This spring marked the thirtieth anniversary of the election of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s president and the end of apartheid, the system of legalized racial segregation that had existed in South Africa for decades.
Around the same time as that anniversary, there was another momentous event in the country: South Africans went to the polls in May, and for the first time in 30 years, the African National Congress — the political party of Nelson Mandela — lost its parliamentary majority.
These two events — the anniversary of Mandela’s election and the unprecedented defeat of his party today — bring up important questions about South Africa’s politics since the fall of apartheid and where the country will go from here.
This will be the first in a two-part special looking at South Africa 30 years after the end of apartheid. Wilmot James, a senior advisor at Brown University’s Pandemic Center, will be our guide for these two episodes. Prior to coming to Brown, Wilmot was a member of South Africa’s Parliament, and before that he managed multiple special projects for President Mandela's office, and was a co-editor of his presidential speeches.
To start this episode, we’ll hear some of Wilmot’s story and how his life intersected with the rise and fall of apartheid in his home country.
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[MUSIC PLAYING] From the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. This spring marked the 30th anniversary of the election of Nelson Mandela as South Africa's president. That election, of course, brought with it the end of apartheid in the country, the system of laws that racially segregated South Africa, which had existed in the country for decades. Around the same time as that anniversary, there was another momentous event in South Africa. South Africans went to the polls in May of this year, and for the first time in 30 years, the political party of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress, lost its parliamentary majority. These two events, the anniversary of Mandela's election, and the unprecedented defeat of his party today, bring up important questions about South Africa's politics since the fall of apartheid and about where the country goes from here. Over the course of two episodes, we're going to try and answer some of these questions. Later on in the summer, we'll take a closer look at this spring's election and what it means for the country. But to set the foundation for that conversation, we wanted to take a closer look at the anniversary that was celebrated this spring, 30 years since the election of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid. To do that, you'll hear from a professor at Brown who worked and lived through much of that history himself. As we left, Mandela said, if government doesn't do that, I think, take the fight to them, the old activists. Great men like Nelson Mandela are unusual. So be careful about who we elect. Wilmot James is a senior advisor at Brown University's Pandemic Center. Prior to coming to Brown, he was a member of South Africa's parliament. Before that, he managed multiple special projects for President Mandela's office and was co-editor of Mandela's presidential speeches. He'll be our guide of sorts for these two episodes. And to start, on this episode, we'll be hearing some of his story. And we'll look at what it can tell us about South Africa's politics then and today. Wilmot James, thank you so much for coming on to trending globally. It's my great pleasure to be with you. I wonder if we could start a little bit just with some about your upbringing. Where did you grow up? So I grew up in a very beautiful town called Paul outside of Cape Town. It's known today for its wine and its vineyards. And it's just immense geographical beauty. But it was a very turbulent time in the early years of apartheid. Racial segregation and marginalization of black people had existed in the region that would become South Africa for centuries, dating back to its time as a Dutch and then English colony. However, the institutionalized form of segregation known as apartheid began in South Africa with the election of the segregationist National Party in 1948. Wilmot was born in 1953. He grew up with apartheid. But residential areas were being segregated. Schools were being segregated. They were unfolding this plan, this grand plan, to divide South Africa into racial groups. Starting at the top with people of European descent, white, South Africans. An Indian population, that is from India, who were brought initially as indentured labor. Then there were people of mixed descent of which I'm a member. And then there was a very large black population. There were people of African descent. And there was a majority of the population. Do you remember as a child when you first became aware of apartheid? Absolutely. So you will remember this big event in South Africa called Sharful. In 1960, thousands of black South Africans held a protest in the township of Sharpeville against apartheid laws that prevented black people from traveling freely within South Africa. And they were, in fact, not allowed to be in cities largely, they had to carry passports internally. You know, marching against the fact that they had to carry passes to move from one city to another and from rural areas into the city. Protesters marched to the police station in Sharpeville without their passes. Sharpeville was a completely peaceful march. Until police opened fire. At least 69 people were killed and over 180 