Independence and decolonization in Southern Africa

Lesotho, Botswana, and Swaziland

The victory of the overtly republican National Party in South Africa challenged British interests in the subcontinent. The NP’s economic policies appeared to threaten British investments in South Africa at a time when Britain was particularly dependent on its colonial possessions for its sterling balances, while the Nationalists also renewed their demand for the incorporation into South Africa of Lesotho, Botswana, and Swaziland.

By the mid 1950s it was clear that the three High Commission territories could not be transferred to South Africa and had to be prepared for independence. Limited funds were made available for the provision of social services, education, soil conservation, and infrastructure development, but this assistance did little to reduce the territories’ dependence on migrant labour to South Africa. A partial exception was Swaziland, where British- and South African-owned asbestos and coal mines, sugar and timber plantations, and cattle ranches had begun to generate more local jobs after the war.

The independence of the majority of Britain’s African territories put the independence of the High Commission territories in Southern Africa on the British agenda, despite their continued economic dependence on South Africa and the relative weakness of their independence movements.

Lesotho, with high levels of literacy, was the first to organize. In 1952 Ntsu Mokhehle formed the Basutoland Congress Party (BCP), modeled on the ANC. In 1958 Chief Leabua Jonathan, who was to become Lesotho’s first prime minister, founded the conservative Basutoland National Party (BNP), with the support of the South African government, the powerful Roman Catholic church, and the queen regent. Jonathan led the BNP to a narrow victory in the 1965 elections; Lesotho achieved independence in 1966. In Botswana and Swaziland, modern nationalist movements emerged somewhat later and were dominated by members of the royal families, who were able to perpetuate monarchical domination quite effectively through the ballot box. In Botswana, which achieved its independence in 1966, Seretse Khama—the grandson of the Ngwato chief Khama III—emerged as the first president. In Swaziland, where the presence of white settlers and South African and international economic interests held up full independence until 1968, the Swazi king Sobhuza II emerged as head of state through the overwhelming electoral majority of his Imbokodvo National Movement in the rural areas. Thus, in all three territories conservative governments anxious to avoid provoking South Africa emerged in the first elections after independence.

Botswana was undoubtedly the most successful economically and politically and retained the most open political institutions and the most distance from South Africa. Dominated by a modernizing elite, the country’s economy flourished with the expansion of cattle ranching and diamond, nickel, and copper mining. Botswana played a leading role in efforts to coordinate the regional economy. The BCP, with a primarily rural electoral base, ruled Botswana into the mid 1990s.

In Swaziland, Sobhuza II in 1973 declared a state of emergency, suspended the constitution, dissolved parliament and all political parties, and consolidated his rule after a more radical opposition party showed strength in the 1972 elections. In 1978 a new constitution ensured the continued power of the monarchy in alliance with selected chiefs. This ruling elite used its domination of the state and land to accumulate wealth in close collaboration with foreign (mainly South African) investors. Until the death of Sobhuza II in 1982, all opposition to the government and to its close links with South Africa was suppressed. In the 1980s and ’90s political repression and competition for power within the ruling group intensified.

Fears that the more radical BCP would win the 1970 elections in Lesotho led Jonathan, supported by South Africa, to declare a state of emergency, annul the election, and suspend the constitution. Opposition leaders fled, and by the late 1970s chronic warfare had erupted in Lesotho’s northeastern mountains. Through the 1960s and early ’70s Jonathan was South Africa’s most reliable regional ally, but he subsequently became an outspoken critic of South African policies. Jonathan’s authoritarian rule continued until 1986, when he was deposed in a military coup supported by South Africa.

The Central African Federation

Alarm at the NP victory in South Africa also stimulated Britain into federating its south-central African territories as a bulwark against Afrikaner nationalism. Even before World War II, Northern Rhodesian whites had begun to consider federation with Southern Rhodesia as a response to growing African assertiveness, and support for federation increased after the war. At the same time, the growing importance of the copper industry in Northern Rhodesia attracted Southern Rhodesian whites to the idea of federation. Wartime collaboration promoted federal ideas among white settlers and in British government circles. It was widely assumed that Southern Rhodesia would provide managerial and administrative skills, Northern Rhodesia copper revenues, and Nyasaland labour for the new entity. Africans in the north, however, feared that federation would prevent political advance and extend Southern Rhodesia’s racist laws. Ignoring African opposition, in 1953 Britain’s Conservative government brought the territories together in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, commonly known as the Central African Federation.

