ABSTRACT
De Kock and Woods represent polar opposites of the white political spectrum in South Africa’s apartheid era. De Kock, a Colonel in the Security
Police, was one of the most ruthless and deadly defenders of apartheid. Involved in over seventy killings in South Africa and neighboring countries, he was sentenced to two life sentences, plus 212 years for a wide assortment of crimes in 1996 (Meredith 1999: 54). Woods, a liberal newspaper editor, was a personal friend and admirer of Steve Biko. When he received a banning order after Biko’s death in 1977, he fled into exile in England where he became an anti-apartheid activist. Yet de Kock and Woods might agree on one thing: that in order to defend and implement apartheid the South African government’s security forces, including its highest officials, had crossed over the line dividing legality from illegality and become a criminal, terrorist organization. Confronted by Black African resistance to apartheid, which ranged from
peaceful demonstrations and work stoppages to terrorist attacks, the South African government, which was dominated by the Afrikaners’ National Party (NP), became increasingly violent and repressive, and its enemies in the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP), and the Pan-African Congress (PAC) retaliated in kind by resorting to sabotage, terrorism, and other forms of “armed struggle.” The Sharpeville massacre in 1960 and the ANC leadership’s 1961 founding of its armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe (MK-Spear of the Nation), the Soweto school riots and the murder of Steve Biko in 1976-77, the ANC attacks on the Vortekkerhoogte military base and the Koeberg nuclear power plant in 1981 and 1982, the bombing of the ANC’s London headquarters by South African security forces in 1982, the ANC’s car bomb attack on the headquarters of the South African Air Force in Pretoria in 1983, and the government’s destruction of Cosatu House in 1987-these are only a short list of the cycles of attacks, uprisings, revenges, and retaliations that the government and its enemies inflicted in their “total onslaughts” upon one another. Eventually the leadership of both sides recognized how deadly this process had become, and when a peace settlement was finally negotiated by the ANC and the NP, they agreed in the country’s new constitution that the reconstruction of their “deeply divided society” depended not only on their willingness to eschew violence but their overcoming “a legacy of hatred, fear, guilt and revenge.” During its struggle to sustain apartheid, the South African government,
when it was ruled by the NP, made that nation an almost perfect example of what Ernst Fraenkel called a Dual State with two legal systems. Of course, ever since it was created in 1910, South Africa had been a deeply divided nation both politically and racially. The ruling white minority was divided politically by the Afrikaners’ bitter memories of how their independent republics had been destroyed in the Anglo-Boer War, when they had been forced to join the British Empire. “These people-my forebears-understood oppression,” F. W. De Klerk said in the NP’s “Submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (TRC) in 1993. “During their freedom struggle their homes were burned, their country was devastated and more than
20,000 of their women and children died in concentration camps”; they “understood resistance” as they “withstood British attempts to strip them of their culture,” and they understood “poverty and deprivation” when the depression and drought drove them from their farms into cities during the 1930s (De Klerk 1993). But even though the Afrikaners might have understood oppression and
poverty, their politicians were only too willing to cooperate with their British counterparts and impose these conditions on Black South Africans. Between 1910 and 1948 white legislators of both groups passed an assortment of laws discriminating against their country’s Black African, Colored (mixed race), and Asian (Indian) populations-such as the 1913 Land Act, the 1923 Urban Areas Act, the Color Bar Act of 1926, the 1936 Representation of Natives Act, and the 1946 Asiatic Land Tenure Act. But when it took power in 1948, the NP’s racism was even more virulent and explicit. Its election slogan, for example, was, “Die kaffer op sy plek; die koelies uit die land”—“The kaffir [nigger] in his place; the coolies [Indians] out of the country” (Mandela 1996). In 1948, therefore, South Africa’s patch work of de jure and de facto discriminations began to become completely and rapidly de jure (Mandela 1996). Though it had been elected that year with only a small parliamentary majority, the NP passed a plethora of laws implementing and expanding apartheid. In 1950 it also began to adopt a long sequence of national security laws designed to criminalize and crush resistance to apartheid. It was at this point that South Africa began to become a Dual State legally as well as a divided society racially.1
