5 - US foreign policy toward South Africa

Summary

The good relations which so happily exist between our two countries are a source of the greatest satisfaction and encouragement to me, and I assure you that the traditional ties of friendship and understanding between us shall be strengthened to our mutual benefit.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a statement to the South African Ambassador, November 15, 1954.

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of vnce in the world today — my own government … Five years ago [the late John F. Kennedy] said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, this is the role our nation has taken.

Martin Luther King, Jr., April 1967.

The struggle is my life. I will continue fighting for freedom until the end of my days.

Nelson Mandela, June 26, 1961.

Introduction

No other country within the broad framework of US foreign policy toward Africa has generated as much popular discussion and emotional debate among the public as South Africa. Embracing a political system known as “apartheid” in which minority white ethnic groups comprising roughly 15 percent of the population have denied political franchise to a largely black majority comprising 73 percent of the population (Asians and people of mixed race comprise the remainder), South Africa became the target of a growing anti-apartheid movement increasingly prone to draw parallels between the legitimacy of the struggle by South African blacks and the US civil rights movement of the 1960s.