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This cruel form of happiness and justice has, of course, inspired a worldwide campaign against South Africa. After years of prodding by protest groups, the U.S. Congress in 1986 banned new corporate investment in South Africa and stopped the import of South African steel, iron, coal, uranium and textiles, as well as the export of computers and petroleum to that country. Similar punishments have been imposed by the European Community, the Commonwealth and Japan.
In response to all this, the pugnacious Botha could and did invoke the Afrikaner traditions of solidarity and defiance against what he has called "cynical and sanctimonious antagonists abroad." But what has turned many Afrikaners against the segregationist ideology is that it simply does not work very well in an industrialized modern society. The white-run economy needs blacks, and it needs them in the same buildings with whites, working side by side. Botha is an autocrat, not someone who enjoys bowing to pressure, but even he admits that he dislikes and avoids the word apartheid. He prefers "cooperative coexistence."
It was in this grudging spirit that Botha proposed his "reforms" -- whose chief effect was, not surprisingly, to whet the appetite for more. It was in this spirit that he called for new elections, thinking that he could crush his critics on the right by campaigning on a platform of xenophobia. But Botha soon found himself confronting an unprecedented wave of criticism from the "left," which is left only in relation to Afrikaner traditionalism. This criticism came from three important directions:
The intelligentsia. Because it is an ideology as well as a power system, apartheid needs the Afrikaner intelligentsia to explain and justify its workings. The intellectual center of Afrikanerdom is the University of Stellenbosch, just outside Cape Town, and Stellenbosch is in turmoil. Not only are the students increasingly disaffected (see box), but 27 senior academics recently resigned in protest from the National Party and issued a manifesto demanding abolition of all "residuals of apartheid." When the Cape Town Nationalist newspaper Die Burger dismissed the gesture as "trivial" because there were only 27 protesters in a faculty of more than 700, an additional 301 promptly signed the manifesto and promised that more would soon add their signatures.
"The government is the captive of its own meaningless rhetoric," observes Stellenbosch Economics Professor Sampie Terreblanche, a leading National Party adviser, member of the Broederbond and, until he was fired last month for joining the 27, vice chairman of the South African Broadcasting Corp. "The government is never prepared to admit mistakes. It will not dismantle apartheid. The National Party is an Afrikaner party, and it intends to keep power not just in white hands but in Afrikaner hands. It was never in favor of real reform. That was just cosmetic, to prolong Afrikaner control."