wounded. The massacre sparked outrage around the world, including at the United Nations, which soon after declared that apartheid was a violation of the UN Charter. A few years later, in 1963, there was a more violent uprising in Wilmot's hometown of Parle. Wilmot remembers it vividly. We were alone with my mother and her siblings who were all living together in the house. And we had this sort of noise in the middle of the night and it was a protest march. And we opened the door to see what was going on. And they were all carrying machetes. And they were marching towards the police station. Protesters attacked the police station, and houses and businesses were burnt to the ground. At least two people were killed in the violence. And that was the first time that I recognized it, something was evaded all in my country. Just watching that happen. I grew up in a place, and I loved it. We loved these children, you know. Barefoot, I had a vignette across the way from us. It was a very peaceful, lovely town to grow up in. And they just shut it at all. The cause was absolutely one to support. But my first exposure was one. It was very, very, very, very disturbing. I was a child, you know. As Wilmot was growing up, it seemed to him like South Africa was stuck in the past, or even worse, going backwards at a time when the rest of the world was rapidly moving forward. Africa was being decolonized. In fact, all the major colonies of the empires were getting their independence, starting with India. And that happened in the 1950s, and the data accelerated in the 1960s. It was the year of John Kennedy. You had the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the counterculture movement in the 1970s. In South Africa, on the other hand, we went into the opposite direction. No independence, no democracy, no freedom, and it seems like things were going backwards. My parents had lost their home once by a forcible residential segregation. I went to a colored school. I went to a church in a colored area. I lived in a colored area. I had to sit on a bench at set colored, you know. So how did you get involved in politics in South Africa? When did that begin for you? So I became involved in politics as an undergraduate student in the early 70s, and we launched protests at universities. And it was a time of the black power movement in the United States, and that had a spillover effects into South Africa. So I became part of the black consciousness movement in the 1970s. This quickly got Wilmot into some trouble with South African authorities. The police, one night, knocked on my parents door. Just went straight into our bedroom and the rest of me. And I was placed in prevent, was known as preventative detention. I was lucky I wasn't tortured because I didn't want any information out of me, but I was in the hands of the police and the security release. It was in the middle of this traumatic experience that Wilmot got some life-changing news. While in prison, he received a letter. I got news that I received a full blood scholarship. And in fact, a year after that, I ended up in the United States on my way to the University of Wisconsin in August of 1977. And landed the day I was especially died. As Wilmot was getting his PhD in sociology in the United States, it started to look like South Africa might be catching up with the world. Over the next decade and a half, the movement to end apartheid grew, both within the country and internationally. This movement was embodied by the anti-apartheid movement's leader, a political prisoner named Nelson Mandela. - The Africans require to want the franchise on the basis of one man, one vote. They want political independence. - Do you see Africans being able to develop in this country without the European being push-eyed? - We have made it very clear in our policy that South Africa is a country of many races. There is room for all the various races in this country. - That was an interview Nelson Mandela gave while hiding from law enforcement inside South Africa in 1961. At that time, he was a key organizer against apartheid and was considered to be an enemy of the state. A short time later in 1962, he was arrested. He continued to lead the movement from prison. And by the 1980s, while Mandela was still in prison, it was becoming clear to many people, both inside and outside of South Africa, that apartheid was unsustainable. - In the 1980s, the issue in South Africa was that you had a zero sum, what's known as a zero sum conflict. White said power, but they were minority. Black said no power in the majority. And how did you bring the two together without destroying one another? That's the puzzle, that was the dilemma. South Africa was on the massive bridge in the 1980s. Rolling protest marches, police reaction and suppression. People locked up in jail. So that was ongoing. And then you had major international pressure, sanctions, disinvestment, and isolation of South Africa. - The path forward was unclear and the possibility of violence loomed over everyone. As Willmont put it. - If the white people then decided to extend the vote to everybody, they lose power. And they were terrified by that fact. I was once in a meeting where a very distinguished white juris came up to me. He said the greatest fear, he said, was that black people would do the same thing to them that they doing to black people. That was the greatest fear of white people. - Yes. (gentle music) - So how did South Africa find a relatively peaceful way out of this moment? Well, there are a number of factors, of