On the Permanence of All Things: Settler Colonialism, Memory and Transitional Justice in South Africa

“it is as if apartheid was let go so settler colonialism could endure”¹

Introduction

Don Mattera’s seminal autobiographical novel, “Memory is the Weapon”, concludes as Sophiatown,² the author’s hometown, is finally razed to the ground by bulldozers. While the final message leads to a renewed consciousness and internal resistance, it also ends on a sour note: “The world became alien, and I felt lost.” Four decades after the original publication of the novel, this feeling seems to be shared among many of those who lived through the years of transition from apartheid to the new democratic order.

Having earned the ominous title of “the most unequal country in the world”,³ South Africa appears to have betrayed many of the hopes and dreams that were grown around the anti-apartheid struggle. Democratic suffrage was introduced, land restitution and redistribution programs were launched, truth-telling processes were instituted, and yet many of the key aspects of the previous regime appear to still stand. What happened?

This article aims to provide new answers and perspectives on this decades-long question. By employing the lens of settler colonialism, together with a critical approach to transitional justice processes, I attempt to build on the previous works of Veracini, Cavanagh, Park (and many others). The key hypothesis that this article was built around deems apartheid not only as “the ultimate security blanket for settler colonialism”,⁴ but also as its unintended obstruction.

While pursuing the final objectives of settler colonialism, it became a liability: the extreme measures employed finally exposed the regime to the world, threatening its transformative process. I then argue that the transition to democracy managed to salvage the most essential aspects of settler colonialism in South Africa, leading to a mixed result that, while not scrupulously adherent to other ‘realized’ settler societies, succeeded in securing the privileges of the white minority.

Therefore, the reconciliation and forgiveness narrative at the center of the transition to democratic rule, I suggest, was actually instrumental in the perpetuation of the settler agenda.

1. The Evolution of Settler Colonialism in South Africa

Settler colonialism is “a structure, not an event”,⁵ with the ultimate aim to supersede itself, disappearing and leaving a new social order. One of the means through which this happens is migration, even if settler migration behaves quite differently vis-à-vis the native population: “settlers come to stay. They are founders of political orders who carry with them a distinct sovereign capacity.”.⁶

If ‘regular’ colonialism was centered around the exploitation of the colonized land resources, human and natural alike, replacement is the settler’s dominant agenda. This doesn’t exclude that, for a determined period, different forms of colonialism operate within settler colonial ones (or the opposite). Nevertheless, the coveted result is always the disappearance of the native population (through many processes, not necessarily physical ones), the stripping of their indigenous status, in favor of the affirmation of the settlers’ sovereignty and recognition as the true natives of the land.

Historically, the establishment of settler colonialism in South Africa was a fluid process that developed over time. When the Dutch East-India Company (“Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie”, hereinafter “VOC”) first established in 1652 an outpost in Table Bay (that would later become Cape Town), the objective was initially of a logistical nature: to serve as a supply point for eastern expeditions.⁷

Trading with the native Khoisan, however, couldn’t deliver the variety and quantity of goods necessary for the enterprise. Therefore, a small number of VOC employees were granted permission to set up farms in the neighboring lands, establishing the first European settlements in the area. The Boers (farmers in Dutch) thus began their journey on the pages of history. As Ross points out, during the VOC administration, “the people who came to South Africa did not do so with the prior intention of settling there, but rather in the course of some other career, after which they remained in the country.”.⁸

Were there settlements without settlers in Cape Colony? The first resemblance of settler colonialism’s ideological apparatus can be found right at the end of the seventeenth century, when the never-ending expansion of farms led to the displacement of the Khoisan tribes from the Western Cape. A series of genocidal acts, known as “bushman hunting”, were carried out by farmers, organized in paramilitary commandos.⁹ While not yet resembling a coherent settler society, those planned crimes demonstrate that a certain level of consciousness was developing among some sectors of the population, targeting native land and forcing its people out.

