What I saw before Mandela walked free: A witness account from the closing months of Apartheid

In 1989, in the final months before Nelson Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison, I lived in South Africa for nearly 11 months. I went in on an Ivorian passport. The apartheid state classified me as Coloured, though I am Black as charcoal. I saw the apartheid economy from the inside, and I write now because the xenophobia in today’s South Africa is being carried out by men who do not know the history of their own liberation.

I. How I got in

I travelled into South Africa in 1989 at a time when every African government, with the lone exception of Côte d’Ivoire under President Félix Houphouët-Boigny, had barred its citizens from setting foot in the country. What Côte d’Ivoire was on this continent, Margaret Thatcher’s Britain and Ronald Reagan’s America were in the wider world, the powers most determined to resist sanctions and keep trading with Pretoria. I entered on an Ivorian passport. The apartheid

Department of Home Affairs, which sorted human beings the way a clerk sorts envelopes, looked at the passport, looked at my face, and pencilled me in as Coloured.

That classification was a small bureaucratic act with very large consequences. As a Coloured man I could drink in certain bars, sleep in certain hotels, drive through certain suburbs without being stopped. The Black South African born five miles from where I stood could not. I am Black as charcoal. A friendly African state had vouched for me, and the regime still sorted me by my face, granting me Coloured mobility only because the connection made me useful.

There was nothing strange about that passport in my hands. I am an Nzema man from the far west of Ghana, and my ancestors lived partly on the other side of the frontier, in what is now Côte d’Ivoire, before the Berlin Conference of 1884 set the European partition in motion and the boundary agreements that followed hardened the line into a border. That border cut through a single people. The Nzema have always moved easily across it and acquired Ivorian papers as a matter of course. I was not borrowing another identity. I was using one history had always left open to me.

II. The Mission

I was there as the African front for a major Cape wine producer, and the same Ivorian relationship that let me enter made it possible. The plan was a 100-million-dollar bottling project, to be built in three phases, aimed at the French wine trade across Francophone West and Central Africa. South African bulk would go in, Ivorian-labelled product would come out, and the sanctions regime, built around country of origin, would never see the source. This was sanctions evasion. It was also, from the South African point of view, survival.

The French government killed it. Paris was content to let Abidjan be the African outlier on

apartheid, but not to let it host a platform built to drive French wine out of France’s own African markets. The sabotage was efficient and final.

III. How the Homelands really worked

I was hosted by the late Roger Oliphant, who lived in Mabopane, on the Pretoria side of the Bophuthatswana boundary. Roger was no minor operator. He was the biggest business tycoon in the territory, and most of the white capital moving into the Homeland was channelled through him. He was classified Coloured, and that was precisely why he was useful. White capital, expanding aggressively into the Homelands in the late 1980s, used men like Roger as the visible face of operations where white ownership was politically awkward.

I lodged at the Upper Berkeley Park Hotel in Pretoria and moved between Pretoria, Johannesburg, Cape Town and Paarl. I drank in the Hillbrow bars, the one neighbourhood in Johannesburg where the racial geography of apartheid had collapsed. And I went into the shebeens of Soweto, the unlicensed drinking houses that existed because the state would not let Black South Africans buy alcohol as whites did. They were warmer and more honest than any licensed bar in Pretoria.

I was in Johannesburg when Sandton was being built. Plots in streets that are now the most expensive on the continent were going for the equivalent of 1,000 United States dollars.

I did not buy. I was there to do a job. It tells you what apartheid South Africa was to a man with foreign currency and the right papers.

IV. The girls were in school. The boys were in the street.

This observation has stayed with me for 40 years. In 1989, in the townships and Homeland settlements I visited, the Black South African girls were in school. They wore their natural hair, not bleaching their skin, not wearing wigs. They carried themselves with the organic dignity of young women who knew who they were. They were doing the schoolwork.

The boys were not. The boys were in the streets, burning tyres, throwing stones, fighting the regime in the only theatre it had left open to them. The struggle was real. The regime was monstrous. Somebody had to fight it. But the fight consumed a generation of Black South

African men at exactly the moment their education should have been built. When liberation came, they were 30 years old with no qualifications, in a country that suddenly required them.

The girls became the nurses, the teachers, the small business owners. The boys became the unemployable. This is not a slander on Black South African manhood. It is what happens when a generation must choose between books and barricades, and chooses barricades because the regime left no choice.

V. What the Xenophobes do not know

The young Black South African man who attacks a Ghanaian shopkeeper in Soweto, or a Nigerian trader in Alexandra, does not know that Ghana hosted the African National Congress when it had no home; that Nigeria taxed itself for decades to fund the liberation movements that the Frontline States bled to bring his freedom about. The foreign African in front of him is a creditor of his liberation.

He does not know because nobody taught him. So the young man who cannot find work looks across the street at the Somali shopkeeper who can, and decides the shopkeeper is the cause of his condition. He is wrong. But his wrongness is the predictable product of an educational vacuum and an economy that was never restructured.

VI. What I propose

The voices in Lagos and Accra calling for retaliation are understandable, and wrong. Retaliation against ordinary Black South Africans would be a moral failure.

I propose something different. Withdraw. Every African working in South Africa, every African running a business there, every African professional in a South African hospital, school, mine or boardroom, should consider an organised, dignified withdrawal. Not a flight.  A return. Come home, and put the skills you built there to work in the economies that need them.

And to the extent that South African capital sits in our markets, our telecoms, our broadcasting, our retail chains, our banking and our mining, our governments should examine national ownership with clear eyes. This is not confiscation. It is the lawful, negotiated transfer of strategic infrastructure to the citizens whose markets sustain it. That capital exists here because African consumers permit it. That permission is not unconditional.

Let those who do not know their history learn it the hard way. Let them see what their country looks like when the African professionals withdraw their labour and their capital, and whether the white minority that engineered apartheid will fill the gap.

This is not retaliation. It is the withdrawal of a gift that was never acknowledged. The South Africa of 2026 is not the country I was sent into in 1989, but the architecture of who owns what has changed less than the flags suggest. The xenophobia is the symptom, not the disease. The disease is older, deeper, and not the work of Ghanaians or Nigerians. We should stop trying to cure it for them.

BY NANA ANNOR AMIHERE II

The writer is a traditional ruler