Word: apartheid
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...main pillars of Hendrik Verwoerd's Grand Apartheid remain firmly in place, with no explicit commitment to remove them: the Population Registration Act still legally classifies people by race; the Group Areas Act still bars blacks from residing in most white neighborhoods or from sending their children to whites-only government schools; land acts dating back to 1913 and 1936 still reserve 87% of South Africa's land to whites, who today constitute 14% of the population...
...issue is no longer really apartheid; it is political power. Foreign Minister Roelof ("Pik") Botha explains that the government began to shift away from apartheid when the National Party realized that it was impossible to stem the tide of blacks moving to urban areas in search of employment. "As the economic realities overwhelmed the dream," he says, "so did we come to realize that there were consequences of these policies that were indeed oppressive and humiliating." Bowing to those realities, P.W. Botha scrapped the hated pass laws...
...another attempt to soften the face of apartheid, he had set up the tricameral Parliament in 1984. It established a strictly limited form of power sharing that for the first time included coloreds, or people of mixed race, and Indians, but not blacks. Whatever the failures of that system, Pik Botha insists, it at least helped condition the minds of whites "to see a man of color acting like a gentleman just like everybody else." By the time De Klerk ordered the removal of the remaining WHITES ONLY signs on South Africa's beaches just before the Christmas holidays, whites...
However, the whites' commitment to reform stops short of entrusting their own destiny to any other than white hands. If apartheid as a method has failed to protect their rights and privileges, whites will find another, more palatable way to retain them. De Klerk has put the position squarely a number of times: "White domination must end, but we are not prepared to exchange it for black domination...
...negotiate everything, including its proposal for "group rights," but few believe the whites would give up that demand. A.N.C. leaders have acknowledged a need to somehow provide protections for minorities. But, says Thabo Mbeki, the group's foreign minister, "we will argue that group rights are the same as apartheid...