Prosperity muted African protest in the early years of federation, although dissent mounted in the impoverished reserves of Southern Rhodesia, where disaffection was fueled by attempts to restructure peasant production at a time of growing landlessness and congestion on inferior land. Despite the rhetoric of multiracial partnership, the economic advantages of federation appeared mainly to benefit Southern Rhodesian whites.

Malawi and Zambia

By the late 1950s more militant national movements had emerged in the Central African Federation and were attempting to mobilize a disaffected peasantry in all three territories. The emergence of these nationalist movements profoundly disturbed the federal authorities. After sporadic unrest in Nyasaland in 1959 a state of emergency was declared, while in all three territories nationalist leaders were arrested and their organizations banned. The crackdown set off further disorder, and in the northern territories the British were persuaded to move toward decolonization. By 1961–62 the nationalists had been released and new constitutions drawn up, and in 1963 the federation was dissolved. In the following year the Malawi Congress Party under Hastings Kamuzu Banda and the United National Independence Party (UNIP) under Kenneth Kaunda won the first universal suffrage elections in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, respectively, and led them into independence as Malawi and Zambia.

Banda and Kaunda differed greatly in their relations with the liberation struggles in the rest of Southern Africa. In the hope of gaining control of northern Mozambique, Banda negotiated with the Portuguese and withheld assistance from Mozambican nationalists, who during the 1960s were beginning their military campaign. He also established close ties with the white South African government, which supplied much of Malawi’s direct aid. Malawi thus became the foundation of South Africa’s “outward-looking” foreign policy in Africa.

Although initially Zambia was as tied economically to Rhodesia and the Portuguese colonies, Kaunda backed the resistance movements there and supported United Nations (UN) sanctions against the white government in Rhodesia. He paid a heavy price. The sanctions closed Zambia’s major trade and transportation routes through Rhodesia, and, although alternate routes were established through Angola and new east-west lines through Tanzania were constructed by the mid 1970s, subsequent armed incursions from Rhodesia and South Africa and continued warfare in Angola and Mozambique disrupted the costly new trade and transportation lines. Zambia’s economy contracted by nearly half between 1974 and 1979, and its collapse was prevented only by intervention from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

During the late 1970s Malawi, long believed to have successful rural development policies, also faced economic crisis. The lean years of the 1980s saw a widening gap between rich and poor, which was worsened by Banda’s support of the Mozambican insurgency movement Renamo and the influx of vast numbers of refugees from the civil war in Mozambique.

Angola and Mozambique

White power in Angola and Mozambique remained relatively weak in comparison with South Africa and South West Africa. After the war Portugal sought to maintain its colonies in the face of growing, if still slight, African urban nationalist movements by increasing the settler population dramatically. This was facilitated in Angola by a coffee boom and the discovery of minerals and petroleum and in Mozambique by government-instituted agricultural schemes.

These developments brought little benefit to the majority of Africans, however, who continued to work as ill-paid migrant labourers, their upward mobility blocked by settlers. Even in areas of limited fertility, Africans still had to produce their quota of cotton, rice, or coffee; most of the good land was taken over by wealthy white landowners and multinational companies, and the forced labour codes remained in operation until 1962.

The longest, most divided, and bloodiest wars against colonialism in the subcontinent occurred in the Portuguese colonies. War first erupted in Angola in 1961, in a series of apparently unconnected uprisings. The initiative was captured by the urban-based Popular Liberation Movement of Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola; MPLA), under its poet-president Agostinho Neto. The MPLA was supported by communists in Portugal, the Soviet Union, and Cuba, but its hegemony was contested from the start by Holden Roberto’s National Front for the Liberation of Angola (Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola; FNLA), based in Congo (Kinshasa), and by Jonas Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola; UNITA), supported primarily by Ovimbundu in the south.

In Mozambique the nationalist organizations were initially more successfully united. The anticolonial struggle was led by Eduardo Mondlane of the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frente da Libertação de Moçambique; Frelimo), which was formed in 1962 by exiles in Tanzania. Internal dissent had been crushed by 1964, and Frelimo launched a guerrilla war against targets in northern Mozambique, claiming to have established its own administrative, educational, and economic networks in the northern districts. Despite the assassination of Mondlane in 1969, a new phase of the war opened in 1971 under the leadership of Samora Machel, and by 1974 Frelimo controlled much of northern and central Mozambique.

