Word: bothas
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Much as the black-ruled nations of Africa might detest it, they cannot ignore the fact that the pariah state of South Africa is the economic and military superpower south of the Sahara. This galling reality is the backdrop against which State President P.W. Botha is staging a new diplomatic offensive. In three weeks he has met publicly with three African heads of state and secretly, officials in Pretoria claim, with two others. Flying home from Zaire last week, Botha announced jubilantly, "We are going to other African countries as well, where we will be busy this year and next...
That is precisely the point. By talking to Botha, black leaders considered implacable enemies of apartheid provide him with a political breakthrough. They handshake him out of isolation and invest him with the credentials of international respectability. Televised images of black leaders welcoming him to their lands bolster his ritual argument: southern Africa is an interlocking unit that cannot hope to solve its problems without South Africa's wealth and skills. More immediately, the visible evidence that black African states are cooperating with him helps Botha undermine the sanctions campaign in the U.S. and Europe. "Allegations that South Africa...
...Botha's promise to stop destabilizing neighboring states is one reward black nations can anticipate in return for their hospitality. South Africa also doles out large-scale development loans and credits, which all its neighbors need, and carries on semicovert trade with more than 40 other African countries...
...same time, Botha must prove to skittish white citizens at home that there is a payoff for his initiatives. Last August he pulled the South African Defense Force out of Angola. He has agreed to a Nov. 1 deadline to set in motion the long-delayed independence process for Namibia. Afrikaner skeptics are muttering that independence for "South West," as they call Namibia, will just bring another Marxist government to power on South Africa's borders. Botha is using coverage of his road-show triumphs to counteract angry charges of "surrender" from the right-wing Conservative Party, which threatens...
While in South Africa, Hoffenberg--who emigrated from that country three years ago--interviewed more than 30 prominent South African personalities, including President P.W. Botha's chief political and constitutional advisers, leaders of the Black Consciousness Movement, and members of reactionary white political parties...