Surrender without Defeat: Afrikaners and the South African "Miracle"

Giliomee, Hermann

Surrender without Defeat: Afrikaners and the South African "Miracle"

Journal Article

1997

Journal Title

Daedalus

Link to Journal

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/daed

Publisher

MIT Press

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of Political Studies

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

During the final months of the 1980s one of the last developments that pundits would have predicted for South Africa was that the ruling Afrikaner group would give up power more or less voluntarily, to be replaced by a stable, inclusive democracy. Over the longer run the more common prediction for the country was that of a low-level insurgency ending in a full scale civil war and a racial conflagration. For the short to medium term most serious analysts anticipated power shifting from the existing Afrikaner monopoly to an Afrikaner-led, multiracial oligarchy ruling as coercively as the apartheid regime. In 1988, Ken Owen, a respected Liberal editor, commented on the white-black struggle: "Barring massive external intervention I would put my money on any alliance dominated by Afrikaners. They have the capacity to devastate the region and yet to survive".

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