both flanks."
On the right, Afrikaner urban workers and marginal farmers who relied
on apartheid's defenses against black competition and the numerous bu-
reaucrats who lived by administering the apartheid laws feared the conse-
quences of extending effective political rights to Blacks. They were deter-
mined to preserve the Verwoerdian system with the utmost rigor. On the
left, some Afrikaner clergy and intellectuals-the
very class that had pro-
duced the apartheid ideology in the first place-and
several Afrikaner
business leaders were beginning to realize that apartheid was both immoral
and inexpedient and were starting to strive for substantial changes.
In 1978, the National party itself was tainted by scandal. It was revealed
that members of the government had misappropriated
public funds
intended for secret propaganda
purposes. The taint extended to senior
cabinet ministers and even to Prime Minister John Vorster, who had suc-
ceeded Verwoerd in 1966. On September 28, Vorster resigned and the
parliamentary members of the party elected Pieter Willem Botha as their
leader and hence as Vorster's successor,"
Botha, who was born in 1916, was intelligent, determined, hot-tem-
pered, and domineering. A politician through and through, he was a Na-