Separate and Unequal: Apartheid in South Africa

It is impossible to separate the work of J.M. Coetzee from the historical context of apartheid in South Africa. In fact, in interviews Coetzee tells that when he was writing Waiting for the Barbarians he was thinking specifically about the physical and psychic damage done to all South Africans under the apartheid system   To really understand Coetzee’s novel, then, it might help to understand what apartheid actually was.

In 1948, the National Party, a minority group of white South Africans, formalized racial segregation via a series of laws and legal actions that prohibited the rights of the non-Caucasian populations.  Under apartheid, legislation classified the South African population as White, Black, Colored (of mixed racial ancestry), and Indian.  While the majority of the population of South Africa under apartheid was black—19 million Black individuals to 4.5 million White individuals—Whites made 75% of the national income and 87% of land was only available to them.

Moreover, in a series of laws passed in the 1950s, Black individuals were stripped of their citizenship. They were required to carry passbooks that determined where they could live and work, prohibited mixed marriage, forced to register their race, and segregated from Whites in public areas.  With the passage of the Terrorism Act in 1967, Blacks could be detained without trial.  Suffering under increasingly violent and repressive conditions, the non-Caucasian populations started to revolt.  In retaliation, the National Party declared states of emergency and increased penalties for protesting against government policy.  Penalties included imprisonment without trial, harsh fines, and public beatings.

One of the harshest prohibitions to political action was the actual banning of an individual. When anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko was banned in 1973, for example, he was exiled to the Eastern Cape, where he was not allowed to speak to more than one person at a time, and it was forbidden to quote anything he said, including comments in casual conversations.  Like many apartheid resistors, Biko was eventually imprisoned and was brutally murdered by white police officers.  The apartheid government never put his murderers to trial, and even after a confession on their part years after apartheid was dismantled, they were never tried for their crimes.

On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela, a black anti-apartheid activist who had been imprisoned for 27 years, was released from prison.  During this period, the National Party and the ANC (African National Congress, a political party of mixed ethnic groups) underwent negotiations to transfer power from the minority white government to a political party that better reflected on the country's mixed ethnic groups.  To quell fears of a violent outbreak, the parties took great care to ensure peaceful resolution of economic fears and the distribution of political rights, such as voting and the right to a proper trial.    

After the 1994 election, the ANC was named the ruling party of South Africa, and remains so to this day.  There are still power disputes, and many still claim that the single-party government is not conducive to ending poverty and corruption, that is fails to address the AIDs epidemic in the country, and that it has not adequately sought reparations for victims of apartheid. As for J.M. Coetzee, he continues to write novels preoccupied with the problems of South Africa, even in his retirement in Australia.  His latest novel, published just last year, is Diary of a Bad Year.     

--Sasha Irby