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How did the white minority in South Africa see their situation in the apartheid times, let's say in 1970? For example, how did their mass media explain the black and coloured people being unhappy with the situation, the international sanctions, and other apartheid-related problems in the country? How did the state leaders plan to keep the white rule regime further on, what were they hoping for?

I am asking here, because all sources on this issue that I have seen look too much ideologically biased.

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    Vtc as basic historical information freely available.
    – TheHonRose
    Aug 6 '16 at 14:37
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    To answer such a question one might either interview people who lived in SA during the 70's or carefully read memoirs. There is an annotated list of memoir literature at symposium-magazine.com/… which you might helpful as a starting point. (There's also a third way, by studying the literature of the period, but it's much more indirect and vague. Since we're dealing with a recent period and memoirs are available, I'd not highly recommend this third approach in this case).
    – Felix Goldberg
    Aug 16 '16 at 9:43
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Am quite happy to oblige. I grew up in South Africa, with Afrikaans my second language. Went to an Afrikaans school till the age of ten. Spent the early seventies in the Anti-Apartheid activist group around Richard Turner in Durban - have been trying to write a book about that period for years. (He was murdered in 1978 - he's usually mentioned in the same breath as Biko.) I knew quite a lot of the people involved, including those close to Mandela. Have been following the politics there obsessively ever since. The mass media (I still have a clipping file from those years) is indeed an important point of departure for these things. Think: "International communism is going to bury us all." "Adapt or die" (P.W. Botha, in a [in]famous speech somewhere seventies/eighties.) Think: what happens if you export McCarthyism to Africa?

Ask away.

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