course. Not the least of which was the personal charisma and brilliance of Nelson Mandela. But that wasn't the only factor. There was the international pressure, there was domestic pressure. And then in 1989, something happened that accelerated this transformation. One day there was an accident in history. The Berlin Wall fell. And that she could change because the former Soviet Union was the biggest backer of Nelson Mandela's party. He was not a communist, but they were a supporter of what they called the deliberation movements across the globe. And suddenly the biggest backer of the African National Congress supplied them, arms supplied them with munitions, with trading and so on just fell. And the white president of South Africa saw his chance. He saw that day week, I'm gonna now release Nelson Mandela and then unbend the political organizations and start bargaining with him because I have the upper hand. In February of 1990, South Africa's president, F.W. de Clerk freed Nelson Mandela. There's Mr. Mandela, Mr. Nelson Mandela, a free man. After 27 years, his head was high and his fist was clutched. Many whites and blacks see Mandela as the best hope for a peaceful end to apartheid. What his unconditional release has shown how volatile the situation has become, setting off both joyous celebration and violence. At least one person was killed during looting in Cape Town. Over 100 were injured. Nelson Mandela, leading the newly unbanned party, the African National Congress, began to negotiate the end of apartheid and the holding of free elections with President de Clerk. It was a high wire act that Nelson Mandela was uniquely suited to perform. That process of putting everybody into the political negotiations was an act that only Mandela could get right. I asked Wilmont for some examples of this unique ability. Two immediately came to mind. The first took place after the assassination of an anti-apartheid activist named Chris Hani. This was in 1993 as the negotiations were still underway. Chris Hani was a close ally of Nelson Mandela, an important figure for black South Africans. His murder by a far right, white radical had the potential to unravel these negotiations. There was great fear that black people just burned the country down. He was a beloved leader and he was assassinated. And the following day, Nelson Mandela, he went into the television and appealed to people not to burn the country down. We are a nation in mourning. Our pain and anger is real. Yet we must not permit ourselves to be provoked by those who seek to deny us the very freedom Chris Hani gave his life for. And people listened. Nobody else could have done that. That doesn't one episode. The second was a meeting between Mandela and the three divisions of South Africans, the trans forces. The head of the army, the head of the navy, and the head of the air force. They all three were not willing to support the democratic elections, those three generals. And he sat down with them, I've got a number of meetings and I said to them that I know that I'll never be able to beat you on the battleground, but I want you to remember three things. The first is that you cannot kill us all. And us is not just black people in South Africa, but the black people of Africa, that population. The second is that the world's on our side and that you are isolated. And the third, you cannot go back to your former colonial motherland and we simply have to learn how to live together. And they looked at one another, they stared rather in a mutual comprehension, that South Africans were interdependent and that their fate was a joint fate. And that if we were to succeed, everybody has to be part of the story. The next day, they decided that they will participate in the election. And South Africa's white right wing were brought into the political process and got representation as a minority party. In 1994, South Africa held free elections. By this time, Wilmot was a professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town. He had moved back to South Africa in 1983. He was also the director of the Institute for Democratic Alternatives in South Africa, an NGO that was supporting the transition to democracy in a variety of ways. He also served on the Independent Electoral Commission, which helped to oversee and monitor the fairness of these unprecedented elections. South Africans of all races went to the ballot boxes and well, we know what happened next. - They were celebrations in every black township all around Johannesburg. Enough of the votes have been counted to know now that so far Nelson Mandela's African National Congress has won about 62% of the votes. - Enjoy that we can loudly proclaim from the rooftops free at last. - Do you remember like just what went through your head when the results of the election came in in 1994? - Well, we were surprised by how much support the African National Congress obtained, which meant that there was an overwhelming mandate. And so that's what went through my mind. You've got Nelson Mandela, one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century, with a major mandate to in fact take the country forward. And that's how lucky I was to be part of that process. That's what went through my head. I was also terrified about what lay ahead. It's one thing to protest is another thing to govern. And so that was a massive challenge. - Before we talk about some of those challenges and how they've been addressed or not been addressed since that time, I wanna go back just, you first met Nelson Mandela shortly after