supreme court decision, Plessy versus Ferguson, that legalizes segregation in the United States under the albeit false pretense of separate but equal, and I think it’s important to note that there is no such pretense of equality between black and white populations in South Africa in the program for separate development and in the program of apartheid. So to summarize, the US was a more duplicitous in its brand of white supremacy. And Malcolm X notes this when he gives the speech comparing the US and South Africa in England in the 1960s, he says that he has way more respect for a person who tells you to his face that he doesn’t like you and doesn’t want to see you and doesn’t want you in his country, and he’s referring to South Africa. Than he does for the United States, that will pretend like there is a possibility for democracy while at the same time being underhanded and reinforcing aspects of white supremacy in the polity.

Joanne Freeman:
Malcolm X was just one of several African American leaders who inspired black South Africans, just as Nelson Mandela inspired the world many years later, some of the others, Martin Luther King jr and Mohammed Ali.

Amanda Joyce Hall:
A place where we see the civil rights leadership directly in conversation with what’s going on in South Africa is in Martin Luther King’s 1964 speech, when he goes to receive the Nobel peace prize in Oslo, Norway.

Martin Luther King Jr.:
Today I come to Oslo as a trustee, inspired and with renewed dedication to humanity-

Amanda Joyce Hall:
In the speech, the first half of the speech, he’s talking about a need for civil rights in the United States, but the second half he moves to condemning apartheid in South Africa.

Martin Luther King Jr.:
… You honor the dedicated pilots of our struggle, who has said at the controls as a freedom movement sought into orbit. You honor once again, Chief Luthuli of South Africa, who struggles with and for his people, are still met with the most brutal expression of man’s inhumanity to man-

Amanda Joyce Hall:
We kind of see the ways that civil rights leadership are trying to make people think about this enemy of white supremacy as having kind of multiple permutations in different locations.

Amanda Joyce Hall:
The black press in South Africa was operating under extreme censorship and could not report on political activities that were happening within the country or that were happening among black South African groups. But the black press did frequently comment and report and write articles on events that were happening in the black international world.

Amanda Joyce Hall:
They frequently reported on black radicalism in the United States, reporting on the showdowns between the Black Panthers and the police in the United States, they reported on the trials of Angela Davis. So we see black radicalism in the United States making this feature and the South African black press. It’s reported in a way where they are championing these actions. Occasionally they described black power and how black power became a source of inspiration and how it was analogous to an extent to the black consciousness movement, which is the youth movement that begins in the late 1960s, early 1970s in South Africa.

Amanda Joyce Hall:
But also in the interviews, and this also came up in the press, was the way that black cultural figures became prominent during the 1970s in South Africa, so the biggest example is Muhammad Ali. The image of Muhammad Ali is everywhere in the black press following every single boxing tournament that he does in South Africa. And when I asked them what about this, why Muhammad Ali was such a big deal in South Africa? He just said it was inspiring to just see a black man punch back and fight back.

Ed Ayers:
Okay, we’re going to bring in one other voice in this topic, Robert Trent Vinson teaches history at the college of William and Mary, and he spent a lot of time thinking about the connections between black America and South Africa. Robert says that in the 1980s, Americans were bombarded with images of violence between the South African government and anti-apartheid activists.

Robert Trent Vinson:
Turning on the TV we saw the armored vehicles, police and army units in the townships, really very aggressively attacking black activists, black residents.

Ed Ayers:
As a young black teenager growing up in South central Los Angeles, Robert saw similarities between the South African police on TV and the police in his own neighborhood.

Robert Trent Vinson:
Because the police for us felt like a type of occupying presence in our lives, and they were very forceful in their enforcement of the law. One of the vehicles they used was called the Batteram, we called it that, they were sort of small armored tank units, and they were used to sort of bust into houses that were suspected to be drug houses. And sometimes they got it wrong, they bust into some little old grandmothers house and cause all sorts of chaos. We saw the same thing in South Africa, a similar kind of vehicle busting into the homes of black South Africans in the townships, they were called hippos there, so our batteram for their hippos. And in a way it felt it was a similar dynamic of surveillance and enforcement of a law that sometimes you were on the wrong side of whether you did anything or not.

Ed Ayers:
Robert says black Americans and South Africans connected both politically and culturally over the struggle against white supremacy.

Ed Ayers:
(singing)

Ed Ayers:
In the late 19th century for instance African American missionaries built churches and established relationships with black South Africans who were looking for more black led Christian institutions. The American gospel group, the Virginia Jubilee singers who likely performed an arrangement very similar to this one, gave over 1000 performances in South Africa over five years.

Ed Ayers:
(singing)

Ed Ayers:
The members of Virginia Jubilee singers were all formerly enslaved people, and black South Africans found their music profoundly moving. Robert says they recognize their story of suffering, but also the promise of salvation in the songs that they sing.

