Each 18 July, the global Red Cross and Red Crescent movement—the world’s largest humanitarian network, with more than 80 million members—commemorates Nelson Mandela’s birthday. On this day, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the guardian of the Geneva Conventions and a provider of aid in armed conflicts around the world, reiterates that Mandela ‘always spoke about the importance’ of its detention work and expressed gratitude for its prison visits.Footnote 1 Repeated from the Genevan headquarters to African field offices and amplified across vast social media channels, such claims turn Mandela into a powerful testimonial for the ICRC.Footnote 2 Jacques Moreillon, a leading ICRC delegate in 1970s South Africa, reinforced this image by claiming that ‘no outside actor came close to the ICRC’ in pressing for improvements in Apartheid prisons.Footnote 3 By appropriating Mandela’s moral authority—also through its implicit association with the conditions enabling his eventual release—the self-proclaimed ‘neutral’ organization positions itself as uniquely effective, unlike the ‘political’ United Nations (UN) or human rights NGOs. In doing so, the ICRC projects itself as a uniquely global actor with unrivalled access to one of the twentieth century’s most notorious detention archipelagos.
Mandela’s own expressions of gratitude, however, are best read against the post-release reinvention of his political image, as Western political and media actors reframed his earlier liberationist radicalism into a universalist, human rights-centred iconography in the post-Cold War transition from Apartheid—a shift he actively embraced.Footnote 4 While UN bodies and many other institutions have likewise laid claim to Mandela’s legacy—most prominently by renaming the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners the ‘Nelson Mandela Rules’,Footnote 5 the ICRC’s appropriation is especially consequential. In essence, Mandela’s depoliticized, centrist imagery is used to project the organization’s self-image of universality into a post-colonial order and to assert its distinctiveness over rivalling actors. His legacy is framed as central to the Red Cross’s universalist claims, mobilized in response to global humanitarian debates over race, positionality, and Whiteness that resurfaced after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.Footnote 6 However carefully staged, this projection of neutralist universality sits uneasily alongside the origins of its first prison visits in 1960s South Africa, a history that remains central to its politics of humanitarian memory today.
Using newly discovered multilingual archival materials from African national liberation movements (NLMs), anti-Apartheid repositories, the Apartheid state, and the Red Cross itself,Footnote 7 I show how critics widely perceived the ICRC and Pretoria as acting in concert, both invested in shielding White minority rule from external scrutiny.Footnote 8 Rather than driving reform, the ICRC’s prison visits in the 1960s offered a useful humanitarian façade behind which Apartheid repression could persist. Building on a new historiography that presents critical approaches to the history of humanitarian organizations in the (post-)colonial period,Footnote 9 my reading thus departs from Andrew Thompson’s claim—based on a much narrower, predominantly ICRC-centred archival base and echoed by observers close to the organization—that the post-1945 ICRC ‘led the way in holding late-colonial … states to account for their treatment of political detainees’.Footnote 10 In reality, Pretoria used limited, tightly controlled ICRC inspections not to improve conditions but to deflect UN criticisms and to rehabilitate its damaged credibility after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, instrumentalizing the Red Cross’s reputation to reassure Western elites, especially in the United States, France, and the UK.Footnote 11
Through carefully managed inspections, Apartheid authorities turned the Red Cross visits into useful instruments internationally for concealing their brutality. What made this effective was not only the regime’s staging but also the ICRC’s own refusal to challenge it, let alone issue public criticism,Footnote 12 citing a rigid interpretation of its fundamental principles of neutrality, universality, and impartiality—an approach that was also critiqued internally by other ICRC officials. As in other (settler) colonial contexts across Africa and Asia,Footnote 13 the first Red Cross inspectors largely accommodated the colonial state’s demands, whitewashing its record of brutality and dismissing African detainees’ own testimonies and legal claims. While now remembered with pride by the Red Cross, these missions were at the time widely condemned—especially by African prisoners, exiled activists, and their post-colonial allies, echoing an older body of scholarship that accentuates aid recipients as fundamental critics of global humanitarianism,Footnote 14 who characterized these interventions as serving the regime’s—and the organization’s—own priorities more than mitigating the suffering of African victims.
As a consequence, many detainees of colour at first perceived little difference between the White visitors from Geneva and their Afrikaner captors, pointing to their co-constitutive role in upholding a system of racial domination and to broader formations of White solidarity that formatted these encounters. That perception hints at what I describe as the organization’s Whiteness: an institutional habitus of humanitarian practice rooted in a colonial experience that centred White inspectors as neutral, impartial, and authoritative, promoted reciprocal protections and solidarities across European actors (English, Afrikaner, Swiss, German, etc.), and made racial hierarchy more tolerable under the guise of humanitarianism.Footnote 15 This conceptualization remains attentive to historical contingencies and other structuring forces, including the impact of legal constraints, and does not preclude intra-European tensions—see, for instance, British–Afrikaner and Catholic–Protestant antagonisms. By operating within parameters set by Pretoria, the ICRC allowed White supremacy to appear more compatible with global humanitarian norms. Consequently, anti-Apartheid activists condemned this tacit support of minority rule, pointing in particular to the ICRC’s refusal to recognize captured African National Congress (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) combatants as prisoners of war (POWs), whom its inspectors instead labelled as criminals—a legal orthodoxy that would persist deep into the 1970s if not until Apartheid’s collapse.Footnote 16
Reconsidering the Red Cross’s role as one of the world’s most prominent humanitarian organizations during the period of decolonization challenges both a scholarship and institutional memory that portrays it as a leading force in humanizing late-colonial (counter-)insurgencies—and instead points to a record even more compromised than historians of global humanitarianism have thus far assumed. It also highlights how the Apartheid state sought to manage the potential threat of international law not only through human rights but also by means of humanitarian law, with Red Cross inspections acting as an important instrument of legitimation. While the human rights history of Apartheid is well documented, its encounter with humanitarian law and the world’s principal prison inspector in ‘armed conflict’,Footnote 17 as ANC and SWAPO (South West Africa People’s Organisation) legal advisors preferred to classify their armed struggles for self-determination, has been largely overlooked, obscuring how this field of law became another important site through which Apartheid and its critics battled for international legitimacy.Footnote 18
Afrikaner leaders, contrary to the common assumption that they saw no legitimacy to be gained in cooperating with international organizations, welcomed the first prison visits of the ICRC and tried to learn from other colonial regimes how they should be staged.Footnote 19 They required advance notice, miniscule delegations, and denied access to interrogation centres where torture was routine.Footnote 20 By the 1980s, South African officials internally acknowledged that ICRC access was never a right but always a discretionary privilege, useful above all to block more critical Afro-Asian UN and human rights experts from gaining entry.Footnote 21 In this way, Pretoria turned so-called neutral and impartial humanitarian inspections into a political asset, sanitizing Apartheid’s image and deflecting Afro-Asian criticisms on the global stage.
