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"Petty politics and stereotyped slogans no longer please anyone," wrote another of the 27 signers, Philosophy Professor Willie Esterhuyse, in the Sunday Times of Johannesburg. He claimed to be speaking not just for a few professors but also for a growing number of professional people, doctors, businessmen, the young. "People are not only yearning for new ideas. They also want a new political style, a rhetoric which is conciliatory. Unhappiness with the National Party and its leadership does not simply concern the pace of reform. It is concerned with the nature, goals and strategies of reform itself."
Novelist Andre Brink (Knowledge of the Night), some of whose work has been banned in South Africa, agrees: "If faced with the ultimate choice between sharing and going under, the Masada complex need not prevail. There is still a chance -- small and diminishing rapidly -- of entering into the kind of dialectic with the present which may open up the future." Frederik van Zyl Slabbert was leader of the official opposition, the Progressive Federal Party, until he resigned in disgust last year, so his criticisms are hardly new. But he is also a former professor of sociology and thus well tuned to the new mood of intellectual disaffection. He blames Botha for much of the discontent. "He is an authoritarian President, uncomfortable with questions or discussion. In the past, the National Party was consulted; now Botha tells it what to do. This has emasculated the Parliament. The party faithful feel that they have lost control over their destiny."
Of the onetime farmers who still proudly celebrate the anniversary of the Great Trek, Slabbert says, "Afrikaners are now bourgeois, upper middle class, the Babbitts of Bloemfontein. They are beginning to feel ashamed of their racism. The tribal bonds are weakening. Afrikaner hegemony and solidarity are crumbling."
The church. South Africa is officially a Christian state, and most Afrikaners take their Calvinist religion seriously. In the upcountry towns where Afrikanerdom still follows the old rules, Sunday is strictly a day for prayer and rest and for paternal readings from the leather-bound family Bible: no sports, no fishing, no television.
The Dutch Reformed Church came with the original settlers in 1652, and although it allowed the first black slaves to worship together with their masters, it decreed in 1857 that blacks and whites must attend separate services. Because of its insistence that apartheid is the will of God, the N.G.K. has sometimes been referred to as the "National Party at prayer."
The earliest faint stirrings of dissent occurred in 1974, when that year's synod departed from the traditional affirmation that apartheid derived directly from Scripture, and said only that apartheid was not in any way contrary to Scripture. That dissent grew stronger in 1980, when eight theologians published a statement protesting the "apparent inability of the institutionalized church in South Africa to fulfill its God-given calling of reconciliation . . . between different race groups." In 1982 the eight grew to 123 ministers calling on the N.G.K. to play a "much greater role of reconciliation," and though that year's synod elected an eminent conservative as moderator, it decided that the church's racial policy should be "completely revised in the light of Scripture."