Quote:
Originally Posted by majoun
Apartheid South Africa was doomed from the moment it formally existed, when the National Party won the 1947 election and formally created apartheid... The question here is how did it manage to last as long as it did? No surprise it collapsed as a result of the end of the Cold War, but one would have expected it to collapse sooner. Did US and UK support keep it going?
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I do agree that the end of the Cold War was a key factor in the collapse of South Africa's apartheid state. Before 1989, the ANC and the strong Communist and Socialist strain of thinking within and around that organization meant that the end of Apartheid would have cost white South Africans everything. They would have lost political power of course, but they would have lost all of their economic power as well. They would have become a dispossessed people. Therefore, the white South African people and elites were willing to fight the ANC to the end.
What the end of the Cold War showed was that a Socialist South Africa was no longer a viable post-apartheid option. Therefore, disbanding apartheid would not have meant the loss of ALL power and privilege for the whites, just the loss of political power. White South Africans weren't willing to forfeit everything they had for the sake of peace and harmony, but they were, in the end, willing to forfeit a lot of what they had.