Ending Apartheid
The struggle to end Apartheid in South Africa was many things: an underground political movement, an international exercise in public relations, and a conventional armed struggle with tanks and fighter planes. In this game, you play the ANC, and you must bring multi-racial democracy to South Africa. You must also help to end the civil wars raging on South Africa’s borders by getting the South African Defense Force to pull out of these conflicts. You have to do all of this while keeping your activists alive and out of prison. Good luck!
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I had a marginal victory because I won all the battles, but was ran out of intelligence and was having a slow time with negotiations. I had global and domestic support, but I lost the peace-activists in the last two moves due to assassinations or something.
Played this again and recorded it this time - I really like how this one has a lot of challenging decisions, the consequences of which you have to balance against each other. Choosing to keep support up by spending intelligence is a hard decision, and I like that there's a constant threat, and a limited ability to defend against it once the USSR falls. Watching a "U" change to a "S" has never felt so heavy! I also really enjoyed looking up all the terms, and that the game is teaching me about the relationships between all the different interests, which is what gameplay does best. It's fun untangling what you're communicating about the different groups given their response to events that occur. Big lesson this go around: If you don't have activist support, you simply can't even think about entering into formal negotiations, domestic support alone won't cut it... This is definitely one of my favorites of these card-like games.
Oh my gosh! Thanks so much for making this video! It was really fun to hear your commentary. Thanks for being funny rather than mean about some of the game's quirkier elements. Your point on the Operation Savanah popping up after it becomes useless is well taken. Thanks again!
My pleasure! I know it can be useful to see how people play the game in practice.. Oh and regarding Operation Savanah - it occurs to me that another way to address this is by giving the SADF one more square as their homebase which is not controllable by the player (like the last square in the new Ukraine / Russia game), so they could never be completely extinguished. With that kind of a change, then those Operation Savanah cards would remain relevant, and there would continue to be a need for weapons later on in the game.. Of course it's possible that might be out of alignment with the meta-narrative here.. Was it possible for the ANC to conquer the SADF once and for all? Or did it remain a persistent threat up until end?
Well, it was really the Cubans who defeated the SADF in Angola with the help of US oil companies. Cuban and Angolan forces defeated the SADF at the battle of Quito Cuanavale, which is also called the Stalingrad of Africa. The Angolan Civil War deserves its own game. Anyway, this was in 1988 and secret talks between the ANC and the South African government were fairly far along. The arms embargo was also starting to hurt the SADF's combat effectiveness, especially in the air where the South African Airforce had lost air superiority to Cuban MiG 21s. Strikes and civil unrest back in South Africa also tied down South African troops that could have intervened in various border conflicts. Basically, the SADF ran out of money, men, and equipment. After Quito Cuanavale, South Africa's government decided to start pulling out of Angola and Namibia.
Could the SADF have invaded neighboring countries after this point? In theory, yes. The SADF remained a highly effective and professional force. However, South African society was tired of decades of war by this point.
At the end of the day, Mandela pulled off nifty trick: in ending Apartheid and the border wars, he made South Africa the economic capital of Southern Africa. South African businessmen ranged across the continent setting up mining ventures just in time to sell minerals to an emerging China. South Africa also became an important force in ending devastating conflicts such as the two Congolese civil wars. A desegregated SANDF often forms the backbone of peace keeping missions across the continent (civil war is bad for business). Today, south African troops can be found as far afield as Sudan.
Cuba won the battle, South Africa won the future.
Damn... Thanks for that context, pretty fascinating and inspiring stuff! Any films you recommend on this topic?
If you only watch one film, Catch a Fire gives you a pretty good sense of the ANC and its struggles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_a_Fire_(film)
This is why you need to win all your battles before the USSR falls, that's what I learned. Once you do that, all the cards involving battles can't hurt you and you don't have to worry about scrambling for weapons.
Yup. By the end of the 1980s, the SADF's intervention in the Angolan civil war was becoming a major drain on the South African economy. It was becoming difficult for SA to fight a conventional war far from its borders and maintain control at home. The game attempts to show how this hybrid conflict really helped end Apartheid. At the same time, the fact that the ANC was effectively at war with South Africa, and aligned with communists, probably hurt the ANC's ability to win over moderates in South Africa. You have to strike a balance.
Damn, I needed to make concessions in order to fend off a political foe, but I hadn't yet purged my activist leaders of extremists and replaced them with moderates, and now it's too late because the USSR was overthrown so I no longer could get the intelligence I would need to do so. Meanwhile I'm not on speaking terms with my one moderate activist after doing too many arms trades. So now we don't get free elections. Damn't Gorbachev, couldn't you just have kept things together a little while longer?
We tend to think that there was a certain amount of inevitability to the end of white rule in South Africa. However, there were LOTS of things working against the ANC. For instance, if the Rwandan genocide and the civil wars in the Congo had happened earlier in the 1990s, I am not sure white South Africans would have agreed to free, multi racial elections. There was also a real possibility that South Africa would break up into several states due to the huge diversity within South Africa. Despite all this, Nelson Mandel got the job done, and South Africa is a unified, democratic country.
Great analysis, love that you're making games infused with this much meaning.