Why didn't white South Africans (Afrikaners) make a separate all White country in the Cape area, when they had all of the power, right before they were made sure that the Apartheid regime would fall?

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Well, in the first instance, let's be clear that 'white South Africans' do not and did not represent a homogenous ethnic group. South Africa's white population is descended from a diverse array of white European ancestors and although the Dutch-dominated Afrikaner ethnic group is by far the largest and constitutes a majority of the population, something like two in five white South Africans today have English as their first language, and one of the supposed long term goals of the architects of the system of apartheid was to collapse - to some degree - English and Afrikaner identities together towards a single 'White' identity (although, in practice, this was probably more about creating an incentive for non-Afrikaner whites to pragmatically embrace the Afrikaner nationalist agenda embodied by the National Party that ruled South Africa throughout the apartheid period). That, immediately, is a complicated challenge to the idea of building any kind of Afrikaner ethnoracial state independent of the rest of South Africa. In similar terms, the idea of using the Cape area is problematic. The Cape provinces represent the vast majority of South Africa's landmass but Afrikaners only overwhelmingly dominate in the very sparsely populated north western region of the country; English-speaking White South Africans have a much stronger presence in other, especially urban, parts of the Cape provinces.

More broadly however, the ending of apartheid was not the product of a sudden and radical transformation in South Africa's white political mainstream; as F W De Klerk once explained it in a television interview a few years ago, there was no Damascus Road experience where one day he "woke up convinced of the evils of apartheid"; it was a process and a journey. P. W. Botha, the man who lead South Africa first as Prime Minister and then as State President through the 1980s and was thoroughly conservative in his politics and attitude to apartheid, had already begun the process of reform. Legislative changes made by the Botha government had already loosened restrictions on mixed race marriage and living and granted increased, though still limited and widely rejected by their recipients as hollow appeasement, political rights for Indian and mixed race people living in South Africa. Even these extremely mild and half-hearted reforms of the apartheid system had sent shockwaves through South Africa's political establishment and caused the ruling National Party to split, with a group of diehard pro-apartheid National MPs forming the Conservative Party in the early 1980s. The NP had already been losing voters to an older far-right movement at that time, and those voters coalesced, along with defecting NP voters, behind the new Conservatives. But at the 1987 election they still only managed to take 27% of the popular vote and 22 of 166 seats in the all-white Parliament, barely beating out the anti-apartheid Progressive Federal Party (to which Helen Suzman, who for 13 years was the only anti-apartheid MP until the PFP's breakthrough in 1974, belonged) who claimed 19 seats with far fewer votes. The formation of the Conservative Party essentially purged the National Party of a significant chunk of its most extreme elements, but its poor performance in 1987 exposed that its voter base was not adequate - in either scale or distribution - to form a government. The Conservatives were expected to perform much stronger ahead of polling day.

When F W De Klerk replaced Botha as State President in 1989, he called an early general election on a mandate of seeking reform and further amelioration of the apartheid system. The Conservatives were only able to pick up a handful of additional seats from the National Party who still retained 48% of the vote and an absolute majority in Parliament despite campaigning for the reform of apartheid. Together, National (committed now to reforming apartheid) and the new Democratic Party (formerly the PFP) won a little more than 68% of the popular vote and 127 of 166 elected seats in Parliament. The Democrats, in reality, saw a more substantial increase in their support than the Conservatives did. The 1989 election gave De Klerk the mandate he needed to begin the process of including the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party in the civic life of South Africa even though they remained substantially excluded from the electoral process still, and releasing Nelson Mandela from prison. It is important to keep in mind the context in which all of this was happening. As well as any genuine shift in belief and value occurring on the part of men like De Klerk (whose career gave nothing to suggest he would be the NP leader to end apartheid), white South Africans were also under increasing pressure to accept at the very least the pragmatic need for apartheid to end. The NP's violent repression of anti-apartheid resistance had failed to stem political and racial violence. The 1976 Soweto uprising and subsequent massacre of black civilians, many of them children, by the white regime had exposed both at home and abroad the full scale of apartheid's brutality and evil, and the murder of prominent black leader Steve Biko by white police a year later had only added to that tension. Through the 1980s more and more nations began to impose sanctions and embargos on South Africa with ramifications for the country's economic health, particularly its export goods, capacity for capital investment and the strength of the domestic currency, whilst looming instability in and the subsequent rapid collapse of the Eastern Bloc reduced western incentives to tolerate an anti-Communist ally in South Africa that pursued such abhorrent domestic policies (whilst also reducing white fears that the ANC, allied with the SACP, could align South Africa with Communist forces).

Even then however, the end of apartheid did not come swiftly or easily - it was the result of painstaking, agonised negotiations between the ANC (and other actors) and the NP government. Many of apartheid's most stringent measures were repealed by the NP - which still commanded the support of nearly half of white voters - very early in the negotiations, but that did not mean that a free and fair multiracial democracy was an inevitability when De Klerk released Mandela and unbanned the ANC in 1990. The closest moment of serious challenge from the white electorate came in 1992. Louis le Grange, the Speaker of the House, had died in late 1991 and his constituency needed to vote for a new MP. At the subsequent by-election held in February 1992 - in the town where De Klerk went to university - despite the Democratic Party unofficially stepping down to give the National Party a clean run at holding the seat, the Conservative candidate won by 12 percentage points. De Klerk had described the vote as a major test of support for negotiating a powersharing agreement and dismantling apartheid, expecting an easy win for the NP that he could paint as proof the 1989 election result still gave him a mandate to govern (the Conservatives had come somewhat close to winning the seat in 1989). In response De Klerk declared that the white electorate would be given the chance to show their confidence in his government nation-wide: he called a ballot across the nation to be held a few weeks later, in which every white voter would have the chance to vote 'Yes' or 'No' on continuing negotiations for a new Constitution with the ANC.

The result of the referendum the following month was an overwhelming win for the NP against a Conservative Party, among others, who campaigned aggressively for the preservation of white minority control in the country. With the vast majority of white voters participating, close to 70% of the ballots cast backed De Klerk's position; even with non-voters accounted for, almost 60% of the white adult population of South Africa voted to back the National Party. Most shockingly for the Conservative Party's supporters the vote distribution was brutal for their interests: even most of the Afrikaner heartlands voted 'Yes' to De Klerk's strategy. The National Party's cause was boosted by the fact that in 1990 and 1991, major agreements between the government, the ANC and other agents had secured formal de-escalation of political violence in South Africa (although a great deal of it continued without the official sanction of the parties). Contrary to expectation, some means of ending apartheid was endorsed unequivocally and in strong terms by the white electorate in the 1990s, for a mix of moral and pragmatic grounds. It is important to keep in mind that apartheid was, for all intents and purposes, a failed attempt to create a white ethnic state in South Africa whilst removing the vast majority of the black African population to the Bantustans (psuedo-independent states that were, in practice, simply impoverished clients of South Africa). But as well as a system of enforcing white supremacy and isolation, apartheid was a system of labour exploitation, and no amount of racism could escape the fact that white South Africa was wholly dependent upon the labour and work of black South Africans to function as a modern economy. Even the Afrikaner Broaderbond - an Afrikaner nationalist and historically white supremacist secret society that the vast majority of the male National Party elite were members of or connected to - recognised by the early 1980s that apartheid had failed as a policy, and that a racially divided South Africa, at least in such extreme ways, was simply not viable for much longer.