PW Botha's Rubicon Speech of 15 August 1985: A river too wide and a bridge too far

Abstract

In August 1985 the President of South Africa's minority government, PW Botha, a man whose country was besieged by growing calamities, faced much the same scenario. He struggled between the grip of the past, the present situation and the demands of the masses about the future. On 15 August 1985 Botha had the opportunity to cast himself into the role of either a Ramases, the stubborn Pharaoh, or a Moses, a political pioneer who could part the ideological waves and lead his people towards a new political dispensation. Amidst much speculation at home and abroad, nobody knew for certain which way PW Botha would decide to go. Therein lay the drama of the event which in South African history would become known as the Rubicon Speech. Although possibly sounding  melodramatic, it would not be too far-fetched to reason that in apartheid's political/diplomatic and economic histories the Rubicon Speech is a clear and undeniable watershed. That does not imply that the Rubicon affair was the ultimate catalyst for all the political-cum-economic developments in the latter half of the 1980s. But an unmistakable distinction can be made between the period before Rubicon and after Rubicon.