I visited South Africa during Apartheid AMA

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For some reason, I feel compelled to point out a couple of things. The first is that Americans, in particular, didn't usually make the kind of trip to South Africa that I made. I would say that, of those who did, most went for some sort of Safari. I don't specifically recall ever encountering other Americans while there (I have a vague recollection of having met somebody, perhaps at the airport, who was there on a business trip). In particular, I am inclined to think that I was the only American on the flight from Buenos Aires to Cape Town. For an American, this is rather an uncommon experience, as we tend to be just about everywhere (when major airline accidents are reported anywhere in the world, there seem to always be some US citizens among the casualties). I can see how I would not be likely to have encountered another American on a flight from Moscow to Tashkent, but then even getting on such a flight would have been difficult.

The other thing I neglected to mention was that a major motivation for taking this trip was the opportunity to ride on two famous trains, the Blue Train between Johannesburg and Cape Town, and the Drakensberg Express between Johannesburg and Durban. At the time, the exchange rate there was extremely favorable to Americans (it basically sucked in Europe and elsewhere) so such trips were affordable to me. At the time, the opportunity seemed unique enough that I hated to pass it up.

Werent your "famous trains" themselves an artifact of apartheid?

Not to beat up on you. Just sayin.

you're talking about famous trains pulled by steam locomotives.

I saw a TV series about remaining steam trains around the globe at about that time. One episode was devoted to South Africa. Had the impression that SA was forced to keep on using steam trains because of the embargo ...they couldnt get oil but had a domestic supply of coal I think. Anyway somehow the embargo prevented them from modernizing to diesel-electrics. And they did that the moment Apartheid fell. Ergo no more unique trains.

I wouldn't say that any more than I'd say anything else there was an artifact of Apartheid. Many countries run this sort of train. Australia has the Indian Pacific, it's exactly the same sort of train, just not Apartheid per se (let's steer clear of THAT topic, however).

Ironically, the Blue Train was officially "international", perhaps the only passenger train having that distinction. At first, they maintained a separate segment for non-whites but then abandoned that. Although everyone I saw on the train was white.

You're right about the coal. OPEC countries would have nothing to do with South Africa. One time I came to the realization that a train I was riding was under steam power (I think it was actually a Belgian passenger who first noticed). The other time I experienced this was going through northern Yugoslavia (Slovenian/Croatia) in 1972 (except for tourist attraction railroads).

Didnt there used to be lotsa passenger trains that were "international".

Like the Orient Express. It went east-west the length of Europe and Turkey. And was the scene of intrigue, international espionage...and an Agatha Cristy murder, or two. All of that romantic stuff. Until the jet age and the iron curtain. Sixty Minutes did a piece on it in the Eighties. By then it was just a boring milk train which hadnt "seen a state secret in decades".

In an earlier post, I explained that in SA they used the term "international" to mean not segregated. Because their policy viewed blacks as citizens of separate countries whom they were helping to gain independence. Although I don't know what they planned for Coloureds and Asians .

I see you were trying to observe first hand the life back then under apartheid and using the US south as a personal reference point, both of which were valid objectives.

I am curious how your mind operated back in the early 1980s in processing some interesting use of euphemistic apartheid language to somehow soften the actual treatment of black south Africans such as "international" to designate blacks entering white areas. Of course in Afrikaans history they taught their children that blacks were not indigenous to South Africa. That the original population were the bushmen largely died out or were pushed to the periphery when white settlers (Voortrekkers) occupied South Africa (around the 1600s). The apartheid narrative claims that the ancestors of the bantu tribes (Zulu and others) moved south from Botswana to confront the Dutch german and french white settlers (who claim god gave them South Africa as the promised land mirroring the Jewish promised land of Israel). Many were christian refugees escaping Europe at the time, They came into contact with black people and of course battles ensued but ultimately guns/gunpowder won over spears. This false narrative was used as the intellectual framework to build apartheid and the British colonial administrators (under the union with Afrikaans speakers) agreed to arrangement.

If you understand the historical seeds then it was easy to designate blacks as "interlopers" into the white own, white build enterprises who could issued work permits to the indigenous people treating them like outsiders (when in reality they were dispossessed).

