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This conclusion begins with a vignette of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990. It then explores some aspects of the anti-apartheid movement that crested during the late 1980s, lingering on campaigns in Great Britain, Sweden, and the United States. The road between the postapartheid and postcolonial moments, however, was neither straight nor straightforward. The conclusion explicates some of the differences between the apartheid question in the 1980s and 1960s, and then reviews Gordian Knot’s central findings and restates its main arguments.

South Africa's unique location helped shape the distinct character of Islam there, principally through contact with Asia, Egypt, Iran, and the Arabian Peninsula, allowing beleaguered South African Muslims to look beyond their borders for support. As early as 1626, Shaykh Yusuf, a Sufi saint brought from Indonesia by the Dutch East Indian Company, founded an active Muslim community. Later, Muslims from India came to Natal and the Transvaal, and differences between the communities remained pronounced over such issues as political activism, the place of women, and the use of Arabic. In recent times, Imam Abdullah Haron emerged as a martyr following his death at the hands of police in 1969. Extremist groups like Achmat Cassien's Qiblah and People Against Gangsters and Drugs (PAGAD) resorted to terrorism under the guise of Islam. Muslim numbers remain among the lowest in any country in Africa, and the historic split between ancients and moderns, conservatives and progressives, remains undiminished.

This introduction frames the major themes of this book. It begins with a vignette from the Bandung conference that highlights apartheid’s importance to the decolonization project. The introduction then explains the book’s conceptual framework and outlines the motives that drove the major players, before concluding with two arguments relevant to African and American international historians: namely that Africa’s independence fundamentally remade world affairs and America’s approach toward global governance. The book is a history of the postcolonial nation-state—its arrival in the Black Atlantic and impact on the rest of the international community—that uses the debate about South Africa as a political and intellectual microcosm.

This chapter is about the origins of the global apartheid debate. It opens with a section about Harold Macmillan’s famous 1960 ‘Wind of Change’ speech in Cape Town—in which the British Prime Minister celebrated the arrival of African nationalism and warned that Afrikaner leaders needed to abandon apartheid—and then shifts attention to the history of apartheid and African nationalism in South Africa. The first section explains the country’s place in the British empire, the intellectual rationale of ‘separate development,’ and the political infighting between apartheid pragmatists and apartheid theorists before 1960. The second section highlights the nonwhite community’s efforts to overcome racial discrimination in South Africa, lingering on the tensions between cosmopolitan liberalism—embodied by the African National Congress (ANC)—and African nationalism of Anton Lembede and later Robert Sobukwe. These two parallel stories came together only one month after Macmillan’s visit to South Africa in the form of the Sharpeville Massacre.

This chapter examines the contours of the apartheid debate during the early 1960s. It begins with an overview of the tensions between the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), and then explains how both organizations fared in exile after the Sharpeville Massacre. The PAC’s message resonated in 1960 as African nationalists everywhere embraced the anti-apartheid issue—especially at the U.N. General Assembly where the newly formed African Group spearheaded a sanctions campaign against South Africa. Pretoria took this threat seriously. Fearful of revolution at home and divestment abroad, South Africa’s white leaders clamped down on critics and initiated a campaign of political suasion in Washington and London. When placed alongside each other, these duelling efforts hinted at two models of nationhood—specifically racial equality’s conceptual relationship to economic development and territorial autonomy—as well as two different visions of where power was located in the “international community.”

Divided into three sections, this chapter explains how the apartheid debate changed during the late 1960s. The first section opens by looking at the murder of South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, and explains how new Prime Minister John Vorster implemented his “outward policy” of building economic relations with moderate African leaders. The second section turns attention to the Richard Nixon administration and highlights the way his White House eliminated African expectations at the United Nations. The third section then shifts to the African National Congress and unpacks how it rehabilitated its role as the voice of nonwhite South Africa through diplomacy in the Third World and among nongovernmental organizations in Europe and the United States. These three changes reflected the new dynamics of the 1970s—an era marked by individualistic cynicism rather than postcolonial optimism—and pointed toward a fundamentally different type of anti-apartheid movement.

Chapter Three considers the transition from segregation to apartheid, outlining the ways in which an obsessive focus on either “black” or “white peril” maybe read as a symptom of a melancholy inability to imagine interracial love. Beginning with the work of Sol Plaatje, a writer who is able to imagine the possibility of harmonious interracial relationships, the chapter examines his The Mote and the Beam as a transnational “sex tract” that explores the dilemmas around interracial sex. After an examination of some of the work of Sarah Gertrude Millin, the chapter examines the differences between the American and British/South African editions of Daphne Rooke’s novel, Mittee. It is argued that, despite an inclination at times to draw on racist stereotypes, Rooke is the only major white writer of the apartheid era to draw attention to intraracial, rather than interracial, sexual violence.

Chapter Four focuses on ways in which black writers in the apartheid years rescripted previously white-authored narratives about rape. Arthur Maimane’s Victims is pivotal here as he mimics and destabilises the idea that “natives have a rape-utation”. The chapter argues that the novel engages with the fear at the heart of classic “black peril” phenomena, the anxiety over white women’s bodies and particularly black authorship about white women’s bodies. The chapter then considers the way in which black authors, such as Lauretta Ngcobo and Farida Karodia, have rewritten “white peril” narratives, previously the domain of white women writers such as Schreiner, Bancroft and Millin. The chapter concludes with examination of intraracial rape in short stories of the late apartheid era, including Njabulo Ndebele’s Fools, Ngcina Mhlope’s “Nokulunga’s Wedding” and Baleka Kgositsile’s “In the Night”.

Chapter Five scrutinises the relevant literature of the post-apartheid transition and beyond - a context where gender rights are entrenched in law, but where sexual violence remains a persistent hangover from a violent, racially divided and patriarchal past. Starting with an analysis of J. M. Coetzee’s famous novel, Disgrace, I demonstrate the ways in which this text brings disturbingly into focus a history of representation in which rape and issues of race are dangerously enmeshed. The chapter also examines the theme of unspeakable violation in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit and Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story, both of which engage with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The chapter also considers the ways in the works of Mark Behr and K. Sello Duiker challenge the myths that rape only happens to women and that male rape is homosexual. The chapter concludes with discussion of Lara Foot-Newton’s drama about the horrific rape of a baby, Tshepang.

Viewed from Pretoria, Kennedy looked to be apartheid’s worst enemy. Not only was the young American president strengthening US relations with black Africa both economically and morally, but he also took a stand against minority rule in southern Africa and in support of civil rights for African Americans in the United States. In reality, the specter of the New Frontier in Africa turned out not to be as bad as the South African government initially feared. Kennedy’s opposition to apartheid remained largely rhetorical as he rationalized that taking a tough line against the South African government would not convince it to change its racial policies but would only serve to militarize the conflict between the white minority and African majority. As a result, Kennedy refrained from taking stern action against Pretoria and did not send aid to the African National Congress as he had done for the Angolan nationalist movement.

In the Cape, criticism from educated visitors, settlers, and missionaries created pressures which were instrumental in bringing about the emancipation of slaves in spite of the lack of any serious locally-based abolitionism movement. Classical ideas played an important part in the debate, but they were deployed by both sides. The jurists were crucial to the discussion which was integrated into wider debates on Roman and Dutch Law. Issues of morality and sexuality formed a crux around which issues of religion were integrated into the debate. Nevertheless, local political circumstances were not favourable for abolition and it was only with the influence of enlightened British government in the settled areas of South Africa that the debate came to a forcible settlement. Nevertheless, local opposition to abolitionism may be seen as establishing a prehistory for the Apartheid regime.