Not a bad little analysis coming from an exterior perspective, and I can definitely see how you have tried to appreciate all points of view. It has elicited a number of responses from me in thought, but I unfortunately do not have the leisure to put them all down here, not immediately anyway. Here's something by way of (hopefully constructive) criticism though. I know that when someone studies something from the outside, without having the advantage of prolonged exposure to, or experience with, the subject, it can be easy to miss out on an important aspect without realising it.

I don't know whether you missed this or whether you purposely omitted it for the sake of brevity, but as an historian and a South African myself, I can tell you that what was glaringly lacking in your context provision was mention of the Cold War. The War was very real for South Africa during the Apartheid years, and it wasn't always cold either. Some (I use the term with great deliberation) of the freedom movements were closely associated with the agents of Communism, or, indeed, were the agents of Communism. Much of the opposition to those movements came from the enemies of Communism rather than from White supremacy (some even came from within other Black liberation parties). Remember that in the first half of the 20th Century, South Africa's leadership, under the Anglo-Afrikaans South African Party and its genitors, enjoyed a close relationship with the Churchill government, and other like-minded anti-Communist bodies around the globe. Much of the British and British-descended population of the country, while prone to liberal ideologies as you said, remained firm in their opposition to Communism.

There were also strongly anti-Communist sentiments to be found in various Afrikaner, Xhosa and Zulu political camps. The opposition to Communism in Apartheid South Africa formed a kind of third force within the country, since it was not particularly supportive of Apartheid policy (especially in the long-term), but could not allow the NP government to fall to a Communist revolution, or to foreign invasion by Soviet proxy belligerents (Cuba in particular brought hot war to Southern Africa, along with their Communist allies from within Angola and other African nations). Thus four discrete major political divisions existed within the region at the time, and each can be divided, in its turn, into still more distinct positions, but where these four are concerned, they existed in a kind of trapezoidal model, with the greatest tensions between the opposite corners (i.e. the Apartheid hardliners in bottom right against the liberal reformers in upper left, and the Communist forces in lower left against the anti-Communist remnants of the SAP in upper right, if that makes any sense at all).

All this is relevant to the current political situation because much pro-Communist sentiment remains in the electorate. This is what has led to the demands for nationalisation of private enterprises (which will undoubtedly be calamitous for the economy) and the expropriation of land. In a way, the current objectives of the more radical parts of the ruling party, and of opposition parties further to the Left, are a melancholy vindication of the anti-Communist quadrant, who had always warned that a New South Africa could never be successful without decisively detaching itself from Communist ideals, something which the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela unfortunately failed to do.