Rev Left Radio - South African Apartheid: An Introduction

Episode Date: November 20, 2023

In this crossover episode that we have done in collaboration with our sister podcast Guerrilla History, we bring on Ashley Fataar to provide a primer into Apartheid in the South African context, and where we also begin to explore some of the parallels to the apartheid that the settler-colonial state of Israel is enforcing in occupied Palestine today.  This is a good introduction to the topic, and we plan on getting everyone in the RevLeft family (Breht, Henry, Adnan, & Alyson) together in the coming weeks to do a deep dive into apartheid in South Africa and where we can further explore these connections to what we are seeing today!  Be sure to listen to this conversation to prepare for that coming conversation, and be sure to subscribe to Guerrilla History, RevLeft, and Red Menace wherever you get your pods. Ashley Fataar is a long time socialist activist and writer based in South Africa.  If you would like to get in touch with Ashley, you can reach him via email at [e-mail].   Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. Today's episode is kind of a little collaboration between Rev Left and our other sister podcast, Gorilla History. And in that vein I have on Henry, so me and Henry are going to be interviewing Ashley Fittar about South African apartheid, how it rose, what its internal dynamics were, eventually how it ended, and how its legacy still lives on in South Africa today. want to make it clear that this episode is a really good primer. It's a 101 introduction to this issue, specifically because we are going to do more work on this issue. We wanted to have a

nice, relatively brief introductory conversation with a very knowledgeable expert on the overview of South African apartheid, so then we can move into some of its more detailed dynamics going forward. So I think at some point in early to mid-December, me, Henry, perhaps Allison and Adnan are all going to have a sort of Rev Left family get together where we sort of dive into the depths of South African history, South African apartheid, and really focus on pulling out lessons from that history that can be applied in particular to the Palestinian National liberation struggle and what we can learn from this previous instantiation of apartheid that fell within some of our lifetimes and what we can what we can learn from that and apply in the

Palestinian context. So this is a really interesting and important introduction. And it's only that, but it's a good one, an introduction to South African apartheid with Ashley Fattar. This episode was helped set up by our friend Leo Zilig, who is at the review of African political economy. I know Brett, you reached out to me and said, Henry, I'd like to have an episode of Rev Left that focuses on this topic of South African apartheid and parallels to Palestinian apartheid. And I said, great topic. Something I've been thinking about as well, but I don't have a guest in mind for that. So fortunately, we are friends with Leo and we're able to reach out and he put us in touch with Ashley. So as I mentioned, our guest for this episode is

Ashley Fattar. Hello, Ashley. Can you introduce yourself to the listeners of the shows? Hi, Henry. Hi, Brett. Hello, everyone. Yeah, I'm a name is Ashley Fattar. I'm a long-time activist and socialist hold in Zimbabwe for a number of years, but I'm now in South Africa, which is where my family is from and where I was born. Through my late father, I was exposed to what you're called the Toskist traditional socialism, and I'm based in Cape Town in South Africa. Thanks. Wonderful. Well, let's just go ahead and jump into it. I think the first place to start, before we get into, you know, differences and similarities between the situation in Palestine, the situation in South Africa, is to sort of help our audience, some of whom might know very little about the history of South Africa, just kind of orient them to the history there. So I'm going to ask a pretty big question, but, you know, you can be very summary oriented and brief, as brief as you want to be. But I'm wondering just to help orient the listener. to the history of South Africa,

if you can kind of give us a 101 overview of the rise of the apartheid state, how it came to be, and then the sort of the chronology of how it passed away before we get into the details. Okay. So beginning about the later half of the 1600s,

there were European traders who start by where I am in Cape Town and began establishing refuting stations for the ships between Europe and Asia. And as time went on, more and more Europeans arrived. And essentially, what is today, South Africa, had also Zimbabwe. And a few other countries, quite a few other countries in Africa, then came on in the colonial occupation.

And these are European countries that look at Britain, France, Portugal, and Germany, and also to an extent, Holland as well. So those are the five main, and Belgium as well. So what then happened is that the native population, the African population, is what dispossessed of their land. The cattle, which was also source of income, they were dispossessed of their cattle and forced to work in white-owned, European-owned companies, farms and so forth. The system of apartheid came into effect in South Africa illegally in 1948, but before that the Native Land Act of 1923, specified certain types of land and areas of land that would only be occupied used by white people, by Europeans. And the less Arabian land was allocated to the local African population.

So this is a reality that continues inside Africa today. We have essentially what we now have, or economic aparthe. And yeah, so this is how very briefly South Africa, the situation in South Africa was how it came to be. Before Henry jumps in, I just want to say that it's interesting that 1948 is a crucial year in this situation as well. And it's also very important for people to understand that even though the official end

of apartheid occurred, that that legacy continues to live on in South Africa and sort of shape that system, of course, based first and foremost on class and race. race, which we can get into in a little bit here. But I think that's an important note for listeners to take to take home. Absolutely. And just as, as Brett mentioned, apartheid formally ended in 1994, but it has just shifted forms in many ways. It's no longer a legal construct as so as much as a political, sociopolitical construct in that these these divisions within society have been entrenched and are very present within the economic sphere, even though they're not present within the legal sphere.

