page_title: Premiership of Margaret Thatcher
section_title: South Africa and release of Mandela
hierarchical_section_title: Premiership of Margaret Thatcher / Third term (1987–1990) / Foreign affairs / South Africa and release of Mandela
caption_attribution_description: Afrikaans: Betoging teen apartheid by Suid-Afrikahuis, Londen English: Anti-apartheid protest in London, UK, at South Africa House
context_page_description: Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on 4 May 1979 and served until 28 November 1990. She was elected to the position after leading the British Conservative Party since 1975.
  In domestic affairs, Thatcher is best known for her sweeping policies concerning the affairs of the economy, including the privatisation of most nationalised industries. In foreign policy, she fought a war against Argentina and played a key role with US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in ending the Cold War. By the late 1980s, she would alienate several senior members of her Cabinet with her opposition to greater economic integration into the European Community. She also alienated many Conservative voters and members of Parliament with the imposition of a local poll tax. As her support ebbed away, she was challenged for the Conservative Party leadership and persuaded by Cabinet to withdraw from the second round of voting—ending her eleven-year tenure as Prime Minister.
  Although she remains a domestically polarising figure, historians and political scientists generally rank Thatcher as an above-average Prime Minister.
context_section_description: Thatcher continued to be the leading international advocate of a policy of contact with apartheid South Africa, and the most forthright opponent of economic sanctions against the country, which was ruled by a white minority government. Her stand had divided the Commonwealth 48–1 at three conferences since 1985, but had brought her influence in South Africa's white community. Rejecting the US policy of disinvestment as a mistake, she argued a prosperous society would be more receptive to change.
  In October 1988, Thatcher said she would be unlikely to visit South Africa unless black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and in March 1989 she stressed the need to release him in order for multi-party talks to take place, urging that the African National Congress's promise to suspend violence should be enough to permit his release, and that the "renunciation of violence" should not be an absolute condition for negotiations for a settlement. At the end of March 1989, Thatcher's six-day, 10,000-mile tour through southern Africa—a follow-up to her "look and learn" exercise in Kenya and Nigeria in 1988—did not include South Africa because Mandela had not yet been released.
  Thatcher met reformist F. W. de Klerk in London in June 1989 and stressed that Mandela must be freed and reforms put in place before she would visit the country. In July 1989 she called for the release not only of Mandela, but also Walter Sisulu and Oscar Mpetha, before all-group talks could continue.
  Thatcher, therefore, welcomed de Klerk's decision in February 1990 to release Mandela and lift the ban on the ANC, and said the change vindicated her positive policy: "We believe in carrots as well as sticks". However Thatcher had also set the freeing of Mandela as a condition of friendship with the white government.
  Thatcher said the European Community's voluntary ban on new investment should be lifted when Mandela was released. However her call to the world to reward reforms was countered by Mandela himself, who while still in jail argued sanctions must be maintained until the end of white rule, and criticised her decision to lift a ban on new investment unilaterally. Mandela declared: "We regard the attitude of the British Government on the question of sanctions as of primary importance ... My release from prison was the direct result of the people inside and outside South Africa. It was also the result of the immense pressure exerted on the South African Government by the international community, in particular from the people of the UK."
  However, Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd was adamant: "We needed to make a practical response to a man, President F. W. de Klerk, who has taken his political life into his hands". Nevertheless, as a gesture of goodwill Thatcher agreed to begin aid to the ANC, which until its suspension of violence she had criticised as "a typical terrorist organisation", her disapproval reinforced by her anti-socialism.
  Thatcher's opposition to sanctions left her isolated within the Commonwealth and the European Community, and Mandela did not take up an early offer to meet her, opposing her proposed visit to his country as premature. Mandela rejected all concessions to the South African government, which he accused of seeking the easing of sanctions before it had offered "profound and irreversible change".
  Mandela delayed meeting Thatcher until he had gathered support for sanctions from other world leaders in the course of a four-week, 14-nation tour of Europe and the United States. Their first meeting failed to resolve differences over her unilateral lifting of sanctions and his refusal to renounce armed struggle until existing conditions for the black majority in South Africa changed. In their economic discussions, Mandela initially favoured nationalisation as a preferred method for redistributing wealth between blacks and whites, but with British investment in South Africa in 1989 accounting for half of the total, and with bilateral trade worth just over $3.2 billion, Thatcher successfully urged him to adopt free-market
caption: An Anti-Apartheid Movement protest at South Africa House in London, 1989
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