Portugal’s initial response to the outbreak of revolt in Angola and Mozambique was all-out war, and by the mid 1960s there were some 70,000 Portuguese troops in each territory. Large numbers of Black troops were recruited, and villagers supporting the guerrillas were subjected to savage reprisals. In a bid to attract international support, Portugal opened the colonies to foreign investment in 1963, and by the late 1960s the regime also instituted modest economic and educational reforms to preempt the nationalists and meet rising demands for a semiskilled workforce. But the reforms were too few and too late, and in April 1974 the sheer cost of the wars—together with rising dissatisfaction with the government in Portugal—led to an army coup, the collapse of the Portuguese government, and Portuguese withdrawal from Africa.

When the Portuguese left Luanda in November 1975, Angola was in the throes of a civil war between its divided liberation movements. The war escalated as the United States aided the FNLA-UNITA alliance through Zaire and encouraged a South African invasion of Angola in 1974–75 in the hope of installing a pro-Western government. The Soviet Union supplied weapons to the MPLA, which was aided by Cuban troops. The South African invasion was repelled, but South Africa continued to destabilize the MPLA government over the next 15 years through its covert support for UNITA, which it hoped to install as its client. The MPLA eventually established control of Angola under Neto, but its government was undermined by South African incursions, the flight of most of the settlers at independence, incursions of Kongo peoples from Congo (Kinshasa), hostility from the United States, and its own doctrinaire economic policies.

Portuguese withdrawal also led to Mozambique’s independence under a Frelimo government in June 1975, but the flight of skilled expatriates and Mozambique’s proximity to hostile regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia caused immediate problems. The country was severely hit by a drastic cutback in recruitment by the South African Chamber of Mines in 1976 and, like Zambia, paid heavily for obeying UN sanctions against Rhodesia and for supporting the liberation movements. Nevertheless, in the early years of independence, Frelimo abolished many of the most hated aspects of colonial rule and greatly increased the availability of welfare resources for the Black populace. Mozambican territory was raided by Rhodesia and South Africa in 1979, and this was followed by further South African attacks and the infiltration of the Mozambican National Resistance (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana; Renamo), a brutal insurgency group established by Rhodesian intelligence services in 1976–77.

In Mozambique and Angola the unpopularity of the governments’ Marxist policies—including the concentration of the population in communal villages, state farms, and cooperatives and attacks on private property, chiefly authority, and religion—eased the way for South African intervention. During the 1980s both Frelimo and the MPLA lost control outside the main urban areas.

Zimbabwe

African liberation in Rhodesia was closely tied to the independence struggles in Mozambique. The election of 1962—boycotted by African nationalists—was won by the extreme right-wing Rhodesian Front (RF) party, which ran on a platform of immediate independence under white control. The Central African Federation was dissolved in 1963. Britain was unwilling to grant Rhodesia independence; in 1965 the RF, under the leadership of Ian Smith, unilaterally declared Rhodesia independent. Under the RF, government policies came even closer to those in South Africa. Although Rhodesia had an ostensibly colour-blind franchise, less than 1 percent of Africans were able to vote. The powers of chiefs were bolstered and discriminatory legislation increased. Despite international pressure, Britain refused to use force against the illegal regime. International economic sanctions were undermined by South Africa, Portugal, and multinational oil companies. White commercial agriculture was heavily subsidized and competed with African peasants, who felt the main burden of the sanctions.

The banning of successive nationalist organizations and the detention and exile of their leadership led to fierce infighting and the emergence of two major liberation organizations, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), under Robert Mugabe, and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), under Joshua Nkomo. With Frelimo’s military successes in northeastern Mozambique in 1971–72 and, more important, with the transformation of the power structure in the region after the independence of the Portuguese territories, a new guerrilla strategy began to make headway. Various attempts by the British to resolve the conflict—including a referendum on a new constitution in 1972—all failed, and by the late 1970s the Rhodesian army and the guerrillas pursued the war with increasing ferocity, both sides often intimidating and torturing recruits in the rural areas.

