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Behind Botha's obdurate stand is the tacit admission that his tentative reforms over the past two years have been less than successful. His white constituents, the majority of them Afrikaners, whose African roots go back to the landing of Dutch settlers in Cape Town in 1652, are more split than ever. A verligte (enlightened) faction, which forms a significant part of Botha's ruling National Party, is aware that some form of political accommodation with blacks must come eventually. A verkrampte (literally "cramped," or hard-line) breakaway group is determined to keep things as they are, if by sjambok and shotgun. At the same time, the black majority is torn between appeals by nationalists, who believe that nothing less than force will ever wrest power from the whites, and by moderates, who preach reform and peaceful evolution toward power sharing by all races.
From the time he assumed the national leadership, becoming Prime Minister in 1978 and State President under a new constitution in 1984, Botha was regarded by South African standards as something of a reformer. He had inherited the apartheid system as defined by the late Hendrik Verwoerd, an elaborate concept that provided not only for racial segregation but for the creation of a group of separate tribal "homelands," in which all of the country's blacks would eventually have theoretical citizenship, even though most would continue to live where they always had, in the black townships of white-ruled South Africa. By this curious bit of legerdemain, the Afrikaners hoped to keep in check the potential political power of blacks, who now number 23.9 million, compared with the whites' 4.9 million, the 2.9 million coloreds, and the nearly 1 million people of Indian descent.
Evidently recognizing some of the inadequacies of apartheid, Botha set out to change parts of the system. Perhaps his most notable accomplishment was the creation of separate, if largely powerless, houses of Parliament for the coloreds and for the Indians. Earlier this year, as part of its effort to remove some of the rough edges of apartheid, the government decided that mixed marriages and sexual relations between whites and nonwhites would no longer be forbidden. But these reforms, important as they may be in the context of South Africa, meant little to blacks and did not affect what apartheid is really all about: the preservation of white political power. Botha conceded that ways would have to be found to allow blacks to live legally and permanently in the townships they have long inhabited. But he also reaffirmed his commitment to the homelands concept. Nor did he ever speak of full citizenship for blacks or accept the idea of a house in Parliament for blacks. Most important, Botha made it clear that the principle of one man, one vote was not negotiable under any circumstances.