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Unlock This CourseBy the middle of 1985 Botha's mix of force and reform was in trouble. His reforms had not won black support, and many townships had become ungovernable. His answer was to rule by emergency powers.
Key terms:
There were four main reasons for the emergency:
On 20 July 1985 Botha declared a State of Emergency in 36 districts, mainly in the Eastern Cape and around Johannesburg. It was the first since the one that followed Sharpeville in 1960, and it used the same law, the Public Safety Act. It was later widened to the Cape Town area. It was lifted in March 1986, but the unrest went on.
On 12 June 1986 Botha declared a new emergency covering the whole country. The timing was deliberate: 16 June was the tenth anniversary of the Soweto Uprising, and huge protests were expected. This emergency was renewed every year and lasted until 1990.
Any policeman or soldier could arrest a person without a charge, and the Minister of Law and Order could then hold that person for as long as the emergency lasted. Nearly 8,000 people were detained in the first emergency and about 25,000 in the first year of the national one. Thousands were children under 18. Many detainees later said they had been beaten or tortured.
From November 1985 television cameras were banned from areas of unrest. From June 1986 reporters could not report what the police and army did there, name detainees without permission, or print 'subversive statements' such as calls for boycotts. When newspapers left blank spaces to show what had been cut, that was banned too. In 1988 the newspaper New Nation was closed for three months and the Weekly Mail for one month.
Soldiers in armoured vehicles patrolled the streets alongside the police. They set up roadblocks, enforced curfews and searched homes. Rules limited how many people could attend a funeral and banned speeches and banners there. The security forces were given indemnity for anything they did 'in good faith', so they had little to fear from the courts.
Organisations were hit as well as people. The school pupils' organisation COSAS was banned in August 1985, and most UDF leaders were detained or went into hiding. The police also backed black vigilantes against the comrades. In May and June 1986, just before the national emergency, vigilantes known as the witdoeke burned the shacks of UDF supporters in the camps around Crossroads, near Cape Town, leaving about 60,000 people homeless.
In the short term, repression worked. By 1987 the street battles had died down, most people's courts and street committees had been broken, and the government had taken back the townships. In February 1988 the UDF itself was banned from all activity.
But the wider consequences damaged the government:
The emergency could stop a march. It could not remove the reasons for marching. Africans still had no vote, and the emergency offered them nothing. So resistance did not end. It changed shape.
The result was a stalemate. The opposition could not overthrow the government, but the government could only rule by force, and force was costly at home and abroad. Botha suffered a stroke in January 1989 and resigned as president that August. His successor, FW de Klerk, lifted the emergency in June 1990, with the province of Natal following in October. What he did next is covered in the lesson De Klerk's Reforms and the Repeal of Apartheid.
Don't write about one State of Emergency that ran without a break. There were two: a partial one from July 1985 to March 1986, and a national one from June 1986 to 1990. Don't say the emergency failed straight away: it did calm the townships by 1987. It failed because resistance came back in new forms and the causes of protest were never dealt with.
Extract A (a practice extract written for this lesson). From a modern history textbook.
'The State of Emergency was Botha's admission that he had run out of ideas. He flooded the townships with soldiers, locked up tens of thousands of people, among them children, and gagged the press, yet he solved nothing. Resistance simply changed its shape. Strikes, hunger strikes and open defiance followed one another, and every arrest created fresh enemies. After almost five years of brute force the government was no nearer to peace than on the day the emergency began.'
What impression does the author give about the State of Emergency (1985-90)? You must use Extract A to explain your answer. [6 marks]
The author gives the impression that the State of Emergency was a harsh policy that completely failed. The language makes it sound brutal: Botha 'flooded' the townships with soldiers and used 'brute force', and the author picks out the fact that children were locked up. The language also stresses failure. Calling it an 'admission that he had run out of ideas' suggests desperation, and phrases such as 'solved nothing' and 'no nearer to peace' leave no room for success. The author has also chosen what to include. The extract lists the protests that carried on, such as strikes and hunger strikes, but leaves out the fact that the emergency did calm the townships for a time. This selection makes the failure seem total.
What lifts this to the top level: it names one clear impression, proves it with short quotations, and explains how the author's choice of words and of what to include and leave out creates that impression.
Don't retell what the State of Emergency was: this question is about the author, not the event. Hunt for loaded words such as 'flooded' and 'brute force', and always ask what the author has left out. For more help, see the Exam Skills lesson Paper 1 Question (a): What Impression Does the Author Give?