Word: botha
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...Botha's talk of reform pleased few. Black rioting, predictable under the law of rising expectations, became so widespread and bloody that he imposed a harsh state of emergency last June. An estimated 20,000, mostly blacks and many of them children, have been detained without trial since the beginning of the state of emergency; some 4,500 of them are still under arrest. But black leaders refuse even to negotiate with Botha unless he agrees to legalize the A.N.C. and begin negotiations on a new and democratic constitution. Some Afrikaners, on the other hand, reacted to all talk...
...confined in a new kind of establishment: concentration camps. Of the estimated 60,000 prisoners, some 26,000 women and children succumbed to famine and disease. When it was all over, the British reigned supreme over the sullen and resentful Afrikaners. Some Boer military leaders, notably Louis Botha (no relation to the current President) and Jan Christian Smuts, preached reconciliation with the British, and it was largely because of them that Britain united all its regional territories into the Union of South Africa in 1910. Botha and Smuts became the nation's first two Prime Ministers and led it into...
...economic hard times, and to promote the use of Afrikaans, a hybrid variant of Dutch that became a written language only in the middle of the 19th century. Today, though not listed in any telephone book, the Broederbond has 12,000 members in more than 800 cells, including President Botha (Member 4,487) and most other Afrikaner leaders of both church and state...
...response to all this, the pugnacious Botha could and did invoke the Afrikaner traditions of solidarity and defiance against what he has called "cynical and sanctimonious antagonists abroad." But what has turned many Afrikaners against the segregationist ideology is that it simply does not work very well in an industrialized modern society. The white-run economy needs blacks, and it needs them in the same buildings with whites, working side by side. Botha is an autocrat, not someone who enjoys bowing to pressure, but even he admits that he dislikes and avoids the word apartheid. He prefers "cooperative coexistence...
...this grudging spirit that Botha proposed his "reforms" -- whose chief effect was, not surprisingly, to whet the appetite for more. It was in this spirit that he called for new elections, thinking that he could crush his critics on the right by campaigning on a platform of xenophobia. But Botha soon found himself confronting an unprecedented wave of criticism from the "left," which is left only in relation to Afrikaner traditionalism. This criticism came from three important directions...