But turning back to 1948, as you mentioned, this is kind of the legal start of apartheid, although the roots of it go obviously much farther back than that. It really started when the National Party won the elections in 1948, and then through various acts that came through, as you mentioned, there was land acts that started actually prior to this, But then in 1950, there was a few more. And I think 53, there was some more. By the end of that, 80% of the land was held by the white minority of the country, whereas the other 20% was held by everybody else in the country.

There was laws that came into place that categorized people and classified them into different racial groups. Originally, there was three, the so-called Bantu group, which was just any black African. the colored non-white group and then white and then eventually they added the Asian group, which was Indians and Pakistanis. But the point that I'm driving at here is that this was like a confluence of many legal acts that came into force. I'm just wondering if you can talk a little bit about who the National Party was and how their victory in 1948 kind of set up this enforcement of various legal acts that

collectively became known as apartheid, and how these acts then kind of came together to create an entire system of apartheid based on these kind of, you know, piecemeal bits here, bits there that then kind of came together into a hegemonic structure within society. So you first of all had the native land act. the laws that decided which land that could own and they could not own.

And that was crucial because the African population income, the livelihood, existence was based on the land. So they did that in order to force

the black males, adult black males, to go and work in the farms and this is essentially the crux of a project how it came about why it came about so in the late 1800s year the discovery of gold and diamonds in what is now the northern part of south africa and the mining to get at the diamond of the gold needed a labor-intensive operations. So by forcing the African populations through the very punishing hut attacks,

they forced the African population off the land and enter the mines. Then the, so that was essentially the kind of start of the operations, the start of apartheid where one section of the population is not being forced to stop what it's doing, been doing for a number of years, for, it's not a number of years, but for centuries and being forced into a new form of economic production. So then they moved towards, so the next Step Wasaki formally taking away their land. And then the

another piece of important piece of our part in legislature is the Group Areas Act. And this then also determined in addition where people could live and where they could not live. So

as urbanization begins not begins at. They needed a an urban system where essentially the black population and the working glass populations didn't live in the same area as those who owned the businesses. So they decided, okay, this area is reserved for blacks, that area is reserved for so far colors, that areas reserved for so-called Indians, and that area is reserved for whites. So that then came to, is one of the things that came to signify the system of apartheid. In addition to that, in public transport, people of different colors could not use the same public transport.

At work, the restrooms were racially segregated. Facilities were racially segregated. And out on the public benches, those were also racially segregated, like what you have in the southern part of the US as well, that's kind of racial segregation. So that then, so the National Party provided essentially the whole legal framework of apartheid. That was its significance. and drove apart communities, especially with glass communities, into different areas. Yeah, that's, yeah.

Yeah, so there, I mean, just a couple of things that you mentioned. There's obviously the taking over and the occupation of land as a crucial element in colonial apartheid. You have the, you know, exploitation of cheap labor. of the indigenous population by the colonizing force to generate profits. You have a racial, ethnic, or religious caste system in this case. It was very racially oriented in the case of Palestine. It's a little bit more towards ethnicity and religion, though, of course, race, of course, is incorporated into all of that.

So we see some of these patterns being that explicitly and objectively existed in South African apartheid, also existing in the context of Palestine. And I think we will get more into that in a bit. But first, I want to continue the history. of South Africa, and particularly, I want to talk about the African National Congress and the rise of Nelson Mandela in particular. Now, everybody listening probably knows that at the beginning, you know, this group and Mandela in particular was labeled a terrorist. They took up, you know, non-legal means of resistance, often armed resistance as well. So I was wondering if you can kind of talk about the African National Congress, how it came to be and some of the tactics used by them or other forces. of liberation in the area before apartheid ended. Okay. So, African National Congress came about as a means to,

initially they didn't go about demanding the return of the land, because the African National Congress was started in 1912. And if you look at the People's Charter, which is in 1955, which the African National Congress watered down. It was this, that's a reflection of the ANC, kind of liberal politics.

So in other words, what the ANC demanded was, we want the right to vote, we want the right to live wherever we want to live, and we want to be able to go into business. But let's look at the right to live wherever you want to live. The fact is that it's based on how much money you have, how much money you're paid. So the ANC is inherently a liberal kind of black nationalist party.

