MILESTONES
battled it out with the older, more peace-loving residents
THE HOUSE OF DEATH
(the ‘vigilantes’). Botha, too, had failed, and he began to think of real political compromise.
One sunny afternoon in April 1966 Hendrik Verwoerd, the South African premier and chief architect of ‘grand apartheid’, walked into the House of Assembly in Cape Town with his wife Betsie at his side, He was well prepared to give the opening address to the new parliament – an important speech, it was thought, one in which he would reveal a new and friendlier approach to the country’s black neighbours and to the wider world. But before he could start, a parliamentary messenger walked across and stabbed him four times in the chest.
The turbulent planet
In 1971 computer users were offered a new tool:
they could now store information on a flat, easy-to-handle IBM memory bank. It soon displaced the punched cards and magnetic tapes of the 1960s, and it was called the ‘floppy
The old tyrant died almost instantly. His killer was identified as Dimitri Tsafendas, a disturbed man of GreekAfrican origin who had been shunned by white society. He was later adjudged unfit to stand trial. Many South Africans wanted to see the end of a leader perceived to be an enemy of democracy, but not in this way.
disk’. Not too long afterwards the grandfathers of the ‘internetwork’ made their appearance, and in 1975 a 20-year-old Harvard student named Bill Gates and his partner Paul Allen formed their backroom Microsoft venture and contacted a leading microcomputer firm with a bit of software they’d invented, which they called BASIC. The techno revolution
‘total strategy’ against what he called the ‘total onslaught’
was on its way.
mounted by communist-inspired Africa, a stick-and-carrot
policy to bribe neighbouring countries on the one hand
Water’ was among the top singles of the early 70’s, and
and destabilise them on the other. At home, he came up
perhaps appropriately so. The Vietnam war had got out of
with a labyrinthine constitutional scheme to allow Indians
hand; America’s President Richard Nixon was heading for
and coloured people a modicum of political influence – an
impeachment after the Watergate scandal hit the headlines;
almost unworkable system which divided government into
the country was in turmoil; Arab armies struck at Israel
racial compartments, but with the whites hanging on to
during Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish days; Mao’s
real power. The black majority, fatally, was again ignored. A
‘Cultural Revolution’ was grinding its dismal way to a halt;
total meltdown, it seemed, was inevitable, and indeed by the
the global oil crisis was just around the corner and, at the
mid-eighties the country had become virtually ungovernable
end of the decade, Margaret Thatcher, aka the Iron Lady aka
– the initially moderate United Democratic Front did its best
Attila the Hen, assumed the British premiership to show the
to control the situation but most of the extra-parliamentary
world a new and unkind, if seductive, face of governance. The
opposition was either in exile or in prison, and townships
joyously eclectic fashions of the 60’s gave way to the midi,
Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled
went up in flames as out-of-control youth (the ‘comrades’)
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