Recent scholarship has traced the roles of international and humanitarian organizations in Africa’s wars of decolonization,Footnote 22 but newly available archives from Southern Africa—especially ANC papers, anti-Apartheid records, expanded ICRC files,Footnote 23 and Apartheid records once thought lost—push both the empirical record and its global-historical implications much further. Read alongside materials in French, Afrikaans, Swiss-German, and English and through a global-comparative lens, these materials reveal how an internally divided Pretoria sought to choreograph external scrutiny, how divisions within the ICRC exposed deeper institutional fractures, and how African prisoners and their (socialist) advocates reinterpreted inspections in ways that unsettled prevailing legal-humanitarian practices globally. They also shed new light on Switzerland’s colonial entanglements as a self-declared non-colonial power in a decolonizing global order,Footnote 24 showing how its officials worked in concert with late colonial regimes to shield Apartheid through tightly controlled inspections and behind-the-scenes coordination.Footnote 25 Unlike many existing studies of Algeria,Footnote 26 Kenya,Footnote 27 Indonesia,Footnote 28 and other decolonization conflicts—which privilege colonial and/or international perspectives and sources across longer temporalities, this article works across all three sides while narrowing in on the moment of inception, when the very terms of inspection were first negotiated, illustrating how humanitarian practices changed through highly contentious interactions and subsequently adapted in a global context.
The significance of this story extends far beyond Apartheid or even the Red Cross itself. The article illustrates how international and humanitarian organizations operate under asymmetrical White power and risk complicity—and later develop selective institutional memory regimes of this. To be sure, the ICRC is hardly alone in this,Footnote 29 but its authority as the world’s guardian of the Geneva Conventions makes it a particularly revealing case. Its repeated appropriation of Mandela’s legacy exemplifies a wider global pattern: of how international organizations claim proximity to icons of justice while circumscribing their radicalism to fit their own institutional doctrines (in this case: universality, Red Cross neutrality, impartiality). Revisiting the ICRC’s early prison visits under Apartheid is therefore not only about recovering a neglected episode in South African and global history, but about interrogating how humanitarian and international legitimacy is constructed, as well as how complicity is rationalized and memorialized afterwards in a global context.
The Red Cross and Africa’s racial order
By the early 1960s, the South African government had established a formidable system of racial terror. In the wake of the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, Pretoria declared a sweeping state of emergency, banned the ANC and PAC, and authorized the indefinite detention of prominent anti-Apartheid figures such as PAC leader Robert Sobukwe.Footnote 30 These repressive measures coincided with a broader global reconfiguration of power, as sixteen newly independent African states entered the UN, embedding a new legal-political sensibility that conceptualized White minority rule as illegitimate.Footnote 31 Empowered by this shift, the now Third World majority in the UN General Assembly (UNGA) advanced a series of resolutions condemning Pretoria’s increasing repression, demanding external oversight of its prison system. By 1963, the convergence of global moral outrage after Sharpeville and the regime’s tightening racial terror created mounting pressure for an international intervention, creating the conditions for the first ICRC prison mission to Apartheid South Africa.Footnote 32
That same year, anti-Apartheid activists began urging the ICRC to act, following the refusal of the South African Red Cross Society (SARCS) to visit Sobukwe on Robben Island and growing alarm among exiled PAC comrades in Dar es Salaam—and certain Liberal Party members—over the destructive effects of his prolonged isolation.Footnote 33 Paradoxically, while committed to claiming African dominance in the region, the PAC turned to the all-White ICRC and invoked the Conventions to protect its imprisoned leader, even though Sobukwe himself had long favoured the virtues of non-violence over the humanization of warfare. Their appeal for ICRC involvement further unfolded amid a wider landscape of (settler-)colonial crises across Africa, from Algeria, Southern Rhodesia, to Kenya,Footnote 34 and the growing assertiveness of the Afro-Asian majority at the UN, which was placing ever more pressure on Pretoria to permit international scrutiny of its expanding prison system, even as these UN bodies remained contested spaces in which South Africa also retained important partners willing to accommodate the regime’s wishes.Footnote 35
While Pretoria blocked UN representatives and human rights groups such as Amnesty International (internally dismissed as ‘pro-communist’) from entering the country,Footnote 36 ICRC delegates were permitted access in the early 1960s. Amnesty, moreover, declined to classify captured ANC combatants like Mandela as ‘prisoners of conscience’,Footnote 37 leaving the ICRC as the only international body allowed to enter South Africa’s prison system. The SARCS, by contrast, showed little interest in conducting detention visits, regarding most South African political detainees as dangerous ‘subversives’ unworthy of humanitarian concern, and suggesting that conditions in Apartheid prisons were more than adequate.Footnote 38 Dominated by an all-White, largely Anglophone elite, the SARCS feared that intervening on behalf of political prisoners like Sobukwe might jeopardize its already fragile standing with the Afrikaner state.Footnote 39 At the same time, it faced competition from the Afrikaner Noodhulpliga—better known as the ‘Afrikaner Red Cross’—which, though denied recognition by the ICRC, courted the regime’s favour and openly rejected the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition on racial discrimination.Footnote 40 Whereas the SARCS opportunistically invoked these treaties to denounce ‘barbarous’ violence in Black Africa,Footnote 41 African national Red Cross societies drew on the same principles to demand worldwide condemnation of Apartheid.Footnote 42 Under this mounting pressure, the ICRC’s acting regional delegate, Georg Hoffmann, was forced to reckon with appeals for intervention in 1960s South Africa.
