Word: botha
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...Botha postpones racial reform...
South Africa's recent national elections, in which nonwhites were not allowed to vote, reflected unprecedented division within Botha's ruling National Party over the pace and scope of future "accommodations." Though the party, which has been in power since 1948, maintained its iron grasp on the government by winning 131 of 165 parliamentary seats, it is now supported by only 57% of South Africa's 2.1 million eligible white voters, including most of the Afrikaner majority-within-a-minority...
...enough support at the polls from liberal Afrikaners to increase its parliamentary strength by nine, to 26. On the right, the ultraconservative Herstigte Nasionale Party (H.N.P.) drew 191,249 votes, compared with only 34,159 in the 1977 election. Reason: growing numbers of the Afrikaner working class fear that Botha's reform measures will prepare the way for black majority rule. Declares H.N.P. Leader Jaap Marais: "Botha is stimulating racial frictions by creating expectations. It implants the idea that the existing order is not legitimate." He adds, "We have a kaffirboetie government," using Afrikaans slang for "nigger lover." Says...
Nonetheless, Botha vows to "continue the direction we have taken" in easing the laws that govern the so-called petty apartheid. But he has no intention of changing the far more important underlying structure of apartheid that denies blacks the right to vote in national elections, requires segregated primary and secondary schools, forbids blacks to own land in major cities and forces 52% of the black population to live in ten impoverished rural reserves, or "homelands." All together the homelands constitute 13% of South...
With their intensified militancy, growing numbers and new power, the blacks of South Africa are not likely to be bought off indefinitely by promises or good intentions. After he took office in 1978, Prime Minister Botha declared that South Africa must "adapt or die." His advice still holds good...