Negotiated Partition of South Africa – An Idea and its History (1920s–1980s)

This article analyses a number of academic and journalistic proposals on the negotiated partition of South Africa coming from different schools of thought, from within South Africa and abroad, from the 1920s up to the late 1980s. These proposals of dividing South Africa into a ‘predominantly black’ and a ‘predominantly white’ state were presented by their authors as an alternative to apartheid and seen as a way out of the impasse created by the unwillingness of the National Party to accept the one man, one vote principle for a unitary state. The article examines how the proposals gradually foresaw giving the economically most relevant parts of the country to the ‘predominantly black state’. The article argues that this debate also has to be seen in the context of the Cold War where the partition of countries had been a means to pacify divided societies, at least temporarily.