The South African Boycott Experience

Jonathan Hyslop, Salim Vally, Shireen Hassim

Jonathan Hyslop
Salim Vally
Shireen Hassim

Jonathan Hyslop,
Deputy Director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research,
University of the Witwatersrand

In the current debate about calls for an academic boycott of Israel, the history of the boycott of South Africa during the apartheid era has become an important standard. That history is represented in strikingly different ways by the opposing camps. For proponents of a boycott of Israeli universities, the South African campaign is a clear precedent to follow. In the eyes of the drafters of the AAUP report “On Academic Boycotts,” on the other hand, the AAUP never supported an academic boycott of South Africa. According to the statement, what they backed was a campaign for economic divestment.

Throughout the high point of the academic boycott, from the early 1980s to the end of that decade, I was on the staff of the University of Witwatersrand, better known as Wits, the Johannesburg university where I still work. The campus was highly politicized, and as a member of the executive of the academic staff association, I followed the issue of the academic boycott closely and participated in many discussions about it. For a time, I supported a selective form of the academic boycott.

But far from being an unproblematic strategy, the South African academic boycott was riddled with conflicts among its supporters, inconsistencies, and minor injustices. It was plagued by the problem of unintended consequences. In my view, it had no important political effect in undermining apartheid and, I will suggest in this paper, may have had a minor negative impact on postapartheid society.

The account of the boycott implicit in the AAUP report is equally unconvincing. If, as claimed, antiapartheid American scholars were pursuing a divestment campaign rather than an academic boycott, they never succeeded in conveying this fine distinction to South African colleagues at the time. It certainly appeared to us, from our experience, that American universities, scholars, and journals were boycotting South African universities, at least as strongly as their British colleagues. Indeed, while I can recall several significant British scholars giving support to antiapartheid activities on South African campuses in the 1980s, I can recall no examples of activist American scholars who were equally flexible in their approach to the boycott. For practical purposes, there was an American academic boycott of South Africa in the 1980s.

My purpose in this essay is not to prescribe to Palestinian, Israeli, British, or American scholars. My hope is, rather, that by identifying some of the issues that arose around the question of an academic boycott in South Africa, I can assist in their endeavors to come to terms with the present issue. Perhaps in the 1980s I would have been keen to hand out advice to all and sundry, but in the immortal words of Bob Dylan, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

The Total Boycott

In the years 1984 to 1989, the question of an academic boycott attained salience as an issue in South Africa and abroad, and it is with this period that my discussion is largely concerned. The boycott was supported by both exiled liberation movements recognized by the United Nations—namely the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC)—and inside the country by the United Democratic Front (UDF), which was essentially a legal vehicle for supporters of the ANC. By the start of the 1980s, it was clear that the ANC was a far more effective organization than the PAC, so the positions of the ANC and the UDF are the important ones for the purposes of this discussion.

The original form in which the academic boycott was pursued was that of an exclusion of South Africa from all forms of academic connection and exchange—a total boycott. However, it was not long before problems became apparent with this approach.

First, in the West, it was only liberal and leftist antiapartheid scholars who could be induced to support the boycott. Rightists and apartheid sympathizers came to South Africa freely and without political cost to themselves at home. International experts on counterinsurgency, military technology, and the like visited freely and worked with the regime.

Second, well-informed scholars abroad, who wanted to support the explosion of critical scholarship, cultural production, and activism that the revolutionary times had produced on South African campuses, faced a problem. They could not give such support if they were required to observe a blanket academic boycott. And the ANC itself began to develop an understanding that the political developments on South African campuses were worth encouraging and that international links might contribute to this.