Throughout the course of the eighteenth century, Cape Colony continued its rapid expansion, fostered by the continuous influx of immigrants, a demographic boom and the slave labor imported from Asia and Eastern Africa. The origin of the “coloured” question, the discrimination later faced by the descendants of mixed relations between slaves, European and indigenous people, can be traced back to those times, when the intermingling of the population was much more fluid, and the strict ideology of homogeneity hadn’t been affirmed yet.

Up until the end of the century, when the Napoleonic wars finally discontinued Dutch rule in the region, Cape Colony was under the strict control of the VOC, which appointed its governors. Settlers weren’t involved in any kind of relevant administrative position and didn’t act in order to fill this gap, showing no signs of a nationalistic awakening.¹⁰ These elements indicate that, on a structural level, a settler society hadn’t developed yet, leaving out the most salient characters we normally associate with settler colonialism.

The arrival of British rule in 1805 determined several critical changes in the administration of the colony, resulting in an ever-increasing opposition and calls for autonomy. The development of Afrikaner nationalism can be thus explained as a reaction to the British imported one, conveyed through a process of “anglicisation” of the institutions,¹¹ down to the very administrative and clerical positions, and via the sponsoring of the most significant immigration wave yet, made up of 4000 British settlers.¹² The most important transformations, however, were the abolition of slavery in 1834 and the proclamation of equal rights to all the inhabitants of the colonies (native included) in 1828.

These new laws threatened the economic model and preeminence of the Boers, founded on cheap slave labor, especially when the available cultivable lands were running out. Organized groups of farmers, the Voortrekkers, decided to move across the Orange River in search of new territories. This movement came to be known as the Great Trek and involved, at its peak, over 15.000 Afrikaners. The quest that led to the foundation of the independent Afrikaner republics (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State) achieved a mystical aura in settler society, becoming the founding myth of its newborn nationalism.

When taken into their historical context, however, those states resemble more the ‘common’ exploitative colonies, rather than employing the settler colonial processes with replacement at their core. The shift happened with the mineral revolution: from 1896 onwards, huge deposits of diamonds and gold fields were discovered between Kimberley and the Witwatersrand, flipping the economy on its head. The heightened demand for cheap labor resulted both in the increased influx of immigrants, from Asia and neighboring African countries, and in the dispossession of the natives: racial capitalism had begun its successful marriage with settler colonialism.

The unification of the South African republics in 1910 allowed to streamline the typical settler colonial triangular citizenry relationship, composed of the dominant settlers on one side, the marginalized “exogenous others” (the broad category of coloureds and the other ethnic immigrant groups) and the suppressed indigenous people.¹³ Containment, fragmentation and dispossession became the key words of the settler regime(s) between the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century.

Throughout a series of laws, Africans were firmly restricted to ‘unskilled’ labor, segregated into ever smaller districts, and de facto precluded from acquiring lands in the few reserves left.¹⁴ Racial capitalism equally worsened the quality of life of the immigrant labor force: stripped of rights, imprisoned and immediately repatriated when no longer needed. Even if the settler elite saw in a favorable light the possible extermination of the indigenous people, the industrial revolution sparked by the new mineral discoveries made it “desirable from every point of view that the Native should work, and there is therefore nothing improper in persuading him to do so”.¹⁵

On a superficial analysis, one could be led to believe that this approach, coupled with the failure of the settler body to replace the indigenous population, meant that South Africa didn’t really utilize the toolkit of settler colonialism. However, while being the demographic majority, the native and the “exogenous others” were removed from the settler space, relegated to a mere fraction of the country and stripped of civic and historical recognition. This centerpiece of settler colonialism was better articulated in the pigmentocracy (i.e. the racial hierarchy) that differentiated rights and belonging between “Whites”, “Asiatics”, “Coloureds” and “Natives”¹⁶ (the most loathed and suppressed by the regime, as Don Mattera frequently points out).¹⁷

All these elements were present before the official introduction of apartheid (separateness in Afrikaans) in 1948 by the National Party. As we pointed out, this category of policies was built upon an exhaustive body of laws that had already profoundly shaped the livelihoods of all the non-white population. Therefore, we can consider apartheid as an expression of South Africa’s own settler colonialism,¹⁸ even if a set of important distinctions is due.

