1983 The New Constitution

• A complicated new constitution was drawn up for South Africa in 1983
• Coloureds and Indians were to be allowed to vote for their representatives in their parliaments
• 178 places in the white parliament compared to 85 in the Coloured Parliament and 45 in the Indian Parliament - a cabinet was then drawn proportionally from the three Parliaments
• Blacks were excluded – only allowed to vote for local black assemblies which were given some responsibility for running local affairs
• Ultimately whites remained in control of the country but were using this new constitution to pose as multiracial
• Many people were unhappy with the new constitution and did not bother voting – from many different parts of life
• Blacks, Indians and Coloureds decided to boycott the elections to the new parliaments and local councils
• ‘Total strategy’ is a term with which most South Africans will be familiar - it came into common use during the era of P.W. Botha - its authors portrayed it as the apartheid government’s response to the perceived threat of the ‘total onslaught’
• The New Constitution:

  
• The total onslaught, the story went, was the threat posed to South Africa (and to the Western world) by the Soviet Union’s designs on the strategic value of South Africa as the industrial powerhouse of the African continent; the guardian of the sea lanes around the Cape of Good Hope, and in particular the possessor of enormous mineral wealth, which would enable the USSR to the world to ransom
• Furthermore, there were revolutionary forces within South Africa, which were intent on supporting and fuelling this threat
• The irony of the doctrine of total strategy was that, it was designed to portray the apartheid government as the sole supporter of Western democracy on the continent of Africa - whereas the real purpose was to maintain apartheid power, serving the interests of 13% of the population at the expense of 87% of the population
• Could there have been a total strategy without the spectre of a total onslaught?
• The justification to the international community and the white population of South Africa would have been a lot more difficult
• Botha’s total strategy was intended to serve many purposes:

  • To win the support of Western governments
  • To justify repression of the black population, especially those wanting to topple white power
  • To brainwash the white population into closing ranks, particularly within the security forces and judiciary - even condoning torture and assassination of political activists
  • To justify the destabilisation of South Africa’s neighbours, through cross-border raids, through support for UNITA (a rebel group in Angola)
  • Other renegade forces and through military invasion of Angola