South Africa if USSR survives
- Thread starter Pooh-Bah
- Start date
The process of dismantaling Apartheid was in tandemn almost with the fall of the Soviet Union. Still without the thaw of the late 80's I think SA might hang on for a few years but not long. SA was happy to ignore international opinion and could prevent militants from directly overthrowing it but they couldn't beat the unwillingness of the white population to fight on.
That's an interesting question.
I think that if the USSR had survived apartheid would still have ended, but it would have been a longer process, and there would not have been as many concessions from the Nat government as happened in OTL. Without the threat of the USSR it was much harder to justify the "rooi gevaar" - (red peril for the non-Afrikaans speakers on the board) as a reason for not fraternising with the ANC as happened in OTL.
By the late 1970s it was already accepted that apartheid was unworkable, and some sort of compromise had to be reached. This can be seen from PW Botha meeting with Mandela in 1987, I think, and the scrapping of the so-called "petty" apartheid laws.
With the existence of the USSR it may have been easier for the Communist faction of the ANC to gain control of the party. However, it is unlikely that there would have been all-race elections in 1994. The negotiation process would have been much slower.
I think that if the USSR had survived apartheid would still have ended, but it would have been a longer process, and there would not have been as many concessions from the Nat government as happened in OTL. Without the threat of the USSR it was much harder to justify the "rooi gevaar" - (red peril for the non-Afrikaans speakers on the board) as a reason for not fraternising with the ANC as happened in OTL.
By the late 1970s it was already accepted that apartheid was unworkable, and some sort of compromise had to be reached. This can be seen from PW Botha meeting with Mandela in 1987, I think, and the scrapping of the so-called "petty" apartheid laws.
With the existence of the USSR it may have been easier for the Communist faction of the ANC to gain control of the party. However, it is unlikely that there would have been all-race elections in 1994. The negotiation process would have been much slower.
If the USSR had survived then apartheid would have lasted longer and probably ended violently. One the USSR collapsed, the United States no longer needed South Africa and the sanctions were stepped up hastening the end of apatheid. Any post apatheid South Africa would not look to the west if the west had continued to prop up apartheid
That is incorrect. The Soviet Union only collapsed in 1991 I think. Mandela was released in February 1990. Once he had been released that was the end of apartheid, with him out of prison there is no way the Nats could have got that genie back in the bottle. The catalyst was the end of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe.
It has been argued that sanctions did very little to end apartheid actually. White South Africans were quite happy with the status quo, it was the realisation that the country was becoming ungovernable in the medium term.
Between 1996 and 2005 it is estimated that 800 000 whites have left SA, but the government no longer tracks emigration figures.
I don’t think the continued survival of the USSR would have made much of an impact on SA – by 1989, even with a successful coup against Gorbachev, the USSR is in a very bad position following Afghanistan, the Armenian earthquake and the fact the Party has all but admitted it cannot be an effective superpower any more.
What are the USSR’s options?
They can rattle the saber against a neighbour or two but a few sanctions and suddenly the country doesn’t have enough food to feed itself. The rest of the Warsaw Pact won’t necessarily do what its told (excepting Bulgaria which was perhaps the most loyal Pact member).
They can choose to prop up Saddam when he lunges for Kuwait but this might provoke a hostile response from Iran who are of course within spitting distance of the Baku oilfields.
They could carry on as normal, perhaps giving the USSR as much as 25 further years of life but the regime will collapse in the end because capitalist countries are in the strongest position they’ve been in for years and the socialist nations just cannot keep up given their inherent weaknesses.
They could ferment trouble in Southern Africa, after all the USSR and Cuba did train most of the Marxist guerrillas but what will it gain them? So long as there are national emergencies in South Africa, potential for insurrection etc, the National Party is less likely to relinquish power. And so long as British and American sympathisers continue to ship oil and other goods in defiance of international sanctions, the longer they can hold on to power.
Oh, and as for the figures, I can add that between 1995 and 1999 before the rules changed, at least 450,000 white South Africans made it to Britain
What are the USSR’s options?
They can rattle the saber against a neighbour or two but a few sanctions and suddenly the country doesn’t have enough food to feed itself. The rest of the Warsaw Pact won’t necessarily do what its told (excepting Bulgaria which was perhaps the most loyal Pact member).
They can choose to prop up Saddam when he lunges for Kuwait but this might provoke a hostile response from Iran who are of course within spitting distance of the Baku oilfields.
They could carry on as normal, perhaps giving the USSR as much as 25 further years of life but the regime will collapse in the end because capitalist countries are in the strongest position they’ve been in for years and the socialist nations just cannot keep up given their inherent weaknesses.
They could ferment trouble in Southern Africa, after all the USSR and Cuba did train most of the Marxist guerrillas but what will it gain them? So long as there are national emergencies in South Africa, potential for insurrection etc, the National Party is less likely to relinquish power. And so long as British and American sympathisers continue to ship oil and other goods in defiance of international sanctions, the longer they can hold on to power.
Oh, and as for the figures, I can add that between 1995 and 1999 before the rules changed, at least 450,000 white South Africans made it to Britain
How powerful were the communists in the ANC in the late 80s - early 90s? I find it difficult to see the NP peacefully handing over power if its successor is effectively the South African Communist Party.
If the ANC compromised with the NP to get free elections earlier, could that result in the economically hard-left leaving and a more centrist party remaining? Is that at all plausible?