In the public discourse, apartheid is closely associated with the segregation of public facilities and everyday life, while the most important features, like physical removal and the destruction of entire communities, are often overlooked outside academia. Both petty and grand apartheid are features of settler colonialism: the former pertains the settler’s state of mind and the inherent fear of “racial contamination” of the pure population body they created,¹⁹ while the latter concerns the logic of replacement that’s vital to the whole settler’s enterprise. Throughout the whole 46 years of ‘official’ apartheid, the policy that shaped the lives of the non-white population the most was the bantustanization, the process of “creating minorities out of a majority”.²⁰

The aims were multiple: stripping Africans of citizenship and reallocating them to small enclaves (a kind of “administrative transfer”²¹ per Veracini’s classification system), a nominal shield from accountability for the South African authorities (since the Bantustans were nominally sovereign and independent entities), the erasure of indigenous claims to the land (since they obtained their homelands) and the fragmentation and control of the communities, useful for curbing the brewing resistance.

This process suited the needs of racial capitalism as well: stripping away citizenship and residency status meant the creation of a “foreign” and commuting workforce, easily exploitable and replaceable. While apartheid served the goals of settler colonialism by transferring the land and stripping away its people, its insistence on the exploitation of the segregated African workforce meant the employment of a police state, the emergence of indigenous resistance movements and the imposition of sanctions by the international community, both of which greatly strained the Afrikaner regime.

By the end of the ‘80s, this entailed that the process of indigenization of the settlers and dispossession of the native was in crisis, as apartheid was exposed to the world. In that context, settler colonialism was unable to supersede itself, a change was needed.

2. Changing Script: The Role of Transitional Justice

The process of gradual abolition of the apartheid regime, led by the De Klerk government, was the last resort to maintain control by the Afrikaner elite. The “Total Strategy” employed by the previous administrations had soundly failed in reviving the economy and containing the popular mass resistance,²² forcing them to choose between a controlled compromise with the banned opposition groups and the chaotic capitulation of the regime.

They chose the former. Of all the processes that characterized the transition to the new democratic order, shedding light on the criteria of the Transitional Justice bodies, of which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the better-known institution, is key to understanding the resilience of the settler colonial order. Transitional Justice (hereinafter “TJ”) is an umbrella for a variety of mechanisms tasked with dealing with “historic human rights violations and political violence in societies undergoing some form of political transition”.²³

While retributive TJ can take the form of international tribunals, entrusted with the prosecution of the biggest human rights violations, restorative TJ can be employed at different levels, from the grassroots to the top. Oftentimes, applying TJ methods means striking a difficult and precarious balance between the victims’ need for justice and society’s overall need to move on from the past.²⁴ Truth-finding commissions can be useful in exposing a buried past of human rights violations, recognizing victims’ pain and providing historical insight to society, allowing it to heal and move on.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (hereinafter “TRC”) was established in 1995 with the mandate to investigate gross human rights violations carried out between 1960 and 1994. One of the powers granted to the commission was the faculty to promulgate amnesties for politically motivated crimes, following a public confession. The ideological subtext of the TRC was a mixture of Christian notions, like the idea that truth would lead to reconciliation, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s own interpretation of restorative justice as “ubuntu”, a Zulu word that refers to the “interconnection of humanity”.²⁵

As the TRC itself was the fruit of a political compromise (with many factions within and outside the African National Congress pushing for more radical measures), its whole premise is flawed on a structural level. In the first place, restricting the analyzed period to the apartheid era ignores the decades (if not centuries) of abuses that preceded it.

