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Children and adults waved the country's flag and donned the South African soccer team's green and yellow jersey. And the collective hum from those piercing African horns called vuvuzelas reverberated throughout the country, from luxury estates in Johannesburg to dirt-poor shantytowns in Capetown.
"The World Cup was this opportunity where all kinds of South Africans came together behind soccer," says Sue Cook, who works as a policy adviser to one of South Africa's many black ethnic communities.
Hosting an event watched by 260 million people around the world marked an important milestone for a nation that just two decades ago was an international pariah: For years, South Africa was cut off from international trade, sanctioned by the United Nations, and excluded from global sporting events like the Olympics and the World Cup because of apartheid, a brutal system of racial segregation that was abolished 20 years ago this June.
The roots of apartheid—which means "separateness" in Afrikaans, a Dutch-based language—go back to the late 1600s and 1700s, when first Dutch, then British, settlers arrived and began dominating and segregating South Africa's native black population. Beginning in the 18th century, a system of "pass laws" segregated and strictly limited the movement of nonwhites, who had to carry passes to enter white areas.
Prisoners in Their Own Land
But apartheid began to take on an especially pernicious form in 1950, when the ruling Afrikaners, descendants of the original Dutch settlers, began enacting laws that forced blacks and "coloreds" (people of mixed race) to live and work in restricted areas, and barred them from owning land outside those areas.
Nonwhites soon found themselves prisoners in their own land. They were educated only enough to perform basic labor in white-run industries. They could not socialize with whites, have a voice in government, or even travel outside their designated areas without government permission. All blacks—who made up 70 percent of the population—had to carry pass books that recorded their movements, and they could be arrested for inviting whites to their homes without approval.
Secret police spied on black activists, and arrests, beatings, and even murders of dissidents were commonplace. Nelson Mandela, who led the military wing of the leading anti-apartheid group, the African National Congress (A.N.C.), was arrested and sent to jail with a life sentence in 1964. Stephen Biko, the 30-year-old leader of the South African Students' Organization, was beaten to death by government agents in 1977.
One of the most notorious cases of brutality took place on June 16, 1976. Black students were angry over a government order requiring that all major courses be taught not in English, but in Afrikaans, the primary language of South Africa's white rulers.
After months of classes they couldn't understand, more than 10,000 students staged a protest march on the streets of Soweto, a sprawling black ghetto near Johannesburg. Less than an hour after the march began, police opened fire on the unarmed crowd, killing at least 23, including 12-year-old Hector Pieterson. A photo of a boy carrying Hector's lifeless body as his sister runs beside them gained international attention and became a symbol of black resistance against apartheid.
More riots followed, and by the end of the year, police had killed more than 500 protestors and injured thousands.
Against this backdrop, black rage in South Africa didn't surprise outsiders. "Suppose white American families were told that their children would be taught all their school subjects in French and Dutch from now on. Imagine that virtually all white children, regardless of ability, were given a different and inferior kind of education," New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis wrote after the riots.
But with the Soweto uprising, apartheid's foundation began to crack. Unable to contain the rioting, the government slowly began to look for ways to diminish black anger. It drew up a new constitution that gave some nonwhites a voice (but still excluded blacks); it tried to give all blacks citizenship in separate semi-independent "homelands" within white-controlled South Africa.
Mounting Pressures
None of it worked. And South Africa's relations with the rest of the world became increasingly strained. In 1977, the United Nations imposed an arms embargo on South Africa. International sports groups banned South African teams from competitions, and many companies boycotted South African goods and services. The demand for Nelson Mandela's release grew into a global campaign, and a leading critic of apartheid, the Anglican Bishop of South Africa, Desmond Tutu, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.
Along with the rest of the world, the U.S. condemned apartheid, but was criticized for not doing enough to end it. Instead of trying to isolate South Africa's rulers with economic and political sanctions, as many nations had done, President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) followed a policy his administration called "constructive engagement": negotiating with white and black leaders to seek a peaceful end to apartheid.
Some thought Reagan's approach was too soft. Testifying before Congress in 1984, Tutu called the administration's policy "immoral."
But the State Department official responsible for that policy, Chester A. Crocker, says that critics didn't know about the enormous pressure the U.S. was placing on South Africa's white leaders. Crocker says the U.S. softened its public criticism of the government while privately demanding that it grant blacks long-denied freedoms.
Crocker adds that the most important push for change in South Africa came not from outsiders but from within. "You need leaders to make peace," he says. "It takes guts."
Those leaders were South Africa's last President under apartheid, F. W. de Klerk, and Mandela. (They shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.) Seeing that apartheid was not only isolating his nation but robbing it of the talents of its black workers, de Klerk released all political prisoners, including Mandela, from jail in 1990, ended restrictions on black political groups, and began negotiations toward democracy.
Healing Old Wounds
On June 17, 1991, South Africa's Parliament voted to repeal the legal framework for apartheid. Three years later, Mandela was elected President.
Though South Africa has made the transition to majority rule, it hasn't always been a smooth ride. The government, now led by President Jacob Zuma, has been battered by charges that it tolerates corruption and has been slow to address the needs of millions of its poorest black citizens. And with Mandela now 93 and increasingly frail, many South Africans fear that the country may never live up to the ideals of the modern nation's father figure.
"The country's very nervous about whether they can continue to be 'the good South Africa'" without Mandela, says Cook, the policy adviser. "They're going through a lot of separation anxiety."
Yet despite those uncertainties and the work that lies ahead for South Africa, hosting the World Cup gave the country a renewed sense of hope and a self-confidence it had never known. "And South Africa needs a lot of that," Cook says, "just to heal its own wounds."
(The New York Times Upfront, Vol. 143, April 4, 2011)
