Under the vicious, heartless and pernicious, inhuman, political and economic systems of APARTHEID, there could not have been a World Cup competition in South Africa, 2010. There would have been no first whistle or handing the cup to Spain, Brazil, Nigeria or Argentina.
The bigoted, white racists of South Africa would still have been in, demonic control in South Africa as they were for over two centuries.
We applaud the Hand of JEHOVAH ADONAI for overturning the evil forces that ruled South Africa with its demonic leaders and followers from the UNIVERSE OF FALLEN ANGELS.
It is very sad to hear that the young Romeos and Juliets of Independent South Africa are not interested in the History of Apartheid.
This is exactly why I am writing this short historical account of some of the events that happened under the APARTHEID regimes of South Africa before the first whistle is blown, so that the youth are not carried away by social festivities and forget the sufferings of Dr. Nelson Mandela, Jo Slovo, Alfred Nzo, Jack Simons, Nyamuza, Mbeki, David Ivon Jones, Ruth First, Eddie Roux, Albert Nziola, Edwin Mofusanyana, his wife Josie Mpama, John Gomas, S.P Bunting, Makabeni, Khaile and Thabedi, Alex La Guma, Olivia Thambo, Walter Susulu, Jacob Zuma etc. All these anti-apartheid fighters, organized to smash apartheid, an inhuman political and economic system, which enhanced national oppression and economic exploitation. They were the revolutionary forces that destroyed the Apartheid system. They will remain South African heroes till time indefinite.
The unprecedented predicament of South Africans during Apartheid should not be trivialized nor played down by South African youth. It will be a monument of tragedy, if that were to be the case. They can forgive but they should not forget.
I sent notes to Comrade Oliver Thambo in March 1986, when he paid an official visit to Nigeria. He met President Ibrahim Babangida and other leading government leaders at the Headquarters of the Nigeria Labour Congress and expressed support for the fighting people and revolutionary forces in South Africa.
The great poets Aeschylus and Goethe defended the rights of people to freedom. People must shape their own destinies and not be subjected to foreign domination.
The South African writer Campbell Archibald Jordan used his position as Professor of African Languages at the University of Wiscons to sensitize the African-Americans about the evils of apartheid and racism in America.
Produced below is an essay I wrote in 1988 entitled, “HUMAN RIGHTS IN SOUTH AFRICA: NIGERIA AND EXTRA-AFRAICAN RESPONSE TO APARTHEID”: A modest contribution to the struggle against apartheid.
From the “Reflections of a Zen Buddist, Epigrams from the Ming Dynasty, we learnt that “when a man, with a jar of wine besides him, takes the heaven as a tent and the earth as a mat, he is in harmony with the life-giving forces” The South African minority white settlers seem to be in the state of inebriety, otherwise, they would have reacted more realistically to the whirlwind of revolt which has engulfed the apartheid enclave in the last few years and especially in 1988.
Injustice, no matter with what might it is perpetuated and no matter how long it lasts, will come to an end. This is the lesson which we have learnt after a study of struggles for human rights protection and promotion through the ages.
The Stoics criticizing the injustice of Hellenistic tyranny, declared a belief in a natural law ruling over God as well as men, which directed what was just from what was unjust. The Early English men curbed the excesses of the Stuarts by forcing King John 1,on June 15,1215,to sign the Magna Carta (or the Great Charter) which spelt out the peoples’ liberties. The most famous of the sixty-three clauses read: No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseissed or outlawed or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will go upon him nor will we send upon him save by the lawful judgment of peers or the law of the land. To no one will we sell, deny or delay right or justice.
Human rights received legal sanctification in the declaration of Human Rights which the French Revolutionaries introduced after deposing their king. Man is born free and equal in rights and that the purpose of political association was the confirmation of the natural and inalienable rights to security and resistance of oppression. They stressed in particular freedom of the press, and from arbitrary arrest. All these and other universally accepted human rights provisions have found their way into all constitutions of civilized nations as well as all human rights conventions concluded in the last sixty years in Europe and America.
When the Americans decided to revolt against the dark morass of British colonialism, their long struggle against violation of human rights led Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the Declaration of American Independence to affirm, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”.
Apartheid in Crisis
The system of apartheid, a “manifestly inhuman legal and political order” which is, as of now, facing “the greatest onslaught from progressive makind” is in crisis. To understand this crisis better, it is necessary to link the despondent political situation in South Africa with the deepening depression of the world capitalist economy. Economic growth there has slowed down inexorably in the last three years. This has fractured the affluence of the South African Ruling class. This injury has also been transmitted to Europe/American centers of finance that sustain fiduciary relations with apartheid South Africa which explains American, British and West German refusal to impose economic sanctions against the apartheid government in Pretoria. All these nations have acted in defiance of the robust protestation of world public opinion. Some ‘whites’ who could read the hand-writing on the wall of history have long fled from South Africa as a result of the radical changes that took place in Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. They calculated that these would also come about in South Africa in no distant future. Their exit led to a flight of capital which further worsened the South Africa monetary economy.
Besides, the economy itself had taken on the characteristics of a war economy because the industrial sector had been geared towards war efforts when South Africa stepped up its aggression and brutality against Angola, and other frontline states.
It has long become evident to political observers that the South African system was heading for the rocks when the South African government, while aiming at high profits through the exploitation of black labour, frittered same away in fighting an expansionist war in the sub-region and a repressive war at home. Added to this madness is the continued sustenance of racism through mindless violence. The employment of vicious methods of suppression inevitably resulted in violation of human rights in South Africa.