And it's the core of its programs, of its policies, of its, of its policies, of its politics has been the black what was the black petty bourgeois class the small catlists

that is what has driven the the ANCC and yes it's presented as the main liberating organization in

South Africa but that is not the case because it was only it wasn't until the first half of the 1980s. It was only then that the ANC was began to get some kind of relevance. Because up until that point, it was the more radical Black Nationalist Paranifurist Congress

and then socialist groups, which we've had the political influence in South Africa, especially in the working class partnerships. And it was through the creation of the United Democratic Front in the first half of the 1980s, that the ANC began to have some kind of relevance. So it was literally a decade before formal independence in 1994 that the ANC had some kind of relevance. And the ANC deliberated the people. South Africa, but that is not the case, because the one argument which is really not true is that

the ANC waged a guerrilla war. It's certainly true that there were a handful, there were some guerrilla action, but it was a handful of guerrille actions, and what they did was, it really wasn't of any significance. It was the black working class in the workplaces and in the townships who carried out the struggle. It was that black working class that actually freed Mandela and the other leaders of the ANC from prison is the actions of the black working class that caused the forced the, the apartheid government unbanned the ANC, the Saudi Arab and Communist Party and other anti-apartheid parties. so it's it's it's it's the it is the the mass action of the black working class in

South Africa that led to it being freed from a formal apartheid from legalized apartheid that's that's the important point to bear in mind I'm going to hop in here and I know that we're going to talk more about the parallels between South African apartheid and Palestinian apartheid later in more detail But there are a couple of points that were brought up that do really parallel what we're seeing now, rhetorically, with regards to the Palestinian resistance to Israeli apartheid in occupied Palestine. And here's a couple of the points that came up. So one is that we often think of the ANC is kind of like the leading edge of the anti-apartheid movement, or they were the anti-apartheid movement. I mean, of course, they were in many ways the leading edge, but that they kind of became synonymous.

What we're seeing right now with regards to the Palestinian resistance is this totalization of the Palestinian liberation movement to Hamas in the Western media, particularly. As soon as we see, you know, look at what's happening right now in Gaza. It is Israel versus Hamas, not the Palestinian liberation movement. There's no discussion of the fact that there is new. numerous groups that are active within the Palestinian liberation movement, all of whom have signed on to the current collaborative efforts to fight actively against Israeli apartheid. But there's this totalization of the resistance being just Hamas within the media. And of course, then we're called on whenever we talk about this, do you condemn Hamas?

In much the same way, as you mentioned, when talking about the anti-apartheid movement, it often gets totalized just to the ANC in the efforts of, you know, people like Mandela, rather than thinking about that broader context, thinking about societal movements that are happening outside of parties, working class movements, and also thinking about the fact that, as you mentioned, there was many socialists and communist currents that were operating within the South African anti-apartheid movement as well, just as we see, again, now in Palestine, We have groups like the PFLP and the DFLP that are explicitly socialist groups, but they never get touched on, you know, even though the PFLP is the second largest group of the PLO, for example. They don't get discussed.

You know, it's always this totalization to Hamas. So I do see a parallel there, and I also see the parallel that Brett brought up with regard to the fact that Mandela was, you know, kind of he was thrown in jail under the ground that he was kind of this terrorist actor. And the fact that we have this, again, this framing of somebody who is fighting for liberation of their people as a terrorist and that there's this wholesale taking up of this term terrorist to describe somebody who is fighting against oppression and for liberation. This is, again, exactly what we are seeing in the case of the Palestinian liberation movement where the fact of active armed resistance equates you to terrorism without any sort of. of discussion of that context of it being a liberatory struggle against an oppressive settler colonial regime. So the question that I'm going to bring up here, Ashley, is that, you know, we do have these parallels.

Can you dive in a little bit deeper into the South African context? Because I think that the listeners are going to be with it being, you know, current, more familiar with what I'm talking about the Palestinian side of this context, but maybe aren't as familiar with the way that these groups were operating in the anti-apartheid movement outside of the ANC as well as how this rhetoric

of terrorism was being utilized against members of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Yeah, so they were label as terrorists because the context then was the Cold War and the aparthe government

was pro-West. So the West, which includes at the time Joe Biden who was a senator he they didn't want South Africa

post the apartheid to fall into the hands of what was then the Soviet Union so the ANC and the PACE who were labeled as being terrorists in order to

try to sway influence, not even support away from the anti-apartheid movements. But let's just look at the anti-aparid movement or what's broadly referred to as the anti-aparid movement. So you had, I'm just going to sort of look at the different streams. So you had the ANC, which was a kind of, how you can call it, almost a neoliberal black nationalist movement, seeking the rights to vote and for people to live and work where they want to.

And then slightly to the left for them, the more radical but so nationalist, left nationalist anarchist Congress, which demanded not just the rights, but also black people had to become the owners of the means of production and it didn't specify which social class but it was nevertheless for the petty bourgeoisie so the PAST was kind of a more radical section of blackness

black petty bourgeoisie in South Africa with a handful kind of saying yes we are Marxists but in reality, not really. Then you had the solanist trend, which is that of the SACB and the SACB essentially was just provided a red cover for the ANC, as somebody put it. The SACP has never been politically independent.

It's always been at the side of or behind the ANC and accepted the leadership of the ANC. And then you have, the other count is that the Toskists, others would say, workerist organizations. So that was kind of your unity movement, the Workers League of South Africa, the Workers International Landward League at the time. So those were the four political currents

and all broadly lumped into the anti-party movement. fighting for the same ideal, the same objectives, but which is not the case. Because the Truscists recognized that getting rid of apartheid without getting rid of capitalism was not going to improve the lot of the black working class. So it was about more than fighting against just legal, you know, racial segregation, racial, for separation, but also a position, a situation where the workers had the significant and the majority say in what goes on in the workplace. And any of that kind of answers your question?