Third, there were some cases of real, if minor, personal injustice arising from the implementation of a total boycott. For example, sociologist Eddie Webster played a crucial role in the development of trade unionism in the 1970s. He was detained by the police at that time and then subjected to a lengthy trial on charges of political subversion in which he was eventually found not guilty. He was one of the most important educators of the trade unionists, lawyers, and industrial-relations practitioners who democratized the labor arena in South Africa during the 1980s and 1990s. Yet when Webster arrived to speak on a British university campus, he was picketed by members of the local antiapartheid movement for breaking the boycott. The spectacle of people who had never faced any force more lethal than the Thames Valley Constabulary adopting a position of moral superiority over someone who had seen the inside of South Africa’s prisons for his beliefs is sufficiently ludicrous as to merit our reflection.

Fourth, the idea of a blanket ban on foreign academics taking posts at South African universities assumed that they would naturally be predisposed to play a reactionary role. This was certainly not the case. Political scientist Tom Lodge, for example, initially came from Britain to South Africa as a postgraduate researcher. He later accepted a post at Wits. During the 1980s, by commenting to the media on the ANC’s political statements, which could not be directly quoted in South Africa at the time, he was able to project the banned organization’s views into the public sphere. Lodge testified for the defense in a number of political trials. His teaching and publications helped educate a generation of activists about the history of political movements in the country. Lodge’s role was recognized both by the security police, who set fire to his office, and by the ANC, which welcomed him at its exile headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia. Yet the logic of the total boycott was that Lodge would have made a greater contribution to change in South Africa by staying at home and going on demonstrations during the weekend.

The Selective Boycott

Such difficulties led to the emergence of support inside the antiapartheid scholarly community for the idea of a selective boycott. Although the ANC was hesitant to give public support to such a position, in practice it did begin to give approval to a number of scholars who sought its private endorsement of their visits to South Africa. As this position gained more support, UDF-related organizations inside the country attempted to take on a role in deciding which visits were politically acceptable.

The idea of a selective boycott, however, also proved problematic. Hard-to-answer questions arose. What were the criteria for exemption? Who made the decision?

One approach was to differentiate between “good” universities, with which foreign scholars would be encouraged to link up, and “bad” universities, which would continue to be boycotted. But this line proved impossible to draw. In the 1980s there were three broad categories of universities in the country. Afrikaans-language universities, such as Stellenbosch and Pretoria, were closely linked historically to the regime and were almost entirely white in staff and student composition. Then there were “liberal” universities. Witwatersrand was a good example here. Historically, it had always been predominantly white in staff composition. By the 1940s, however, a minority of black students was present on campus. In the 1950s, the government decided that strict racial segregation should be implemented in higher education and that all black students should attend separate institutions. This was vigorously opposed by the university authorities and students at Wits and similar universities in the name of academic freedom. Nevertheless, restrictive legislation was passed in 1959, and through the 1960s and 1970s, despite continued protests by the university, few black students were admitted. But at the end of the 1970s, weakening political resolve by the government and continued attempts by the university to get around the legislation meant that black students again began to enter Wits in greater numbers. By the time of the mid-1980s upheavals, Wits had a large, often highly politicized minority of black students. Finally, there were what came to be called (rather misleadingly) the historically black universities (HBUs). These were established or consolidated under the 1959 legislation with the intention by the state to provide segregated education for people of color. These institutions had a significant number of black academic staff, but they tended to be dominated by Afrikaner professors and administrators and were, for the most part, run in an authoritarian style. Their establishment in large measure backfired on the government, because the HBUs became a focus of black radicalism. Steve Biko’s black consciousness movement, for example, emerged from them, and they saw three decades of nearly continuous student unrest.

