black majority had gained power, but most were
resigned to it. The task, as they saw it, was to
make the best of it, to entrench some white rights
and to guard the Republic against a black back-
lash and radical socialist experiments.
South Africa was at the crossroads. In 1989, it
found in two remarkable men the leadership to
help guide the country out of its impasse of vio-
lence and bloodshed. In September 1989 F. W.
de Klerk was inaugurated as president in succes-
sion to Botha. He had a reputation for caution
and was thought to be in tune with Botha’s
approach of dealing with South Africa’s problems
by a mixture of reform and repression. As educa-
tion minister he had introduced the requirement
of Afrikaans instruction in black schools, which
led to the Soweto outbreak and the school
boycott in 1976. The Nationalist Party which
elected him could regard him as a safe choice. But
in only a short time de Klerk charted a new course
of reform and serious negotiations with black
leaders. In February 1990 he lifted the bans on
the ANC and on the PAC, prohibited since
Sharpeville in 1960; to general astonishment he
also repealed the even older prohibition on the
South African Communist Party, which was
working with the ANC. President de Klerk’s
partner in the forthcoming negotiations was
Nelson Mandela, unconditionally released, to a
rapturous welcome, on 11 February 1990 after
twenty-seven years in prison. Soon afterwards, in
May, substantive negotiations between Mandela,
the ANC leadership and de Klerk began. Early
progress was rapid and in August the ANC
announced that they were suspending the ‘armed
struggle’.
Neither de Klerk nor Mandela, of course, had
a free hand. In the first place Mandela had to
work with the collective leadership of the ANC.
Nor could he claim to speak for all black people.
Chief Buthelezi, representing mainly Zulus and
his Inkatha movement, had followed a separate
approach to African rights within Africa for many
years. A black leadership power struggle, looking
beyond the end of white majority rule, led to
bloodshed between Inkatha and the ANC.
Buthelezi with 1.5 million followers was not pre-
pared to be pushed aside. The smaller Pan-African
Congress was also suspicious of the ANC and its
left-wing outlook and was less prepared to com-
promise with white South Africa, but it could
count only on minority support among black
Africans. The black so-called homelands, with
‘governments’ and administrators of their own,
backed up by the administration in Pretoria, had
created self-interested groups in favour of main-
taining the status quo. In any settlement they
knew they would vanish. Differences of wealth as
much as tribal differences also divided black inter-
ests. World attention was fixed on Mandela,
whose dignified leadership, free from rancour
against his former white jailers, had earned him
worldwide admiration. In any settlements, other
non-white leaders would also play a part, includ-
ing those of the coloured and the Indian popula-
tions. The ANC, the largest African political
organisation, however, could claim to speak for
the majority of black Africans.
De Klerk’s first hurdle was that not only had
he to reach a settlement with black leaders but he
also had to carry his own National Party and the
white community with him. Rather more than
a quarter of former supporters opposed him, rang-
ing from militant white racialists with neo-Nazi
emblems to Afrikaners who claimed they were
ready to trek again to establish a pure Afrikaner
republic in one of the distant corners of the
Union. The business community was fearful of
the ANC’s communist alliance. The threat of con-
fiscation of white property and of nationalisation
of South Africa’s industries, mines and financial
institutions lessened after 1990 with the collapse
of Soviet-style command economies. Even so, a
black majority government would wish to improve
black standards of living and conditions of work as
rapidly as possible. Such an aim suggested an
active, interventionist government, rather than
one following free-market, laissez-faire policies.
The upsurge of black violence, though
directed against other black people, was also
fuelled by rogue elements in the South African
police and intelligence services; it raised the awful
spectre of a complete breakdown of law and
order. If black aspirations could not be satisfied,
would black Africans turn on the better-off
whites? How were white minority rights to be
1
SOUTHERN AFRICA 769
