Grappling with history honestly

More recently than George H.W. Bush was president of our own country, F.W. de Klerk presided over apartheid South Africa.

His passing last week at the age of 85 is a reminder that the most awful system of racial segregation on the planet persisted until only a few decades ago—within many of our lifetimes.

American conservatives have an especially complicated history with apartheid South Africa. For starters, the white regime was a former British colony, then a dominion, and an ally in World War II, led by a general (Jan Smuts) of whom Churchill said, “My faith in Smuts is unbreakable; he is a great man.”

More recently, segregationist South Africa was aligned with us during the Cold War. Fans of The Crown will remember when, in season four, conservative UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher stood against the other 48 members of the British Commonwealth and the Queen herself over economic sanctions on South Africa, leading to an awful row between the Palace and Ten Downing Street.

Domestically, the movement for divestment and boycott was often led by liberal college students and liberal churches, provoking a stubborn skepticism from conservatives. In fact, one of the few major foreign policy failures of the Reagan Administration was the overwhelming congressional vote overriding his veto of the Comprehensive Apartheid Act in 1986, which leveled economic sanctions on the racist republic.

Reagan, who spoke with such tremendous boldness against the human rights failures of the “evil empire,” the Soviet Union, was also clear after the veto vote that America “opposes apartheid, a malevolent and archaic system totally alien to our ideals. The debate . . . was not whether or not to oppose apartheid but, instead, how best to oppose it and how best to bring freedom to that troubled country.”

Indeed, there can be no hesitation in condemning the absolute immorality of apartheid, racial economic oppression, and the denial of civil and political rights to a whole people based on race. Even when a nation is aligned with America on other foreign policy questions, we should not hesitate to recognize and name tyranny and the violation of basic human rights.

The story of South Africa is also a good reminder of Lincoln’s famed admonition that a house divided against itself cannot long endure (the launching point for his 1858 Senate campaign, Lincoln’s’s famed “house divided” speech actually quoted from the Gospel of Mark, where Christ says, “And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand” (Mark 3:25)). Lincoln went on to say “this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

Formalized apartheid lasted from South Africa’s sovereignty in 1948 to the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994. But throughout, black South Africans pressed for their rights, and in later years, leaders like Mandela, Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and others saw success in the fight to bring international pressure against South Africa’s racist regime. Together, Mandela and de Klerk brought a relatively nonviolent end to apartheid and transition to democracy, leading to a joint Nobel Peace Prize. The house did not fall in a bloody coup or revolution, but rather became a modern representative democracy.

South Africa’s transition to modern nationhood has not been easy, and its political life is often conflicted, but the apartheid regime had to fall.

There remain dark corners of the world where people are still oppressed based on their race—the Uyghurs of northwest China come immediately to mind. The advocacy of outsiders is all the more important in such instances where it is a racial and ethnic minority being suppressed.

The revolution in South Africa was never labeled with a color, like many of the popular uprisings of today, but it was an early forerunner based on the same principle: though an unjust police state may suppress the majority of its population for some time, even decades, such a regime is ultimately unsustainable. Freedom and fairness win out in the end.