NIC secretary Farouk Meer wrote at the beginning of 1989 that whites had been ‘brainwashed, cajoled and bullied into a false sense of fear and apprehension, mistakenly seeking security and privilege with the tenuous protection of security forces, big business and Nationalist politicians’. He was not optimistic that an end to centuries of racist and exploitative rule was imminent. But within months of his statement, the Berlin Wall came crashing down and the international terrain changed dramatically, with major implications for local politics.

Elements within the apartheid regime regarded the changing context as a favourable environment for negotiations. As apartheid spy boss Niël Barnard put it:

What Barnard did not mention was that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the West could no longer be drawn into the argument that apartheid South Africa was a bulwark against communism, thus weakening the Nats’ ability to solicit support internationally. In short, dramatic changes in geopolitics made both the ANC and the NP more amenable to sitting around a table.

Fatima Meer observed acutely in 1987 that P.W. Botha, fearing ‘Afrikaner strife’, had failed to make the ‘necessary intellectual leap to real change’ and continued ‘worshipping the carcass [of apartheid]’. While observers believed that ‘the Afrikaner will never give up’, Meer argued that there was ‘no special mystique about the Afrikaner’, who had long ‘parted company with his tough frontier forebears’. The Afrikaner attitude towards blacks had not changed, but because they had ‘accumulated so many creature comforts’ they would ‘ultimately bargain to save some of them rather than lose all’.

As Barnard observed, the fall of the Soviet Union had an immediate impact on the ANC and the SACP. With the Soviets ‘abandoning the “no win” Cold War’, there was declining support for ‘any further protraction in South Africa's guerrilla warfare’.4 Even before this, the ANC had sensed that it could not defeat the Nats militarily. The ANC had largely evacuated from Mozambique after the Nkomati Accord was signed in 1984, and the civil war in Angola sputtered on. Destabilised by the apartheid regime, the so-called Frontline States – Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe – were encouraging the ANC to continue negotiations.