Hoffmann’s eventual shift toward intervention was shaped by Franz Kappeler’s reasoning, Switzerland’s ambassador in Pretoria and a trusted confidant of the regime. A believer in the so-called ‘civilizing virtues’ of White minority rule, Kappeler suggested that a narrowly circumscribed ICRC inspection of Robben Island—where Sobukwe was held in isolation—might help restore Apartheid South Africa’s battered international prestige after fierce denunciations at the recent founding conference in Addis Ababa of the Organization of African Unity (OAU),Footnote 43 where the Ethiopian leader Haile Selassie had condemned Apartheid as an ‘evil’ to be eradicated.Footnote 44 By reframing the PAC’s request for ICRC intervention as a tool for Apartheid damage control, the Swiss diplomat presented its neutrality as a means of shielding Pretoria from pan-African and UNGA pressure—particularly that mobilized by Tanzania and other African states. Acting on his advice in May 1963, Hoffmann approached the Foreign Ministry with an offer to visit Sobukwe,Footnote 45 promising that the Conventions would not be applied to this case.Footnote 46 At the same time, he dismissed Liberal Party appeals to extend his inspections to a wider body of detainees, insisting instead on an exclusive visit that singled out the PAC leader while leaving the broader prison population unseen.Footnote 47
To understand Hoffmann’s actions requires situating both him and Kappeler, within longer careers of accommodation to racist regimes. Kappeler’s record of racial appeasement stretched back to his time in Nazi Germany, where he had been soft on Hitler’s racial segregation of Jews, and later aligned himself with Pretoria in opposing UN resolutions condemning White minority rule.Footnote 48 This history reassured particularly South African Foreign Ministry officials that Swiss representatives, and by extension the ICRC, posed little threat to their expanding prison archipelago; instead, they came across as potentially useful intermediaries to help break South Africa’s growing diplomatic isolation.Footnote 49 Hoffmann’s own record further reinforced this impression. Having earlier served as an ICRC delegate in Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War—and later during the Algerian War of Independence, where he gained extensive experience applying the POW Convention and mediating disputes over its scope between state captors and guerrilla movements—from the French Résistance to Algerian maquisards, he carried these assumptions into his subsequent career in Sub-Saharan Africa. His first posting in this region, during the 1960s Congo Crisis, would focus largely on safeguarding White settlers, hostages, and mercenaries, effectively applying the Convention in ways that essentially privileged Europeans.Footnote 50 These first encounters in decolonizing Africa cemented his conviction that Africans were ‘naturally cruel’ and incapable of grasping the Conventions without White tutelage, a racist assumption that would underpin his subsequent operations in South Africa.Footnote 51
Echoing the anxieties of colonial states in the region, Hoffmann condemned post-colonial states’ efforts in the 1960s to extend POW protections to members of NLMs as a ‘regrettable and dangerous’ distortion of humanitarian law. He insisted that the UNGA—where some of these efforts were taking place—was exploiting the law ‘for political reasons’ by applying it to captured ANC fighters, whom he all dismissed as ‘subversives’ using terrorist methods.Footnote 52 While conceding that such combatants might fall under Common Article 3, he emphasized that this provision still permitted capital punishment if imposed by a ‘regular court’ with the judicial safeguards of ‘civilized peoples’.Footnote 53 Taking Pretoria’s assurances of due process at face value, Hoffmann resisted any type of legal interpretation that could be seen by White minority regimes as illicitly expanding the POW Convention’s scope, warning it would unravel the entire legal framework. By reproducing Apartheid’s claim to embody a ‘civilized’ legal order, the ICRC stealthily legitimized racial domination. In this logic, strict adherence to legal precedent and neutrality was portrayed as essential to preserving colonial prison access, allegedly in the prisoners’ own interest, but in practice it made deference to Apartheid’s legal system the very basis of humanitarian protection, inverting carceral realities by reframing accommodation with terror and domination as protection itself.Footnote 54
The ICRC’s first official tour of decolonizing Africa in early 1962 further reveals how deeply these racial and exclusionary logics were embedded within the institution.Footnote 55 Led by Hoffmann and Samuel Gonard, the mission purported to familiarize the ICRC with post-colonial Africa’s predicaments but concentrated almost entirely on White-ruled territories and relied heavily on conversations with, and knowledge of, White male officials. Indigenous voices were systematically marginalized, dismissed as incapable of understanding and applying international law correctly.Footnote 56 The resulting report gave an overtly racist portrayal of African counterparts, describing the ‘mentalité africaine et nègre’ as medieval, depicting Africans as ‘naturally cruel’, and declaring that the principles of humanitarian law were ‘inaccessible’ to them, while noting that voluntary Red Cross work was beyond their rational capacity.Footnote 57 Rather than interacting with post-colonial actors, the mission treated Black populations primarily as racial threats to be contained, suggesting evacuation schemes for settlers and simplified dissemination campaigns for Black audiences.Footnote 58
Shaped by Cold War anxieties over ‘race wars’ after Congo, Kenya, Southern Rhodesia, and Algeria, the ICRC report revealed an institution more concerned with preserving settler security than curbing its excessive violence against racialized majorities.Footnote 59 These assumptions, far from isolated personal prejudices, reflected more systemic organizational attitudes and practices, contradicting pervasively apologetic statements of White innocence from (former) ICRC officials who later portrayed the institution as a ‘victim of its own good intentions’.Footnote 60 To Pretoria, they confirmed the ICRC’s potential as a stabilizing partner than a critical observer of Apartheid detention policies.
