Communism and the Color Line
Tim Borstellman returns to tell Brian what role — if any — the United States played in Mandela’s 1990 release from prison, and why some officials couldn’t shake their suspicion of him.
Music:
Throughput by Bluedot Sessions
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Brian Balogh:
Earlier in the show you heard from Tom Borstelmann about the CIA’s role in Nelson Mandela’s arrest, we’re going to return to my conversation with him to learn about what role, if any, American officials played in Mandela’s release from prison. But before we get there, Tom takes us back to the late 1970s and the early 1980s. He says, there was a tension in the United States between a growing anti-apartheid movement and the conservative president Ronald Reagan.
Tom Borstelmann:
When you mention Reagan, it’s important that Reagan and Margaret Thatcher the prime minister of England at the same time through most of the 1980s, both of them were crucial supporters of the anticommunist apartheid regime. Absolutely. It is also true that by 1986, all that organizing in the US, in the UK, in Europe, both Western and Eastern Europe, all that organizing had raised consciousness across the globe about the now increasingly obvious and sort of radically visible injustices in the rule of the apartheid regime, which had reached extraordinary levels of violence by the early 1980s. So by 1986, the US Congress passes the economic sanctions, the comprehensive anti-apartheid act of 1986. Reagan himself vetoes it, and the veto was overwritten by a Senate that has a Republican majority. Reagan is at odds with his own party at that point, he’s sort of holdout.
Tom Borstelmann:
It was an indicator of just how far the struggle against apartheid had come and the importance of the international sanctions, which helped to bring an end to apartheid within a few years, by 1990 of course, February 11th of 1990, famously Nelson Mandela is released from prison and that’s just four years after the American sanctions go into effect.
Brian Balogh:
Could you put those economic sanctions against South Africa in the larger perspective of effectiveness of sanctions? Are they seen as one of the leading examples of instances where economic sanctions can actually yield results?
Tom Borstelmann:
They are, in the case of South Africa by the time the US gets onboard with the 1986 comprehensive sanctions act, the US is one of the last to engage in a sort of serious set of economic limitations on trade with an investment in South Africa. So there’s a kind of unanimity in world opinion by that point, which makes the sanctions that much more powerful when the US puts them on. Now, the US of course has the largest economy in the world, in the case of South Africa, you have this enormous internal organized uprising that by 1985 is huge and it’s bringing the country and its economy to a halt, while at the same time there is extraordinary level of unified international pressure of banks not loaning money to the South African government, of corporations not building plants there for factories, of not trading with the region, not investing in the country, in South Africa. So that’s a kind of internal and external combination that was fantastically powerful.
Brian Balogh:
And stepping back, in spite of the global anti-apartheid movement, do you think it would have been possible for the American government to warm to Nelson Mandela, were it not for the warming, so to speak, of the cold war and eventually the end of the cold war, take out that Mandela is released at just about the time that the cold war is coming to an end.
Tom Borstelmann:
It’s essentially close to three months after the fall of the Berlin wall, three months and two days. So it’s not a coincidence. The whole longterm process by which in South Africa, anti-communism served as a cover for racial totalitarian rule that falls apart with the end of the cold war. So it changes the dynamic and you’re asking about a counterfactual situation, and counter-factuals are always tough, right? Because one level they don’t really [inaudible 00:31:34] possible to resolve, but they’re crucial for us to think through, and I appreciate the question in that regard, because otherwise it’s hard for us since we’re not social scientists to measure what might have been different and therefore which factors are more significant than others.
Tom Borstelmann:
So if you’d not had an end to the cold war, it’s not at all clear that the US relationship with South Africa would have developed the way it did, I mean, that did resolve the problem. The U S certainly could have come around to warming its relationship with the ANC, even if the Soviet union still existed on into the 1990s. That’s possible. The level of resistance to apartheid had reached staggering effect by 1985, so it’s imaginable, but who knows exactly how it would have been. I could offer one remarkable scene that I think is maybe the best one of the changed US relationship with Mandela and with the ANC, and with black South Africa after the end of apartheid.