Yeah, I have one brief comment about Joe Biden before Brett asks the next question. Just since you mentioned Biden, this is kind of just a humorous aside. but in February 2020, some listeners might remember that Biden was campaigning for president at the time and on the campaign trail in at least three different campaign appearances. He mentioned that he was on a trip to South Africa and got arrested in Soweto when he was going to visit Nelson Mandela. And I have one of the specific quotes, it's just funny. He says, this day 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid.

I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our UN ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robbins Island. But of course, when looking at the actual record, there was no record of him ever being arrested in South Africa. And the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 77 to 79, Andrew Young, who also was a previous congressman and also mayor of Atlanta, he's still alive. They called, at least at the time that, you know, the story was out there.

He was still alive. I don't know if he's alive today. But they called him up and said, hey, you know, Andrew Young, do you recall Biden never being arrested in South Africa during your visit there? And he goes, no, I don't think that that happened. And I don't think that that would have been allowed to happen for an active U.S. Congressperson to be arrested in South Africa. And if it was, it certainly would be in the news at the time.

But, you know, it was never mentioned prior to this campaigning in 2020. And it also wasn't even in Biden's autobiography when he was talking about South Africa. So, you know, just a kind of humorous aside about Biden and his, you know, senility or whatever. In addition to which the streets of Soweto and Robyn Island are at two different ends of the country. So, yeah, there's no way you're walking through the streets of Soweto to get to an island on the other side of the country. Yeah. Yeah, absurd. I want to ask a little bit about the armed struggle aspect of the anti-apartheid movement.

Of course, we've seen, you know, with the Palestinian resistance, has never made any qualms about using violence to, you know, obtain their national liberation. Of course, Israel makes no qualms about using mass murder campaigns against the Palestinians, as is happening right now. But, of course, any time an oppressed people pick up the gun, they are labeled terrorists by the dominant hegemonic power. We see that in almost every instance. And we never see a, I mean, almost never, a fully peaceful national liberation struggle because those who have imposed these conditions on oppressed people do not give up their power and their luxury and their wealth and their control very easily. So they're forced in a lot of circumstances to engage in violent resistance.

So with all of that in the background here, can you kind of talk about, in particular, the armed struggle aspects of the anti-apartheid movement and how they were related. labeled terrorism by the dominant powers. Okay. So the African National Congress and the P.S.C. had what they call training camps in countries like Angola, Zambia, and Tanzania. Possing Mozambique as well. But the thing is that neither of them had, neither of them received any significant military

hardware, guns, that sort of thing, in order to wage an effective guerrilla struggle. The ANC never got anything from Russia, the PACC didn't get anything from China or from any of the other, and they certainly didn't receive anything significant from countries like Angola, Zimbabwe, and so forth. Russia said at the time that it was not interested in a full-fledged war in South Africa. It wasn't prepared to go to that extent in the Cold War. Because they realized that South Africa, with its high level of industrialization, it had a population that was very urbanized.

So they didn't want a situation. Russia did not want a situation where, Guns ended up in the hands of the working class, which then takes over the means of production. That is what they were scared of. The second thing is to wage a guerrna struggle in South Africa is a daydream. Because it's not like, you know, say Vietnam in the 70s or 60s, Cuba in the 50s, where you have a significant part of the population in the countryside, that can give you support, that can hide you, that can shelter you.

In South Africa by the 1980s, three quarters of the Black population was urbanized. So they couldn't really have any kind of significant military force within the townships without being discovered. So it's important to restate that the guerrilla stung in South Africa was not significant. It wasn't anywhere near the levels of what took place in Mozambique or Zimbabwe or Angona, for that matter. It really wasn't anything significant. That's an important point that should be understood. The struggle was waged by the workers, the working class, in the townships of South Africa and in the weather places. That is where the main struggle took place in South Africa.

As a follow-up, you mentioned Namibia, you mentioned Angola. I know this is one aspect of this struggle was, of course, Cuban assistance in the area at the time. Can you touch on Cuba's role in these historical events? The Cuba's were in Angola. So what happened was as Portuguese imperialism collapsed, Portugal found that it could not continue to wage it couldn't continue to occupy Angola. So they kind of

said, okay, well, we're going to leave it between, and the two main proposals at the time was Unita, which had some kind of Western backing, and the MPLA, the popular movement for the liberation of Angola, which had Russian and Chinese backing. So, in

order to help Unita, the Salafir apartheid regime sent in soldiers' military into Angola from what is now Namibia in order to help Unita. And what the Cubans did is that they then supplied soldiers on hardware to NPRLA and the new government of Angola to fight the South Africans. And through that intervention, the Cubans helped the. Angolans to deal a decisive defeat to both the South Africans and Unita, led at that time by Jonas Savinbi.