Therefore, apartheid becomes a unique event, something taken outside its settler colonial context (that survives without scrutiny). In the second place, the focus on politically motivated crimes conveniently ignores the far more important structural issues, both of apartheid and settler colonialism, that shaped everyday life: displacement, racialization and impoverishment.²⁶ Notwithstanding the debate on the effective regret of those who applied for amnesty and the reconciliation between them and the victims, a more subtle but poignant aspect of the TRC can be found in its final report.

Within the pages of the volumes emerge the conception of apartheid and colonialism as different phenomena and the denial of Afrikaners as settlers, reframing them as victims of British colonialism. Park argues that such conclusions contribute to continued denial of historical truths, reinforcing the structure of oppression that was left behind by the democratic transition.²⁷

Furthermore, on a psychological level, the settler’s mentality was left untouched by this operation: by not addressing the abuses of the pre-apartheid era and by ignoring the enduring privileges, little was done to tackle the settler colonial core, that is, the legitimacy of its mission. As asserted elsewhere, TJ “can be counter-revolutionary when it silences demands for justice […] and conservative when it reinforces structures of dominion and inequality in the name of reconciliation and forgiveness”.²⁸

3. What’s Left: Memory and the Legacy of Domination

Building upon the legacy of apartheid in South Africa was always going to be a troublesome and nigh impossible job. The decades of Afrikaner segregationism, built upon centuries of settler colonialism, left the country with an 87% of white land ownership, leaving only a fraction of the poorest and most infertile territories to the rest of the oppressed population.²⁹

Given the scale of land dispossession, it was only natural that most believed, and hoped, that with the advent of the new democratic order, land restitution would follow. The reality of negotiations between the De Klerk government and the ANC, led by Nelson Mandela, proved otherwise. The “property clause” of the interim constitution recognized “acquiring, owning and disposing of property (including land) as a basic right in the new South Africa”,³⁰ preventing land confiscation and recognizing the existing balance of economic power.

The ANC initiative thus developed in a three-fold approach: land restitution, land redistribution and a land tenure reform for those who were the most precarious. The first is perhaps the most critical, as only those dispossessed after the 1913 Natives Land Act were eligible for restitution, therefore validating the centuries of previous plundering and expropriation. Due to the nature of the constitutional restraints, expropriation was rare: following a “willing buyer, willing seller” approach, land owners were endowed with a significant price-setting power, troubling the work of the commissions with exorbitant requests and lack of cooperation.³¹

Several problems greatly obstructed the restitution process: in the first place, claimants with documentary evidence had a substantial advantage over those who didn’t, proving it discriminatory towards marginalized groups who had lived as tenants or on state land. A lack of available resources, on the administrative side, and the still presence of apartheid-era bureaucrats also hindered the work of the commissions. By 2018, more than 80.000 claims were successfully processed, impacting over 2,1 million beneficiaries for a cost of over R40 billion.³²

Analyzing the logic behind such manoeuvres allows us to critically reflect on the nature of the new democratic order. On the field of legitimacy, having the State carry the costs of land reforms, instead of the landowners, was akin to “legitimizing colonial land theft”.³³ At the same time, restoring land rights and promoting development often proved to be irreconcilable, especially in the context of the neoliberal GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution) reforms.

Without enough public support, land restitution wasn’t enough to ensure the well-being of a household, leading to increased risk of poverty-induced dispossession.³⁴ What the reforms couldn’t bring back, however, were the communities that were eradicated by settler colonialism: the Group Areas Act and similar kinds of laws didn’t just evict and segregate people, they destroyed communities and entire sets of relationships. While these could survive in the memory of those who were displaced, they couldn’t be brought to life the way they were: “They didn’t want to give me my heart’s desire”,³⁵ said one of the claimants who was awarded monetary compensation, disappointed she couldn’t really obtain what apartheid had stolen from her.