By 1978 it had become clear that the Rhodesian government would not win the war, and Smith, under pressure from Western countries and South Africa, agreed in 1978 to allow the internal African opposition to contest multiracial elections the following year. These elections, however, excluded ZAPU and ZANU. Thus, despite the appointment of a Black prime minister, the war continued unabated. In 1979 renewed negotiations in London ultimately led to a peace settlement that established majority rule, and in 1980 Mugabe and ZANU won a landslide electoral victory.

The release of a large number of unemployed, armed young men into the countryside bequeathed a violent legacy, and by 1982 the initial ZANU-ZAPU government coalition broke down in the face of increasing violence in Matabeleland, for which ZANU held ZAPU responsible. Early in 1983 Mugabe sent government forces to punish the people of Matabeleland. Despite the withdrawal of troops and an amnesty in 1988, memories of this brutal counterinsurgency campaign were even more traumatic than recollections of the liberation struggle.

The idea of a one-party state was dropped amid calls for reparations for the massacres in Matabeleland and for greater public accountability. Although the early years of Zimbabwean independence were economically promising, with the return of investment as sanctions were lifted and a series of good harvests, much of the white economy and bureaucracy remained intact, and gross inequalities persisted. Despite its revolutionary rhetoric, ZANU (which ruled Zimbabwe into the mid 1990s) seemed more intent on replacing white government with Black than with transforming the lives of the poor.

South West Africa

In South West Africa, too, the National Party increased its control in the 1950s and ’60s. Long governed as part of South Africa, in 1949 South West Africa became South Africa’s fifth province, and its white population was swollen by about 3,000 immigrants. The economy grew dramatically, increasing the mobility of Black workers and creating an urban-based Black intelligentsia for the first time. Apartheid was extended to South West Africa, however, and in the mid 1960s its reserves were also consolidated into seven ethnically defined homelands under tribal authorities.

The small political associations in South West Africa after the war were profoundly influenced by their South African counterparts, but the first mass organization to protest against South Africa’s policies was formed only in 1958; in 1960 this organization became the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO). Launched by Ovambo contract workers, SWAPO came to represent most Black South West Africans in opposing apartheid, racial inequalities, and economic subordination to South Africa. After years of fruitless peaceful protest, SWAPO began a military campaign against the government in 1966.

Although South Africa did not recognize the authority of the UN, the issue of South African rule in South West Africa came before the UN regularly, and in 1966 the UN called for complete South African withdrawal. This decision was upheld by the International Court of Justice at The Hague in 1971. In 1973 the UN appointed its own commissioner for Namibia (as the territory became known in the 1970s); despite the presence of the UN commissioner and the intensification of SWAPO’s military campaign, it was only after Angolan independence in 1975 and increasing international pressure that South Africa’s policies began to change.

Namibia

The independence of Angola prompted changes in South African strategy toward Namibia during the late 1970s, as South Africa attempted to transform the territory into a quasi-independent buffer against more radical change by proposing complex constitutional arrangements for a transitional government. The strategy, based on the co-option of a local Black elite as a moderate alternative to SWAPO, was intended to placate international opinion while leaving control of Namibia in South African hands and keeping its military options open. The constitutional proposals were rejected by the international community, however, and in 1978 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 435, which set out proposals for a cease-fire and UN-supervised elections. South Africa did not move to implement this resolution, though it had accepted similar proposals earlier.

By the second half of the 1980s—in part because South Africa once more had been drawn into invading Angola—the war in Namibia was becoming increasingly costly for South Africa in military, political, economic, and diplomatic terms. A turning point occurred in 1988 when the South African Defense Force’s inability to take Cuito-Cuanavale in Angola revealed South Africa’s lack of superior airpower and its inadequate weapons technology. Under joint pressure from the Soviet Union and the United States, South Africa finally agreed to implement Resolution 435, and democratic elections in 1989 were won by SWAPO, led by Sam Nujoma. In 1990 Namibia finally achieved independence.

South Africa

The process of decolonization in south-central Africa and the High Commission territories was generally peaceful. By the late 1960s the few remaining nonindependent African countries were all in settler-dominated Southern Africa. The 1970s were a time of escalating wars of liberation in Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. The independence of the Portuguese colonies under self-styled Marxist governments was crucial in shifting the balance of power against the remaining white minority states in the subcontinent. International involvement in the region increased, and by 1980 only South Africa and Namibia remained under minority rule.

