APARTHEIDIN CRISIS
tionalist triumph in 1948. As minister of defense since 1966, he had built
the South African army into the most formidable
military machine in
Africa. He claimed that the international
community was waging a "total
onslaught"
against South Africa and gave the military a major say in the
government. The State Security Council, which had been created in 1972,
had rarely met under Vorster. Under Botha, it became more powerful than
the cabinet. Botha chaired the council, which included the minister of
defense (Gen. Magnus Malan, the former head of the Defence Force), five
other cabinet officers, and the heads of the Defence Force, the police, and
the intelligence services.f
Reforming Apartheid
The policy of the Botha administration
was a complex attempt to adapt
to changing
circumstances
without
sacrificing Afrikaner
power. It in-
cluded efforts to neutralize South Africa's neighbors, to scrap apartheid
symbols and practices that were not essential to the maintenance
of white
supremacy, to draw English-speaking
citizens into the party, to win the
cooperation
of big business, to intensify the ethnic and class cleavages
among the subject peoples, and to suppress domestic dissidents.
The government's domestic reforms resulted from investigations made