At the doctrinal level, these exclusionary logics were most incisively articulated by Jean Pictet, the leading ICRC jurist at the time,Footnote 61 whose mid-century writings laid the foundation for the 1965 Red Cross Fundamental Principles.Footnote 62 Although Pictet proclaimed universality as a fundamental principle, his vision of the Red Cross movement as a ‘conquering force’ rested on liberal-imperial assumptions that framed its virtues as timeless, superior, and civilizational.Footnote 63 Universality functioned less as inclusivity than as a paternalistic hierarchy: participation in Red Cross humanitarian practice was made contingent on alleged ‘personal qualities’ linked to stages of racial development, justifying only token Indigenous participation under White supervision. This outlook echoed Hoffmann and Gonard’s far more overt racial thinking and continued a doctrinal lineage dating back to his predecessor Gustave Moynier, who had been complicit in Leopold II’s crimes in Congo and insisted that humanitarian principles applied only to the ‘Aryan race’.Footnote 64 Drawing on settler-colonial tropes, Pictet depicted Red Cross principles as tools to prepare decolonizing societies for inevitable race wars, embedding colonial anxieties into the movement’s doctrinal core in ways that paralleled Hoffmann’s own reports warning of ‘race wars’ and proposing White-led humanitarian practices.Footnote 65 Pictet’s universalism thus exemplified the contradictions of mid-twentieth century liberal international thought:Footnote 66 affirming human dignity while naturalizing racial hierarchy, erasing Indigenous humanitarian traditions, and presenting Western humanitarianism as the sole legitimate order.
Apartheid’s polycratic state and the politics of ‘nothing to hide’
When concrete proposals for an ICRC intervention first surfaced in Apartheid circles, Pretoria’s Foreign Ministry welcomed them as a chance to break its diplomatic isolation internationally, but Justice Minister John Vorster initially blocked the plan, showing the polycratic character and competing power centres within Apartheid’s leadership. In charge of prisons and the regime’s machinery of racial terror, Vorster viewed outside scrutiny over his work as a potential threat while carrying his own personal resentment as well: during the Second World War, when interned for his pro-Nazi sympathies, the ICRC had allegedly declined to visit him, even though he argued that he had been treated far worse than Sobukwe was now.Footnote 67 Still, the Afrikaner minister eventually gave in. Why? Persuaded by the Foreign Ministry’s argument that controlled ICRC access could rehabilitate South Africa’s international image—especially in Western elite circles—he sanctioned limited prison visits while ensuring the prison system’s core repressive structures remained untouched. Kappeler’s assurances also played a role: unlike human rights groups or Afro-Asian UN and OAU experts, he insisted, the Swiss and ICRC embodied a ‘neutrality’ that distinguished them from Apartheid’s most vocal critics. Swiss condemnations of Afro-Asian attacks on Pretoria further reassured Vorster that ICRC involvement could serve the government’s interests, and his own.Footnote 68
Despite continued resistance from the Ministry of Defence, which feared the consequences of ICRC inspectors roaming South Africa’s growing prison empire, Vorster—trained as a lawyer and aware of humanitarian law’s potential implications for the status of NLMs and their segregationist enemiesFootnote 69 —began to see ICRC inspections as a way to project Apartheid’s images of innocence and compliance with international standards globally, signalling that it had ‘nothing to hide’.Footnote 70 To be sure, these calculations remained steeped in racialized thinking: some state officials worried that admitting the ICRC would reduce South Africa to the status of ‘uncivilized’ states like Congo, precisely because the ICRC had already intervened there;Footnote 71 others pointed to Algeria and Kenya, where colonial regimes had successfully instrumentalized ICRC visits to their own advantage in their respective struggles against Afro-Asian critics at OAU and UN levels.Footnote 72
In practice, Pretoria adapted these and other precedents with stage-managed inspections for journalists and parliamentarians, ensuring that ICRC visits would be announced in advance, delegations kept small, interrogation centres closed, and inspectors shadowed by trusted state officials. Before Hoffmann began his first inspection on Robben Island, he met with senior officials, including Vorster himself, who orchestrated a tightly controlled display of Apartheid prison life. In preparation, the Afrikaner minister ordered temporary improvements such as better food rations for ninety-day detainees in South Africa and occupied Namibia, even as he insisted that the racially hierarchized food scale be strictly upheld. Such changes were never meant to mitigate the system’s cruelty but to perpetuate it, alleviating some grievances while leaving intact the structural machinery of racial discrimination.Footnote 73
In theory, ICRC prison visits followed a set routine: officially neutral delegates questioned prison directors about detainees, regulations, and staff conduct, inspected facilities such as showers, acted impartially, and conducted private talks with prisoner leaders, before drafting confidential reports that Geneva edited and sent to the South African Foreign Ministry—though never to prisoners’ families or NLMs. In South Africa, however, Hoffmann’s practice looked quite different: he never gained full access to Vorster’s prison system, torture sites were excluded, private interviews were sometimes monitored by state escorts, and his reports sidestepped Apartheid’s most defining feature—the systematic degradation of African prisoners’ dignity.Footnote 74 These issues further call into question his successor Moreillon’s sweeping claim that ‘only the ICRC [carried out prison visits] thoroughly, comprehensively, and repeatedly’.Footnote 75 His predecessor Geoffrey Senn had already noted in a private letter to liberal MP Helen Suzman that the ‘consequence [of the ICRC’s] holy tradition’ of acting ‘diplomatically’ was ‘that nobody knows to what extent the ICRC is successful’.Footnote 76
So although formally authorized to visit Sobukwe and other political prisoners on Robben Island, Hoffmann limited his tour to the PAC leader alone, whose main complaint was the psychological toll of his prolonged isolation as well as his lack of family contact.Footnote 77 Other political detainees—held with common criminals—went unexamined, and Hoffmann’s exculpatory report was warmly received in Pretoria.Footnote 78 Rather than resisting this co-optation, the Swiss drew closer to South Africa’s state officials, justifying his inspective caution by claiming that Vorster’s refusal to apply humanitarian law left him without a proper humanitarian law mandate. In practice, this meant he collaborated ever more deeply with the state,Footnote 79 obstructing Afro-Asian and OAU initiatives for greater oversight or legal recognition of captured PAC or ANC members as POWs, and even consulting Pretoria on how to best reject UN Secretary-General U Thant’s proposal for family aid to detainees—thereby placing his own professed principles of neutrality and impartiality at risk.Footnote 80
