Professor Colin Bundy
Apartheid in Crisis, 1973-1994
Summary
Between 1973 and 1976 the security and stability of the apartheid regime was shaken -by economic malaise, by new waves of domestic protest and by a shift in the regional balance of power. President P W Botha sought to match ‘Total Onslaught’ with ‘Total Strategy’ but by the mid-1980s the crisis deepened. Both the National Party government and the exiled ANC were forced to acknowledge that matters had reached an effective stalemate – and there was only one move left.
Professor Colin Bundy
Historian Colin Bundy retired after a career as an academic and university administrator. He served as vice-chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand, principal of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and principal of Green Templeton College, Oxford. As a scholar he was best known for his Rise and Fall of a South African Peasantry and was co-author (with William Beinart) of Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa. He has published widely on South African history and politics, and this lecture draws upon two of his books in the Jacana Pocket series: Short-changed? South Africa since apartheid, and Poverty in South Africa: Past and Present.
It was indeed critical. I think in two main respects. Firstly, the fall of communism, the really from Gorbachev onwards, the backpedalling from Moscow of support for MK crucially meant that even the idea of an armed struggle was no longer available to the ANC. And so it moved quite rapidly, 1986 onwards towards preparing itself to negotiate. And that was an absolutely critical preparation for what happened. The second thing that happened, particularly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Eastern European Soviet block, was that the West no longer no longer had to worry about Soviet support for a future ANC government. That was quite simply not part of the future and not a danger to Western interests.