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South Africa at the Crossroads
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19988 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
2,416 Words |
| Author
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Kurt M. Campbell
Kurt M. Campbell is associate professor of public policy at
the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University. |
Negotiations between the two key groups in South African politics--President F.W. de Klerk's ruling Nationalist Party and the principal opposition, Nelson Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) abruptly halted in the wake of the Boipatong massacre. An angry ANC leadership broke off the talks and demanded an international inquiry into township violence and policy misconduct. At first rejecting "foreign intervention," de Klerk then said he would not object to an international fact-finding commission, alleviating, at least a little, the nation's worst political crisis since de Klerk legalized the ANC in 1990 and began talks on ending apartheid.
Until the murder of more than 40 blacks in the Boipatong township, the two sides were moving closer to a transitional government that will take the country from apartheid to something else. However, deciding what that something else will be has spurred intense internal debate and maneuvering. The Nationalist Party and the ANC are at once bitter opponents and silent allies in the struggle to remake the country into the so called New South Africa, a slogan that is beginning to tarnish like other hopeful visions, such as perestroika and the new world order. Both the Nats, as they are colloquially known, and the ANC are battling extreme elements--gun toting Afrikaner separatists on the right and Marxist-leaning radicals on the left--and each other as the country heads into a period of unprecedented political change.
The last several years have witnessed some clearly historic development on the southern tip of the African continent. Indeed, the dramatic and sweeping nature of these developments--the UN-sponsored, U.S. brokered end of the 15--year Angolan civil war, elections in a free Namibia, the release of Nelson Mandela from his Robben Island prison, and the unbanning of the ANC--are perhaps only matched by the drama of events unfolding in the former Soviet Union and in the fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe. Along with some previously unthinkable occurrences that have since transpired (the fall of the Berlin wall and the implosion of Soviet communism) must be included the notion that South Africa's Afrikaners would willingly entertain the possibility of establishing a true democracy that might transfer political power to the disenfranchised black majority in the country.
Yet this is precisely what South African President F.W. de Klerk has done. He has brought a homespun, Dutch Reformed version of perestroika to the once staid and soiled politics of the ruling Nationalist Party. And like Mikhail Gorbachev, de Klerk's hidden agendas have been completely unforeseen and
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