Issue 191 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published November 1995 Copyright © Socialist Review

South Africans were scheduled to vote for local councils on 1 November. The results were not known when Socialist Review went to press. What is certain is that there will not be the same vibrant enthusiasm, the same electrifying sense of liberation at the polling booths, as there was in April 1994.

In part this is easy to explain: the first vote for millions of black people after the end of apartheid is clearly different to the follow up ballot. But there is another factor--the growing disenchantment that many black people feel with the slow pace of change in the last 18 months. Almost half the black population has no job, over 7 million do not even have a basic home. The 'social housing' sector in Tory Britain has built more homes during the past year than the ANC led government in South Africa.

Four recently published books help to provide some of the background to the present situation.

In Tomorrow is Another Country, journalist Allister Sparks tells the story of what he calls 'South Africa's negotiated revolution'. He concentrates almost entirely on events at the top, the manoeuvres by the leaders of the ANC and the white regime, but it is still a useful book.

Sparks shows how the National Party government gradually moved towards the recognition that it had to negotiate with the ANC if it was to achieve any sort of stability. The brutal racist, President Botha, was persuaded by his colleagues that contact must be made with Nelson Mandela. In great secrecy, negotiations with Mandela began in 1985. This was so sensitive that F W de Klerk, who was to push Botha aside in 1989 and become president, did not know about the talks for almost four years after they had started.

De Klerk is now hailed as the 'great reformer', worthy to be given the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Nelson Mandela. But Sparks shows that even well into his political career, de Klerk gave no signs that he wanted to dump apartheid.

Sparks also shows that even after unbanning the ANC, the white regime still hoped to achieve a deal which would enshrine 'group rights' for whites and many restrictions on majority rule. His plans were derailed by the same force that had pushed the regime to the negotiating table in the first place--the black working class. At critical moments when the National Party tried to stall and delay, workers struck, marched and protested. The ANC never made their struggles the focus for a more fundamental liberation, but it used these displays of potential power to frighten the government into real concessions. As Sparks says:

'South Africa's black population is also its working class, and by unbanning the blacks' political movements de Klerk enabled them to mobilise their mass support and literally paralyse the country... There was little the president could do to counter this formidable new prospect. This was the genie he had let out of the bottle.'

The strength of Sparks' book is that he does understand something of the reasons why change has come about. Its great weakness is that he celebrates the 'moderation' of the ANC, its commitment to the market and its willingness to work with multinationals.

Fergal Keane, the BBC's Southern Africa correspondent since 1990, covers much of the same ground in The Bondage of Fear. He writes less about the strategies of the leaders and more about life on the ground.

Sometimes he manages to give you a real flavour of people's existence.

A section about Inkatha, exposes the terror the organisation carried out to strengthen their leader Buthelezi. But it also sympathetically describes the dreadful conditions faced by Zulu migrant workers that leaves them open to recruitment by Inkatha if they are not given a real alternative.

He tells of Robert Zindlele who has lived in a Johannesburg migrants' hostel since 1976. He visits his wife and five children in Zululand twice a year. He shares a small room with four other men.

Keane writes about his own reactions to events and the individuals who impressed him. It is not really an attempt at a detailed analysis of the process of change, but helps give you a flavour of the background.

The worst chapter is the one about the future. Here the usual demons are conjured up--the fear of 'unrealistic wage demands', the need to 'maintain fiscal discipline and not follow the "borrow and spend" policies that have ruined so much of Africa'.

Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, out now in paperback, provoked very mixed feelings in me.

On the one hand it is impossible to ignore the courage of the man, his modesty and his undoubted desire to see South Africans--black and white--prosper and live in peace. Mandela suffered for his membership of the ANC. At the age of 46 he was sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island.

Mandela never stopped fighting apartheid, and his book describes the struggles for basic human rights inside prison and out. But the book also reveals some of the weaknesses of Mandela's politics. It shows he always believed apartheid could be negotiated away rather than smashed by the working class.

Mandela admits that his decision to negotiate secretly with the regime was highly controversial. It had to be concealed even from his fellow prisoners.

So while the ANC was urging the people of South Africa to render the state ungovernable, Nelson Mandela was shaking hands with some of the leading butchers from the white regime.

At the end of the negotiation process, apartheid has gone. It was a huge victory for every anti-racist and socialist. But the giant companies still dominate the economy. The priorities of that economy are determined by Anglo American, Gencor, De Beers and Rembrandt, not the mine workers or the squatter camp dwellers.

Segregation and Apartheid in 20tb Century South Africa is a much more academic book than the others. It is a series of essays on the subject of racial segregation. Most of them will be enjoyed by anyone who has a little knowledge of South African history. The best contributions make it clear that apartheid was not some strange, cruelly exotic throwback to irrational prejudice, but the thoroughly rational way (in the bosses' terms) in which capitalism established itself in South Africa.

Nor was segregation (the pre-apartheid structures of black and white existence) a Boer creation. What were to become the central elements of segregation policy originated not in the Boer republics but in the most British of colonies, Natal. The physical separation of black from white was rooted in the practices of the British Empire. Imperialism, capitalism and segregation were inextricably linked.

The book also reprints Harold Wolpe's analysis of the links between the specific form of South African racism and the demand by gold and diamond mining for plentiful sources of cheap labour. It remains one of the most important contributions to showing the links between apartheid and capitalism.

These debates still underpin the central question for black South Africans today. In the battles to come workers will increasingly come face to face with the reality that winning the vote was only a step on the long walk to freedom. If they are to achieve genuine liberation they will have to smash capitalism.