Such feelings aren’t uncommon in the contemporary landscape of South Africa, where most promises of radical change were left betrayed, as the real inequalities were left in place. Memory itself became a contested ground, as an ‘official’ narrative was imposed on communities through the TRC, as well as with the erection of commemorative markers. This top-down approach, focused on an account of oppression transcended through resistance, imposes a vision of historical events that, as Marschall argues, can erase “alternative memories and inopportune victims”, resulting in alienation.³⁶

Conclusion

“Memory is a weapon. I knew deep down inside of me, in that place where laws and guns cannot reach, nor jackboots trample, that there had been no defeat. In another day, another time, we would emerge to reclaim our dignity and our land.”.³⁷ The finale of Don Mattera’s autobiographical novel points us to reflect on what became of that dream, of that idealized conception of liberation and retribution that many Africans, ‘coloureds’ and natives alike, strove to realize.

Was South Africa decolonized in name only? Was settler colonialism uprooted from the land? The answer isn’t clear-cut. The substantial civic and political gains that the new democratic order introduced for the oppressed population are hard to ignore. At the same time, as one prominent politician expelled by the ANC once said, “Political freedom without economic power means nothing. You can vote until you turn yellow, but without economic freedom, it means nothing.”.³⁸

Truthfully, the end of apartheid didn’t translate into the end of settler colonialism, but did contribute significantly to its erasure. As the definition goes, we cannot strictly declare contemporary South Africa as a realized or complete version of settler colonialism, which achieved the replacement of the native and complete sovereignty of the settlers.

Even so, several characters are still present: the settler body managed to retain most of its privileges, especially in the economic sphere, in a way that the continuation of apartheid couldn’t have sustained. It could be argued that, without those compromises, South Africa would have plunged into a bloody civil war, as settler mentality often reasons along the lines of a zero-sum game.³⁹ Nevertheless, in the eyes of the world, Afrikaners have become indigenous, as the new order washed away every crime.

But memory endures, inequality still stands (worse than during apartheid as well), and dissatisfaction grows. The legacy of settler colonialism, transformed and realized in part, is bound to be resilient without radical change, without the deconstruction of the economic order that first drove it.  

