Continued from previous page the political struggle,” he said, adding that despite the year and a half he spent at Pollsmoor — and the two years under house arrest — he was never formally charged with anything. “I was quite involved with political organizations including the Call of Islam, which mobilized Muslims against apartheid. I was in the leadership of the United Democratic Front — the internal expression of the ANC because the ANC itself was banned. All of this activism came out of high school, because I had the misfortune to enter high school in 1976, the year of the great Soweto uprising.” We asked Rasool if he ever imagined that some day he’d be South Africa’s ambassador to the United States. “The only thing we dared to imagine was staying out of prison and staying alive, because we were dealing with one of the most brutal regimes imaginable,” he responded. “There were no ambitions. There was an aspiration for freedom, but never the assurance that you’d see it. So often, to give ourselves hope, we would invoke the slogan ‘freedom in our lifetime.’” But hope was nearly impossible to maintain in the face of the complex bureaucracy the South African government created to intentionally separate blacks, whites and other races. “They created enormous physical buffer zones,” the ambassador said.“If you had to drive from the airport in Cape Town to a hotel in Sea Point or the waterfront, you would typically pass three railway lines. Between the airport and the first railway line, you had these very tough shantytown homes where poor, black working-class people or the unemployed would live. Between that railway line and the next one you’d find tenements.That would be the coloreds — poverty-stricken and hungry — but at least they lived in brick tenements. And crossing that second railway line, you’d then have
PHOTO: LARRY LUXNER
Pictured above is Nelson Mandela’s former jail cell at the Robben Island Prison, where South Africa’s iconic antiapartheid hero spent 18 of his 27 years behind bars. This year, as the country marks the 100th anniversary of the African National Congress, it also celebrates the legacy of Mandela, 93. Locally, South Africa’s embassy in Washington is working on a statue honoring the former president.
the colored and Indian middle-classes living in three-bedroom houses like the kind you’d find if you were to drive out to Virginia. “Crossing that last railway line, you’d be in the equivalent of Beverly Hills, where people had a lifestyle that would even exceed the American dream. That’s where the whites would live, with their sprawling properties and palatial mansions, all behind high security walls and with massive private security in the streets.” Rasool explained that apartheid was “not a case of simple racial discrimination as in the United States, but a very carefully planned thing in order
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to create buffers between races.What it effectively did was to replicate the physical separation with the implementation of psychological land mines in people’s heads — creating this sense that black anger does not reach whites, but is passed through all those who were oppressed. So you got tension between coloreds and blacks, rather than between whites and blacks.” Apartheid as a legal institution dates back to 1949, with passage of the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act. A year later, the Immorality Act of 1950 made sexual relations with a person of a different race a criminal offense.That same year, laws
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were passed forbidding whites, blacks, Indians and coloreds from living side by side, and in 1953, the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act created separate public facilities for different races, giving rise to “whites-only” signs in schools, universities and hospitals — and even on beaches and park benches. As the U.S. civil rights movement was just getting under way, South Africa’s white minority government stepped up its repression of non-whites through the 1950s and 1960s.The Black Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970 stripped black people of their South African citizenship, instead making them citizens of one of 10 autonomous territories, known as Bantustans. The objective: to ensure a demographic majority of white people within South Africa by having all 10 homelands achieve full independence, four of which were eventually declared independent by the apartheid regime. Residents of these irregularly shaped Bantustans were given their own passports, and these “countries” even issued their own stamps and currency. Not a single country besides South Africa ever recognized their existence as full-fledged countries, though Israel did business with all four and even allowed the Bantustans of Ciskei and Bophuthatswana to open commercial offices in Tel Aviv. Even so, Rasool explained, “after 1980, the government got the sense that apartheid couldn’t last. That was what gave rise to the final phase of the struggle, when the white government tried to give coloreds and Indians certain privileges, but left blacks permanently poverty-stricken.” The reason: international sanctions and a constant barrage of protests against South Africa that excluded the country from world sporting events, many United Nations agencies and even the British Commonwealth. Speaking with Rasool, it soon becomes clear
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