So it prevented the fall in Angola into the hands of a Western-backed army led by Savimbi. So that was the significance of the Cubans in Angola. Yeah. Also worth mentioning that in talking about the battles that took place. place between Unita and the MPLA and with the Cubans actually taking a very active role in this, we had the famous battle of Quito Carnivali, which was one of the biggest tank battles after World War II, and I believe it was the biggest battle in the African continent after World War II, at that point at least, very significant. And without Cuban support, that battle

would have gone completely differently, and the struggle likely also would have gone. completely differently. But the question I'm going to be hopping in with is actually kind of the inverse of Brett. So Brett was asking about the role of Cuba in the anti-apartheid movement and various of these other anti-colonial movements in Africa. The inverse of that would be the role of the West in propagating and perpetuating and supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa. And again, this parallels what we're seeing today in Israel, Palestine. We are seeing an absolute unconditional support for the settler colonial regime in Israel in much the same way that the apartheid regime was being to the hilt propped up by Western backers. So if you

could talk a little bit about how that Western backing actually propagated its in the South African context, and perhaps that'll also allow them the listeners to think about the parallels between what was happening in South Africa during the apartheid regime in the way that the U.S. and its other Western allies were supporting the apartheid regime

with the exact same sort of backing that we're seeing for the settler colonial regime in Israel today. So with South Africa, there was a company called Arms Corps, which was owned by the government, and its purpose was to acquire military hardware, hardware for the southern military. It wasn't really a situation where military jets tanks

would be assembled in the West and then brought to South Africa. It was a situation where the, for lack of a better way, the blueprints, the plans for these aircraft and tanks and so forth, other weaponry, was given to South Africa. South Africa then modified and tweaked them and produced its own versions, so-called own versions of these various tanks and jets. So the West poured that in, and then, of course, in addition to that, It was other things where the sanctions were violated, which the West knew about, but did nothing to stop.

So South Africa was using a passenger aircraft and loading weaponry into the cargo hold on its regular international flights. In addition to it, you had secret cargo flights as well in and out of the country. So that is how the West propped up South Africa and also companies like IBM supplied computer hardware and software

in order to keep to help things run as well the supply of oil as well and the oil refining technology was provided by the West nuclear weapons technology was also provided by the West in order to prop up the apartheid regime.

Really quick follow-up question. Those nuclear weapons, when the apartheid ended, if I'm not mistaken, that weapons program was sort of dismantled and those nukes were taken elsewhere or ended. Can you talk about that and the reasons behind that? Because I think that's particularly interesting. Yes. Once the apartheid ended, then the post-aparid government ended the entire nuclear weapons program. What happened to the weapons, I can't recall offhand.

But yes, that nuclear weapons program was completely dismantled. So I think if I'm not mistaken, the only country that was a nuclear power, that is Nodalga nuclear power. One quick note to mention about in 2010, there was a report that came out from the Guardian that mentioned that there was some apartheid era papers that had been released and declassified that showed that Israel offered to sell South Africa, the apartheid South African regime nuclear weapons. Now, keep in mind, listen. that Israel still denies having nuclear weapons.

This despite the fact that I think yesterday or the day before at the time of recording, we're recording November 6th, the Minister of Heritage of Israel said that they should nuke Gaza. Now, keep in mind, this is a regime that says, hey, everybody, we don't have nuclear weapons, despite the fact that everybody for decades has known that they have, but they still claim that they don't. The Minister of Heritage, again, yesterday or the day before at the time of recording said we should nuke Gaza. Okay, if that's not a, you know, saying that we have nuclear weapons, I don't know what is. But another example would have been in 1975. Again, that's when these, you can find the article on the Guardian's website still. This report came out that in 1975,

there was documents that drafted where Israel offered to apartheid South Africa's defense minister, P.W. Both of that they would offer to sell nuclear weapons at that time. I mean, this is how many years ago now. So Israel has been a nuclear power for a long time. And I just wanted to bring that up, Brett, since you did mention about, you know, the nuclear program that was within South Africa and the fact that this was being offered to the apartheid regime by Israel kind of tying these two threads together. Yeah, definitely very important to note all of the external support that apartheid South Africa got and a lot of that support came from the U.S., the U.S., the U.K. and Israel. But let's go ahead and sort of shift towards the end of apartheid,

and then we can kind of discuss some of the differences and similarities between what's happening in Palestine and what happened in South Africa. I'm particularly interested in the sort of shift in global opinion, the public pressure put on the South African apartheid regime, because you know, today we have like the BDS movement. We have now with this latest sort of flare up of slaughter that Israel's imposing on Gaza and on Palestinians more broadly, you have a huge shift in world opinion, even in places like the West where, you know, there hasn't been that level of Palestinian support in the past. And of course, Western governments are trying to crack down on it, Zionists across the world are very insecure at this sort of explosion of support for