Robert Trent Vinson:
So, in the songs, these are the sorrow songs, this are the spirituals that come out of slavery. So they speak of the sorrow and the suffering that 246 years of American slavery have rocked, but they also, those sorrow songs are also speaking to ultimate deliverance and salvation. So black South Africans are really paying attention to this because they’re just coming under colonialism, independent societies have been conquered by this point, and they’re trying to wrestle with what it means to be under white domination. And they see despite individual differences in their struggles, local differences, that there’s a broader connection that they have to fight against, right? So this is a term that, W.E.B. Du bois actually gives us, the global color line, but these folks see that in the 1890s, they’re articulating this idea of a global color line, which is why they need to link up their struggles. So we see that dynamic happening early then, we really see it taking off with the Marcus Garvey movement, the UNIA.

Marcus Garvey:
… [inaudible 00:20:53] all men regardless of color are created in the image of God.

Ed Ayers:
Marcus Garvey was a Jamaican political activist based in the United States, in 1914, he launched the Universal Negro Improvement Association or the UNIA. The group advocated for black Americans to return to Africa and establish their own society, independent from their white oppressors.

Marcus Garvey:
… Because if Negroes are created in God’s image, and Negros are black, then God must in some sense be black.

Ed Ayers:
Garvey’s goal of unifying the African diaspora, also known as pan Africanism appealed to black South Africans.

Robert Trent Vinson:
He’s articulating this idea of black political independence, economic autonomy, and full control over religious, social, cultural institutions, a self contained black world, if you will. In which black people could live to their full potential, be full citizens in a newly independent Africa. And so because he’s articulating race as a fundamental organizing force, this is attractive particularly in the places of Africa where race is really predominant. And yes, colonialism in Africa argues that race matters from the perspective of the European colonialist, but it really, really is emphasized in South Africa, where we get a heightened form of colonialism, segregation and then a hyper form of colonialism called apartheid. And so because race means so much more in South Africa than even in other parts of Africa, the race based appeal of Garveyism really takes off in South Africa as well.

Ed Ayers:
And Garvey remains popular for a long time there, he gives black South Africans a language of aspiration for a long time, even longer than they had the United States, is that right?

Robert Trent Vinson:
Absolutely. So for Garveyites in South Africa, the larger language of Pan-Africanism that you’re connected to a whole race of people across Africa, across the African diaspora, means that you’re not a native. And so that term native articulated by white South Africans was to suggest less than, not a full citizen, but a native, someone who is parochial, whose narrow, whose identity is based on narrow ethnic identities, not larger national or international identities. So just the idea that you’re a Garveyite, and some of them may even call themselves Americans to identify themselves with African Americans, was suggested a larger pan African identity and suggested that there was a broader destiny to attack this global color line.

Ed Ayers:
So does Nelson Mandela absorb some of this spirit inspired by Garvey?

Robert Trent Vinson:
Mandela comes to maturity aware of Garvey, aware of other African Americans like WB Du Bois, sporting figures like Jack Johnson and particularly Joe Lewis defeating German boxers, in the case of Joe Lewis on the Eve of World War II, and obviously Nazi Germany articulating these ideas of Alien race supremacy. Folk like Joe Lewis have this out-sized sociological impact, because again boxing in the ring, it’s a fair fight. Let the best man win, and this becomes a metaphor for African Americans and black South Africans that if only the playing ground was level we can achieve like any other race and indeed exceed expectations and even go beyond.

Robert Trent Vinson:
So the idea of the African American and particularly the idea of the Americ, African American who achieves, who is successful despite handicaps or discrimination, these are inspirational examples that black South Africans like Mandela are aware of, and draw inspiration from.

Ed Ayers:
I feel strangely patriotic knowing that African Americans were inspiring people on the other side of the world, and we’re really grateful to you for telling us the story today.

Robert Trent Vinson:
Right, but I think to bring this full circle from the Virginia Jubilee singers in the 1890s and the admiration black South Africans had to these African Americans, I well remember Mandela coming out of jail, and first of all, not fully recognizing him because we didn’t have an image of him for 27 years, so we had this much younger man in our head. But when he walked out of jail, we looked at him, we, meaning Americans, my group of African Americans looked at him as almost a Messiah figure Ayers, not just a leader of a black South Africans, but a potential leader for us too. My generation particularly were looking for new heroes, Malcolm X was long dead, Martin Luther King long assassinated, right? And we were sort of looking around, who was the next leader, if you will? And Mandela was that for us, and when he made a tour of the US in 1990, it was almost like a reversal of the old model of black South Africans looking toward African Americans, it was really African Americans, at least in my world and me, that were looking to Mandela to be our leader too, to be a global statesman, and not just for black South Africans, not just for African Americans, but a statement for the world. A model for the world.

Ed Ayers:
Robert Trent Vinson is a professor of history at the college of William and Mary, he’s the author of the Americans Are Coming. Dreams of African American liberation in segregationist South Africa. You also heard from Amanda Joyce Hall, a PhD candidate in the department of history at Yale university.