Apartheid and Anti-Apartheid in the 1960s and 1970s

As the end of Nationalist power in South Africa recedes in time and memory, conferences and symposia devoted to the anti-apartheid movement have proliferated. Two sets of questions appear to be emerging the substantial volume of new literature upon which they draw. In the first place, there is new interest within South Africa in the phenomenon “high” apartheid. Secondly, growing concern with transnational or world history is drawing new attention to the history of worldwide anti-apartheid movements. The perspective of such studies is often focussed on the politics of countries which displayed solidarity with oppressed South Africans. This presentation will draw together new insights indicate where the particularity of “high” apartheid intersects with global concerns about “anti-apartheid.”

Apartheid will only be fully understood when we are able to examine the exercise of power alongside the dynamics of resistance, repression, and compliance. The era of high apartheid is all too often sandwiched between accounts of open mass resistance in the 1950s and the re-emergence of mass struggle in the 1970s. The presumption that the system was ultimately unworkable and bound to fail tends to naturalise anti-apartheid resistance in ways that take opposition for granted. Thus, historians have tended to focus rather more on revealing apartheid’s underlying dynamics and motivations than on explaining what made it exceptional. The unintended consequence of seeing apartheid as part of a more generalized system (imperialism, racism, capitalism, fascism) was that apartheid’s unique characteristics were often downplayed. This presentation seeks to redress some of these imbalances and to focus more clearly on why apartheid mattered to groups opposing it.