Dark chapter in SA history unfolded with rise of apartheid

WHEN the National Party (NP) came to power in May 1948, it paid only modest attention to promoting its image to the outside world. The party, under the leadership of Daniel François Malan, a former newspaper editor and Dutch Reformed Church cleric, had won the election by playing to white dissatisfaction with domestic and economic problems in South Africa after World War II.

A strong turnout from the rural Afrikaner population had led Malan and his supporters to a victory that few South Africans – and not even some in the party – had predicted. After years in opposition, the NP was ready to set about transforming the country into a bastion of white dominance, under the banner of Afrikaner nationalism, on the basis of the policy of apartheid.

Prior to 1948, South Africa had long pursued a system of racial segregation, but under apartheid this was to be tightened, formalised and extended in unimaginable ways.

The Malan government didn’t completely ignore the need to have an overseas propaganda effort. It reorganised its Information Office – not to be confused with the Department of Information, which was created in 1962 – to concentrate on expanding its messaging abroad.

The office produced booklets and other promotion materials about South Africa and its new government. One of the first changes made at the Information Office was transferring its overseas information of- ficers, who were formerly under the Department of External Affairs, to the State Information Office, which was under the direction of the Department of the Interior.

The director of the Information Office was then given access to the heads of all government departments and was instructed to come up with an overall media plan to coordinate the government’s public relations efforts abroad. The budget for this office and its international propaganda activities was about $146 000 (about $1.4 million or R14.8m today). A large part of this modest sum was used for efforts aimed at the US and the UK.

Malan considered the US a critical ally and sought to win its backing by working to convince the American government that black rule in Africa would amount to a takeover of the continent by communism, and that white rule was the only way to ensure that that didn’t happen.

In order to protect South Africa against growing calls for sanctions by an increasingly hostile UN, Malan sought America’s friendship by participating in the Korean War in 1950. South Africa provided a squadron of pilots to help in the war effort.

Keeping the UK on its side was also a key focus of the Malan government. He courted British protection on the UN Security Council by keeping South Africa in the British Commonwealth, even though there was considerable opposition in his party to remaining part of this successor to the British Empire.

In the late 1940s, there was actually little need for a sophisticated propaganda apparatus aimed at the great powers. Much of Africa and Asia was still colonised by European powers, whose colonial governments were often not very different from South Africa in terms of racial policies. Even the US, which had emerged as a superpower after World War II, was still a long way from being racially integrated.

President Harry S Truman had appointed the first federal black judge, William H Hastie jr, and a few months after the NP’s victory he had signed an executive order which abolished segregation in the US military.

Still, most blacks in the US, particularly in its southern region, lived in conditions similar to their counterparts in South Africa.

Black people were barred from certain neighbourhoods and coloured” and “white” signs announced segregated drinking fountains and bathrooms.

Yet even the Truman administration was somewhat concerned about the harshness of the apartheid laws and the racial policies of the new South African government, for the US was trying to convince the world of its own progress in moving toward an integrated society. But most of Truman’s worries about South Africa centred on a possible loss of access to strategic minerals, such as uranium, which were critical to powering the growing nuclear arsenal of the US military and which South Africa could provide.

The Truman administration also worried that the Malan government might be distracted by its preoccupation with its racial policies and pay less attention to the larger issue of stopping communist expansion in Africa.

Despite these concerns, many in the Truman administration expressed sympathy for the new South African government and its decision to rigidly separate the country’s population by race. Robert McGregor, a US diplomat in Durban, wrote to his seniors in Washington that it was “quite possible, even likely, that we would act in the same manner if we endeavoured to govern as a white race among a black population five times as numerous”.

Dean Acheson, the American secretary of state, who was sensitive to the racial situation in the US and its impact on American foreign policy – even writing that racism in the US “jeopardises the effective maintenance of our moral leadership of the free and democratic nations of the world” – nevertheless saw the apartheid government as a critical ally against Soviet expansion.

Acheson believed that communists dominated black liberation movements like the ANC, which received their orders from Moscow.

Truman himself put aside his feeling about apartheid, saying South Africa and other African countries could not be allowed to fall into the hands of the Soviet Union because “we would lose the source of our most vital materials including uranium which is the basis of our atomic power”. Much to their surprise and delight, it was a black American whose support for apartheid provided a major public relations coup for the South African government in the early 1950s.

Max Yergan hardly seemed like the man who would serve as a spokesman for the apartheid gover nment or defend its policy of racial segregation.

Himself barely a generation removed from slavery, he graduated from college – a rare feat for a black American in the 1910s – and joined the Young Men’s Christian Association, being posted to India as a missionary. Following work in Britain’s East African colonies, Yergan applied for a post in South Africa. After protracted talks among officials at the YMCA and numerous conversations between the organisation and the South African government, Yergan was approved.

He arrived in Cape Town in January 1922 and then settled in Alice in the Eastern Cape, home of Fort Hare Native College, now Fort Hare University, set up to provide higher education to black South Africans. A good number of black South African leaders attended the university, including Nelson Mandela. The Yergans’ house and Max’s office were on the campus of Fort Hare.

For the next 14 years, Yergan would travel, by foot, horse and car, throughout the Eastern Cape and other parts of souther n Africa, teaching and observing the conditions of blacks in the country. It was during this time that he also met and befriended a number of individ- uals who would play a crucial role in the history of South Africa, including Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu, a professor at Fort Hare and later president of the All African Convention; John Langalibalele Dube, founding president of the ANC; Dr Alfred Bitini Xuma, who would later become president-general of the ANC during the 1940s; and ZK Matthews, a professor at Fort Hare and another future ANC leader.

No one was more taken by the black American than the young Govan Mbeki, who would become a leader of the ANC and of South Africa’s Communist Party as well as father of Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s second black president.

The 24-year-old Govan, who was a student at Fort Hare, was a regular visitor to the Yergan household and often accompanied Max on his trips through the Eastern Cape. Mbeki recalled that Yergan fed him with literature, including Lenin’s The State and Revolution.

Another Fort Hare student equally impressed with Yergan was Wycliffe Tsotsi, who remembered Yergan as being a staunch foe of segregation, but someone who was secretive about his feelings, mindful of the watchful eye of the South African authorities.

Yergan’s meetings with some of the future leaders of the ANC and the All African Convention did not go unnoticed.

From the time he set foot in South Africa, the government, or black informants who worked for them, monitored nearly all of his activities.