Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Winter 2004
Advocating a philosophy of constructive engagement, Pifer hired David R. Hood, a lawyer and former dean of the University of Hawaii law school, to direct the Commonwealth Program and revitalize the Corporation’s South Africa projects, with an emphasis on funding challenges to apartheid in the courts. The Corporation’s return to South Africa was a response to and coincided with the heating up of guerilla war tactics waged against the South African government by the African National Congress (ANC) and an increase in bannings, arrests and jailings of anti-apartheid activists. During this period of fervent anti-apartheid struggle and militant government repression, Winnie Mandela, Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko headed a growing list of internationally known black South Africans who symbolized the struggle for freedom.
On June 16, 1976, demonstrations in the black townships collectively known as Soweto gave a new face to the resistance against apartheid—the face of children. Thousands of high school students took to the streets to protest compulsory use of Afrikaans in the schools. Police opened fire on the students killing thirteen-year-old Hector Petersen and at least three others. The uprising that followed spread to other parts of the country leaving over 1,000 people dead, most of them killed by police.
In response to increasingly brutal government repression, Carnegie Corporation, along with the Ford Foundation, supported the formation of “public interest law” projects that challenged apartheid policies in the courts through The Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, and the Legal Resources Centre, which opened offices in several regions of South Africa.
The dedicated activist lawyers working for these projects found loopholes in the dense, though not seamless design of apartheid laws governing issues of housing and residence. They challenged bannings and arrests and found ways to score victories for South Africans for whom the law had been an enemy. Founded in the turbulent era of anti-apartheid activism, these organizations survived to have a lasting impact on South African society.
Interviewed in the Carnegie Corporation Oral History Report, Voices from South Africa, Geoffrey Budlender, co-founder and currently national director of the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) says, “The LRCs played a significant role indirectly in South Africa becoming a democracy under law with a Bill of Rights. At a time of high repression, we were saying, ‘let’s go to court,’ and that made a lasting contribution that can’t be measured. It was very important that Ford and Carnegie took the risk of supporting these projects.”
And Arthur Chaskalson, chief justice of the Consitutional Court of South Africa who was also LRC’s first director concluded, “These programs had a very profound impact on how law could be used to change society. They gave people the opportunity to stand up and claim their rights.”
The Second Poverty Study
In 1982, the Corporation initiated another major study of
poverty in South Africa, which was known as the Second Carnegie Inquiry
into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa. Says David Hood, “The
second poverty commission was a way to close the books on the first poverty
study. The intention was to create a document that revealed what life
under apartheid really meant.” Initiated during the presidency of
Alan Pifer, the second poverty study was carried out during the tenure
of his successor, David Hamburg, who served as president from 1982 to
1997. Fifty years had passed since the Poor White Study and most black
South Africans endured a level of poverty much more acute than that suffered
by the Afrikaners whose conditions had been examined earlier.