[sglancy12]

One of the big questions that I have yet to satisfactorily answer about the TW2K alternative timeline and gazeteer I'm working on concerns the fate of the Republic of South Africa.

The policy of apartheid and white minority rule seems to have quickly been dismantled following the collapse of the Soviet Union. My impression is that once the Soviet Bloc collapsed the white minority government could no longer justify their opposition to Mandela and the African National Congress on the grounds that the ANC was pro-communist. With the Soviets consigned to the dustbin of history, America and NATO was no longer worried about the Red Banner Northern Fleet rebasing to Capetown. So, the white minority government realize that they could no longer justify the apartheid system as a bulwark against communism. Within just a few years of the Soviet collapse, white minority rule was over.

But if Gorbachev is assassinated in 1989 and hardliners control the Kremlin and the satellite states of the Warsaw Pact, would the South African government dismantle apartheid?

What would be the fate of South Africa during the Twilight War?

Would South Africa continue fighting in Namibia and Angola?

Would South Africa's neighbors like Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe organize to invade South Africa on a mission of racial liberation?

Would South Africa's English and Africkaner minorities hold the country together or would they retreat to a smaller, more defensible area and try and hold out? Or would they start fleeing for places like Australia and New Zealand? Maybe bartering the nation's nuclear capacity for a mass evacuation of the white population?

Would it turn into a race-war blood bath or could Nelson Mandela and President Botha come together to try and preserve the country while the rest of the continent is being destroyed by a hundred tiny wars over tribalism, resources and religion?

Could (or rather would) Apartheid be dismantled in time to avoid an apocalyptic race war? Or would some other accommodation be reached between whites and blacks in South Africa to get the nation through the global crisis?

A. Scott Glancy, President TCCorp, dba Pagan Publishing