Although issues relating to human rights can be studied from different disciplinary viewpoints, we hold that a juristic approach assists tremendously in exposing the essentially repressive and discriminatory nature of the manifestly inhuman system of apartheid. The United Nations International Law Commission had spear-headed many draft resolutions which later became universally accepted conventions by the community of states in the world, these legal documents would be referred to in due course, so that we can win some insight into the UN struggle against apartheid.
“Human Rights represent demands or claims which individuals or groups make on society, some of which are protected by law
and have become part of lex lata while others remain aspirations to be attained in future”. From Professor Osita Eze’s definition above, it comes off clearly that South Africans who suffer from deprivation have the right to make demands. Also since no law in South Africa operates to protect them from oppression by a minority, the oppressed majority are justified in seeking even extraordinary measures to defend their rights. These rights, Eze writes, are generally grouped under five sub-headings: Civil, political, social, economic and cultural. It is very apt to examine the content of civil and political rights which include the right to life, the right to self determination, freedom from torture and inhuman treatment, freedom from slavery and forced labour, the right to liberty and security, right of fair trial, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of movement and choice of residence, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to marry and found a family, the right to participate in one’s government,either directly or through freely elected representatives, the right to nationality and equality before the law.
Economic, social and cultural rights involve the right to an adequate standard of living, the right to work, the right to just conditions of work, the right to fair remuneration, the right to organize, form and join trade unions, the right to collective bargaining, the right to equal pay for equal work, the right to social security, the right to property, the right to education, the right to participate in cultural life and enjoy the benefits of scientific progress.
As can be seen from this exhaustive list of human rights, the South African apartheid state represents a complete negation of all that is decent, just and humane. The majority of the black populations do not enjoy the right to self-determination since they are dominated by a clique of austere and wicked human beings who herd them into the rural wilderness’ otherwise known as “Bantustans”.
As reported in the African Communist, in 1960, “In Bophuthatswana for example, over a million Africans whose crime is that they are non-Iswana, are being chased and viciously persecuted by the Bophuthatswana administration and its police force in an attempt to uproot them from their homes and force them to go to their countries. In Winterveldt, 800,000 non-Tswanas face continuous raids for permits, passes and trespass. As can be seen, nearly all guaranteed human rights are violated in South Africa, to wit: freedom of movement and choice of residence, freedom from slavery and forced labour, the right to liberty and security and so on. For black people, there has not existed in South Africa, the right to just conditions of work nor have they had fair remuneration on the basis of equal work for equal pay since whites with the same educational and professional skills are paid higher. Repressive labour laws and wanton intimidation make it difficult to exercise the right to collective bargaining. In sum, the black majority in South Africa are denied fundamental human rights. As a result, their struggle and resistance are justified in law.
International Legal Developments: Response By The United Nations Organization.
One of the most notable aspects of legal development at the international level in the past thirty years has been the development of norms to combat and whereby possible, outlaw racism and racial discrimination on a world-wide basis.
Since 1952, when 12 member states requested that the question of race conflict in South Africa, resulting from the policies of apartheid of the Government of South Africa should be placed on the agenda of the General Assembly, the Assembly and other United Nations bodies have been concerned with this question. Indeed, the abolition of the racist domination and exploitation in South Africa and assistance to the South Africa people in their efforts to establish a non-racial society, have become primary concerns of the entire United Nations systems of organization and of the international community as a whole. There had been segregation of races under the Notorious Group Areas Act, complete segregation in public services, suppression of democratic movements advocating racial equality under the suppression of democratic movements advocating racial equality, the suppression of Communism Act, barring of non-whites from combat service, withholding of voting or other political rights from non-whites except in the Cape Province, restriction of Africans to reserves and restriction of their movement under the Mines Workers Amendment Act, and provision of vastly inferior education and housing conditions for non-whites.
The aim of the memorandum was to prevent further deterioration in the situation in South Africa and expedite a solution to the problems of apartheid in the country. Other efforts were made by various UN organs between 1957 and 1988 to promote the observance of human rights in South Africa.
In addition to adopting more than twenty-five resolutions on the racial situation in South Africa, the General Assembly drew the attention of the Security Council of the UN to the problem on more than five occasions, informing the Council that the situation constituted a threat to international peace and security and urged the Council to take appropriate measures including universally-applied mandatory measures to secure South Africa’s compliance with the resolutions of the United Nations organs.
A special Committee Against Apartheid was created in 1962 “to keep the racial policies of the Government of South Africa under review” and to report either to the Assembly or to the Security Council initiated measures in response to apartheid. It had passed a number of resolutions condemning apartheid. Member States of the UN had been urged not to sell or ship arms to South Africa. Also, ammunition of all types as well as military hardware were recommended for prohibition. The UN Secretary – General and a group of experts appointed by him have regularly visited South Africa and other states to intensify pressures on the South African government.
The UN commissioned a study on apartheid which was finished in 1967. The experts studied “the ill-treatment of prisoners, detainees and persons in police custody in South Africa”. The reports that emanated from these studies, the conclusions and recommendations made were forwarded to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations and other bodies concerned. The Working Group of the Commission set up in 1967 made a special study of the question of apartheid from the point of view of international penal law, paving the way for the suppression and punishment of the crime of apartheid. This Working Group also made available to the thirtieth -session of the UN General Assembly. In 1977, a report on the deaths of detainees and police brutality in South Africa since the Soweto massacre of June 1976 was discussed at the United Nations in New York.
In its recommendation to the government, the General Assembly called upon South Africa:
– To terminate diplomatic, consular and other official relations with the racist regime of South Africa or to refrain from establishing such relations.
– To implement arms embargo against South Africa without any exception or reservation.
– To terminate all economic collaboration with South Africa.