For the territories of Southern Africa, the continuance of apartheid in South Africa shaped the postindependence years; the liberation of these territories in turn inspired and politicized South Africa’s Black populace and transformed the balance of power in the region. In response, P.W. Botha, who became prime minister of South Africa in 1978 and led South Africa until 1989, massively increased defense expenditures and began a low-grade war on the neighbouring states, determined to destroy all ANC bases. At the same time, Botha pursued an internal program of constitutional reform, which strengthened the powers of the state president and increased repression of the Black majority. The South African military assumed greater political importance. South Africa destabilized the region by arming internal dissidents, who attacked schools, clinics, railways, and harbours. This intervention was especially devastating in Angola and Mozambique, but South Africa also destabilized eastern Zimbabwe and raided alleged ANC bases in Zambia, Botswana, Swaziland, and Lesotho.

For all the apparent success of its social engineering policies, by the late 1960s cracks had begun to appear in the National Party’s edifice of control. It subsequently confronted multiple crises, as Black opposition again broke to the surface with the emergence of the Black Consciousness movement in 1968, led by the charismatic activist Stephen Biko. The movement sought to raise Black self-awareness and to unite Black students, professionals, and intellectuals. As Black political activity increased, the apparently monolithic NP began to fragment.

The economy also began to show signs of weakness by the mid 1970s. Inflation climbed steeply and the economy contracted; a reliance on imported technology contributed to a trade deficit. Whites, who constituted a declining proportion of the population, could not meet the demand for skilled and semiskilled labour. The small internal market and African trade sanctions also hampered growth.

Yet the economic growth of the 1960s had expanded the Black working class and increased its confidence, and 1972–73 saw a wave of strikes and rapid growth of the trade union movement. In some sectors the labour activism caused African wages to rise more quickly than white wages. Nevertheless, technological innovation led to high unemployment for the unskilled, and urban conditions for Africans continued to deteriorate as impoverished homeland inhabitants defied the pass laws and sought work in town. For them, the fiction of the independence of the homelands came to have a grim reality in the 1980s, as their homeland citizenship restricted their legal access to jobs and housing in the rest of South Africa.

The revival of labour activism and the independence of Mozambique and Angola further inspired the Black Consciousness movement. In June 1976 the government’s determination to impose Afrikaans on Black schools provided the flashpoint for prolonged countrywide protests, touched off after police fired on demonstrating students in Soweto (a Black township outside Johannesburg). This event transformed political consciousness beyond the youth—although they remained in the forefront of protest thereafter—with far-reaching consequences. Churches were radicalized, large numbers of community organizations sprang up, and there was a resurgence of support for the banned ANC, particularly among young people. By the late 1970s the ANC had decided to reorganize its underground internally, emphasizing political organization within the country.

In response, the government abandoned many aspects of orthodox apartheid: African trade unions were recognized, the pass laws were abolished, and attempts were made to co-opt the African middle and skilled working class (through the granting of limited urban and welfare rights) and to enhance the status of Indians and Coloureds (through constitutional change). The result was to politicize civil society even further, as the state was seen as using welfare for purposes of social control. Government attempts to address problems almost invariably led to fresh confrontations with the alienated Black population.

The reform process had stalled by the mid 1980s, and the state attempted to undermine Black opposition by cultivating conservative African leaders, notably Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, head of the primarily Zulu Inkatha movement in Natal, which became the scene of internecine violence. When F.W. de Klerk ascended to the presidency in 1989, he faced continuing African militancy, international economic and cultural sanctions, renewed economic recession, and intensifying war in Angola and Namibia.

On February 2, 1990, de Klerk announced his intention to free Nelson Mandela, lift the ban on many opposition parties (including the ANC and the PAC), and negotiate with the Black majority for a new, nonracial constitution. Agreement on an interim constitution was reached in 1993, and in April 1994 Mandela was elected president of South Africa.

(Note: This article covered the history of the region from the prehistoric period to the end of the colonial period in the 20th century. Coverage of the region’s physical and human geography can be found in the article Africa. For discussion of the physical and human geography of individual countries in the region and their postcolonial history, see Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.)