Ronald Reagan, celebrated this week as a world statesman and champion of democracy, was nothing of the sort if you lived in Southern Africa during his tenure.
For the people of the region ”the Reagan doctrine” unleashed devastating private and state terrorism, the legacies of which they still have to contended with. His policies not only extended the lifespan of apartheid but, scholars are now arguing, they unleashed in Southern Africa the terrorist violence that has become the central preoccupation of 21st-century politics.
Reagan set the tone of his presidency shortly after his inauguration in 1980, telling a journalist that the United States would try to be ”helpful” as long as South Africa was making a ”a sincere and honest effort” to reform apartheid. He added that white South Africa was a ”friendly country” and a good ally in the international battle against communism.
Later that year Chester Crocker, the highest-ranking Reagan administration official on matters African, told a South African reporter: ”All Reagan knows about Southern Africa is that he is on the side of the whites.”
Crocker, a protégé of Henry Kissinger from the Nixon era and married to the daughter of a prominent Rhodesian lawyer, would develop what would become the cornerstone of Reagan’s Africa policy: ”constructive engagement”.
It was based on two main premises: one, the insistence that regional peacemaking in Southern Africa was the necessary precondition to change within South Africa. This included such extraneous issues as Cuban troop withdrawal from Angola, for example. The second was that the embattled tyranny of then president PW Botha was genuinely capable of reforming itself and, in fact, was committed to doing just that.
Instead, the 1980s became the most bloodied decade in the region’s history since World War II. Aiming to destabilise neighbouring governments to force them to expel the African National Congress, the apartheid government pursued proxy-wars in Angola and Mozambique, fomented conflict between local groups, conducted commando raids into Botswana and occupied Namibia, killing and displacing thousands of people, militarising whole populations and crippling economic systems.
The United Nations estimates that 300 000 children died in Angola during the Reagan years, while Human Rights Watch estimates that the use of landmines caused there to be more than 15 000 amputees in the country by 1988.
At home, security forces killed, tortured and detained as many as 10 000 opponents and fed, with funding and guns, what the government passed off as ”black-on-black violence” in the South African media.
Journalist Bill Berkeley in his book The Graves Are Yet Not Full reports that in his first two years in the White House, Reagan eased controls on exports to apartheid South Africa, beefed up its diplomatic mission (appointing the right-wing ambassador Herman Nickel), intervened to support South African loan applications to the International Monetary Fund, approved visas and official visits for military leaders as well as for South African intellectuals close to the regime.
The Reagan administration also vigorously defended South African interests in the UN. Later it would sell computer technology to the South African government and military.
Robert Kinloch Massie, a senior Harvard University researcher and the author of a bulky account of the long relationship between the US and South Africa points out that despite complaints, from within the US and elsewhere, that constructive engagement was benefiting apartheid, the Reagan administration persisted with its strategy until the end of the decade.
The tricameral reforms of 1983, a series of inadequate reforms rejected by the majority of those disenfranchised, were applauded by the Reagan administration as a ”step in the right direction”. And when Botha unleashed full-scale state terror in the aftermath of his now-infamous Rubicon speech in 1985, Reagan instead blamed South Africa’s deepening political and economic crises on the ANC and ”tribalism”.
When the US Congress finally succeeded in enacting stringent sanctions against the South African regime and businesses (which the South Africans would, of course, go on to circumvent with the active support of the US administration and businesses), they met strong resistance from the White House. Reagan first vetoed, then tried to stall, the implementation of the legislation.
With political apartheid a thing of the past, the one aspect of Reagan’s Southern African policy seems to be coming back to haunt Americans, and the rest of us, too. That is the spread of terror as a tactic in the region. In a new book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror, the New York-based political scientist Mahmood Mamdani argues that Southern Africa provided the birthplace for privatised and ideologically stateless resistance groups, providing the model for Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.
Mamdani, originally from Uganda, argues that in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the US government shifted from a strategy of direct intervention in the fight against global communism to one supporting new forms of what was termed ”low-intensity conflicts” by private armed groups in the 1980s in Indochina, Latin America, Africa and Afghanistan.
Unita in Angola and Renamo in Mozambique, both trained and armed with US support by the former South African defence force, were the guinea pigs for this policy. Renamo became ”Africa’s first genuine terrorist movement” as it discharged aimless violence against Mozambican civilians without any chance of becoming a serious contender for national power.
What is referred to now as collateral damage was then not an unfortunate by-product of war, but ”the very point of terrorism”. Adapting the strategy used in Africa, the US would go on to support the Contras in Nicaragua and elsewhere, before finally encouraging a broad front of extreme Islamists, to fight the Soviets, ”the Evil Empire”, to the finish in Afghanistan.
The US media are currently infused with nostalgia for the Reagan years.
If Mamdani and others are correct, we may still be living them.
Dr Sean Jacobs is a fellow of the International Centre for Advanced Studies at New York University