Any attempt to differentiate between these categories of universities would have come politically unstuck. The HBUs were the universities most directly and brutally controlled by the government. But they represented the largest concentrations of black students, and it would have been morally unacceptable to force visitors to avoid these campuses while encouraging them to speak to students on predominantly white campuses. The liberal campuses had a record of defending academic freedom, but this did not stand them in good stead. Black students often charged that the liberal universities’ focus on academic freedom was accompanied by a hypocritical evasion of wider political issues and that they continued to be white dominated. The former charge had enough reality in it to hurt, and the latter point was unanswerable. To have made the liberal universities exempt from the boycott would have provoked student anger. The Afrikaans universities may have seemed the most obvious candidates for ostracism, but this was not straightforward either. Especially at Stellenbosch, the cradle of Afrikaner intellectuals, a courageous minority of staff and students were working in an antiapartheid direction. The magazine published by Stellenbosch staff members, Die Suid Afrikaan, was important in challenging received political ideas within the Afrikaner elite. By the late 1980s, there was substantial student radicalization and political protest in Stellenbosch, which the university authorities met with a heavy hand. In these circumstances, to have boycotted the Afrikaans universities would have meant actually assisting the authorities in their attempts to impose ideological isolation. So it proved impossible for the boycott to differentiate by university.

That left the possibility of exempting individuals from the boycott, and this was indeed attempted. And despite having supported such an approach myself in the late 1980s, I now think it was misguided. It seems to me that the AAUP report is right to see such a strategy as involving a “political” test and in seeing this as ethically problematic. For how did one find an acceptable gauge for exemption from a boycott? Was it enough to make an antiapartheid declaration? What else could reasonably be asked for? Should support for a particular political movement be required, and, if so, what did that do to intellectual pluralism? What happened to political mavericks who were opposed to the regime but genuinely disagreed with the political ideas of the antiapartheid movements? What did one do about the difference between the position of the social scientist or humanist whose work could easily engage with current political questions and that of the natural scientist who was less easily placed to do so? Answers to these questions were not easily found; the selective boycott created a set of irresolvable dilemmas.

The Impact of the Boycotts

How effective was the academic boycott? That question can be answered at several different levels, and at each level it is important to understand the impact of the campaign in relation to the broader effects of sanctions.

Most straightforwardly, sanctions can be considered from the point of view of how effectively they put pressure for change on the Pretoria government and on white society in general. Economic sanctions certainly weakened the status quo in South Africa during the 1980s by contributing to the economic decline that the country suffered in this period. The effect should not be exaggerated, though: the mass revolts inside South Africa were the chief force making for the eventual democratization. And the revolts, combined with the Botha government’s inability to devise a coherent reform strategy, were also more important than sanctions in creating the investment famine, capital flight, and currency decline that characterized the period. Sports sanctions became tighter than before. British actors did impose a successful boycott of South Africa by the UK television industry, but British television productions had never been popular in South Africa. Cultural sanctions in the eighties had almost no effect on the availability of the imported cultural staples of white society: U.S. movies, television series, recorded music, and magazines.

Compared with economic, sports, and cultural boycotts, the academic boycott was feeble indeed. I can honestly say that, throughout the 1980s, I did not talk to a single South African scholar or university employee whose political views had been changed in any way by the academic boycott. Whereas the economic boycott had some palpable effect on the regime, and sports and cultural boycotts had irritant effects on white society, the academic boycott had little in the way of visible achievements.

But the impact of the boycotts also needs to be looked at in a more complex way. We need to consider why, given that it was viable for whites to continue to resist change, albeit at an economic and military cost, the large majority of them did in the end support F. W. de Klerk’s turn to negotiate with the ANC and, however grumblingly, go along with the transition to democracy in 1994. The original social base for apartheid, in the 1940s and 1950s, was a radical Afrikaner populist movement of farmers, minor civil servants, workers, and intellectuals. It was all about ethnically and racially based social protection—agricultural subsidies, expanded civil service employment, politically skewed promotions, and the “reservation” of skilled jobs for white artisans. Now such a movement would never have accepted a deracialized society at any price; no amount of sanctions and boycotts could have shaken its commitment to apartheid. But the very success of Afrikaner nationalism became its undoing. The state put enormous resources into educational uplift for Afrikaners and into providing preferential opportunities for Afrikaner businesses. The result was that, by the 1980s, a whole generation of the children of Afrikaner workers and low-level employees had moved into the professional, managerial, and entrepreneurial strata. Like English-speaking whites, the majority of Afrikaners were now no longer reliant on state protection; they had urban skills and capital of their own. They traveled internationally and were exposed to global media. This all provided the basis for a shift in identity—Afrikaner nationalism became increasingly less central to the worldview of the new middle class.

