Introduction - I
SpookyBoy
Banned
First, some background music...
This is a timeline based on an idea I have had for a long time - a violent end to the apartheid era in an alternate 1990s. Even after Mandela was released from prison in 1990 in OTL, South Africa was a very unstable place, and in between then and the ANC's historic election victory in 1994, perhaps became even more so, with oft-overlooked incident such as the Bophuthatswana coup d'etat, the Bisho massacre, and even armed conflict between the ANC and the Zulu conservative Inkatha Freedom Party, with the intelligence services accused of aiding the IFP in order to forment conflict. The POD is pretty straightforward - in January 1989 in OTL, State President P.W. Botha suffered a mild stroke, causing him to resign as leader of the National Party, a resignation that was intended to be temporary while he recovered. Instead, rivals in his party, who resented his authoritarian leadership style, successfully used it as an opportunity to take control of the party and government for themselves, leading to the rise of F.W. de Klerk who embarked on a reform program and famously released Mandela from prison the following year. In this timeline he simply doesn't suffer from a stroke - allowing him to continue onwards for a few more years without significant reform, allowing a few more years for tension to grow, all whilst economic sanctions begin to take their toll on his Republic's well-being...
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26 July 1990, Cape Town, South Africa
For hours, the man had been lurking in the bushes outside of the posh state mansion. Remaining deathly silent in his camoflague paramilitary fatigues, nothing ran through his head other than his mission at hand. The way he'd managed to slip past all security, the way he'd managed to get this far on his own. He hadn't spent those years out in Angola for nothing. It was getting late. It wouldn't be long until his moment would finally arrive. Armed only with a knife, his wits, his trusty rifle and pure, irrepressable, ethnocentric zeal, he'd made it this far, and was determined to accomplish the task at hand. Suddenly, he heard something. A black armoured limousine made its way into the driveway. He picked up his rifle, and prepared himself for the moment of fate. The passenger door opened. A bald, stern-looking white man in his fifties emerged from the vehicle. The race traitor in chief had arrived! As security guards approached him so they escort him into the premises, the assassin fired a single shot.
Bang.
Blood poured out of the minister's bald, wrinkled head on to the stone path where his body laid.
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REFORMIST SOUTH AFRICAN MINISTER SHOT DEAD
AP, 27 July 1990
F.W. de Klerk, South Africa's Minister of Education and National Planning, was shot dead outside his home in Cape Town last night. The assassination comes nearly three months after he had announced support for open negotiations with the African National Congress, a banned anti-apartheid opposition group. A suspect, named by authorities as Jan Kruger, armed with a rifle, surrended himself to police peacefully. According to reports from officials, Kruger, 33, was a member of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, a notorious white supremacist paramilitary group. The AWB has denied involvement in the killing, and the suspect has claimed that he was acting alone. State President P.W. Botha has condemned the incident as a "barbaric act of extremism".
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Frederik Willem de Klerk (1936-1990)