Tom Borstelmann:
But the image that sticks with me is a photo, I think it was probably in the New York times, from 19… I think it was 1997, in the late 1990s, one of Mandela’s many trips abroad, and this one to the US, where he goes and gives a talk, a speech to a joint session of Congress. He’s invited there and at this point everybody loves him, it’s post cold war and people have, just like they’ve sort of re-imagined Martin Luther King as this figure of great ease and comfort to elite white former segregation. They re-imagined Mandela as also sort of making them feel good about themselves.
Tom Borstelmann:
So this almost entirely white set of Congress people and senators are sort of lauding cheering for Mandela and then taking photos with him afterwards, and when the best part of the whole photo shoot was early on when Strom Thurmond, who’s still alive, still in the Senate at age 99, which is why I think it was 97, because I think he died in ’98.
Brian Balogh:
And I wish you just say notorious segregationist.
Tom Borstelmann:
Yeah, he’s the former South Carolina Governor, and also a former candidate at the Dixiecrats, the breakaway segregationist Democrats for the presidency in 1948, and thanks to the civil rights movement in the US to the black freedom struggle, he had changed his tune, like politicians will do, and his constituents changed, so did he. And then you get this picture of him holding up his R [inaudible 00:34:05] next to Mandela, the two of them graspy hands the way Victoria’s combinations will win. And this huge smile, his teeth aren’t so good anymore, Thurmond. But here’s Mandela, the former black freedom fighter for South Africa, and here’s Thurmond, the symbol of everything opposed to Mandela’s lifelong struggle with these huge smiles in front of the camera, it was a wonderful end to the 20th century.
Brian Balogh:
But time moves on, and tell me if this is true, I find it incredible that Nelson Mandela was on the terrorist watch list in the United States until 2008.
Tom Borstelmann:
Yes, this apparently was true, and I don’t know the full backstory on why that lingered that long. How much of that was sort of oversight, how much of it was sort of a knowing act by racially non liberal members of the state department or others who might… Yeah, I find that hard to imagine, I think it was probably more a result of oversights, but it’s hard to know. But that’s the old problem of one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and those things are not… At one level it’s just sort of a cliche that doesn’t reveal much, but it’s also true that people’s… when context changes, people see things differently, and it’s only after the US has finally eliminated its own forms of formal racial segregation and violence that Americans can begin to see a little more clearly, it’s like they get bifocals about South Africa as a result.
Brian Balogh:
Tom Borstelmann teaches global history at the university of Nebraska, Lincoln. He’s the author of many books including Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War, and the Cold War and the Color Line: American race relations in the Global Arena. While politicians and diplomats navigated a shift in relationship between the US and South Africa during apartheid, another channel fostered a unique cultural connection between the two countries. And this one was much more musical in nature.
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From Music to Madiba Lesson Set
From 1948 to the early 1990s, South Africa used an institutional policy of segregation known as apartheid to marginalize the nonwhite population. Though whites were a minority group in South Africa, apartheid allowed them to exert control over the government, economy, and society. Apartheid faced opposition from the global community including the United Nations especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Social movements within South Africa intensified during this time as well, even as prominent black leaders like Nelson Mandela were imprisoned.
The United States government shifted its stance on South Africa throughout the 20th century. During much of the Cold War, the U.S. prioritized maintaining friendly alliances with anticommunist regimes over the fight for global equality. In competing with the Soviet Union, the U.S. also relied upon valuable minerals exported by the segregationist South African government. There were clear racial elements to U.S. policy as well, as many politicians were in favor of a continuation of domestic Jim Crow era laws promoting a segregated society.
This lesson, and the corresponding BackStory episode, focus on the evolving history of relations between the U.S. and South Africa. Though the U.S. and South Africa have different histories, they shared racial and political upheaval throughout the 20th century. Examining the U.S. response to South Africa allows students to explore the complicated issues that shaped foreign policy during the Cold War era.
