| | No contemporary observer of South African politics can be left in any doubt about its essentially elitist nature. Barely masked by the rhetoric of populist legitimacy and mass action, rival leadership groups circle each other in the ring, calculating advantages, as the long road away from apartheid moves into a new and predominantly constitionalist phase. Perhaps the least ideological and most pragmatic of these groups - and hence the most easily comprehensible to external observers - is the anglophone business community. Their role, for long a subordinate one, now serves to heighten the clash of fundamentalist visions between the major protagonists, the black African and white Afrikaner nationalist movements. |
