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If the South African social order is understood as a body in motion, rolling through time, then the Soweto uprising altered its momentum, changing both its bearing and its inertial force. While the revolt posed no real danger to the continuance of the state, which maintained both control over the apparatus of material production and a virtual monopoly on the use of force, Soweto did create new social frictions, altering many of the conditions that had allowed apartheid to prosper. Chief among these were changes to Black South Africans’ implicit acceptance of their status as political objects. Soweto and its aftermath demonstrated that, while Black South Africans still lacked the power to create a new social order, they did have the power to disrupt the existing one and to render it inefficient. In order to deal with this newly realized power and try to regain the economic efficiency and social coherence of the previous decade, White elites decided to adapt apartheid. They called this process reform. The idea of reform suggests orderly change, and it was employed by the South African government to frame its proposals as necessary, both to deal with an altered political environment and to prevent a much more dangerous, chaotic, revolutionary future. The mainstream political acknowledgment of a wide variety of pressures on the apartheid system, including global pressures for economic and social sanctions, unleashed a spectrum of political discourse previously unknown in South Africa. There was turmoil in White politics as the National Party shifted away from its roots in Afrikaner nationalism to a more class-based constituency, a move which alienated many of the more conservative Afrikaners but won it new adherents among the more business- and internationally -minded English-speaking Whites. The apparently genetic political incompetence that apartheid attributed to Indians and Coloureds was somehow 95 Chapter Five Constitutional Reform, 1983–1984 undone and members of these communities were offered means to become responsible citizens of the republic. While Africans were still excluded from these official channels, they slowly found extra-parliamentary political power that they increasingly exercised in these years. As a result, the number of political agents inside South Africa increased dramatically. Reform was not an attempt to end racism or White privilege, but rather to make these core principles more practicable by altering apartheid at the margins. It was designed to do this by investing more South Africans in the existing system , thereby releasing much of the mounting pressure for more radical changes. There was, however, no consensus on what the balance should be, and by raising the possibility of change, the government significantly widened a discourse that previously had existed only among a very insulated elite. The discourse surrounding this official politicization of apartheid and the official and unofficial expansion of political agency therefore provide a remarkable opportunity to study the political identity of South Africa’s transition. REFORM, RESISTANCE, REPRESSION Reform The end of the 1970s was a time of crisis for many White South Africans. The violence of Soweto had ended one of apartheid’s primary benefits, the opportunity to live a rationalized life of privilege without being confronted with its more negative effects. A number of less dramatic, but just as far-reaching changes in the economy and in South Africa’s international reputation led to an increasing sense of isolation and unease. For some, these changes elicited the kind of fiercely defensive responses reminiscent of the founding myths of the Afrikaner nation. For others, however, there was a growing belief that some changes needed to be made. These reactions accentuated existing divisions within the governing National Party. Beginning in the 1960s, the Afrikaner elite had split into left, right, and centrist groups. To distinguish themselves, the main left faction adopted the label verligte, usually translated as “enlightened,” and the right called themselves verkrampte, a term related to the Afrikaans word for “narrow.” The verkrampte wing saw itself as the guardian of pure apartheid and worked to resist any change to its policy of radical separation. They preached hard-line racism, the chosen status of the Afrikaner volk, and apartheid as a moral vision. Yielding ground on any aspect of the policy, they argued, put the society on a slippery slope toward fundamental change. Verkrampte political rhetoric usually combined arguments for defending White interests and those about the divine and natural foundations of racial difference. For many verkrampte, apartheid was the social manifestation of fundamental truths and the institutional arrangement best suited to governing a racially...

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