Episode
Frontline: Apartheid Part 4: 1978-1986
Overview
When PW Botha became prime minister of South Africa two years after the Soweto uprising in 1976, he realized that apartheid must ‘adapt or die.’ Part 4 explores the reforms undertaken by Botha to maintain white supremacy, changes that have deeply divided Afrikaners and have provoked explosive reactions from many blacks.
Details
- Series
- Frontline
- Season
- Season 6
- Episode
- Episode 4
- Air date
- 1987-12-15
Episode context
Apartheid Part 4: 1978-1986 is Episode 4 in Season 6 of Frontline. It aired on 1987-12-15.
Previous / Next
Episode 3: Apartheid Part 3: 1963-1977
Independent homelands' for blacks was the centerpiece of Prime Minister Hendrick Verwoerd's vision of apartheid. Part 3 focuses on how the white government found African leaders to collaborate with them in a plan to make foreigners of black South African citizens by deporting them to independent homelands in rural areas of the country. The program looks at the increased resistance to the homeland policy as seen through the first nationwide attack by young black South Africans in the Soweto ghetto in 1976.
Episode 5: Apartheid Part 5: 1987
Part 5 looks at an unprecedented meeting in the struggle for South Africa’s future. Two years before the release of Nelson Mandela, dissident white Afrikaners met with black leaders from the outlawed African National Congress in Dakar, Senagal, to discuss strategies for change in South Africa, presaging the reforms that would come later.
More episodes from this season
Episode 2: Apartheid Part 2: 1948-1963
Part 2 details the new policy which included classifying all South Africans by race, removing blacks from cities where many had lived for generations, and establishing separate and unequal schooling for blacks. Frontline focuses on the increasing black resistance in the 1950s and the rise of resistance leader Nelson Mandela.
Episode 6: Praise the Lord
Frontline traces the rise and fall of television evangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker and investigates why government agencies failed to vigorously investigate charges of corruption in the Bakker empire.
Episode 1: Apartheid Part I: 1652-1948
Many white South Africans claim that the entire country is theirs by right. No black man, they say, occupied South Africa before the first tiny Dutch settlement in 1652. Part 1 refutes this claim and traces the country’s colonial history, the emergence early in the 20th century of the African National Congress, the rise to power of Afrikaner nationalists, and the formal policy of apartheid.
Episode 7: Operation Urgent Fury
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh investigates one of Ronald Reagan’s greatest truimphs-the rescue of American students during the 1983 invasion of Grenada. Hersh’s reporting reveals an inept US military operation and questions whether the students needed rescuing at all.
Episode 8: The Man Who Shot John Lennon
Frontline goes inside the mind of Mark David Chapman, the man who shot and killed John Lennon in 1980. Newly acquired records paint the chilling portrait of a celebrity stalker who meticulously planned the murder, believing it would make him famous.
Episode 9: Your Flight is Cancelled
Since deregulation, America's airline industry has become a nightmare of delays, cancellations, and near misses. This film probes the air traffic dilemma inside America's busiest airport -- in the control tower and behind the ticket counter.
Episode 10: Shakedown in Santa Fe
Eight years after one of the most violent prison uprisings in US history, Frontline returns to the penitentiary in New Mexico to probe the contininuing struggle between the inmates and the guards, the wardens and the reformers, for control of one of our most dangerous prisons.
Episode 11: Let My Daughter Die
Joe and Joyce Cruzan want doctors to remove their severely brain damaged daughter from the life-support system that keeps her alive. Nearly two years before it became the US Supreme Court’s first right-to-die case, Frontline explored the complex legal and moral issues of this Missouri couple’s battle to allow their daughter to die.
Episode 12: Back in the USSR
In 1968, American journalist Jerry Schecter, accompanied by his wife and five young children, moved to Moscow on assignment for Time magazine. In 1987, Frontline returned with the Schecter family to the Soviet Union as they renewed old friendships and explored Russia under glasnost.
Episode 13: Poison and the Pentagon
The military is America’s largest producer of toxic waste. Frontline reporter Joe Rosenbloom investigates the Pentagon’s poor record of cleaning up its pollution that contaminates the ground water in communities across the country.