ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the 1970s, 'the only apparent blips on white South Africa's rosy horizon ... were nagging inflation and the growing irritant of an international sports boycott'.3 By the end of the decade, South Africa had experienced a resurgence of industrial unrest, the fall of the Portuguese empire, the collapse of the policy of detente with sub-Saharan Africa, the Soweto uprising, the Information scandal and the imposition of a mandatory arms embargo by the United Nations. The 'blips' which had irritated the country in 1970 had grown into a full-blown economic crisis and a global anti-apartheid campaign for disinvestment.4 Great Britain and the United States of America had also experienced a dramatic decade. Great Britain's post-war political consensus collapsed during the mid-1970s in political acrimony. In the United States, President Nixon resigned in 1974 following the Watergate scandal; meanwhile the United States experienced the global repercussions of their strategic defeat in Vietnam. Although British and US relations with South Africa had been consciously low key in the period between the early 1960s and 1974, the fall of the
Because of the pressures of space, of the constant need to compress and synthesize, what really happened is not always what we wrote about, even if our facts were indisputable, not because of an intent to deceive, but because we are compelled to deal in essentials... I have always been struck by the fact that reporters, relaxing and drinking together, are always swapping stories about what happened and that these stories are funnier, truer and more revealing than anything they write for their media.1
