Word: botha
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...Botha is not a man given to changing his mind, so his listeners did not expect any surprises last week when the South African State President addressed the opening session of Parliament. Walking behind the sergeant at arms carrying the ceremonial mace, Botha entered the whites-only House of Assembly in Cape Town and faced the newly elected members sitting on green leather benches. In his schoolmasterish, staccato delivery, he told them that his government stood firmly on the principle of politics by segregated racial groups and that those who disapproved would not be permitted to use violence or otherwise...
Nearly every aspect of life in South Africa is a stark study in black and white. That was clearer than ever last week after a strong swing to the right in a whites-only national election. A jubilant State President P.W. Botha, whose party increased its seats in Parliament, went on national television after declaring victory and said, "The outside world must accept that the white electorate is here to stay and has a special duty in South Africa." To Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the country's best-known blacks, the election carried a very different lesson. Said...
State President Botha appealed to white fears with a law-and-order campaign. He touched nationalist sentiment by frequently telling foreigners to butt out of South African affairs. Through a heavy newspaper advertising blitz, reinforced by intensive coverage on national television, the government charged that the P.F.P. was soft on terrorism and Communism and ready to sell out white South Africa to the country's blacks. The Afrikaans-language press harped on the same theme, making much of a photograph of P.F.P. Stalwart Helen Suzman being embraced by Winnie Mandela, wife of the long-imprisoned black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela...
...National Party in January to protest the government's slow changes on racial issues, scored an easy victory in Johannesburg's Randburg district. Denis Worrall, South Africa's former Ambassador to Britain, came within just 39 votes of beating Minister of Constitutional Development Chris Heunis, the architect of Botha's reform program and his possible successor, in Heunis' once safe Helderberg district near Cape Town. In the Afrikaner university town of Stellenbosch, another Nationalist defector, Esther Lategan, was beaten by an incumbent M.P., though she managed to reduce her opponent's majority from 5,622 votes...
...prospect is for more political and racial polarization in South Africa. Botha's Nationalists, fearful that their greatest threat is from voters who think their modest reforms are going too far, are less likely than ever to make any serious changes in the apartheid system. The country's black majority, on the other hand, now has little hope of achieving race reforms through the national government. The sad outcome for South Africa will be still more violence and still more repression...