Paul Eccles Blog

In a previous post I wrote about how many people died at the hands of the SADF in the various dirty wars it fought through Southern Africa, and the number is shocking – millions! Note that these are estimates of excess deaths, not direct combat deaths, but still, the number is shocking. The level of destruction is a lot higher than most people realise.

TLDR – from 1950 to 1990 about 6 million people died prematurely in South Africa!

Now we try to estimate the deaths within South Africa itself. Firstly let’s note that there were a lot of direct deaths, for example the amount killed in the Soweto uprising itself is estimated by some to range up to 700 to 850! The police simply walked around shooting live bullets at children at random. We can try add together all the deaths at the hands of security forces and death squads throughout the country over the whole period, but it will be quite impossible, this is an exercise left to the reader, but just glancing at this partial list of notorious massacres like Sharpeville, Langa, and Bisho gives one an idea of the extent of the oppression.

Now besides the outright murders, we can try to count the number of excess deaths within South Africa. I was inspired to try do this from an important study by the Indian economist Amyarta Sen where he compared the outcomes of China and India, which started at remarkably similar levels of development in the years when they attained independence (1948 and 1949). He notes that while China suffered a major famine in the 1960’s which killed between 17 and 30 million people, while India suffered no such famine, the differences in death rate, infant mortality and life expectancy were such that he estimates India has about 4 million excess deaths per year so that it would have, by now far exceeded the death toll of the Chinese famine.  “India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame”. Indeed at a rate of 4 million per year, over 60 years, 240 million people have died prematurely in China.

Now let us compare the statistics for South Africa, with India and China. We see that South Africa lags behind both quite considerably. This is despite South Africa having a huge advantage in wealth for much of its history. The shameful decline in life expectancy in the 1990’s due to the AIDS epidemic is extremely visible on this graph. We have only now recovered the life expectancy we achieved in 1990.

With this relative level of wealth, we ought to have had much better outcomes. As you can see on the charts above China managed to achieve a much bigger jump in life expectancy, despite being much poorer than South Africa, about as poor as India.

In fact one province in India, which is one of the poorest, Kerala, which has been governed in a socialist manner, has also achieved a similar growth in life expectancy, as well as remarkable achievements in education and human development. Once again showing that it’s about government policy.

So now we come to the central question in this essay, which is how many people did Apartheid kill? This calculation is fairly rough but gives a good estimate I think of the amount. The annualised death rate of South Africans between 1950 and 1990 stayed fairly constant at approximately 300k deaths per year. Meanwhile the population grew from about 13 million to about 40 million in the same period. The mean population during this time was 21.4 million people. This obviously shows that the death rate per 1000 people did fall during this time.

Now I was going to use separate statistics for black and white death rates, but since black people are a huge majority in South Africa, and the death rate for white people stayed quite low, it’s a good approximation to simply use the crude death rate for the period.

But extrapolating from the average death rate in China, which from from the late 1960s was about 7 per 1000 people, that means that if South Africa had the same death rate, every year 7/1000 * 21.4 million = approx 150 000 people should have died. Hence about 150 000 excess deaths per year. Multiplying that by 40 years from 1950-1990 and one comes to a figure of 6 million. Hence about 6 million people died early deaths due to Apartheid neglect.

These are just statistics though. They cannot quite convey the suffering, the many brutal human stories which occurred during this time, the forced evictions, the humiliation, the life under unbearable poverty. It’s also only restricted to the period 1950-1990, when really this is something which has been happening for over 350 years.

Just to give one story, let me relate a story of the forced evictions in Bagopa north of Ventersdorp. The full story is here: https://twitter.com/SizweLo/status/1696787007542829504

Taking advantage of the corruption of their local leader, Jacob More, the government decided to expel the population. Various tactics were employed including bulldozing schools and shops, and the local clinic, destroying water pumps and cutting the bus service to Ventersdorp and pensions of elderly. Giving in to this pressure and bullying tactics,170 families moved and were stripped of their land, citizenship, and source of income, and all value their land and birthplace held. The remaining families were issued a removal order and told to move by 24 November 24, 1983.

The government paused the removal after there was a vigil including by white people. However in 1984, they cordoned off the area, put leaders in handcuffs, and people in trucks, shipping them 200km away. Meanwhile, local White farmers were allowed into Magopa to take advantage of the situation. They bought cows at bargain prices as the panicked residents were loaded onto trucks, fearing that if they did not sell their cattle, they would be stolen in their absence.

This is the terrible kind of story which has happened countless times in South Africa’s history. Brutal exportation of land, destruction of communities. The human cost to all this is incalculable. And we are still living with the legacy of these actions today, they were never undone.

We owe the people of South Africa restitution: the land needs to be reformed, communities need to be re-empowered, in short the state should give a crap about ordinary South Africans. It can be done, there are loads of examples around the world that show this. It’s up to all of us to ensure that this happens, only through a mass movement can we make the kind of changes which will uplift South Africa.