Palestinian liberation, et cetera. And I know that public perception shifts and public pressure had something to do with the end of apartheid in South Africa. So can you kind of talk about how the tide turned with regards to global opinion and some of the external pressure put on the apartheid regime by, you know, the rest of the world? I guess the sort of initial event that brought attention to a part of South Africa was a 1976

youth revolt that started in Soweto and the brutality of the response by the South African government much like what you see happening in Gala today is what shocked quite a

few people and the subsequent despite the attempts by the Southern Government to keep the press out of it like you have in Gaza to stop press reporting on the brutality

that they couldn't prevent that from happening and this continued brutality this excessive response is what drew more and more people to the view that a party is wrong and

where it began to what helped to turn public opinion was in the early in the first half of the 1980s 83, 84, 85 when the disinvestment movement exploded in

Europe and North America students in Britain for instance demanded that our place stopped disinvest from South Africa Southern African fruit was people in Ireland didn't want South African fruit in the supermarket Charles of Ireland. In the U.S. where I was at, at the time 84, students were demanding that universities sell their shares in companies

with subsidiaries in South Africa. So it was that. those protests in the 83, 84, 85, which those protests, those actions is what, and the exposure of what was going on in South Africa is what turned the attention to South Africa and also turned the public opinion against apartheid inside of it. So when talking about BDS, I also want to mention. listeners. If you're a listener of Rev. Left, but not guerrilla history, we've already recorded an episode, which will be released sometime in the near future. It depends on one of these two

episodes will come out first, but an episode on BDS specifically, so in the Palestinian context. So if you're interested in that, we have a really great episode coming up. So make sure you look on the guerrilla history feed wherever you get your podcasts. But, you know, when we look in the U.S., It's really interesting in the case of BDS. We have this example of peaceful, nonviolent resistance against apartheid in the case of, you know, Palestine and in South Africa. And we saw, as you mentioned, Ashley, that in the South African context, BDS kind of, you know, tactics were very successful in turning public opinion and in many ways kind of soften the bulkhead for the actual change. that came into, you know, dismantling the legal apartheid regime that was in place. In the United States today, with regards to BDS measures against the so-called state of Israel,

we have incredible pushback against BDS. Even when I was in, you know, university during my undergrad, there was constantly proposals to ban BDS on campus. And fortunately, well, I was there. Those never went through and we had our, you know, pretty vibrant BDS community on our campus where we were completely, you know, boycotting any, uh, Israeli products as well as companies that had investments within Israel. But we now have, this has only ramped up in more recent years to the point where entire states in the U.S. make, uh, employees, public employees sign loyalty oaths that they will not. subscribed or ascribe to BDS tactics in their capacity or in their private life while they're employed as a public official. They have school teachers in various states that are required to sign

these oaths that they will not carry out BDS tactics in their private life. You know, we're not talking about like using their institution as a mechanism for BDS. We're talking about this individual cannot be a proponent of BDS and their private life while they are a teacher, for example, in various states, and some people actually were fired for that. We have other instances where even coming out in support of BDS is being threatened to be criminalized in various states like Florida, you know, because everything always starts off in Florida these days.

But we have this incredible pushback to utilizing BDS as a tactic to fight against apartheid in the case of the so-called state of Israel and occupied Palestine. I'm curious because I wasn't alive back. You know, I was born after apartheid legally fell. So I'm curious of if, and I know Brett, you're also older than me. So you might be able to answer a little bit in the U.S. context. And Ashley, you might be able to answer more in kind of the, you know, the South African. And I know you were in Zimbabwe for quite some time at this point as well.

What the kind of pushback was to utilizing BDS against South Africa? was, because in the case of Israel, we see incredible pushback by Israel's Western backers. There was also pushback against the movement to boycotts apartheid South Africa. And that came in the form of the argument that, look, these investments are needed in order to, one, they provide jobs for Africans, blacks in South Africa. Two, it's the investments are provide progress and development for South Africa. And of course, then came the next argument, which is the racist one. If you compare South Africa to the rest of Africa, South Africa is really well developed.

So if we remove these investments, then South Africa and the blacks, especially the blacks who are living there, are going to go and end up living like the blacks in the, the rest of Africa, which meant erode infrastructure or collapsed, economy or collapse, production or collapsed. So that was the kind of ideological pushback that occurred. It wasn't at this stage where people in government offices or anywhere else were told, made a sign any kind of oath or agreement that you cannot

you're not going to engage in in activity to against the part of South Africa and I'm talking about being in Zimbabwe but being in South Africa meant that you know those who did

were usually those who were employed the employees at the time found some kind of an exclusive reason to end their government. That was the punishment that they faced within South Africa. Yeah, so one thing I want to discuss, I want to make sure that we touch on are some of the interesting differences between apartheid South Africa and the current situation in Palestine. We've touched on many of the similarities. We've shown how apartheid exists

in both. We've talked about the importance of land, the exploitation of labor, the history of European colonialism and how all these things are present in one way or another in both of these examples. We've even talked about the public pressure. It's something that is still trying to be generated against the Israeli occupation and is making great strides. But there's also important differences. And one of the differences that jumps to my mind off the top is the percentage differences of the colonizing force and the indigenous peoples. In Palestine right now, all things considered, it's pretty equal, the amount of, you know, it's like 50, 50, more or less. And in South Africa, it was a little bit different. And perhaps this might also

contribute, and I could be wrong on this one, but that might also contribute to the relative lack of armed struggle and violence as well, given that there was this really meaningful percentage differences between the two opposing camps, whereas in the, in the, the context of Israel. In Palestine, it's pretty equalized. But I'm sure there are some other differences as well, and maybe you can correct me if I said anything wrong about the percentages as well. But yeah, if you could just talk about the important differences between apartheid, South Africa, and what's happening in Palestine. In terms of like a grunis, what you mean?

