When PW Botha listened to the Harvard man

“Wherever you go in South Africa oppression weighs upon you. There is never a day that your anger lacks for fuel. At its highest pitch you are shaken by its violence, and you feel you will go mad in the streets or commit murder.

But you do not. You make your own contribution to repression by repressing anger. Among friends you do not even talk of the outrages you bear. It simply feeds the flames. So you smoulder but you do not explode.”

Ernest Cole wrote these words in House of Bondage, an account of life under apartheid in photos and essays. It is only through present-tense “this is how it is” descriptions that the generation termed “born frees” can get closer and closer to a picture of life under a system that today appears unimaginable. 

Yet archives have much to teach us. There are names and faces to which collectively we attribute apartheid’s evil: from the image of Cecil John Rhodes with one foot in Cape Town and one in Cairo, to Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, and Eugene de Kock, Prime Evil himself, and finally, to PW Botha, the infamous Groot Krokodil. 

One name that I never thought to associate with apartheid was Samuel P Huntington. The former political scientist and academic wrote such books as The Clash of Civilisations and Political Order in Changing Societies, books that seem to have made him an authoritative and lasting voice in political science. His ideas were so influential that PW Botha caught wind of them, at a time when he needed them most. 

Look hurriedly and there is a good chance you will miss Huntington’s contribution to the effort to resuscitate apartheid in the 1980s. I had, until I began digging through the Harvard University archives. Almost every contemporary front page containing the words “Harvard” and “apartheid” focused on calls for Harvard to divest from companies that were complicit in apartheid. And it appeared, in 1986, when the university announced it was cutting its holdings from some of these companies, that Harvard had inscribed itself on the right side of history.

Yet its contributions, or at least that of one its darlings, the director of Harvard’s Centre for International Affairs and the Albert J Weatherhead III university professor, was perhaps greater than any other foreign institution’s. Botha knew that, as the 1980s came around and his first time as prime minister began, he had to “adapt or die”. It was in this effort that Huntington served as an unofficial adviser to Botha’s government.

In his keynote address to the Political Science Association of South Africa, in Johannesburg on 17 September 1981, Huntington urged Botha to follow a twin policy he called “repression and ‘reform’”. Reform, Huntington said, was necessary not for ethical reasons or because apartheid was at all objectionable, but because, “It seems likely that a minority-dominated hierarchical ethnic system in South Africa will become increasingly difficult to maintain.” Any South African familiar with the sinister nature of Botha’s “Total Strategy” knows that these lightly-stated policies marked the start of a decade of blood.

Huntington stressed in that address that “Perhaps the hardest lesson to learn for governments sensitive to the needs of reform is the importance of introducing reforms from a position of strength.” Otherwise, Huntington said, reforms would “weaken the regime” and “provoke a counter-revolutionary backlash”. 

One shivers at the thought of how far Botha took the meaning of words “a position of strength”. The 1980s was the decade of national States of Emergency, of tanks and army apparatus stationed in the townships, of regular detention without trial, of assassinations and extrajudicial killings that even today long to be answered for. 

Huntington drew on the worst excess of apartheid to facilitate its perpetuation; the elements of the system’s design that made it not solely one of racial segregation but of ethnic segregation, where one language got given one land. Huntington saw the way out of apartheid as going not through multiparty democracy, but through consociationalism, a political structure as hard to pronounce as it is to explain. He described it as “an elite conspiracy to restrain political competition within and among communal groups”, essentially arguing that the “elites” who represent each political group, which were to be divided along ethnic lines, should control the decisions of the group. It was a structure that, given the division of non-white South Africa into homelands, wouldn’t struggle for application.

Few remnants of apartheid are more apparent today than the long and stubborn legacy of spatial apartheid, which even as petty apartheid was stripped away Huntington’s proposals served to ingrain. The uncanny part of this archival work is that there are times where Botha seems to have followed Huntington’s proposals to the letter. Huntington said, in that same address, “Continued adherence by the South African government to the homelands policy, for instance, may make it easier for the government to introduce some form of political representation for the coloureds and Asians.” As it happened, in Botha’s “reforms” of 1984, the tricameral parliament was established and coloured, Asian and white South Africans were included in parliament, while black South Africans were made to remain in the Bantustans they had been condemned to. 

There is little doubt that Botha considered Huntington one of his foremost strategists. A 1987 article by Gay Seidman in The Harvard Crimson stated, “Huntington’s reform strategy quite definitely informed the South African government’s efforts … His 1981 paper helped provide the intellectual justification for, and is cited extensively in, proposals for the 1984 constitution, cornerstone of state president PW Botha’s so-called reforms.”

There is the question, then, of how so little of perhaps the most damning contribution of a man so well regarded in the academic world is known. We might say that the powerful hide the history they would rather have the masses know — indeed, Harvard blocks anybody from accessing any administrative document made until 50 years after its creation. 

But there is something more pernicious in this. It shows a certain cold-heartedness; theories Huntington put in his textbooks he just as easily sent to the mail in envelopes signed “PW Botha”. 

 He believed, in the end, that by “concocting the proper mixture of reform, reassurance, and repression”, a government would be successful in ensuring its continuation; that if South Africa “played on fear and employed deception”, the country’s opponents would back down.

As much as Huntington’s theories eerily predicted, he was wrong about that. If history is written by the victors, South Africa’s history is written by its masses. As deafening as the effort to keep it down was, that is not apartheid’s prevailing story. That story, while it is still being written, begins and ends with the people of South Africa. 

As the country staggers towards 30 years of democracy — 30 years of aspirations yet to be fully fulfilled, freedom yet to be fully attained — reckoning with the legacy of apartheid becomes increasingly important in shaping the next 30 years. We may seek to theorise or intellectualise the path forward but, as history tells us, that can only take us so far. 

This article first appeared in The Harvard Crimson.

SazI Bongwe writes in the hope of bridging the political and the personal, the systemic and the sentimental. The Harvard University undergraduate writes for The Harvard Crimson, The Harvard Advocate and the Harvard Political Review. He was the founder and editor of Ukuzibuza.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.