South Africa’s Apartheid Wars had a profound effect on shaping the postcolonial landscape of the region, as well as the country itself. This much is evident from the difficulties encountered by the liberation movements in making the transition to government. The armed struggle and the experience of exile left a deep imprint on these movements and shaped them as political organizations. They have not been able to divest themselves of internal hierarchical structures, as well as intolerant and authoritarian tendencies. On the other hand, the counterrevolutionary war waged by the apartheid state’s security nexus delayed decolonization and shaped the political culture considerably. The militarization of South African society undermined civil-military relations, contributed to a legacy of corruption in the defense sector, and proved detrimental to the practices of governance.
The integration of the armed formations of the state and the liberation movements into new national armies were fraught processes. Reconciliation became the byword in Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa, but only the latter established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as an exercise in nation-building. However, cohesion and consensus remain elusive as the fault lines of colonial and apartheid society are still very much in evidence. Moreover, the governments of the region harbor resentment about South Africa’s dominance of the region and remain suspicious of its intentions. Therefore, relations between these states, and groups within them, are still prickly. The conflicts might be over but the countries of the region are still having to deal with contestations over their remembrance and commemoration.
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Legacies of South Africa’s Apartheid Wars
Gary Baines
Article
Nampula
Daria Trentini
The city of Nampula is the capital of Nampula Province, an agricultural region situated in the Nacala Development Corridor connecting Malawi and Zambia to the coastal port of Nacala. Founded at the beginning of the 20th century by the Portuguese army, Nampula was located at the crossroads of trading and migration routes that had connected the interior of Southern Africa to the Indian Ocean for centuries. Under colonial occupation, Nampula served as a military garrison for launching military operations to subdue and occupy the interior of northern Mozambique, the last undefeated region of the Portuguese empire. The subsequent construction of infrastructure and the advent of commercial agriculture transformed Nampula into the main economic and administrative hub of the northern region of Mozambique. Following independence in 1975, the demographic and territorial expansion of Nampula was informed by socialist governance as well as by a prolonged civil war that brought thousands of refugees from the surrounding rural areas. The economic liberalizations in the 1990s and the mineral discoveries in the northern region of Cabo Delgado in the 2010s consolidated the role of Nampula as a commercial and trade center for national and international capital. The economic boom—alongside increasing rural poverty and ongoing internal and external conflicts—has continued to attract migrants from the rural regions, as well as from across the country and continent, making Nampula the third-largest city in Mozambique, with a population of 743,125 and an area of 404 square kilometers.
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Violence in the South African Transition
Laura Evans
South Africa’s negotiated transition (1990–1994), while often heralded as a “miracle,” was accompanied by a dramatic escalation of politically related violence in which more than fifteen thousand people died. A sober assessment of these years reveals that such violence was a central dynamic of the transition and its politics. The epicenters of violence were in Gauteng (then known as the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vaal, or PWV) and KwaZulu-Natal (then the province of Natal and the KwaZulu bantustan). Although patterns of conflict were locally and historically specific, being connected to conflicts over scarce resources, in these regions a war between Inkatha (supported by the state) and comrades aligned to the African National Congress and United Democratic Front (ANC, UDF; the dominant strand of the liberation movement) emerged as the central fault line of the violence. State-sponsored violence—much of which took place under the veil of private companies, covert operations, and bantustan regimes—played a central role in precipitating and aggravating political competition and violence, and the white-minority National Party (NP) regime, still in power, was thereby responsible for much of the violence of the period. It is also widely held that, whatever he claimed, the government of F. W. De Klerk had extensive knowledge of the “third force” covert operations that were waging violent attacks and fueling the conflict. Both the NP and the ANC, while publicly eschewing violent methods, used violence as a key element of their political strategy during the period of negotiations, even if they were not always able to control it. While the ANC’s role in aggravating the violence of this period has often been underplayed, historiography from the last decade has amended this perception.
