American relations with South Africa became a source of tremendous controversy in the 1970s and 1980s over the South African policy of apartheid. Apartheid was a policy of strict racial segregation imposed by the South African National Party after its election in 1948. Playing on the fears of the white minority of losing control to and being dominated by the black majority, the National Party narrowly defeated the less extreme United Party. Between 1949 and 1960 a series of laws were passed implementing apartheid, guaranteeing the separation of the races and limiting black mobility and associations.
The United States government tended to downplay apartheid in the 1950s and early 1960s. The South Africans were strongly anticommunist and possessed the most developed economy on the African continent. The United States took the position that apartheid was strictly a South African internal issue.
Following the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the apartheid issue in South Africa was less easy to ignore without giving the appearance that the United States was supporting the apartheid regime. By 1958, the United States began moving away from the position that apartheid was just a domestic issue.
In the wake of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, when South African police killed 69 antiapartheid protestors, the United States recalled its ambassador and for the first time participated in a United Nations vote condemning the action.
During the Richard M. Nixon administration, a concerted effort was made to bring the nations closer. Nixon embraced the idea that closer relations would allow the United States to have more influence with the South African government concerning its racial policy than it could exert by isolating the nation. In addition, Nixon wanted to push aside racial concerns in favor of strategic and commercial concerns with international reach.
With the election of James Earl Carter, Jr., in 1976, there was a significant shift in American policy from the cold war to international human rights. Carter’s ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, hinted that sanctions against South Africa were a possibility and charged that the white minority government was illegitimate. In this increasingly hostile atmosphere, the death of Stephen Biko, a South African civil rights activist who was murdered in 1977 in police custody, moved the UN to impose an arms embargo on South Africa. While the United States supported this embargo, it did not sever commercial relations. As a result, an activist movement in the United States began demanding that American corporations and universities divest stock holding in South Africa. Carter continued to oppose mandatory economic sanctions on South Africa.
The election of Ronald W. Reagan in 1980 resulted in yet another U. S. policy shift. Reagan’s approach to South Africa was called “constructive engagement” and had four objectives: to encourage the abandonment of apartheid; to preserve American access to strategic minerals; secure the sea lanes; and counter communist activity in southern and central Africa, especially in Angola. American companies were encouraged to use their influence to improve conditions for blacks. In 1984 South Africa adopted constitutional changes granting political rights to Indians and “Coloureds,” citizens of mixed race. These reforms, however, did not address the central problem of the disenfranchisement of black Africans. The U. S. Congress called for sanctions and initiated legislation to impose economic sanctions. Public protests against South Africa demanded sanctions and divestment by American firms.
In mid-1985 Reagan, under congressional pressure, imposed limited sanctions—ending nuclear cooperation, banning new loans, and banning the export of computers and technology and the importation of South African gold coins. Further, American banks refused to roll over shortterm loans to South Africa.
In 1986 Congress passed and overrode Reagan’s veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA). The
CAAA imposed wide-ranging economic sanctions, banning new U. S. investment and trade. It required six actions from the South Africans to get the sanctions lifted—politi-cal prisoners must be freed, opposition parties legalized, and the state of emergency lifted; discriminatory legislation must be repealed; political freedom must be granted to blacks; and the government must enter into negotiations with black leaders to dismantle apartheid.
The end of the cold war in 1989, and the rise to power of the reform-minded South African president F. W. de Klerk, helped change the course of South African history. No longer could opposition parties like the African National Congress (ANC) be credibly charged with being communist fronts. In 1990 de Klerk released jailed ANC leader Nelson Mandela. He also legalized opposition groups and called for negotiations to end apartheid. U. S. president George H. W. Bush lifted some of the CAAA sanctions in 1991 and began economic and development programs aimed at South African blacks to educate them to participate in a democracy. American policy during this period focused on keeping the negotiations on track.
President William J. Clinton maintained much of the Bush program. In November 1993 an agreement ending apartheid was reached, and Congress passed legislation repealing the remaining CAAA sanctions, and authorized further development assistance. In 1994 Mandela was elected president of South Africa in the nation’s first allrace election. Clinton subsequently announced a three-year, $600 million aid package, giving South Africa more aid than all of the other African countries combined. By the later 1990s, South Africa had become an important American trading partner in Africa.
See also African nations.
Further reading: Kema Irogbe, The Roots of Uni-ted States Foreign Policy toward Apartheid South Africa, 1969-1985 (Lewiston, N. Y.: Edwin Mellon Press, 1997); a. M. Thomas, The American Predicament: Apartheid and United States Foreign Policy (Brookfield, Mass.: Dartmouth Publishing Company, 1997).
—John Korasick
World History
