ABSTRACT
The southern African region witnessed the birth of militant anti-colonial struggle during the 1960s. Repressive measures that took hold in South Africa from 1960 prevented nationalist organisations from gaining the foothold there that they did in the surrounding countries, however. It was not until the mid-1970s that widespread uprising in South Africa became a real possibility: increasing international diplomatic pressure; an emerging economic crisis stoked by, amongst other things, industrial unrest in South-West Africa [Namibia] in 1971-1972 that spread to Durban in 1973; the 1974 coup in Lisbon leading to Marxist nationalist movements gaining independence from Portugal in Angola and Mozambique 1975; the rising prominence of the Black Consciousness movement; the Soweto uprising in 1976; and the resurgence of the ANC’s sabotage programme1-through a combination of all these events, the mid-1970s thus represents a crucial juncture of South Africa’s trajectory within the region’s geopolitical history. A feeling of revolution is in the air, palpable on the picket lines and township streets, if not yet in the white suburbs or on the veld. This feeling was famously described in a 1977 Department of Defence White Paper as a “ ‘total onslaught’ in virtually every area of society” (Giliomee 2007: 367). Of equal importance is the response that this threat garnered. P.W. Botha’s ‘total strategy’ of regional destabilisation and domestic reform was described by one general in revealing terms: “If South Africa lost the socio-economic struggle we need not bother to fi ght the military one. The objective is no longer territory but the hearts and minds of men” (quoted in ibid.). Prepared to give up land in order to defend the Land, the hegemonic response to the revolutionary imperative for repossession is encapsulated by P. W. Botha’s 1979 appeal to the National Party faithful to ‘adapt or die’.
