Thanks Guy for an interesting article. Mandela was clearly a consumate negotiator. Things could have turned out very differently.

I wonder, though, about the future. The ANC's grip on power seems unhealthy for a democracy. It seems to me the white elite has been supplemented with a small black elite, but with little change in the material conditions of ordinary folk.

Thanks Guy, interesting. There were as you indicate a number of players. One was the Broederbond, which was playing both sides of the fence. This included support for Buthelezi by security instruments of the state including BOSS, resulting in violent attacks against residents in Reef townships by migrant Zulu workers.
Hani was not murdered by a rogue operative. He was removed as a person who might one day replace Mandela.
In the final years the Shell Coy. financed the ANC because they wanted to avoid being identified as sanction breakers by the ANC. They also gave the ANC their old headquarters in Jbg.
Negotiations at the end of the eighties were given great focus and impetus by the fact that financial sanctions had such an effect that Stals, the Governor of the Reserve Bank, went to de Klerk and told him that South Africa had only six weeks of reserves. That served to focus collective minds.
Bruce Haigh