Abstract
Any traveller returning from South Africa since its first democratic elections in April 1994 is inevitably asked: ‘What has changed?’ And the paradox is that everything has changed and nothing has changed; equally paradoxically, in the short term stability has depended on the illusion among whites that nothing has really changed and among blacks that everything has changed.1 In the longer term, however, stability depends on whites accepting that far more needs to change than they have accepted so far, and among blacks that rather less can change than perhaps they have every right to hope for.
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Notes
For a vivid account, see Allister Sparks, Tomorrow is Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa’s Negotiated Revolution (Sandton: Struik, 1994), pp. 226–7.
R. W. Johnson and Lawrence Schlemmer (eds), Launching Democracy in South Africa. The First Open Election, April 1994 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996).
For the triumphalist account, see Julie Frederikse, The Unbreakable Thread. Non-Racialism in South Africa (Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
It is difficult to translate volkstaat into English: ‘national homeland’ would perhaps be the nearest equivalent, but does not quite capture the overtones of the term volk. By early 1996 the Freedom Front had retreated from this demand in the face of its manifest impracticability.
See S. Marks, The Traditions of Non-Racism in South Africa, 1994 Eleanor Rathbone Lecture (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995).
See S. Marks, The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa. Class, Nationalism and the State in Twentieth Century Natal (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press and London and Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986).
See, for example, E. Koch, ‘The Judge and the AG: Were they Duped?’, ‘De Kock: How Murder Became Routine’, and And Now for the IFP’s Gun-runners’, WM&G, 19–23 February 1996, p. 12.
African National Congress, The Reconstruction and Development Programme. A policy framework (Johannesburg: Umanyano Publications, 1994), p. 2.
M. Kirsten, A Quantitative Assessment of the Informal Sector’, in E. Preston Whyte and C. Rogerson (eds.), South Africa’s Informal Economy (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1991).
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© 1998 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Marks, S. (1998). Social Change, Order and Stability in the New South Africa. In: Toase, F.H., Yorke, E.J. (eds) The New South Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26660-9_2
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