Kansas and America share important history with apartheid and the nation of South Africa

Yahoo

28-05-2025

Former senator Nancy Kassebaum served as chairwoman of the Senate Subcommittee on African Affairs and helped develop sanctions against the apartheid regime of South Africa. (Thad Allton for Kansas Reflector)
During my 1980s college years, our student group urged the university to divest from any South African interests. Many campuses nationwide saw students protesting that country's legalized system of racial oppression, apartheid.
In that era, roughly 30 years from the civil rights movement, the fight against apartheid had gained traction in politics and in popular culture. The 1985 protest song 'Sun City' played on a loop on video music shows, while President Reagan seemingly coddled the regime.
Most people, however, may have forgotten the role of Kansas and the United States in this winding human rights saga.
First, some perspective. White South Africans represent 7 percent of the population but own 72 percent of the land. Black South Africans represent 81 percent of the population but own 4 percent of the land.
White South Africans are not oppressed, though the late comedian Robin Williams once rhetorically asked the white minority there: 'Does the name Custer mean anything to you?'
Apartheid, which means 'apartness,' mirrored American racial segregation. A person's race determined where people could live, where they could work, and whom they could marry.
This month, President Trump ambushed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa during a White House meeting, peddling a false narrative of 'white genocide' there. Trump, while aggressively deporting immigrants of color, recently welcomed 59 white South Africans who he claimed were fleeing oppression. If there is a genocide, why are only 59 people trying to escape it?
It's important to note that truth matters little to this president. What is important is the continued building of a false, white grievance narrative for his base. He's reassuring them that he's for them. Always.
The more news media press him about this, the deeper and wider his base's roots of loyalty strengthen and spread.
Nevertheless, Kansas and America had an interesting connection with South Africa, apartheid, and with the jailing and eventual release of Nelson Mandela, who would eventually rule the nation that imprisoned him.
Former U.S. Sen. Nancy Kassabaum, then chairwoman of the Senate Subcommittee on African Affairs, helped develop sanctions against the apartheid regime.
President Regan vetoed the legislation, but Congress overrode his veto. The sanctions, along with international pressure, helped dismantle that system.
A Kansan stood watch over apartheid on its deathbed.
President Clinton dispatched Ronald Walters, the noted political science expert and co-architect of the historic Dockum sit-in, to South Africa to monitor elections that would spell the end of apartheid.
Walters, also an architect of the Congressional Black Caucus, knew Mandela, who phoned the Walters' home in 2010 after Walters died.
Another Kansan, Gretchen Eick, now a retired professor of history and award-winning author, lobbied against apartheid for 30 years and was part of the final 1986 passage of comprehensive sanctions over Reagan's veto.
'A stunning experience!' Eick wrote via email.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, who researched apartheid as a Harvard student in the 1980s, told The Wichita Eagle years ago that he'd grown interested in South Africa because its issues had reached that campus. Kobach said then that he didn't oppose sanctions, but he thought disinvestment removed American companies from fight. Those companies, he said, could form a powerful anti-apartheid bloc.
He reportedly wrote his senior thesis at Harvard about how South African businesses had become politicized. Kobach based that report, for which he won a campus award, on research conducted during a 1987 visit there.
Harvard professor Samuel Huntington advised Kobach's work, and reportedly believed South Africa should pursue a 'policy of simultaneous reform and repression,' said a review in The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper.
Black South Africans faced brutal repression, and the U.S., under President Kennedy, helped imprison Mandela.
NPR, in a 2016 interview with a former CIA official, reported Mandela's 1962 capture happened because of a U.S. tip to South African officials. That capture and arrest led to Mandela's nearly 28-year imprisonment.
According to Time magazine, when the South African government released Mandela in 1990, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution quoted a 'senior CIA operative' regarding Mandela's capture.
Within hours of Mandela's arrest, operative Paul Eckel said: 'We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They have picked him up. It is one of our greatest coups.'
Our country played dual roles in Mandela's life.
It delivered him to his captors but also lobbied South Africa not to hang him for treason and later applied political and economic pressure to end apartheid.
And our 'Free State,' played a small role in Mandela's and in that nation's liberation.
Mark McCormick is the former executive director of The Kansas African American Museum, a member of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission and former deputy executive director at the ACLU of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.