Southern Africans have a special reason to thank Mikhail Gorbachev. He helped bring apartheid to an end. He did this both directly and indirectly.
The whole world has much to thank Mikhail Gorbachev for. As many have pointed out since his death in Moscow earlier this week, Gorbachev – the last leader of the Soviet Union – did more than anyone to bring the Cold War to an end peacefully, reducing the threat that nuclear weapons might be used.
But it was not those armed struggles that brought them to power. That was made possible in part by the fact that from 1988 the balance of forces in the region changed. In that Gorbachev played a major role. The Soviet Union then participated in the joint commission that was set up as a result of that agreement to ensure it was implemented. When a crisis in April 1989 threatened its implementation, the Soviets again worked with the Americans to help defuse the crisis, after which Namibia moved towards independence with the assistance of the United Nations.
The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union destroyed what remaining credibility the idea of a “total onslaught” still had in National Party circles and reduced fears, both in those circles and in Western capitals, that the South African Communist Party would control the ANC if it were to come to power.
When De Klerk made his breakthrough speech in February 1990, unbanning the ANC and announcing that Nelson Mandela would be released from prison unconditionally, he made much of what had happened in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in late 1989. He said that events there had weakened “the capacity of organisations which were previously supported strongly from those quarters”.
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