The identity shift was crucial to the willingness to accept deracialization and democracy in the 1990s. Whites, as a whole, came to see themselves primarily as globalized consumers. The ability to pursue a middle-class lifestyle became paramount in white identity. This was accompanied by a spread of antiauthoritarian ideas (anarchic youth cultures, feminism, gay rights), which made whites more difficult to mobilize politically in the cause of the old order. This is not in any way to say that whites were no longer racist. But they were increasingly less willing to lay down their lives for apartheid. When, in the early 1990s, whites were confronted by a choice between a racially “pure” but impoverished and militarized future and the chance of prosperity in a new democracy, they chose the latter. Hendrik Verwoerd, the founding ideologue of apartheid, reputedly once said that it was “better to be white and poor than rich and mixed.” In contrast, the whites of the 1990s preferred to be mixed, rich, and globalized than white, poor, and isolated.

Now, why this is important to the question of the academic boycott is that, given the importance of the cultural shift in making whites ready to accept change, the failure of the cultural boycott (of which the academic boycott may for this purpose be considered a minor part) was actually rather important to the success of the other pressures for change. In order to be ready to accept democratization, whites had to move away from identities that were primarily defined by racial populist politics and cultural autarky. Although economic change provided the conditions for this, it was not enough in itself; a process of cultural change was also required. The images and ideas that enabled whites to make this reshaping of themselves were not available in the official cultural discourse of the apartheid state and society. They needed a vision of themselves on the other side of apartheid, and this, in the end, came from external sources—U.S. television programs and other cultural products, above all. They also needed exposure to different ways of thinking politically about the world, and here the universities certainly played a role. A culturally isolated white South Africa, in my view, would have been more rather than less likely to block the process of change. I would thus contend that economic sanctions worked because of sociocultural changes that the proponents of boycotts did not understand; they succeeded by good fortune rather than good judgment.

What were the long-term effects of boycotts? What is the relationship between means and ends? If boycotts are a means of political action to create democracy, how does use of those means shape the ends that they are designed to attain? How do the tactics used to promote democracy affect the quality of that democracy?

In many ways, postapartheid South Africa is an exemplary democratic polity. It has reasonably free and fair elections. The country’s new constitution and the constitutional court that enforces it are internationally admired. There is no censorship, and vigorous political debate can be found in the print media and on the radio. South Africa has one of the world’s strongest trade-union movements. In universities, scholars can teach and publish more or less what they wish. Nobody gets arrested for their political views. The governing party, the ANC, can claim a great deal of credit for all this. Through the inspired leadership of Nelson Mandela, it generated a vision of a new and united nation that was crucial to the stabilization of the country. Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, has proved a competent economic manager.

Yet there are profound problems with the ANC’s relation to the future of democracy. The difficulty is that the ANC has a strong distrust of the independence and vigor of South Africa’s civil society and a resentment of the limitations on the power of the government that a constitutional order necessarily creates.

This distrust of civil society was also manifested in the ANC’s leadership of the boycott campaign during the exile years. There was an almost total unwillingness to acknowledge that autonomous civil society or even quasi-state institutions could be sites of important social battles that could have constructive results for a future democracy. The ANC’s vision of the future was of a society that would be reconstructed from scratch. Yet many of the pillars of today’s South African democracy in fact began to be built under apartheid. The ANC appeared to assume that the South African state had such total social control that no democratic impulse could emerge within the old order. Yet for all the brutality and authoritarianism of the regime, its control of institutions and society more broadly was remarkably ramshackle. Powerful independent black trade unions emerged in the 1970s. A tradition of critical journalism produced important oppositional newspapers like the Weekly Mail. The present constitution was largely constructed by human rights lawyers who had worked in the old legal system. Even judges were sometimes important in blocking the working of apartheid; the system of housing segregation largely unraveled as the result of a 1978 decision by Richard Goldstone, later famous as the UN human rights investigator in former Yugoslavia. University teachers who were determined to do so were able to teach both critical social theory and critical studies of the social order and to publish antiapartheid writing.

