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The South African Political Process

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

J. E. Spence
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Extract

Over a quarter of a century ago i was privileged to receive an invitation to contribute an article on South African politics to the first number of this journal. I recall dismissing the thesis that ‘economic forces, together with the emergence of an African middle class, will provide a long term solution to the country's problems…’ I argued that

even if we assume a lessening in international pressure, and an indefinite coqtinuation of the Republic's economic expansion, the [black] elite thrown up by this process may present the South African government (and the opposition parties) with their most fundamental challenge. In these circumstances — the most favourable South Africa can legitimately expect — the choice will still lie between yet more authoritarian methods of social control and a widening of the area of participation in the political process on terms distinctly more radical than those currently envisaged by the two major opposition parties in the Parliament based on the present electorate.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1991 , pp. 316 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1991

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References

1 The Origins of Extra-Parliamentary Opposition in South Africa’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 1, No. 1, October 1965, pp. 55–84.

2 ibid., p. 84.

3 This involved the creation of eight ‘independent’ homelands to cater for the political aspirations of the black majority based on the principle of ethnic separation.

4 See Stanley Uys, ‘White Election-Black Times’, Front File — Southern African Brief, No. 2, May 1987.

5 Some 3,000 people have been killed in Natal since 1987, while deaths through violence in the urban areas numbered some 1,200 between August 1990 and April 1991.

6 See Spence, J. E., ‘Change in South Africa: The End of the Beginning’, Oxford International Review, Vol. 1, No. 2, Nov. 1990, pp. 59–62.Google Scholar

7 Quoted from Spence, J. E., ‘South Africa: charisma and compromise’, The World Today, Vol. 47, No. 4, 04 1991, p. 69.Google Scholar