In 1986, Botha declared yet another
state of emergency and unleashed a last-ditch storm of tyranny.
Bannings of people and meetings followed, and
shootings by the police were carried out with impunity. There were
mass arrests, detentions, treason trials and
torture . Sinister hit squads were deployed to assassinate the UDF leadership. Alarmed by the spiral of violence that was engulfing the country, a group of South African businessmen, mostly Afrikaners, flew to Senegal in 1987 to meet an ANC delegation headed by
Thabo Mbeki . A joint statement pressed for unequivocal support for a negotiated settlement.
Weeks after the world celebrated Mandela's seventieth birthday in July 1988 with a huge bash at London's Wembley Stadium, Mandela was rushed off to Tygerberg Hospital, suffering from tuberculosis. Although he was better by October, the government announced that he wouldn't be returning to Pollsmoor Prison. Instead he was moved to a warder's cottage at Victor Verster Prison in Paarl. Outside the prison walls, Botha's policies had hit the buffers and even the army top brass were pushing for change. They told Botha that there could be no decisive military victory over the anti-apartheid opposition and the undeclared war in Angola was bleeding the treasury dry.
At the beginning of 1989, Mandela wrote to Botha from Victor Verster Prison calling for negotiations. "I am disturbed by the spectre of a South Africa split into two hostile camps - blacks on one side, whites on the other," he wrote. An intransigent character, Botha found himself with little room to manoeuvre. He had brought South Africa to a state of unprecedented crisis, yet he refused to change direction. When he was weakened by a stroke, his party colleagues moved swiftly to oust him and replaced him with Frederik Willem (F.W.) De Klerk .
Drawn from the conservative wing of the National Party, from the start De Klerk made it clear he was totally opposed to majority rule. But he inherited a massive pile of problems that could no longer be ignored: the economy was in trouble and the cost of maintaining apartheid prohibitive; the illegal influx of Africans from the country to the city had become an unstoppable flood; blacks hadn't been taken in by Botha's constitutional reforms; and even South Africa's friends were beginning to lose patience. In September 1989, US President George Bush let De Klerk know that if there wasn't progress on releasing Mandela within six months, he would extend US sanctions against South Africa.
De Klerk made a strategic calculation that the ANC was organizationally weak, having little internal base and having lost all its external support as a result of the enforced closure of its bases in Angola and Zambia, as well as having lost aid from eastern Europe with the collapse of the Iron Curtain regimes. He gambled on his own party's five-decade track record in gerrymandering and on his own ability to outmanoeuvre the ANC. In February 1990, De Klerk announced the unbanning of the ANC, the PAC, the Communist Party and 33 other organizations, as well as the release of Mandela . On Sunday February 11, at around 4pm, Mandela stepped out of Victor Verster Prison and was driven to City Hall in Cape Town, from where he spoke publicly for the first time in three decades. He told his supporters that the factors which necessitated armed struggle still existed, but that he believed that "a climate conducive to a negotiated settlement will exist soon".
That May, Mandela and De Klerk signed an agreement in which the government agreed to repeal repressive laws and release political prisoners, while Mandela persuaded the ANC to suspend the armed struggle. As events moved slowly towards full-blown negotiations it became clear that De Klerk still clung to race-based notions for a settlement. "Majority rule is not suitable for South Africa", he said, "because it will lead to the domination of minorities."
