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PARTISAN REVIEW
Foreign governments also adopted a new attitude towards this partic–
ular revolution. The United States and France seemed suddenly to
recliscover the morality of a revolutionary struggle for liberation. Only
twenty years after their attempts to suppress movements for independence
in Vietnam and Algeria, they denounced colonialism in South Africa,
imposed economic sanctions, and supported boycotts against an illegiti–
mate white minority government.
The revolution in South Africa began in 1989 when
E
W de Klerk
released Nelson Mandela from prison. His reason? He needed someone with
whom to negotiate. Everything had been going wrong in South Africa:
decades of violent acts of terror and desperation on one side and brutal
repression on the other; the ominous defeat of South African troops by
Cuban troops in Angola; an untenable political and military situation in
neighboring Namibia; growing white South African resistance to more
(white) military casualties; general civil unrest; international economic pres–
sure; the rise of a new generation of emboldened black South African raclicals.
Finally, white South Africans made a calculated decision to enter into nego–
tiations with moderate black South Africans. The bans on the African
National Congress and the South African Communist Party were lifted.
After Mandela's liberation and after the white government's introduc–
tion of some insignificant token reforms that chipped away at apartheid, the
last stage of the political and moral struggle against apartheid began. De
Klerk, breaking with the traditional thinking in his party, came to realize
that apartheid could not be "reformed," that there were no political solu–
tions short of black enfranchisement, and that fortunately the ANC was a
liberal democratic party that would protect political rights as well as private
property. Thus, in this final stage, neither side propounded intransigent,
ideological or extremist stands. Both sides appeared willing to work for
what each considered, in its own way, the "common good"-though the
common good was conceived as continuing prosperi ty for the whi te
minority and as reclistribution of the wealth for the black majority.
To their great credit, de Klerk and Mandela proved Trotsky wrong.
"History on the whole," the Russian had conm1ented, "knows of no rev–
olution that was accomplished in a democratic way. ...Classes never
consent
to
lose possessions, power and 'honour' by observing the rules of
the game of 'democratic' parliamentarism." But in South Africa in the
early 1990s, the established powers clid not respond with violence to the
movement to transform South African society.
Revolutionary politicians in South Africa seem to have followed the
American revolutionary model rather than the French one. "As freedom
fighters we could not have known of such men as George Washington,
Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson," said Nelson Mandela when he
