South Africa The Struggle for a New Order, by Marina Ottaway, Copyright, 1993, by The Brookings Institution. The book is dense with details on the governments agencies, the struggle, and the transition from apartheid during the first two years. The author, Marina Ottaway is the former Senior Research Associate and Head of the Middle East Program in the Woodrow Wilson Center, and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her bio on the Wilson Center website states that she is a long time analyst of political transformation in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and has an extensive professional history in teaching, research, and has published and edited multiple works. (POLITICO LLC)
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The NP won the 1948 parliamentary election with less than 50 percent of the vote, but due to gerrymandering, the results are swayed in their favor (25). The party represented the Afrikaner population and marked the beginning of four decades of National Party rule. Soon thereafter apartheid officially begins with the alienation of the blacks through the strength of Afrikaner nationalism and the whites’ fear of blacks having power. In 1990, NP believed that it could set aside apartheid by replacing one government with another without letting go of its power. The author goes on to explain the strength of the National Party and where the strength came from its control over the cabinets, majority of the seats in parliament, and the civil service advancing the Afrikaners. Not to be overlooked was the role and influence of P. W. Botha as leader of the State Security Council. Due to the men who were in charge of developing the New South Africa being the same people who had been in office prior to the move to end apartheid, the NP had autonomy in how they were going to go about reforming the government. None of the leaders had a reputation for being particularly …show more content…
W. de Klerk embraced three nationalist’s traditions including: racism, Afrikaners fear of being choked out not only by the blacks but also by the more educated and wealthier community, and that decolonization, the demands for political rights by the blacks and socio-economic advancement could no longer go unnoticed. So the ones supportive of apartheid argued that segregating the blacks into their own community in their homelands and the whites in South Africa, blacks wouldn’t be dominated by the whites because they would be in their own community. In time the homelands would become independent the way the other African Countries had already, allowing the blacks to have their full political power over their designated areas and the whites could remain in South Africa controlling their own country without the blacks. A problem with this is that the blacks could not make a living in the homelands, mostly dry and waterless. Another issue was that whites needed the blacks to keep their economy going, and ultimately over 3million blacks had been removed from “white” designated areas to these “homelands” of which most had never set foot on.
In terms of trying to reform the party system, what was actually happening was an innovative restructuring of the domination rather than eradicating it. Even though F. W. de Klerk denies that motivation for reform had anything to do with the political social temperature, he began to turn from his original hard lined resolve that his party supported
Chapter …show more content…
The NP won the 1948 parliamentary election with less than 50 percent of the vote, but due to gerrymandering, the results are swayed in their favor (25). The party represented the Afrikaner population and marked the beginning of four decades of National Party rule. Soon thereafter apartheid officially begins with the alienation of the blacks through the strength of Afrikaner nationalism and the whites’ fear of blacks having power. In 1990, NP believed that it could set aside apartheid by replacing one government with another without letting go of its power. The author goes on to explain the strength of the National Party and where the strength came from its control over the cabinets, majority of the seats in parliament, and the civil service advancing the Afrikaners. Not to be overlooked was the role and influence of P. W. Botha as leader of the State Security Council. Due to the men who were in charge of developing the New South Africa being the same people who had been in office prior to the move to end apartheid, the NP had autonomy in how they were going to go about reforming the government. None of the leaders had a reputation for being particularly …show more content…
W. de Klerk embraced three nationalist’s traditions including: racism, Afrikaners fear of being choked out not only by the blacks but also by the more educated and wealthier community, and that decolonization, the demands for political rights by the blacks and socio-economic advancement could no longer go unnoticed. So the ones supportive of apartheid argued that segregating the blacks into their own community in their homelands and the whites in South Africa, blacks wouldn’t be dominated by the whites because they would be in their own community. In time the homelands would become independent the way the other African Countries had already, allowing the blacks to have their full political power over their designated areas and the whites could remain in South Africa controlling their own country without the blacks. A problem with this is that the blacks could not make a living in the homelands, mostly dry and waterless. Another issue was that whites needed the blacks to keep their economy going, and ultimately over 3million blacks had been removed from “white” designated areas to these “homelands” of which most had never set foot on.
In terms of trying to reform the party system, what was actually happening was an innovative restructuring of the domination rather than eradicating it. Even though F. W. de Klerk denies that motivation for reform had anything to do with the political social temperature, he began to turn from his original hard lined resolve that his party supported