My vague thoughts were that the actual POD would be some policy shifts and lucky decisions being made in the Kremlin in the early- to mid-80s, resulting in a still somewhat formidable USSR. As you pointed out, a USSR on life support wouldn't be quite so interesting for an althistorical South Africa.
This is the part that I've always found amazing (not that I dispute that it's true). Did white South Africans not realise that in the 1970's and 1980's that they (along with Rhodesia until 1980) were probably the most hated nation in the world, even in the West? You would have thought that this would surely have had more effect on white South African public opinion than it did.
As for my opinion on the ATL, I think the continued existence of the USSR would set likely mean apartheid would continue for longer, but only a few years longer. I think apartheid would definitely be gone by 2000.
I'm not Marius, I can only go by my other half (a Saffa ex-pat) says together with my in-laws etc and SA knew full well it was a pariah nation but so long as it was useful to one side over the other, there wasn't the impetus to change. If WW3 had broken out, if the Warsaw Pact had poured over the West German border, suddenly South Africa would have been the most important ally in Africa and all of a sudden all of its internal issues would have been forgotten. It didn't happen that way and the (then) political elite took a chance with their future and lost. If there was a prolongued cold war, if the cold war got hot, it's likely that apartheid would have continued despite continued international protest as the West would have wanted the incumbent government to remain in power as it was more compliant with what they wanted.
Neroon
Banned
If the Apartheid regime had clung on a decade or so longer, because of USSR still kicking or some other reason i think the Whites would have been determined to cling on indefinetly. Might have included a Civil War and/or ethnic cleansing to do so but nonetheless they would IMO. Why? Because of Zimbabwe. Unless Mugabe doesn't dare seize the farms and drive out the farmers and generally do a worse job at running the country than most White Imperialists did in Africa with the Apartheid Regime still next door, then the fate of Zimbabwe would have scared reform minded Whites into never letting go willingly.
As the son of a Rhodesian and having studied Africa since my teens, I can say one thing about many white Rhodesians, Afrikaners and "uitlander" South Africans - they really don't give a flying f**k what anyone else thinks about them. They all knew that apartheid was unworkable, but the problem was the alternative - the black African states headed into the shitter real fast, particularly in the Congo and Angola where independence kicked off a civil war. The petty apartheid laws started being dismantled in the Cape by 1975 and Johannesburg was comfortably integrated (though it was technically illegal at the time) by 1980. It was as black as Nairobi or Lagos by 1990. The areas which stayed most resistant to change were the rural areas, where in many cases the segregated schools didn't end until as late as 1997-98.
If apartheid had managed to survive until 2000 and see what Mugabe did in Zimbabwe, there would have been a large portion of the nation which saw that and all of a sudden wasn't too unkind toward apartheid - not just whites, but also the Indians, Asians and coloreds.
In OTL, the negotiations were going slowly and fitfully through the chaos and violence on 1991 and 1992, but when Chris Hani was gunned down in Johannesburg, the country went right to the edge of civil war, and both the ANC and the NP realized that if they didn't sort this out, all hell would break loose. By then, most of the NP had accepted that apartheid was gone, and even if they had to reimpose it they wouldn't be able to - Natal and much of the Transvaal would be an epic mess within days.
The USSR surviving might have kept the communist boogeyman alive, but the facts were that in 1990 the USSR wasn't exactly providing a heckuva lot of support to the ANC. The SACP was a major player in the ANC, though Mandela and most of the moderates of the ANC knew full well that Pretoria would never accept a government that was communist or anywhere near it. The ANC had enough trouble getting Pretoria to accept Joe Slovo and Chris Hani as part of the negotiating team.
This is true and I have read that the notion that the ANC was ever almost entirely Soviet-funded was always untrue (although until the mid-late 1980's, the influence of communist ideolody on the ANC was of course very strong).
In fact, what I read was that the ANC in the 1970's and 1980's (particularly the 1980's) was almost as Nordic-funded, as Soviet-funded. This was primarily funded from individual members of the public in those nations, but also at various stages in the 70's and 80's, the Swedish government (when Olof Palme was Swedish PM) provided at least some level of aid/funding to the ANC. Does any know of any other instances of Western governments providing economic support to the ANC?
The collapse of Soviet power is what I meant and by the end of 1989 it was obvious that as you correctly point out, the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe was on its way out. With the collapse of communism in Poland and the dismantling of the Berlin wall, the Soviet Union had ceased to be a world power and the United States no longer needed South Africa
TheMann is right when he says that white Saffas just didn't give a f*ck about what the rest of the world thought. Also, many white South Africans saw the Nat regime as the lesser of the two evils compared to an ANC-led communist government.
Interestingly, it is speculated that the 1992 referendum, where whites were asked whether the government should continue negotiating with the ANC, and where 70% of the white electorate said yes to continued negotiations, was heavily influenced by South Africa's involvement in the cricket World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. The team had said that they would withdraw from the tournament if the no vote won. South Africans got a taste of international sport again, and voted overwhelmingly to support reform. The sporting boycott probably did more to end apartheid than economic sanctions.
This always strikes me as remarkable, no matter how many times I read about it. I recall my grade 11 modern history teacher saying something about there being three institutions of paramount importance to Afrikaaners: the Springboks, the Dutch Reformed Church, and the National Party. In that order.
From what I've seen, the primacy of sport appears to be largely a legacy of the British Empire - cricket and especially rugby in South Africa; cricket on the Subcontinent; and of course sport in Australia generally. To the best of my knowledge, other colonial empires have not had anywhere near the same effect.