The Penguin History of the World

By the early 1980s there was little doubt that white South Africa was facing a crisis. The country’s trade was hit by sanctions, but even more devastating was the sense among white South Africans that they had no foreign support for their views on racial segregation; even the United States introduced sanctions in 1985. But the sheer sense of oppression was also taking its toll: all its inhabitants were suffering as the country increasingly became a police state because of fear of militant black resistance. More and more non-white groups started to coalesce around the leadership of the banned African National Congress (ANC), with Nelson Mandela – imprisoned since 1962 – as its main symbol. Even some young whites began to vocally oppose the system they had inherited, and the wars in Namibia and Angola were especially unpopular.

Among growing divisions on the Afrikaner side, the government was forced to withdraw from Angola and agree to a settlement for Namibia, which gave that country its independence under majority rule in 1988. Unpopular both among liberals and conservatives, President P. W. Botha had to step down in 1989. The man who replaced him, F. W. de Klerk, soon made it clear that he wanted reforms that would abolish apartheid for good. Political protest and opposition were allowed much more freedom. Meetings and marches were permitted; imprisoned black nationalist leaders were released. The end of the Cold War made these changes even more urgent; even conservative Afrikaner leaders feared images of South African police firing on protesters going around the world at exactly the same time as Communism was giving way peacefully in eastern Europe.

Suddenly, the way ahead opened up dramatically. In February 1990 de Klerk announced ‘a new South Africa’. Nine days later, the symbolic figure of Nelson Mandela, the leader of the ANC, emerged at last from gaol. Before long he was engaged in discussion with the government about what might come next. For all the firmness of his language, there were hopeful signs of a new realism that the task of reassuring the white minority about a future under a black majority must be attempted, even if the Afrikaners themselves at times made such a realism difficult. Just such signs, of course, also prompted some black politicians to greater impatience. Nelson Mandela had a very difficult course to steer, especially for a man who had just been freed from twenty-seven years in prison.

The transition to democratic rule in South Africa was not a simple one. Even though de Klerk, acting with speed and bravery, had rescinded most of the apartheid legislation by the end of 1991, there were many among the white élite who in various ways resisted change. But neither the 1993 assassination of Chris Hani, a prominent left-wing leader of the ANC, nor ethnic strife in the black townships (often fuelled by rogue elements inside the apartheid state), could unmake the road to majority rule. Increasingly, the great majority of South Africans of all races came to view Nelson Mandela – reverently referred to by his clan-name, ‘Madiba’ – as the guarantor of political stability and economic progress in a new multi-racial state. When he was elected president in 1994, Mandela spoke of a country reborn and a pride regained for all South Africans. But it was in the following year, when President Mandela put on the jersey of the all-white South African national rugby team – the Springboks – to celebrate their victory in the World Cup that he became the symbol of national unity for whites as well as blacks. ‘Madiba magic worked for us,’ said the white captain of the team. In 1999, as Mandela stepped down from the presidency, all of South Africa had reason to say the same.

In South America changes were also afoot at the end of the century. For much of its population, the preceding decades had turned out to be disappointing in terms of their welfare and living standards. From a hopeful beginning of the twentieth century, Latin America seemed to have got itself stuck in unresolved problems left over from history, and in international constellations that were not to its favour.

In 1900, some Latin American countries had begun to settle down, not only to stability but to some form of prosperity. Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world. To the original colonial implantations in the continent had been added the cultural influence of nineteenth-century Europe, especially of France, to which Latin American élites had been drawn in the post-colonial period. Their upper classes were highly Europeanized and the modernity of many of the continent’s great cities reflected this, as they also reflected recent European immigration, which was beginning to swamp the old colonial élites. As for the descendants of the aboriginal Americans, they had been pushed entirely aside almost everywhere. In one or two countries, their suppression had been so complete as to produce near-extinction.