South Africa Apartheid By Another Name

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Even the Reagan Administration seemed unimpressed. The day after the speech, President Reagan acted on his Sept. 9 pledge to apply economic sanctions against South Africa and ordered a ban on U.S. imports of Krugerrands, effective Oct. 11. A day later, Secretary of State George Shultz declared that apartheid was "doomed." In an interview with the New York Times, he argued that apartheid "is not only wrong in our view, but, at least in my judgment, it is over." Shultz encouraged the South African government to "signal" its willingness to negotiate with blacks by releasing imprisoned A.N.C. Leader Nelson Mandela.

Botha was scalded by the poor reviews. "More than any other national leader, I went out of my way to create an attitude of justice toward other groups," he said to party members in Port Elizabeth two days after the speech. "There is no sign of any appreciation for this spirit of justice." Paradoxically, both statements are true. Botha has been more of a reformer than any of his predecessors: he has eliminated such petty indignities of apartheid as bans on marriage and sex across the color line, and he has introduced a tricameral legislature that gives limited powers to South Africa's Indians and coloreds (those of mixed race). The result, if anything, has been to increase the pressure for more sweeping changes.

Why Botha's Durban speech failed to live up to its advance billing remains a subject of intense speculation. The initial explanation was that there had been a right-wing rebellion within his Cabinet. Diplomats, businessmen and journalists reject that theory, however, noting that the high-level officials who previewed the speech stressed that it had already been approved by a special Cabinet committee. One top official told TIME that the reforms would become "government policy" unless Botha himself revised the draft. South Africans suggest three more plausible explanations. Botha may have changed his mind at the last minute out of pique, balking at the pressure implicit in the advance publicity. Another possibility is that Botha failed to realize how important the speech had become in the eyes of the international community. South Africa is often so inept at public relations that one Western diplomat in Pretoria jokes that there is a secret government office called "the ministry of bad timing."

Finally, Botha may have decided to space the enunciation of his reforms over the course of the four provincial congresses, thereby involving the whole National Party in his plans. "He had established a timetable, building up to a climax," says one Afrikaner journalist, "and he was not prepared to change that plan for anyone." During that six-week period, however, much of the world caught on to what the blacks of South Africa knew all along: the new pitch for "cooperative coexistence," much like earlier calls for "separate development," "plural relations" and "co-responsibility," is just another way of saying apartheid.