What Democratisation Does to Minorities Displaced from Power: The ...

More documents

Recommendations

Info

294 Eghosa E. Osaghae cratisation in perspective as a dual process of democratic transition and decolonisation and then proceeds to analyse the structures and processes of democratisation, and how the Afrikaners reacted to the changing political milieu. Section 2 examines the effects of democratisation on Afrikaners in the aftermath of the April 1994 elections when the African National Congress (ANC) took over control of state power. Section 3 presents the conclusions of the study. 1. The Nature of South Africa’s Democratisation To analyse meaningfully the situation of Afrikaners in the transition to the post-apartheid state, it is necessary first to understand the nature of the country’s democratisation process. Mainstream analysis of this subject locates South Africa’s democratisation process within the transition-from-authoritarianism paradigm. The transition mode has variously been characterised as transition through transformation where, as in the case of Brazil and Spain, the incumbent authoritarian regime retains the initiative of transition and system transformation; as belonging, alongside Chile, Poland and Uruguay, to Huntington’s (1991) transplacement category whose hallmark is negotiation between government and opposition elites, both of whom realise their inability to determine unilaterally the future political system; and as a typical elite pacting transition (cf. Giliomee, 1995; van Vuuren, 1995; Nel, 1995; Kotze and du Toit, 1995). These categories aptly describe the mode of transition in South Africa, in so far as the transition was negotiated and not forced by unilateral military conquest or revolution. Elite pacting in particular offers a valid descriptive category of the deals worked out between the National Party (NP) government, departing from power, and the ANC, in coming to power. The pact made transition possible as it assured the political and material future of apprehensive NP leaders and other white elites at least in the short run. The narrow (party and elite, rather than mass) interests thereby emphasised are crucial in explaining the post-pacting allegations of NP ‘betrayal’ by the majority of Afrikaners who felt unprotected and therefore justified to fight for themselves, as it were. But the transition in South Africa was not simply another instance of transition from authoritarian rule. It was also, and perhaps more importantly, liberation from colonial rule, notwithstanding attempts by several South African scholars to deny that the white supremacist state was a colonial state. The fact that the liberation move- NUPI DECEMBER 02
NUPI DECEMBER 02 What Democratisation Does to Minorities Displaced from Power 295 ment involved people from all racial groups is also cited to back this claim. While it is true that a significant number of whites both within and outside South Africa were active in the liberation struggle, it is often forgotten that only a small portion of these were Afrikaners, and that the non-Afrikaner white opponents of the apartheid state were, as much as the non-whites, committed to overthrowing the Afrikaner colonial state. The involvement of whites in the liberation struggle did not therefore make the situation less colonial and the transition anything short of decolonisation. As I have argued elsewhere, the failure to factor the perspective of the (previously) dominated and excluded Africans in the analysis of the transition is largely to blame for the narrow perspective that has been applied to transformation in South Africa (Osaghae, 1997; also Southall, 1994). The liberation perspective as it relates to the long-drawn struggle for nonracial democracy provides the necessary historical context for analysing the transformation process. It helps to explain further the attitudes and reactions of whites to the transformation to black (majority) rule which had been on the cards for a long time and had elicited concern, at both the scholarly and the political level, about how to terminate apartheid with minimum loss of privileges to whites. The danger in analysing the transition as simply transition from authoritarian rule is that even if such a perspective takes account of the long-drawn search for a suitable democratic formula to cope with the demands of a divided multi-racial society, and the heightened ethnic mobilisation during the period of transition, it clearly underestimates the reality of black majority rule and the longer-term consequences of this change in power relations. And yet it is this reality – which entails a reconstruction of the nation in the image of the African majority, as well as affirmative action and other attempts at redressing black disadvantages – that better explains the attitudes of Afrikaners and other white groups to transformation. This does not, however, amount to a rejection of the democratic transition paradigm whose major strength is the attention it directs to the process of transition, but to make the point that the dynamics of South Africa’s democratisation cannot be adequately captured if this is done in isolation from the underlying reality of liberation. In this article, therefore, democratisation is understood as something of the twin processes of transition to democracy and decolonisation, both of which were effected through negotiation.
Page 1: Eghosa E. Osaghae NUPI DECEMBER 02
Page 5 and 6: NUPI DECEMBER 02 What Democratisati

What Democratisation Does to Minorities Displaced from Power: The ...

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?