Re-centring the Apartheid Discourse: Strategic Changes in South African Propaganda in West Germany

Abstract

In response to increasing international criticism, the South African government had already begun its first propaganda campaign in the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre. South Africa changed its propaganda strategy dramatically at the beginning of the 1970s under the guidance of Eschel Rhoodie, the Secretary of the Department of Information under Connie Mulder, leading to the famous Muldergate scandal in 1978–1979. Many scholars have studied this period, but little research has been done on the regime’s continued propaganda work in the following decade. This chapter focuses on these later efforts. It shows that there was a remarkable continuity in both actors and measures and that, in the German case, the Muldergate scandal was by no means a watershed. Nevertheless, an important shift in strategy did take place in South Africa’s largest propaganda project in the FRG when its local agency, Hennenhofer PR, conducted a new campaign targeting politicians and opinion-makers that was much more modern than its campaign in the second half of the 1970s. Instead of defending the concept of ‘separate development’, the new campaign of information tours, conferences and bilateral meetings aimed at reframing the West German discourse on South Africa by focusing on the government’s reform program, and including both West German and South African critics. The purpose of the latter was to shift the attention of important West Germans from radical apartheid critics’ call for ‘one man, one vote’ to moderate appeals for a reform of apartheid.