Two great changes have been brought by twenty-five years of apartheid rule in South Africa. Its internal contradictions have been sharpened by the simultaneous attempts to divide the country along even more rigid color lines and to stimulate more rapid economic growth; and its external relations have declined to the point where the Republic today has become the “polecat of the world.”These two developments are inextricably linked so that it makes little sense to try and describe the South African situation without focussing on their interrelationship.