Reflecting on SA’s democratic journey as elections approach

Since 1994 the African middle class has consolidated its hold on power and neutralised competing interests

The final phase of what had been a centuries-long struggle against foreign domination, racial discrimination and unbridled exploitation came to an end on April 27 1994, with the first democratic election held in SA. This phase of the struggle, which had started during the last quarter of the 19th century with the beginning of the diamond and gold mining industry, was led by the black African middle class. In 1994 the African middle class thus gained control of a state that had been built by Dutch and British colonialists since the 17th century.

To get to 1994, the African middle class travelled a long and tortuous road. From the middle of the 19th century, sections of the African peasantry had collaborated with the British army in its drive to defeat the indigenous communities in the Eastern Cape, and later in Natal.

Unable to defeat these communities on their own, the British contrived a “divide and rule” strategy whereby they fuelled succession disputes and other clan differences to create allies for themselves through internal conflicts in African communities. These new British allies also benefited from land and livestock captured from defeated Xhosa and Zulu communities.

Thus, detached from their roots, these collaborators were susceptible to the teachings of Christian missionaries as well as to adopting new agricultural technologies that used animal-drawn implements. They also adopted the use of animals for transport and warfare.

With the discovery of diamonds and gold and the eventual defeat of all SA communities in the late 19th century, the British turned against their former acculturated African allies as they wanted unskilled labour in the mines rather than a prosperous peasantry and middle class.

This was what led to the emergence of the African nationalist movement, which eventually came to control the state originally engineered by the British in SA. To achieve their objective of defeating racial discrimination and domination, during the course of the 20th century the African middle class started mobilising other aggrieved communities:

They formed alliances with SA’s Indian population, who had been brought into the country as indentured labourers by the British to start a sugar industry. They created alliances with the descendants of former slaves whose ancestors had been brought to SA from Asia and Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries.

They created alliances with organised labour, which grew in the course of the development of urban industries, especially during World War 1 and 2.They created an alliance with communists, many of whom were descendants of Jews escaping from pogroms in Eastern and Central Europe.

These struggles came to a head in the early 1960s when the apartheid regime outlawed African nationalist movements, imprisoned many of their leaders and forced the rest into exile. The exile years helped to strengthen the SA nationalist movement in unexpected ways.

With support in the West, especially of social democratic governments and organisations, the SA nationalist movement continued to exert pressure on the apartheid regime. Through a campaign of boycotts of SA products and eventually pressure on Western companies to disinvest, nationalist organisations continued to be seen at home as leaders of the struggle against racial domination.

From the 1960s the African nationalist organisations adopted low-intensity sabotage activity dubbed armed propaganda by the ANC

that was supported by African governments and communist governments in China and the Soviet Union and their allies. This further strengthened the legitimacy of the exiled parties in the eyes of the black majority at home.

During the 1970s and 1980s, when African nationalist organisations were not able to mobilise openly, civil society organisations, especially trade unions, student organisations and faith-based organisations, filled some of the vacuum. Big business under the leadership of Harry Oppenheimer and Anton Rupert joined the fray in demanding the abolition of apartheid laws.

As I have tried to explain above, the struggle against apartheid, though led by the African middle class, was a coalition of many domestic and international players. These different stakeholders had a multiplicity of interests and agendas, some of them contradictory, that they wanted a democratic government to implement.

For the African middle class, especially the ANC, its first objective after 1994 was to consolidate power.

This it decided to do by first and foremost growing the African middle class numerically, and simultaneously strengthening and tightening its hold on the state.

Democracy during the years 1994 to 2024 can therefore be characterised as the period when the African middle class consolidated its hold on power. Its priority was to replace the white civil service and white management in state-owned enterprises with black people.

Second, it had to find ways to weaken big business, which as we have seen had acquired legitimacy as an opponent of apartheid. This was achieved by allowing big business to move primary listings and head offices to London.

Third, civil society, which had emerged as a formidable independent force in the 1970s and 1980s, had to be neutralised. This was achieved first by getting the leadership of the United Democratic Front to agree to the dissolution of the organisation and the absorption of its leaders into the ANC and later into government. To make sure civil society did not re-enter through the back door, the ANC blocked all efforts to introduce a constituency system for election to the national and provincial parliaments.

Finally, the expectations of international allies were addressed by the adoption in 1996 of economic policies inspired by the Washington Consensus. Politically, the middle class gained control of the country but has proved unable to manage its complex inherited economy which is now in a shambles.