he was elected president. Do you remember what that first meeting was like? - I was invited to a private dinner with him. There were six of us. The person who arranged the dinner was his chief of staff, who used to be the president of the University of the Western Cape, which I attended. And he wanted me to succeed him as principal of the university, and he set me up with Mandela so that he could ask me, which didn't happen. So you don't say easily no to Mandela, but I just taken a job as he out of this NGO and I couldn't make that shift at that time. There was the one goal of that meeting. The second goal of the meeting was to get me to help the new government in dealing with the fears that minority has about black majority at all. And I worked with this office to do two things actually. One, it was to run this education program. It was a program in constitutional rights education. And the second thing is I'm responsible for renaming his presidential residence in Cape Town. So I interacted with him not often, but the first time I was an intimate dinner, as you can imagine, was quite special. I was really privileged to be part of that. - Were you starstruck the first time you met him? - Yeah, anybody would be. He's a very tall man, right? And he was a boxer by background. And he had this model as hard as he about him. And he being a leader of a clan, he has a royal background. There's certain royal things that he did like. He would do research on you before the time. And the first question he would ask you is, how's your family? How's your mom, how's your dad's on? And he had a hell of a memory. So yeah, starstruck, just, somebody spends 27 years in jail and comes out the way he did. You know, it's just unbelievable. - Mandela's election marked a new era in South Africa. It didn't, however, erase the challenges that had been building in the country for a long, long time. And Wilmot will be the first to admit the new administration struggled to address many of the issues that plagued the country. - I wonder, Wilmot, what do you see looking back or what did you see back then as the biggest challenges facing South Africa? - Nelson Mandela believed that everybody in South Africa, black and white, the eastern poor should be part of the process. And what we faced was a democratic political environment that built on a very sudden basis when it comes to expertise in education levels. 'Cause you have to remember that the education at black people, the majority in the country received, was consistent with the expectations that whites have of them, basically to be their servants. So they discouraged mathematics and science education for four decades, you can imagine that, right? So you had a massively under-educated black population and you want to build a modern society. We tell you that was the biggest challenge. And so we needed to do something about that process. And the results have been disappointing, I must tell you, quite honest, over the last 40 years, we really have not built a excellent education system, or there's pockets of excellence here and there. That was the one. The second is, South Africa was also geographically built on a large plan of segregation where the poorest people lived on the outskirts of the city and they were far away from places of employment and those places of residence, which is dormitories, they really had not economic heart to them. And undoing that's very difficult, very difficult. Because that's the built environment, they don't change it quite easily. And what we required was a pattern of economic growth that would lift the South Africans up. So education, doing something about poverty and poor housing, and then continuously integrating society and building trust between populations. Those were the three big challenges. Nelson Mandela stepped down as president in 1999. And these problems, along with many others, persisted. Wilmot was never a member of Mandela's party, the African National Congress. But of course, he worked with Mandela and other members of the ANC's leadership. But as he sees it, the next generation of the ANC in many ways has failed to live up to the promises of Mandela and his peers. We watched the second generation of African National Congress leaders come in, and we saw very clearly that they didn't have the same commitment, that they were in it for the money, there's corruption crept in. The second, not everybody, but the second generation of ANC leaders were a problem. We were clearly looking at the situation where this founding generation of African National Congress leaders were being replaced by others, were less capable, again, with many exceptions. It was a party that's with very thin commitments to democracy, and they were also very suspicious and hostile to the private sector and to industry and to companies because of their socialist backgrounds. And that's where I started to shift. And the Democratic Alliance, which is much more of a liberal party, with a much stronger liberal democratic base, was an appealing party for me to be part of. So I joined that party and stood for office and became a member of parliament and then chairman of that party for six years. Wilmot served as a member of parliament with the Democratic Alliance Party from 2009 to 2017. And he saw firsthand how the country continued to struggle to meet the promises that had been made with the fall of apartheid. Today, by many measures, South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world. And much of that inequality falls along racial lines. White South