May 1983 saw two diametrically opposed efforts to change some fundamental features of contemporary South Africa. On May 3, Prime Minister Botha’s new Constitutional Bill was introduced in the House of Assembly providing for the first time for the inclusion of Coloured and Indians in the previously all white national legislature. Minor as the role of these two minorities will be should the new structure be adopted, the provisions signaled two white objectives: to split the black front, such as it is, and to underline the permanent exclusion of the majority Africans from any share in making national decisions.

On May 20, what might be considered the response to that formal exclusion came with the use for the first time by the seventy-year-old African National Congress of a new and deadly tactic when it exploded a car bomb outside airforce headquarters in Pretoria, killing eighteen people.