ABSTRACT
"Suffer the Future" is the almost unanimous resignative warning for South Africa from liberal academics while the majority of African nationalists agree that the current white system can deliver only one thing: the timetable for conflict. This chapter presents an interdisciplinary, comparative, and policy-oriented critical analysis of strategies for conflict solution in South Africa. The pragmatic commitment to power maintenance by a threatened ethnic oligarchy puts South Africa in the category of authoritarian states. South Africa can be viewed as an African country only in a geographic and demographic sense. In most other respects the republic is so different from any other African society that it must be conceptualized as a qualitatively different case. The most important implication of South Africa's extraordinary economic development, and accumulated wealth, lies in the vast leverage it affords the regime to manage internal conflict.