Strikingly, South Africa’s Foreign Minister Eric Louw—himself a former drafter of the 1929 Geneva Conventions—was so impressed by Hoffmann’s favourable report that he pressed for its immediate publication, hoping to counter allegations of human rights abuses raised at, for instance, the UN Special Committee against Apartheid by anti-Apartheid activists such as the Indian Enuga Reddy.Footnote 81 As it had done in Algeria, Namibia, Kenya, and elsewhere, however, the ICRC kept withholding its findings from the PAC and other NLMs, keeping them in the dark about their leaders’ conditions. (In the 1970s, the ICRC privately conceded that it had never interacted with NLMs on the same—let alone equal—terms as ‘white governments’, especially through its withholding of prison visit reports detailing the torture of their comrades.Footnote 82 ) Aware of this liability, Vorster signalled his readiness in April 1964 to authorize further ICRC inspections under equally controlled conditions, convinced that Hoffmann would continue producing reports that reinforced his regime’s claims.Footnote 83 Internally, South African officials later admitted that they had blocked the ICRC from seeing ‘all security prisoners … because it would hamper interrogation procedures’.Footnote 84
Within the polycratic Apartheid state, however, consensus fractured over how, in what form, and when to publish Hoffmann’s report. South African diplomats under mounting Afro-Asian pressure in New York and Geneva pushed for immediate release to bolster their credibility internationally, while Vorster still resisted.Footnote 85 In line with his management style, he delayed release of the report for months, using the uncertainty to tighten his grip over rivalling government ministries competing for power in prison affairs.Footnote 86 At times dismissing the report as inconsequential and at others urging the ICRC itself to publish it—a step Geneva refused on confidentiality grounds,Footnote 87 Vorster kept colleagues uncertain until September 1965, when he finally authorized its release. When extracts of the report appeared in late 1966,Footnote 88 it provoked sharp criticism in the liberal South African press, among post-colonial states, and at the UN,Footnote 89 and it coincided with the International Defence and Aid Fund’s (IDAF) campaign on prison abuses as well as the suspension of a Johannesburg trial after a defendant had been tortured so badly he could no longer testify, directly endangering Apartheid’s claims to a ‘civilized’ judiciary.Footnote 90
This IDAF campaign, coordinated by former political prisoner Dennis Brutus and launched at a London meeting with contributions from exile Albie Sachs,Footnote 91 formed part of a broader transnational effort since the 1956 Treason Trial to secure the release of political detainees and dismantle White minority rule. In contrast to the ICRC’s cautious collaboration with Pretoria, IDAF directly exposed its brutality, generating recurring tensions with Red Cross delegates in Southern Africa.Footnote 92 These frictions culminated in April 1967, when the IDAF published a report combining testimonies from ex-prisoners with sharp criticisms of the ICRC’s failure to confront the regime’s systemic abuses.Footnote 93 The report provoked widespread controversy internationally, severely damaging the ICRC’s standing in human rights and anti-Apartheid circles and prompting further calls for a more fundamental shift in its approach to monitoring Apartheid’s penal system.Footnote 94
Critics dismissed the ICRC’s inspections as staged performances that concealed rather than scrutinized Vorster’s abuses. Suzman argued that the organization’s reports misrepresented daily prison life and that its delegate had been misled, though she tactfully placed blame on the government rather than the ICRC itself, and this helped to preserve her ties with the ICRC, while allowing her to press for further information on prison conditions.Footnote 95 As a lone MP advocating for civil liberties, Suzman read the government more astutely than her ICRC counterparts and used her parliamentary privileges to intervene more consistently on behalf of detainees. Far harsher condemnations came from detainees of colour: ANC activist Thami Mhlambiso, for instance, later recalled that prisoners had been trained to handle ICRC questioning, making the visits ‘superficial in the extreme’, according to another prisoner. For these and other detainees of colour, the Swiss presence actively compounded their suffering, creating false expectations and thereby becoming complicit in a subtler ‘form of torture’ that reinforced, rather than mitigated, the brutality of Apartheid’s carceral regime.Footnote 96 The fiercest backlash to Hoffmann’s mission came at the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), where post-colonial African delegations acting in solidarity with South African political prisoners condemned the ICRC for appeasing Apartheid. The Nigerian representative drew a direct parallel to the organization’s notoriously failed operations during the Holocaust, recalling its silence on the extermination of European Jewry and its complicity in the Nazis’ staged prison visit to KZ Theresienstadt.Footnote 97
While conditions in some South African prisons improved slightly during this period of the 1960s,Footnote 98 such as better rations, the separation of political detainees from common criminals, or occasional concessions like more time outdoors,Footnote 99 these adjustments owed far more to the prisoners’ own agency than to Hoffmann’s interventions.Footnote 100 Hunger strikes, testimonies after release, and other forms of resistance forced state authorities to make limited reforms to contain—or prevent more—scandals.Footnote 101 Although I remain sceptical about the humanitarian impact of Hoffmann’s tour, archival fragments do suggest that a few of his recommendations, such as access to hot water, were selectively implemented,Footnote 102 but always unevenly and almost certainly along racially hierarchical lines.Footnote 103 The narrow and piecemeal nature of these reforms shows, once more, how little the ICRC could actually change, or mitigate the effects of, the carceral architecture of Apartheid so long as it operated within Vorster’s restrictive framework. Far more significant than the narrow question of impact was Pretoria’s systematic exploitation of the ICRC’s presence to its own advantage. By showcasing superficial reforms while shielding interrogation blocks and torture cells, the regime successfully turned the ICRC’s inspections into instruments of legitimation, both domestically and internationally. Hoffmann’s reports provided useful materials with which the government could deflect UNGA and Afro-Asian criticisms, while simultaneously unsettling its opponents by dividing them. In this way, the ICRC functioned less as a constraint on state violence than as an asset for those perpetrating it: its presence conferred a veneer of respectability that enabled Pretoria to project adherence to international norms even as it systematically violated them with impunity.
