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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 of reform as if it were the work of the devil. Sixteen Nationalist members of Parliament broke with Botha and formed the new Conservative Party, pledged to total apartheid, now and forever.
Central to the illusion of apartheid, as decreed by the major segregation laws of the 1950s, was the fantasy that South Africa's blacks could be legally assigned to ten autonomous tribal homelands and then admitted to white South Africa only as migrant workers, not citizens. The realities of urbanization mock that fantasy, and anyone wandering around Cape Town or Johannesburg today can see blacks sitting next to whites in restaurants or lining up in the same banking queue to be served by a black teller. Nobody is surprised to observe a black traffic policeman ticketing a white who ran a stop sign, or even a black-and-white couple holding hands as they wander into a video-rental store.
But venture out into the Afrikaners' rural platteland in the Transvaal or the Orange Free State, and apartheid looks alive and well. The Afrikaner driving his bakkie (pickup) rides alone in the front seat, while his black laborers squat in the back. Outside, some blacks sit eating bread and drinking milk they have bought from the nearby corner store, which has a counter for natives only. There is no obvious hostility here, just a sense that this is how things are, and always will be. As the Lord made them.
What traditionally united the Afrikaners was not just their language and their religion but also their history of struggle and oppression. They are very proud and very aware of their claim that they came to this land first. When Jan van Riebeeck disembarked at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 to establish a supply station for Dutch East India Company vessels en route to India, he found nobody except a few brown-skinned nomads whom the Dutch called Hottentots. Van Riebeeck described these aborigines as a "dull, rude, lazy and stinking nation," and most of them subsequently died in an epidemic of smallpox, brought on a company ship from India. To do the heavy work, the Dutch settlers, who were soon joined by a number of Germans and French Huguenot refugees, brought in slaves, mostly from Madagascar, Mozambique and the Dutch East Indies. Thus the primal relationship between the Afrikaners and the blacks took form.
The British arrived in 1795 and seized the Cape Town settlement with no real justification except that they wanted to deny the strategic site to France's India trade. But even after the defeat of Napoleon, the British stayed on. They subjected the pioneering Afrikaners to the discomforts of British law, including a ban on slavery.