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Another rebel is Esther Lategan, a social worker and businesswoman who resigned from the Nationalists to campaign as an independent. "People live in fear of the future," she says. "You must give them hope, and that is what I am talking about. How long can we stay in control? What about our children? Apartheid must go."
Such open splits are still rare, but the new Afrikaner discontent is having its effect even on politicians loyal to Botha. Foreign Minister Roelof ("Pik") Botha (no relation to the President) told an election rally this month that some of the social restrictions of apartheid are absurd. "I cannot understand," he said, "how you can stand in a lift with a black man with a toolbox in his hand, but when he puts on a suit you want nothing to do with him."
Even the shadowy Broederbond, whose whole purpose is to work for Afrikaner power, is beginning to make strange noises. First it forced out about 1,000 members who had split with the Nationalists to form the ultraright Herstigte (Reconstituted) National Party. Then, last year, it began circulating among its members a "working document" that canvassed opinion on the idea of a multiracial government. "The rights of all groups should be advanced and fulfilled," it said. Now Broederbond Chairman Jan Pieter de Lange is speaking openly of a "tremendous need for more contact ((between races)) to build up mutual understanding."
Attacked from both left and right, Botha is campaigning as a "moderate" with a ferocity that only Afrikaners could consider moderate. Choosing the U.S. as his favorite target, Botha at an election rally in Lichtenburg in the Transvaal declared that the congressional sanctions against South Africa meant the Kremlin "had its work done for it in Washington." Waving his arms, Botha insisted, "South Africa is the scapegoat of America's bad conscience, ((but)) the South African government is not prepared to surrender." Some 2,000 Afrikaners leaped to their feet, applauding wildly. Carrying his campaign to restive Stellenbosch last week, Botha claimed that "reform, change and ( renewal" run "like a golden thread" through the history of the National Party. Those who thought otherwise, he declared, "should be ashamed of themselves." Student hecklers in the back howled and jeered at Botha, and one of them asked when he would retire. "If I feel like I do tonight, you're likely to see a good deal more of me in the future," he said.
Five parties are competing for 166 parliamentary seats in the May 6 election. To the right of the ruling Nationalists are the Conservatives and the even more reactionary Herstigte National Party, to the left the New Republic Party and the Progressives. The extreme right Afrikaanse Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement), an all-white neofascist movement led by Eugene Terre Blanche that advocates total racial separation, will not field candidates in the election. "If the Nationalist government comes back into power," predicted an antigovernment campaigner at a multiracial Cape Town rally this month, "we will take this as a signal that you have rejected our path of peaceful protest." He warned of violence "on a scale never seen before."