‘In the good books of the high and mighty’
Despite mounting criticisms of Hoffmann’s mission, the ICRC launched a new prison tour in April 1967 under the leadership of the more regionally experienced delegate Senn, who had previously visited political detainees in White minority-ruled Rhodesia.Footnote 104 Unlike Hoffmann, Senn privately conceded to Suzman that many of the criticisms of his predecessor were ‘unfortunately’ justified, adding that he had always remained in the ‘good books’ of South Africa’s ‘High & Mighty’.Footnote 105 Determined to avoid such optics,Footnote 106 the self-assured Senn produced far more detailed prison reports, confronted state officials with greater firmness, disliked bureaucratic procedure, and managed to secure family visits for Sobukwe on Robben Island, among other differences.Footnote 107 His experience as a former prison director, combined with the expertise of an accompanying medical doctor, gave him deeper insights into the structural realities of incarceration, from psychological strain and social isolation to different physical hardships of prisoners, allowing him to grasp prison life with a depth Hoffmann had never achieved. Senn also distinguished himself as one of the ICRC’s most outspoken prison inspectors in 1960s Africa. Most exceptionally, he often criticized Pretoria’s abuses and even pressed Geneva’s headquarters to condemn its torture, a position that made him more unpopular than Hoffmann within the organization, and laying bare how ICRC claims to impartiality and neutrality could be interpreted in fundamentally different terms.Footnote 108 In a letter to Suzman, he forthrightly noted that the ICRC favoured ‘liberal-conservative’ delegates who avoided antagonizing governments over inspectors who challenged them, as he liked to describe his own more self-assured style.Footnote 109
Unlike Hoffmann, Senn managed to secure small but meaningful concessions for South African prisoners, such as the right to correspond, access to music, and other modest improvementsFootnote 110 that several prisoners valued as affirmations of their dignity in captivity.Footnote 111 His greater willingness to confront government authorities,Footnote 112 combined with Pretoria’s sensitivity to negative publicity as well as its own internal debates over adhering to international norms (the so-called ‘verlig-verkramp-stryd’), enabled him to push further than his predecessor had done.Footnote 113 Yet even as he sought to exploit the regime’s concerns for its international reputation, Senn’s room for manoeuvre remained very narrow. Although his travel schedule was not fully dictated by Pretoria,Footnote 114 his inspections were closely shadowed by a Prison Department liaison official who controlled his access and encounters in detention. Initially, Senn believed one such official to be acting in good faith, only later realizing that he served as a conduit of state control.Footnote 115
The greatest difference compared to Hoffmann lay in Senn’s refusal to gloss over torture. Unlike his predecessor, he gathered more detailed testimonies from detainees, compiled lists of notorious Special Branch officers, and documented the regime’s systematic usage of physical abuse.Footnote 116 By the 1960s, such violence, especially against prisoners of colour, was endemic to South Africa’s penal system, and Senn became the first ICRC delegate to register it extensively—in confidential reports. Though often described as ‘tough’, Senn’s reporting was less about structural critique than about documenting abuses with unusual precision, thereby first raising Geneva’s awareness of their vast scale.Footnote 117 Still, Senn’s approach remained limited by a colour blindness and imperial-liberal paternalism that assumed torture could be curbed without challenging Apartheid’s racial foundations: his reports condemned brutality but never fully grasped that its systematic character was inseparable from the system’s refusal to recognize racial equality, a clear blind spot on his part that reduced his empathy for especially Black prisoners’ suffering.
Over time, Senn recognized that Apartheid would not be significantly reformed through ICRC interventions, if at all. The regime welcomed his visits only insofar as they produced reports that could be sufficiently instrumentalized, while South African officials routinely denied abuses or deflected with whataboutism (‘the American police are a lot worse’, one remarked).Footnote 118 At the same time, Geneva’s attention gradually shifted toward its massive relief operations in Biafra (1967–70), leaving Senn increasingly isolated and delaying the editing of his reports of South African prisons.Footnote 119 His frustration deepened further as it became clear that Pretoria simply ignored his recommendations, and he began to fear that if the ICRC remained silent, Afro-Asian critics would once again brand the organization as complicit in ‘white supremacy’, as he noted himself.Footnote 120 This anxiety illustrates how much pressure from UN and post-colonial states was reshaping the ICRC’s own sense of identity, its fragility, and forcing a reckoning with its widely contested role in the global politics of decolonization.
