ABSTRACT
Regional events since the Portuguese coup of April 1974 have created a heightened sense of threat among whites in Rhodesia and South Africa, but the reactions of the two governments have been sharply different. In South Africa, John Vorster presented the National party as the sole guarantor of continued white political hegemony over the black majority. The R. W. Johnson and Heribert Adam analyses provide a necessary starting point for an appraisal of white motivations, attitudes, and actions. In Johnson's analysis, the analogy with earlier white settler societies is important. Black demands for power sharing initially prompt white "reform" responses, but the black nationalists reject the offered concessions. A central weakness in Adam's analysis lies in his wavering about the importance of racial ideology as a basic motivating force for Afrikaner Nationalists. The 1975 South African intervention in Angola provides the most obvious of a number of examples in which Adam's analysis fails.
