I'm not really disagreeing. I think your points are well made. On a musical note, one of the things I remember is that Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" caused a real big stir down in the township schools. It might even have been banned at one point. Does anyone else remember this?
Good timing Geoff...
Daily Chronicle
for 05/02
a brief music history
05/02/1980
Pink Floyd's smash hit, 'Another Brick in the Wall', was banned in South Africa as it was felt it might encourage boycotts at black schools. But the overreaction of the Nationalist government to a Pink Floyd song, while being indicative of the institutionalization of absolute paranoia engendered by apartheid, didn't really have any sort of ripple effect. Besides, the townships schools had been in pretty continuous open revolt since 1976. The students began those protests largely because of the influence of Biko & his "Black Consciousness" movement, which in 1977 led to him being arrested, and ultimately beaten to death in jail. Which led to more protests.
The other half of this is that when Biko died and the government acted like it was no big deal, that was also part of the tipping point. Biko had been nominated (although not a finalist) for the Nobel peace prize, and the reaction of many in the international diplomacy community, and in particular throughout the British Commonwealth, was that this was finally the sort of thing that couldn't be glossed over. Every country, inclulding our own on many occasions, a has had rioting that led to massacres (for instance, this is less than 5 years after Wounded Knee), but arresting a guy on the Nobel short list & beating him to death in his cell, well that means you can't really call yourself a civilized country any more.
One of the many things I still hate Reagan for is that when Carter left he was quite a bit more than halfway through getting Mandela out of jail & getting the South Africans out of Namibia (which they had been illlegally occupying in much the same way Israel had no legal mandate for it's occuppied territories), but as soon as Reagan came into the Oval Office he reversed everything and began selling more arms to So. Africa, his excuse being that there were 500 Cubans in Angola. He also began arming Jonas Savimbi, who had convinced the Republicans that he was a pro-democracy Angolan freedoom fighter (but who had convinced nearly every other Western diplomat who ever met him that he might just be the Devil incarnate. Literally!) So thanks to Reagan, Namibia suffered under So. African rule for an extra decade, Angola plunged into a bloody civil war from which to this day it still hasn't recovered (Savimbi reneged on every peace deal he ever signed & finally died in combat in 2002), and the anit-apartheid movement was set back by about a decade as well.
Hope he & Savimbi are enjoying their stay in hell.