Despite his more assertive attitude toward colonial regimes, Senn reproduced many of the same assumptions that had characterized Hoffmann’s mission. Similar to his predecessor, he endorsed solitary confinement as a legitimate tool to discipline ‘hardened criminals’, showing little concern for its inherent cruelty, and he often echoed colonial stereotypes of African prisoners.Footnote 121 His reports dismissed outspoken detainees of colour as ‘aggressive’ and ‘radical’,Footnote 122 attributing certain forms of prisoner resistance to the ‘basic emotionalism of the Bantu people’, and he assumed the position of a White male saviour who told Black prisoners what was in their best interest.Footnote 123 Senn rejected the premise behind their armed struggle against Apartheid, portraying it as futile and destined to fail, and explicitly denied the belligerent status of anti-colonial fighters, just as Hoffmann had done: ‘really tragic, to my mind, is the incapability of the great majority … of “freedom fighters” in South Africa, to understand that there is no hope to achieve, or to gain, anything in the foreseeable future’.Footnote 124
Although Senn is sometimes portrayed as a critic of Apartheid in contrast to Hoffmann’s appeasement, he nevertheless echoed colonial regimes’ fears that NLMs were ideologically subversive and likely to accelerate communist expansion in Africa.Footnote 125 Indeed, Senn’s prison tour was also deeply marked by his anti-communist views. When visiting White communist prisoners in Pretoria in May 1967, he noted their harsh treatment by Apartheid captors but deemed it ‘quite natural’, arguing that the state could not ‘show them any leniency’.Footnote 126 Such Cold War-driven assumptions, widely shared among ICRC and Swiss officials globally, made him particularly receptive to Pretoria’s depiction of the ANC and other NLMs as Soviet proxies rather than as legitimate nationalist and/or anti-racist struggles for self-determination.Footnote 127
His biases, however, went well beyond his anti-communist politics: like Hoffmann, he treated women prisoners with paternalist and misogynist disdain. His reports describe women (of colour) as prone to ‘whims and demands’, given to ‘bickering’,Footnote 128 and dependent on male guardianship, while young Black women were presented as passive ‘victims’ instead of political agents with legitimate demands.Footnote 129 When confronted with women who asserted their agency in the anti-Apartheid struggle, Senn reacted with equal fragility, reverting to familiar patriarchal expectations that their proper role was reproduction and child-rearing.
His dismissiveness also extended to White women of his own class background: in another letter to Suzman, Senn praised her as ‘courageous, determined and unrelenting in her defence of human rights, with a developed intellect and a clear mind—qualities not too frequently found in women’. Suzman wryly replied that ‘women’s lib. would not be pleased to read your comments’.Footnote 130 Unsurprisingly, Suzman later called him an ‘unimaginative man’, echoing deeper frustrations among female interlocutors of Senn’s approach to women.Footnote 131 Many female detainees, keenly aware of both his biases and the risk of reprisals from Afrikaner captors, avoided confiding in him or other White male ICRC delegates.Footnote 132
When Senn met Mandela on Robben Island in April 1967, his racism was clear. Mandela, in the presence of an Apartheid liaison officer, asked that the prisoners’ meagre rice-based diet be replaced with bread to improve their health and sense of dignity. Senn refused, however, insisting that such a change would damage Black men’s teeth. By denying the request before his oppressor, the ICRC delegate reaffirmed the foundations of Apartheid’s racial hierarchies.Footnote 133 Mandela later recalled him as ‘not a very progressive fellow’,Footnote 134 an understatement that illustrates how even a self-styled critical inspector could easily reproduce racist assumptions. This moment, later invoked by Mandela in his memoirs—but subsequently marginalized in ICRC recollections—epitomizes the organization’s compromised role in the 1960s, if not its complicity in rationalizing the regime’s own racism on an international level.Footnote 135
Senn’s co-written report, unlike Hoffmann’s, explicitly identified torture, forced labour, and even named perpetrators.Footnote 136 It urged the state to create oversight mechanisms and inquiries into abuse, leaving Pretoria unable to immediately publish it, as it had done with Hoffmann’s earlier findings. State officials quickly moved to attack the report’s credibility, dismissing prisoner testimonies as unreliable and demanding the removal of all references to torture and individual perpetrators. Geneva’s preoccupation with its massive relief operation in Biafra further worsened the situation: translation and editorial errors were admitted by the ICRC, giving Pretoria an easy excuse to challenge its accuracy.Footnote 137 Exploiting these weaknesses, the Prison Department conditioned further ICRC access on particular revisions, effectively dictating the terms of its future operations.Footnote 138
By entering into negotiations over its own reporting, the ICRC crossed a line, according to several delegates. Other colleagues acknowledged that this strategy was ‘extrêmement gênant et dangereux’, but defended it as the only way to preserve prison access. Geneva seems to have ultimately conceded to (some of) Pretoria’s demands, making alterations to the report that risked hollowing out its neutrality, potentially turning Senn’s critique into a sanitized text.Footnote 139 In the end, apparently neither Pretoria nor Geneva ever made the original or revised report public, and no official appeal was supposedly lodged against its identified violations of the POW Convention.Footnote 140 Although Senn pressed for his original report’s disclosure, senior ICRC officials—including Hoffmann—resisted it, preferring quiet compromise to further confrontation, and thereby illustrating Senn’s isolation within ICRC echelons. The episode illustrates, once more, how the ICRC’s pursuit of continued access and standing with colonial regimes globally, from Southern Africa to South-East Asia,Footnote 141 came at the price of its neutrality in a decolonizing world, allowing Apartheid officials to instrumentalize its presence while keeping the regime’s brutality obscured.
Conclusion
The ICRC’s prison missions in 1960s South Africa produced a detailed record of Apartheid’s carceral order, but, according to contemporary critics, they are better understood as forms of collaboration with the regime rather than as acts of pity or solidarity with its victims or their advocates or conduct consistent with the organization’s professed principles of neutrality, universality, and impartiality. Designed to deflect UN denunciations rather than to empower their instigators, these inspections sought to ease particular abuses while leaving the larger architecture of racial terror unscrutinized, thereby illustrating how easily international humanitarianism could be exploited to stabilize late-colonial regimes within a decolonizing global order. While some former prisoners would later, understandably, recall with gratitude the limited relief that the ICRC occasionally secured, their appreciation must be read in the contexts of coercion and dependency, and cannot be mistaken for the sharper critiques of the organization voiced by many other former detainees and their advocates—again displaying the central role that aid recipients themselves play in contesting global humanitarianism. The ICRC explicitly rejected advancing Africans’ legal claims to belligerency, let alone self-determination, nor did it confront the systematic indignity inflicted on those making them; instead, it reframed its own mission as impartially cooperating with the Afrikaner state to secure limited concessions for those it continued to regard as ‘uncivilized’ or ‘terrorist’. This brings out a broader pattern in 1960s global humanitarianism in which decolonizing norms and institutions remained constrained by those same racialized hierarchies.