In terms of anything at all, just any of the differences that you see. We've talked about the similarities. I'm just wondering, do you see any serious differences between the two? For me, yes, they are. So if you look at what happened on the 7th of October, that was quite a spectacular operation carried out by Hamas. And the point means that in South Africa at the time, there were never ever during a party, there were never that kind of military operation at that level at that scale.

There was, however, in Zimbabwe, the successful spectacular military operations, but South Africa, no, not at all. So that's the first difference. The second is, if you look at what they call the homelands, the bunderstiles, so those were the areas where the black-havering population was relegated to. So, you know, if they weren't working, they would have to go and live in those areas, which is in the countryside. They could only be in the township if they had employment. So if you take Cape Town, for instance, you have Kailchia, you have Gugnettu, you have Philippi area. So in these areas, they are within Cape Town. So, all of the, if you work, say, for instance, in the central business district or in one of the industrial areas, it's simply a matter of getting on public transport in Kailetshire or Philippi wherever and taking a bus to work.

After work, you take a bus by home. But it's different in, so you have the working class that lives in the same geographical area. as in the same city that they work in, whereas in Gaza, I suspect, is different. You live in Gaza, you then have to go through security checkpoints to come out of Gaza into another area, which is Zionist-occupied palace signs on board, called Israel, and you're going to work there. And then when you go back home, it's the same thing you go through that security checkpoint. So it's In a part of

it's got Africa didn't have those kind of security checkpoints. Now again yes the roadblocks but nothing that you see in Gaza and probably the West Bank as well. So there you have

the working class of Israel, the Arab working class that does not live in Israel but it's either in the West Bank or in Gaza. So, lose in a different area and has to walk or commute to get to work and go back home. So that is another important difference.

Those are probably the two, yeah. So those two are the probably the two important differences between apartheid South Africa and apartheid Israel. One thing that I want to make sure that we touch on is the sentiment towards Palestine and apartheid Israel. Israel in South Africa, because South Africa does have this experience that we've been discussing throughout this episode. And we've seen that relations between South Africa and Israel at times, in recent years,

have been relatively strained. For example, in South Africa, sorry, South Africa recalled its ambassador to Israel in 2018, and now, I believe just today, again, November 6th at the time of recording, just recalled all of their diplomats from Israel. Israel that was just in the news this morning, my time anyway. It might have been last night for you, Brett. So we have seen strained tensions. And I'm wondering more about not the governmental relations, which we can kind of see, you know, they have to tow the line. But at the other hand, you know, they do have this, this kind of strained relationship and have to kind of bow to popular

sentiment at times. I'm curious of what the popular sentiment actually is within South Africa, like on the ground because the people in South Africa have this experience of living under apartheid and seeing the structures of apartheid and also can see with their own eyes what is going on in Palestine and as we said it's not exactly the same situation there are differences in the context of Palestine and South Africa but the you can certainly see reminiscences of the apartheid experience in South Africa and I'm wondering if that in any way is coloring the perception of people in South Africa and driving it towards any particular direction

or not, I don't know. So, you know, what is your perception of the feeling on the ground in South Africa towards Palestine and Israel? Generally, the feeling is in favor of Palestine. Because of the similarities in the landist possessions, the similarities of the power, what's happening in Palestine is close to the hearts of many South Africans.

If you look at Cape Town, I think it must have been about 2015-2016. I can't remember there exactly now. If you look at the protests that have occurred in Cape Town and the numbers at each protest, the protests in favor of Palestine against all the protests in favor of Palestine against what was happening in Gaza, that historically was the largest march that Kenton has seen. If not, then certainly in the top three. So that gives you an idea as to the sentiments that Saddam Hussein has for Palestine. You stated what the government has just done, which is a bit, it's hypocrisy given that

the very same government while we're calling the ambassadors. sells weapons to the Israel regime. But the South Africa is outside the government, when it's the word I'm looking for, civil society has a very strong connection with Pernestai. And they would have been able to interview people in or from Pannistai at meetings and so forth. And just a couple of days ago,

the main government-controlled broadcasting company interviews one of the officials from Hamas on South Africa intelligence, which of course horrified local Zionist supporters here in South Africa. So, yes, and so in South Africa, there's this ongoing quotas that are taking place at local levels every single week in favor of Palestine and against what is going on in Gaza. So, yes, and we, yeah. Yeah, so we have just a couple, two more close. questions to close out this discussion. You've been very generous with your time, and we deeply