Boycott politics never took seriously the idea that it might be important to act in a way that supported democratic initiatives in South African civil society. Indeed, the ANC actually opposed international assistance to the trade unions in South Africa in the 1970s and early 1980s on the basis that any legal unions must be stooge organizations (a view not shared by the security police, who put a lot of energy into repressing these unions). Moreover, there was little awareness inside the boycott movement of any possibility that civil society in South Africa might one day need to defend democracy against a postapartheid government. This despite the fact that, in a number of other countries in the region, anticolonial liberation had not been accompanied by democracy.

That South Africa has a viable democratic order today is largely a result of the vibrancy of its civil society. That civil society in South Africa is, in a mild but potentially dangerous degree, threatened by authoritarian tendencies within the new state. The importance of civil society in struggles toward democracy within apartheid South Africa was not sufficiently recognized by the boycott movement. More could have been done by antiapartheid forces abroad to strengthen civil society for the role it has to fill today. To do that would have required the complex politics of identifying and supporting important civil society initiatives, rather than the simplistic politics of lumping civil society and state together. And it would have therefore required more and not less involvement by the outside world in South Africa.

The Effect of Boycott on the Boycotters

Let me now turn to a topic that has been neglected in discussion of the South Africa boycott: what effect did the boycott have on the boycotters, rather than on those they sought to support or isolate by their action? I would suggest that the boycott campaign helped to cast South Africa in the minds of British and American academics as a moral rather than a political problem. While the moral impulse behind the campaign was commendable, it led to a moralism, which ultimately undermined the capacity of scholars abroad to understand the process of social change in South Africa and to contribute to it as intellectuals. The identification of scholars with the struggle for justice meant that they felt unable to comment critically on those whom they saw as being on the right side.

At its worst, the culture of the boycott produced an imagined South Africa that was a theater of morality. That this was so was entirely understandable. If ever a political struggle could reasonably be construed by democrats as one of good against evil, right against wrong, the situation in South Africa in the 1980s was it. But the problem was that, too often, the ostensible topic of South Africa simply became the occasion for a kind of parading of the foreign scholar’s moral virtue. In much antiapartheid writing of the time, we find out very little about South Africa but a great deal about the author’s ethical qualities as an opponent of apartheid. The practice of the boycott often became a gesture of separating oneself from the sphere of evil rather than intellectually engaging with the realities of a society in travail. When traveling abroad in the 1980s, I was struck by the way in which many keen supporters of the boycott were uninterested in discussing the details of what was happening in South Africa. South Africa was merely the occasion for them to play a heroic (in reality, mock-heroic) role on the stage of the theater of morality.

This moralistic standpoint has, in the post-1994 period, become a major obstacle to western scholars’ capacity to think about South Africa. Two melodramatic productions now alternate on the other side of the proscenium arch through which American and British academics view South Africa. For liberal mainstream scholars, the South African drama is the “Miracle Triumphant”; for western leftists, it is the “Revolution Betrayed.”

Those who adhere to the miracle view see the post-1994 period as the remarkable triumph of good. It is indeed extraordinary that South Africa made it through the transitional period to democracy without descending into Yugoslavian-style civil war and national disintegration and that the country functions relatively well despite its deep-seated social tensions. But the idea of a miracle is not conducive to analytical thought; miracles by definition are perfect and not susceptible to reasoned investigation. Analysts who view the story in this light seldom have interesting things to say about how the transition happened, and they are reluctant to acknowledge the persisting inequality, the corruption, and the incipient authoritarianism of the postapartheid polity. This type of approach often goes along with a disproportionate focus on aspects of South African life that can be read as part of a moral drama. The Truth and Reconc