The ICRC leadership remained convinced that so-called humanizing, rather than scrutinizing or confronting, Apartheid represented the most constructive path forward. Working too closely with Afro-Asian critics, in their view, threatened to politicize what they continued to regard as neutral and impartial humanitarianism, and even allegedly risked enabling further communist expansionism in the region. However, the ferocity of the critiques by especially Afro-Asian actors and former (communist) prisoners throughout this decade exposed how clearly a post-colonial world saw the organization’s actions more as one of appeasement rather than as humanitarian neutrality. By working to whitewash Apartheid and so make it more tolerable in the international system rather than contesting its foundations, the ICRC and Swiss state not inadvertently but deliberately provided crucial legitimacy to a system of White minority rule.Footnote 142 Their interventions did not erode the structures of racial terror but, under the guise of impartial humanitarian action, contributed to their endurance within the global system with lasting consequences.
Only slowly did the ICRC begin to adjust its stance toward Apartheid in the 1970s, gradually shifting from being a dependable ally of the government in the 1960s to one of its many mistrusted international counterparts one decade later. However, even this transition remained partial and uneven, continuing up to Apartheid’s collapse at the end of the Cold War, indicating the limits of post-imperial humanitarian reform within a still unequal global order.Footnote 143 This gradual evolution of the ICRC’s legal-humanitarian approaches cannot be understood without reflecting on the broader transformations of the global order in the late 1960s, when Third World and socialist states’ advocacy was reshaping both the Conventions and the ICRC itself. The struggle over whether captured ANC and PAC fighters should be recognized under the POW Convention further exposed the organization’s alignment with colonial legal politics and the uneven adoption of anti-colonial claims into international law. As mentioned, Hoffmann echoed Pretoria’s claims by denouncing those attempts to extend the law’s protections to anti-colonial guerrillas as a ‘dangerous’ move damaging its humanitarian spirit. In defending the legal status quo, he portrayed UN efforts in the 1960s to elevate NLMs as a political conspiracy against White minority rule in Africa and feared that departing from these established practices would further jeopardize the ICRC’s prison mandate and access.Footnote 144
Yet the PAC’s original appeal for Red Cross action had lasting effects. It exposed the ICRC to fierce challenges from prisoners, critical field delegates, African Red Cross societies, and Afro-Asian critics at the UN. These actors denounced the ICRC’s double standards in tolerating SARCS’s segregationist track record and pressed for racial equality, self-determination, and observational scrutiny to take precedence over the fictions of access and ‘universal’ participation within the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement. By the late 1960s, ANC leaders such as Oliver Tambo had begun to appropriate the Red Cross’s own legal code,Footnote 145 with ANC exiles insisting on representation at its meetings,Footnote 146 while UN bodies invoked the POW Convention to demand POW recognition for captured NLM fighters and to press Geneva into closer dialogue with exiled members of NLMs in Dar es Salaam, Algiers, and other Third World capitals it had long treated as ‘subversives’.Footnote 147 These confrontations continued for decades and finally culminated in the South African government’s expulsion from the International Red Cross conference in 1986, which symbolized just how far Afro-Asian critiques had reshaped the Red Cross movement’s doctrine and institutions.Footnote 148
More fundamentally, analysing the ICRC’s history in Apartheid South Africa through a comparative-global lens shows a broader issue that still haunts many other humanitarian and international organizations today: since so ‘much of [their] success … rests on an image of [the] past’,Footnote 149 how should they remember and confront their own institutional histories—including both complicity and resistance within the entangled legacies of race, empire, and (de-)colonization, and how do such memory regimes structure global claims to legitimacy and universality. Recent debates within the ICRC have begun to address more directly (and encouragingly) its Whiteness and racial blind spots,Footnote 150 but these steps remain tentative and fragile, as they are threatened by new budget cuts and mounting far-right and Great Powers’ attacks on international and humanitarian organizations. At the very least, historical reckoning demands revising the organization’s public recollection of its work in Apartheid South Africa, centring rather than erasing its own contested role in decolonizing Africa. This past remains central to understanding why the ICRC and advocates of humanitarian law still struggle to win credibility and trust among armed groups and marginalized communities across the African continent and beyond.
What is needed is not a simplistic condemnation of the ICRC’s vital humanitarian mission but a more historically grounded conversation and further research into its legacies of complicity, and at times resistance, in colonial and late-colonial Africa, and the ways these legacies continue to shape its institutional culture.Footnote 151 For an organization that claims universal authority, confronting its past must be as consistent as possible, not as selective as it currently is. The ICRC, like other humanitarian organizations, has already demonstrated that it can undertake such historical reckoning: in the 2000s, it productively confronted its silence during the Holocaust, reshaping both institutional memory and humanitarian practices. This parallel is neither overstated nor anachronistic, since African actors of the period themselves explicitly invoked the ICRC’s earlier failure during the Holocaust, to the organization’s own frustration at being reminded of that past. If the ICRC could successfully deal with its unwillingness to speak out against the Nazi empire’s extermination policies,Footnote 152 it can—and must—do the same with its complicity record in (late-)colonial Africa, from Leopold’s Congo to Apartheid South Africa. Local (and internal ICRC) initiatives to decolonize Geneva’s institutions, history, and street names point another way forward,Footnote 153 especially when combined with other African perspectives that foreground the agency of NLMs and their Indigenous critics still central to post-colonial African politics, rather than mythologizing pre-colonial African pasts that obscure contemporary realities.Footnote 154 Unless the Red Cross movement embraces this wider historical reckoning, it risks perpetuating the very stories, ideas, and silences that undermine its claim to universality, and that erode the global legitimacy on which its humanitarian mission rests.
Financial support
None to declare.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Boyd van Dijk is a senior researcher at Sciences Po, Paris. He is a historian of the international order and is working on a new book (now under contract with Oxford University Press) writing a global history of the ideas and practice of international law in wartime in the Global South and East during the period of the Cold War and decolonization. He is also the author of the prize-winning monograph Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions (Oxford University Press), and has written articles for Past & Present, Law and History Review, and International Organization.
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