On 3 December 1989, apartheid President F.W. de Klerk boarded two Hercules transport planes at the Waterkloof Air Force Base with his Cabinet and fifty advisers on a trip to D’Nyala Game Reserve near Ellisras in the northern Transvaal.
During the discussions, the following morning, Defence Minister Magnus Malan spoke out against adding the South African Communist Party (SACP) to the list of organisations that were earmarked to be unbanned.
After the departure of P.W. Botha, it was a foregone conclusion that the leader of the African National Congress (ANC), Nelson Mandela, would be released in the immediate future. The apartheid regime was however concerned about how it was going to happen. Understandably by releasing the leader of the national liberation movement he championed, it also implied that the organisation had to be unbanned.
However, the biggest challenge was that the ANC had a strong relationship with the Communist Party, which for the apartheid establishment was regarded as the “rooi gevaar” (the red danger). Within the apartheid security establishment, the “hawks”, who were represented by leaders of the defence force and the police in the State Security Council (SSC), had devoted the rest of the career lives to fighting communism, as they were indoctrinated through the “Total Onslaught” Doctrine.
The doctrine maintained that the “total onslaught” was formulated and documented by the ANC for the first time at its Morogoro Conference
