INSIGHT

TWENTY years ago on Monday, the Berlin Wall came down, signalling an end to the Cold War. This event is one of those historical milestones which is often linked with the question, “Where were you, when …” – you know, “Where were you when John Kennedy died, when Mandela was released from jail, when 9/11 happened?”

When the Berlin Wall came down, I was in Lusaka, Zambia. As was common in those days, I had crossed one of Southern Africa’s divides – “ walls”, as some called them – to talk with the ANC, then still in exile.

So it was that I spent the night the Wall fell with German friends – the three of us, all children of the Cold War. After initial celebration, we spoke until dawn of how our two countries, South Africa and Germany, had been divided by the Cold War and wondered what effect the exciting news from Berlin might hold for our own, and the future of the world.

If a divided Germany was obviously touched by the Cold War, why (and how) was South Africa?

At first blush, the centrality of race in this country’s history makes it difficult to see how deeply the Cold War was entwined with apartheid. But a backward glance will show that from the end of the 1940s until the unbanning of the Communist Party, which came with FW de Klerk’s February 2, 1998, speech, communism was apartheid’s Siamese twin.

An anti- communism confessional was essential to every legal political platform, the Security Police were ruthless in their pursuit of communists and the Cold War formed the very basis of the country’s foreign policy.

How did this happen?

The American historian Greg Grandin has recently suggested that the World War 2 victory over Nazism encouraged hopes for a better, more people-friendly world. The Cold War, Grandin suggests, was a kind of backlash by Western elites against the freedoms promised by high- flown documents like the Atlantic Charter and the Preamble to the United Nations Charter.

In South Africa, the closest example of this was the 1955 Freedom Charter, whose language is redolent with talk of freedom and equality, as its famous opening clause – “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white” – suggests. By the time of its writing, however, the South African Communist Party had been driven underground by the Suppression of Communism Act which had been passed five years earlier.

Its passing firmly positioned white South Africa on the Western side of the great divide of the 20th century. After this, a near-instinctive anti-communism seemed to prevent the country from seeing that not all those opposed to apartheid were agents of communists, in general, or the Soviet Union, in particular.

Like all simple-minded ideologies, this approach rested on a caricature which was very often reinforced by successive foreign experts who washed up on these shores to tell us how important apartheid was in “the international fight against communism”.

This fantasy reached its high point during the presidency of PW Botha, whose rise to political power was connected to his relationship with the increasing role the military would play both in the country’s politics and its international affairs. It was Botha’s view that the country faced, as he frequently called it, a “Total Onslaught” from the Soviet Union and its allies – and it was this that took South Africa into a war against its neighbours.

But, importantly, this missed the point that, from the early 1980s, the Soviet Union under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev was undergoing profound social change which would end the Cold War. Botha was not alone in his view, of course, because few experts – Western or other – predicted that the Cold War would end when it finally did.

Today, as we look back, we may be inclined to consider the Cold War as a thing of the past – dead and buried, as the old cliché runs. And yet, each time we research or think about it, it seems to yield more and more of its secrets. This is, of course, no surprise: it was a profound event that certainly changed the course of history.

Did the end of the Cold War speed the end of apartheid?

Instinctively, one feels this is the case – and yet, opinions on this matter differ. Were the changes that would end the Cold War not the same changes that ended apartheid? In other words, the two events were simultaneous – and one did not follow upon the other. Or were they sequential – apartheid ended because the Berlin Wall came down?

These and other questions are interesting more and more researchers – and, one must report, students, too. In the shadow of the great event that shaped the lives of their parents, the young are hoping to discover something about the present and the future.

- Peter Vale

Peter Vale is Nelson Mandela Professor of Politics at Rhodes University. With his colleague Gary Baines, a professor of history at Rhodes, Vale runs a post-graduate course in Cold War studies. This Sunday and Monday, the university will host an international conference called The Fall of the Wall