WI: Apartheid ends in South Africa Much Earlier?

What would it take for this to happen? I mean a multicultural land which started during De Klerk's tenure IOTL?
 
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One of the major reasons why Apartheid lasted so long in OTL was that it was seen as a necessary bulwark against communism. So if somehow the threat of communism and the Soviet Union, both real and imagined, was lessened the Apartheid government would find itself on a much shorter leash
 
Since the OP doesn't give much detail, it almost raises the question "What if South Africa never passed Apartheid in the first place?". Mind you, that doesn't mean it suddenly embraces racial equality or ditches white control, segregation, etc, but it does mean the decades following 1948 are very different.
 

TinyTartar

Banned
It'd have to be abandoned quickly after it gets enacted. Once it set in, it became part of the Communist question, and events in SA's neighborhood did little to dissuade them of this notion.

Possibly, the costs for enacting it or the practical results prove to be such a complication due to an overly legalistic and complicated system enacted rather than the simpler one in OTL that they decide to not deal with it and come up with some other form of it.
 
I apologize for the vague OP. I have changed it to "SA being a multicultural land like what happened starting during De Klerk's tenure IOTL?"
 
One of the most popular answers for this question is usually for the United Party to win the general election in 1948. Now that's not to say that things would immediate be sweetness and light - their vague policy of reform at some point in the future could well be stopped or even rolled back at some point in the future if things got difficult, but I generally think things would probably be better than they were in our timeline with the National Party.
 
Interesting thought, no Balfour and Smuts allows more Jewish refugees in. Shifts balance both of the United Party and of the white electorate as a whole
 
Another POD is having Southern Rhodesia vote to join the Union in 1922, rather than decide to go it alone.

Most whites in Southern Rhodesia were English-speakers, so they'd definitely lean towards the South African Party, rather than the Nats. Not sure if this will butterfly away the SAP-Nat fusion of the early 1930s, but it may well do so.

This means that the SAP stays in power, perhaps indefinitely. Or a more pro-British party arises again, similar to the earlier Dominion party. This would likely draw support from the Rhodesians and Natalians.

As others have said, the UP winning in 1948 is another possibility.
 
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