What was the endgame here? By the late 1940s decolonisation was in full swing all over Africa, but South Africa was far and away the riches sources of minerals in the whole continent. The largely British owned mining enterprises (started by Cecil Rhodes and others) wanted to continue exploiting blacks as a cheap source of labour. Meanwhile the Afrikaans wanted to occupy the land. Immigration from Europe was encouraged and so the white population was bolstered during apartheid.

The most insidious aspect of apartheid, the race laws (which seem insidious to our 2023 selves) were actually commonplace in the British empire where in places like India British colonial adminstrators wanted to keep the labourforce separate from the whites. Such laws existed all over Dutch and British European colonies. Thus these laws were a throwback to the 1800s and of course back in the 1940s the South African government could use the USA Jim Crow laws as a template. To complicate matters the Afrikaaners believed in biblical interpretations that blacks were inferior using the curse of Ham and other scripture (BTW a lot of white Americans christians still believe this crap).

Thus it became easy to dehumanise the black population in South Africa. It still amazes me when apartheid was dismantled how forgiving the black population has been over their treatment in their own land for almost the same amount of time as the enslavement of blacks in the US. In some ways the integration of modern groups in south africa into a coalition (rainbow nation) is a miracle and serves as a lesson for Israel/Palestine that past transgressions can be forgiven and people can work to live together in harmony even after so much has transpired,.

Well you did point out one thing South Africa had in common with Israel, which is a version of history intended to call into question claims that somebody else has a prior claim to the land on which they are living. I really don't care much about that. I mean, what matters is who is where at the moment, but not how they got there. Although that applies to everyone. Afrikaners have been in South Africa for multiple centuries. One way the demographics are different from Israel is that different ethnic groups predominate in different parts of SA. Xhosa, Tswana, Sotho, and Zulu don't have very much in common with each other. So it's pointless to claim that they all represent a single people who migrated there recently or not.

My impression is that the western part of SA was primarily populated by people with a lighter complexion. Khoikhoi, Hottentot, Bushmen, whatever you want to call them. It's my (unproven) theory that the physical appearance of the typical Cape Coloured results from having those ancestors more than from having white ancestry. East of there, the population is basically what Afrikaners call Bantu, who happen to have a dark complexion. They may be related to people living farther North, but they've certainly been there a long time. I mean Swaziland and Lesotho, that aren't politically part of South Africa, nevertheless represent pre-colonization Southern Africa, and they are certainly well established nations. Zimbabwe, just to the North, has archeological evidence of civilization from way back. Unless you want to claim that those places were built by some earlier (and possibly lighter-complexioned) "race", but I don't think there's any evidence of that.

As for black people not seeking revenge after Apartheid ended, you have to understand that racism in South Africa didn't have the same sort of history as in the US. I can recall at the time seeing an article comparing racism there vs. the US South that said, among other things, that the history of racism in SA involved less violence against blacks than in the South. There were no lynchings. There was no Ku Klux Klan. I won't try to go elaborate that, but you might want to do some of your own research. I mean it was a very complicated and difficult process, but also very different. I guess you could say that whites in South Africa believed themselves superior to blacks in some way, but they didn't actually hate them. Although this is an extremely general statement but it reflects real differences.

Actually retribution killings from far right groups in South Africa did start before and after Apartheid ended. The goal of the Afrikaner Resistance movement (AWB) was similar to that of the KKK in the 1890s, to intimidate blacks not to encroach into white Afrikaner areas and to prevent elections and voting. Despite the asymmetric dominance in the population of black Africans, there was an overall fear of the AWB as they were made up of ex-army, police who were armed to the teeth.

Members of the AWB still show themselves in public and have even created whites only towns in rural South Africa. Others who were not jailed also became mercenaries in various African conflicts across the continent

On the question of bantus in the south, The dominant group in South Africa are the Xhosa (whom Mandela belonged to), They comprise a mix of bantu and bushmen ancestry.While there were tribes that moved south who joined/bolstered the Zulu but both can happen and bantus were always able to move into all areas of South Africa long before the arrival of the Dutch.