schoolchildren and youths gathered together.
The police fired on them to disperse them, killing
twenty-five and wounding many more. A wave of
black protest swept the country. It was crushed,
but not eliminated – only driven underground.
The black Africans could not be pacified, however
many thousands were imprisoned.
The 1980s were dominated by the imperious
President P. W. Botha, who became more author-
itarian as he grew older and earned the less than
flattering epithet, Die Groot Krokodil. The doc-
trine of a purist apartheid was being discarded by
the majority of the white population as impracti-
cal and unenforceable in a South Africa that
required millions of black people to work with
whites in the modern economy. Even Botha, on
becoming president in 1979, had accepted that
the whites would have to adapt.
During the Botha years of the 1980s, a policy
of relaxing some of the aspects of apartheid went
hand in hand with military and police repression
against black political organisations in forceful
displays of white supremacy. Police beat demon-
strators with sticks and whips, and occasionally
shot them. The years 1985 and 1986 were filled
with protests, violence and thousands of arrests.
Botha introduced a state of emergency. Violence
in the black townships could not be controlled by
any responsible black political organisations,
because the security services had ensured that
they could not operate coherently inside the
Republic with most of their leaders in prison and
some 20,000 black people, many of them chil-
dren, detained for months in 1987. Protest
organisations were fragmented and black people
also killed black people, accusing them of collab-
orating or just because they belonged to a differ-
ent group. When law and order break down,
genuine protest and the struggle for freedom
become inextricably mixed up with arson, crime
and gang warfare. This allowed the government
to claim that the black movement was both crim-
inal and communist.
As Botha carried through a ruthless policy of
repression, he also began to amend some of the
200-odd apartheid laws and regulations. In 1979,
black Africans were allowed for the first time to
join official trade unions; the entry of black
people into towns and their right to take up new
jobs were made easier by the abolition of the pass
books in 1986. But these moves did not touch
the fundamental pillars on which white supremacy
rested, of which the most crucial was political
power. The complex new constitution introduced
by Botha in 1984 established separate Asian,
coloured and white parliamentary assemblies
while leaving ultimate power in white hands, but
it satisfied no one least of all the majority of the
black people, who were not represented at all.
International business unease and some tighten-
ing of international sanctions in 1986 also
increased pressure. More importantly in the
course of the 1980s the majority of whites came
to recognise that some fundamental changes had
to come, however much they were disliked by the
majority.
The old white–black relationship, which had
frequently involved caring bonds between black
nannies and white children or between paternal-
istic employers and their workers, was at best an
unequal master–servant tie based on the distinc-
tion of race. It was as out of place in modern
South Africa as the master–servant relations
between rich and poor in Victorian England. The
black population was no longer composed of
semi-literate unskilled workers. There was a
growing number, albeit still small, of skilled, pro-
fessional and middle-class black people, some of
them driving BMWs. The Anglican archbishop
Desmond Tutu was black. The total exclusion of
black people from the government system became
increasingly impossible to justify.
It was these doubts growing throughout the
1980s among a majority of the white community
about apartheid, rather than the opposition from
the small white minority that for many years had
fought for black rights, that cracked a system
which could otherwise have been upheld by
the military force the whites commanded. The
outside world had helped, but these internal
changes of attitude were more vital. The Dutch
Reformed Church no longer supported apartheid
but condemned it as irreconcilable with Christian
ethics. White South Africans in the early 1990s
tended to feel apprehensive about a future that
would be very different from the past once the