1. Veracini, L. & Verbuyst, R. (2020). “South Africa’s settler-colonial present: Khoisan revivalism and the question of indigeneity”. p.262. Social Dynamics 46(2): 259–276. ↩︎
2. Sophiatown was a suburb of Johannesburg in South Africa. Discontinued from public services and distant from the city center, it developed as a ghetto for minorities. The multicultural reality of the suburb threatened the ideas of ethnic homogeneity of the apartheid government, who ordered its destruction and resettlement of the undesired inhabitants starting from 1955. Eight years later the demolition was completed and the suburb renamed to “Triomf” (triumph, as to mock the people who resisted the displacement process), planned for the poor working-class Afrikaners. In 2006 the name was changed back to Sophiatown. ↩︎
3. As per the Gini index of the World Bank South Africa stands at 67 (latest data from 2018), the highest value in the world. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099125003072240961/pdf/P1649270b73f1f0b5093fb0e644d33bc6f1.pdf ↩︎
4. Cavanagh, E. (2017). “Settler Colonialism in South Africa: Land, labour and transformation, 1880-2015”. In Veracini, L. & Cavanagh, E. (Eds.), “The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism”. p.297. Routledge, New York and London. ↩︎
5. Wolfe, P. (1999).“Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnograph Event”. p. 163. Cassel, Orion Publishing Group. ↩︎
6.     Cavanagh, E., & Veracini, L. (2013). Editors’ statement. Settler Colonial Studies, 3(1), 1. https://doi.org/10.1080/18380743.2013.768169 ↩︎
7. Ross, R. (2017). “Settler Colonialism in South Africa, 1652-1899”. In Veracini, L. & Cavanagh, E. (Eds.), “The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism”. pp.187-88. Routledge, New York and London. ↩︎
8. Ivi, p.188. ↩︎
9.     Hitchcock, Robert K., Babchuk, Wayne A. (2017), “Genocide of Khoekhoe and San People of Southern Africa”. In Hitchcock, Robert K. (Ed), “Genocide of Indigenous Peoples”. pp.143–171. Routledge.  doi:10.4324/9780203790830-7  ↩︎
10. Ross, R. (2017). p.190. ↩︎
11. Ivi, pp.191-3. ↩︎
12. As Ross points out, given that the Cape’s white population amounted to 42.000 whites, it was a very significant amount for the times. ↩︎
13. Cavanagh, E. (2017). p.293. ↩︎
14. Ivi, pp.294-6. ↩︎
15. Union of South Africa, Report of the Native Grievances Inquiry, 1913–4, Cape Town: Government Printer, 1914, paragraph. 542. ↩︎
16. Cavanagh, E. (2017). p.292. ↩︎
17. “… Oh great God; anything but that. Oh wit baas call me Hotnot, Boesman, Geelbek (Yellow-mouth); anything but native, kaffir! Baas spare me that insult, though I am blacker than the Ace of Spades… ‘Call me anything, my baas…’” Mattera, D. (1986). “Memory is the Weapon”. African Perspectives Publishing. ↩︎
18. Park, A. S.J. (2021). “Settler Colonialism and the South African TRC: Ambivalent Denial and Democratisation Without Decolonisation”. p.2. Social & Legal Studies. 2022, Vol. 31(2) 216–237. ↩︎
19. Veracini, L. (2024). “Settler colonialism: A theoretical overview”. p.92. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.  ↩︎
20. Cavanagh, E. (2017). p.298. ↩︎
21. Veracini, L. (2024). pp.42-58. ↩︎
22. Harshe, R. (1993). “Understanding Transition towards Post-Apartheid South Africa”. p.4. Economic and Political Weekly, Sep. 18, 1993, Vol. 28, No. 38 (Sep. 18, 1993), pp.1980-1983. ↩︎
23.   Sharp, D. N. (2013). “Interrogating the peripheries: The preoccupations of fourth generation transitional justice”. p.153. Harvard Human Rights Journal, 26.  ↩︎
24.   Browne, B. C. (2023). “Transitional (in)justice and enforcing the peace on Palestine”. p.27. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.  ↩︎
25. Park, A. S.J. (2021). p.3. ↩︎
26. Ivi, p.4. ↩︎
27. Ivi, pp.17-8. ↩︎
28.   Branch, A. (2014). “The violence of peace: Ethnojustice in Northern Uganda.”. Development and Change, 45(3),   608–630. As cited in: Browne, B. C. (2023). p.36. ↩︎
29. Harshe, R. (1993). p.3.  ↩︎
30. Walker, C. (2012). “Finite Land: Challenges Institutionalising Land Restitution in South Africa, 1995–2000”. p.5. Journal of Southern African Studies, December 2012, Vol. 38, No. 4 (December 2012), pp. 809-826. ↩︎
31. Hall, R. (2004). “Land Restitution in South Africa: Rights, Development, and the Restrained State”. pp.2-8. Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, 2004, Vol. 38, No. 3 (2004), pp. 654-671. ↩︎
32. https://www.gov.za/issues/land-reform ↩︎
33. Hendricks, F. & Ntsebeza, L. (2000). “The Paradox of South Africa’s Land Reform Policy: Failed Decolonisation?” Harare: SARIPS Annual Colloquium. As cited in: Hall, R. (2004). p.8. ↩︎
34. Hall, R. (2004). p.15.  ↩︎
35. Walker, C. (2012). p.9. ↩︎
36. Marschall, S. (2010). “The Memory of Trauma and Resistance: Public Memorialization and Democracy in Post-apartheid South Africa and Beyond”. pp.13-7. Safundi, 11:4, 361-381, DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2010.511780 ↩︎
37. Mattera, D. (1986). “Memory is the Weapon”. African Perspectives Publishing. ↩︎
38. Malema: “White people are criminals”, iol news, 8 May 2011. As cited in: Walker, C. (2012). p.3. ↩︎
39. Veracini, L. (2024). p.120. ↩︎