seventeen members of the ANC. In meetings such as these, Mbeki, a suave
and intelligent graduate of Sussex University with the style of a stereotyp-
ical English gentleman, put the white participants at ease, and both sides
grew to realize that they had a common interest in seeking a peaceful so-
lution to the conflict in South Africa. The Dakar session culminated in a
joint communique expressing unanimous support for a negotiated settle-
ment. Mbeki praised Slabbert as an Afrikaner pioneer and stressed that
both sides were agreed on "the kind of democratic, non-racial South
Africa we want."?
Not only reform-minded Whites were facing up to the prospect of fun-
damental change in South Africa. The demands by the Afrikaner Weer-
stand Beweging (AWB; Afrikaner Resistance Movement) and other right-
wing Afrikaner groups that a white state be carved out of South Africa
were evidence that fatalism was infecting the entire white population."
Meanwhile, even as the Botha government was trying to manage the
situation by brute force, it also secretly began to contact ANC leaders, ex-
ploring alternative ways of controlling the country and trying to discover
and exploit the ANC'S internal divisions. Aware that Mandela, through