appreciate that. One of the questions I have to wrap up this conversation, and then Henry can ask one, is about the, we mentioned it earlier. You sort of alluded to the legacy of apartheid still living on. And there is some sort of, sometimes this naive sense that, you know, since apartheid fell, that something like, you know, justice or something like equality has sort of been achieved in South Africa, when in some instances, that may be true. And in many other instances, that certainly is not the case. So can you talk about the continued legacy of apartheid in South Africa and how it shapes ongoing injustices in the country to this day? Okay. So let's start off with what has been achieved. I mean, it's not true to say that nothing was achieved. So what was

achieve is you can't live where you want to live. You can pursue the kind of job in the career that you want to pursue. You have the right to vote. So those are the achievers. In terms of those living in the targent, you have had those who've had houses built for them. That is an achievement. But what is not been achieved, what has not changed is the social aparthe. So those who live in the townships, by experiencing poverty, levels of deprivation worse than under apartheid. During the lockdown because of COVID in 2020, 2021, there were people who, because they weren't working, because they didn't have a social grant, had no access to income, people literally starved to death.

that hasn't changed. The fact that when people protest against a lack of houses in the area, when they protest against not having running water or electricity or a stable, consistent spy, when they protest that they met with the head of the police, policing armored vehicles with ride gear, that hasn't changed. We have a situation where the schools in the townships,

particularly the blood tarnships, are still the same. A situation where three quarters of high schools and sidelab don't have a library. That hasn't changed. So, on the one hand, you have this change. on the other hand, things are the same or worse than what they were under apartheid. And this is why South Africa, long after 1994, had the title of the protest capital of the world, and rightly so, because of the worsening social and living conditions of the black majority of

South Africa, the working class majority of South Africa. Yeah, so to close out this conversation, When looking at this kind of analysis that you've provided in that last answer and also, you know, accounts of other people who have analyzed South Africa and how many of the vestiges and structures of apartheid have perpetuated themselves and today or have slightly changed form and have perpetuated themselves into the present day, even long after, you know, 29 years after the formal end to legal apartheid in South Africa, many, many scholars have called it an unfinished. revolution, you know, not that it was really a true revolutionary struggle, but in terms of being, you know, anything like a socialist revolutionary struggle or anything along those lines. But in terms of when apartheid legally fell, many of the struggles just ended at that point. And that allowed for the entrenchment of these apartheid-like structures into the current day. And so using that knowledge of this kind of unfinished project of the dismantling

of apartheid, what can you take from that experience and try to apply to thinking about the Palestinian example? Of course, we have to be slightly optimistic because otherwise, you know, we look at the news all of the time and we get very depressed about what's happening at all times. But let's be optimistic and, you know, think about the day in which apartheid and the settler colonial state falls because inevitably, you know, justice will be achieved and liberation for the Palestinian people will be achieved in time. That is, of course, you know, us being optimistic and always trying to keep that revolutionary optimism. So upon the day for Palestinian liberation, what are the lessons that they should take?

of this experience from South Africa of this kind of unfinished dismantling of apartheid when they go about ensuring that the apartheid-like structures that are in place within occupied Palestine today

are not perpetuated into the future. Okay. Just a couple of quick answers on the step-waters. So number one is don't disband your organization because you think you've been liberated.

Number two, don't trust the government. Say it's going to do things. Number three, keep on fighting as though you haven't been deliberated. Keep on fighting so that you have a decent, acceptable standard of living, acceptable decent living conditions and working conditions. Once you have those, then you can say, okay, this is what we've achieved. Can we do anything extra in addition to that? Yeah, that's just my sort of very brief answer.

Yeah, wise words. Thank you so much, Ashley, for coming on for sharing your knowledge with us. We deeply, deeply appreciate it. Being so generous with your time, I know it's pretty late where you are. So thank you again. Before we let you go, though, can you let listeners know where they can maybe find you, your work online, and any other recommendations? recommendations or last words you would like to offer anybody listening?

Well, I haven't really set up anything online, but anyone who wants to contact me by email is welcome to do so. Can I give you my email online now? Okay, so it's H-A-S-H and then F-O-F-F-F-R-A-T-W-R at g-mail. And are you welcome to email me and ask me anything that you like? And I will answer you or try to help you any way that I can. Wonderful. And we will link to that in the show notes so people can easily reach out to you. Henry, before we go, do you want to let listeners know where they can find you in your work online?

Of course, listeners, you can find me on Twitter or what used to be called Twitter at H-U-C-1-995. And of course, I would like to recommend everybody subscribe to guerrilla history, wherever you get your podcasts, obviously like listening to Brett because you're listening to either guerrilla history or revolutionary left radio right now. So if you're on the guerrilla, if you're on the revolutionary left radio feed and you're not on the guerrilla history feed, Brett is one of the three co-hosts of the show. So you might as well subscribe to it over there. Yeah. And I'll link to that in the show notes as well. All right.

Thank you again, Ashley. Talk to you soon. Thank you to everybody that listens. Love and solidarity. Thanks, Henry. Thanks, thanks, much. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.