T
Louise Gubb
his short plea and gentle allure of American investors back to South Africa is a clear indication that after 27 years in prison - Mandela, not only brought about the gift of political freedom to black South Africans, but an equally large gift to the South African business community. Just how big and how important Mandela’s gift has been to business South Africa is the subject of this chapter, which I have written using historical articles, references and figures during the years when South Africa was a pariah of the international community due to the system of apartheid enforced by minority white rulers. The white minority government’s involvement in establishing international bodies such as the United Nations as stewards of freedoms for all the peoples of the world despite opposite practices on home soil - caused it to sink into an abyss due to the dehumanising system of apartheid. In the period between 1945 and 1960 South Africa was considered an ally in the fight against communism, and the west - especially America - was also dependant on the mineral wealth of this country on the southern tip of Africa. Consecutive US presidencies, Nixon and Eisenhower, did not succumb to domestic and international pressure to impose real punitive measures on South Africa because of this supposed alliance. America as the biggest world market after the Second World War was the most significant in imposing sanctions against South Africa due to the sheer size of the economy of this superpower. Despite India’s brave efforts in 1946 as the first nation seeking to impose sanctions against South Africa, without the help of the giant America and to a lesser extent Europe, any sanction campaign was likely to be negligible. According to the doctoral thesis of L.E.S. De Villiers (senior South African diplomat in America and Canada during the sixties and seventies, and later, the Deputy Secretary of Information in Pretoria), the Sharpeville massacre was a major turning point for the anti-apartheid movement both inside South Africa and abroad.
On 21 March 1960 a rock-throwing crowd of 20 000 protesters gathered in Sharpeville, where the police went on to massacre 67 people and wound another 178. The protest had been part of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) arranged country wide action against the hated passbook system, and designed in order to invite arrest. These shocking mass killings drew the attention of the international community. Three black people also died in Langa (Cape Town), and a few days after the killings the government declared a state of emergency following violent strikes across the country undertaken in protest against these mass murders. The giant America was suddenly awakened and – in stark contrast to its previous policy towards South Africa and apartheid - it deplored the Verwoerd government’s slaughter of blacks by way of the State Department’s issuing of a strong statement of condemnation. America not only issued this statement but acted at the highest level by permanently placing apartheid on the UN’s Security Council agenda in 1960. De Villiers writes: “American investors joined the capital flight from South Africa in the wake of the Sharpeville shootings causing the South African foreign exchange reserves to plunge by $64-million. Gold slumped.” This is confirmed in a 1986 master’s thesis in
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