As the 1970s dawned, South Africa's rulers were in a self-congratulatory mood. The swelling tide of African nationalism that had so threatened them ten years earlier had ebbed. Fears of an intractable recession and capital flight, so sharply etched following the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, had faded away as a new inflow of foreign capital investment fueled an economic boom. Even the power imbalance between Afrikaner and British elites receded as grand new Afrikaner conglomerates flourished and whites benefited from steady economic growth. The National Party, it seemed, had fulfilled the apartheid promises of the 1948 election.

Unrest in the mid-1970s failed to shatter this hubris: the surprising student revolt of 1976 was contained, guerrilla challenges were suppressed, and strong if discrete support from conservative governments in Europe and the United States continued unabated. Yet ten years later the house of apartheid was in shambles, facing an implacable tide of resistance, international sanctions, a faltering economy, and intensifying capital flight. There would be no turning back the force of this wave: by the late 1980s the transition to majority rule was under way, sealed by Mandela's iconic election victory in 1994. Apartheid's notoriety was quickly replaced by the international celebration of racial reconciliation and the building of a “rainbow” nation, the “new South Africa.”