What was P.W. Botha's vision for the apartheid state?

South Africa – The Rise and Fall of P.W. Botha's Leadership, 1978-89

In this course, Dr Rachel Johnson (University of Durham) explores challenges to and the collapse of the apartheid regime. In the first lecture, we think about P.W. Botha’s vision for the apartheid state. Next, we think about resistance to apartheid during the 1980s. In the third and final lecture, we think about how P.W. Botha looked to reform the apartheid state and how his failure to do so led to the end of apartheid.

What was P.W. Botha's vision for the apartheid state?

In this lecture, we think about P.W. Botha’s vision for the apartheid state, focusing in particular on: (i) P.W. Botha’s leadership of South Africa, as prime minister and then president from 1978-89; (ii) the new constitution adopted in South Africa during Botha’s premiership, which looked to reform but retain the apartheid regime; (iii) the granting of additional powers to the South African Defence Force (SADF) during this period; (iv) F.W. de Klerk’s unbanning of liberation organisations like the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and releasing of political prisoners during his premiership; (v) the national and international status at the inception of Botha’s premiership providing huge challenges to the maintenance of the apartheid state; (vi) the arms embargo, which was called for by the United Nations (UN) in 1963 and made mandatory in 1977, meaning that South Africa had to become self-sufficient in its production of armaments; (vii) Botha’s famous “adapt or die” mandate to the Afrikaner people; (viii) the introduction of the Tricameral Parliament from 1984-94, which included separate representative groups for the White, ‘Coloured’ and Asian populations of South Africa, excluding the African population; (ix) the justification of the exclusion of African representatives from the Tricameral Parliament being that they were self-governed in their respective Bantustans; (x) the powers given to the new state president, the first of whom was Botha, which included the ability to dismiss and overrule Parliament, as well as to dismiss judges; (xi) the opposition to Botha’s proposed constitution in 1983, particularly by the Verkramptes; (xii) Andries Treurnicht’s formation of the Conservative Party in opposition to Botha’s National Party; (xiii) the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983 to oppose the apartheid regime; (xiv) Trevor Manuel’s description of the UDF as the “organised voice of our people”; (xv) the Congress of South African Students (COSAS), which affiliated itself with the UDF and led numerous boycotts in response to apartheid reformations; (xvi) the formation of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in 1985, which led strikes and boycotts; (xvii) the reading of Nelson Mandela’s response to Botha’s offer to release him from prison under the requirement that he renounced the armed struggle at Desmond Tutu’s reception of the Nobel Prize for Peace event; (xviii) the release of Herman Andimba Toivo ya Toivo on 1 March 1984, used as an example by Nelson Mandela to highlight the unjust nature of P.W. Botha’s proposal of a conditional release.