Africans, while making up less than 10% of the country's population, still hold the majority of the country's wealth. The black unemployment rate in South Africa is some 30 points higher than the white unemployment rate. Even Democratic participation in the country has declined dramatically since its first free elections in 1994. In that election, 86% of the voting age population voted. In 2024, this spring, participation was just over 56%. In that election, as we mentioned earlier in the show, the African National Congress, the party of Nelson Mandela, lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since 1994. So we're gonna have you back on the show with a few other experts later in the summer to talk about South Africa's politics today and what this historic election means for the country's future. But I wonder as we start to wrap up, what do you see as some of the most important lessons from South Africa's progression over the last 30 years, the successes and the failures of its leadership? Both for South Africa and are there bigger lessons for the world? - The first lesson is that it is of vital importance for any country, but particularly for South Africa since the 1990s to consistently build up and maintain its infrastructure. It today suffers from almost daily blackouts because of poor electricity generation. It's created such harm, I must tell you, the inability to function properly daily because of that. The second lesson is that you need to build an education system systematically over time. And you mustn't come up with fancy ideas that are not workable and experiment in a way that's harmful and we did that. When I was in Parliament, I used to ask a question every year. I would ask, how many teachers of mathematics have a qualification in mathematics? The answer on the mathematics question was 40%. So we did not do that properly. Teacher training and building an education system. The third is that never stop building trust in your country. We can see what's happening in the US today and elsewhere around the loss of trust and a COVID-19 sort of reveal what that is. So we need to build trust, for example, when it comes to responding to COVID-19 or build trust to dealing with a nation's problem and that has to be an ongoing crisis. South Africa's transition to democracy 30 years ago underscored just how important building trust is to resolving crises or conflicts. People like Nelson Mandela understood that trust was required for finding a peaceful path forward. And it's something that is sorely lacking in many conflicts around the world today. If I think about Israel and Palestine, the greatest fear of any government in that kind of situation is if you wake up one day and you want to make a deal and there's nobody you can make the deal with because you can't trust anybody. Right now, Israel needs a deal, make on the other side they can trust. Would you say it's also part of Israel's responsibility to have their leadership be as trustworthy as possible too to the rest of the world? I think that's something that many people feel has been lacking in Israel's own leadership. Absolutely. I mean, Israel needs an aviator clerk, somebody who wants to make a deal and who believes that the existential prosperity of Israel requires that. So that's certainly required. And right now it does not have an aviator clerk. None of these problems have an easy answer. Perhaps rebuilding trust least of all. But maybe we'll leave it here today with the recollection Willmont had from his last meeting with Nelson Mandela in 2008. The background to the visit was that he felt, Mandela felt that he didn't do enough for the country to deal properly with HIV and AIDS. His eldest son had died of AIDS. And he asked whether we could run a program where we would elevate the importance of HIV/AIDS in the country. And I at the time I knew David Baltimore was president of Caltech University and was a Nobel Laureate to give the Nelson Mandela Science lecture on the origins of HIV. So when David then came to Johannesburg to give that lecture, I took him to see Mandela. And the two of us spent half an hour with him. And as we left, Mandela said to me and to David that if government doesn't do the right thing, take the fight to them, the old activists. And listen to those words, if government doesn't do that, I think take the fight to them. That's the last time I saw it. He is, like few others, a person committed to public service. Great men like Nelson Mandela are unusual. So be careful about who we elect. Wilmot, James, thank you so much for coming back on to Trending Globally. It's a great pleasure. It's lovely to talk to you. [MUSIC PLAYING] Later on in the summer, you'll hear more from Wilmot and two other experts on South Africa's politics today and where the country goes from here. This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards and Zach Hirsch. Our show was engineered by Eric Emma. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. Additional music by the Blue Dot Sessions. If you like Trending Globally, leave us a rating and review on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you haven't subscribed to our show, please do that too. It really helps other people to find us. If you have any questions or ideas for guests or topics for Trending Globally, send us an email at trendingglobally@brown.edu. Again, that's all one word, Trending Globally, at brown.edu. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Trending Globally. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]
