You write "White Afrikaners 'feared for their lives' because black Africans, Indians, and other minorities were getting way too uppity..." This is incorrect on two fronts.
First, whites in South Africa were in fact one of the minorities (black people were and are the majority by a large percentage), which was a major contributing factor in driving apartheid.
Secondly, to think that apartheid was rooted in a sense that people of color were "getting too uppity," is superficial. It was, rather, rooted in nationalism that in turn had its roots in the experience of the Boer War and the decimation of the Afrikaner population in the concentration camps (including literally half of all the children in the Boer republics). (The book "Apartheid: Britain's Bastard Child" is instructive here.) If you talk to Afrikaners from that era (and I have, often, although now there aren't so many alive anymore), they convey a sense of never wanting to be ruled by anyone else again. Keep in mind that the British were deeply racist against the Afrikaners as well, and this combined with the Boer War led to a sense of humiliation that contributed to the development of this strong desire for self-rule.
This was combined with a worldview that saw the black and other non-white cultures as less developed than white culture - something that was rooted in South Africa's colonial past, as well as the fact that there was indeed a serious clash between traditional and Western cultures in South Africa (where apartheid got it wrong was that it assumed that all black people were traditionalist, and also that it never tried to appreciate the values of traditional cultures). Apartheid was technically called separate development because it was premised upon the paradoxical idea that all people are in principle equal, but all cultures are not equally developed, and hence they were to be kept separate so that they can develop at their own pace. It was in fact a twisted form of multiculturalism. This is why to this day I cringe when people in the West speak of "developed" and "developing" nations - that is the language of apartheid.
I'm no apartheid apologist, but if we are to do what you suggest, we could at least be historically accurate as far as possible, and not impose American assumptions about the roots of racism on another context. South African and American racism are quite distinct in many ways, although equally bad in its practical effects.
What is interesting, is that, just like the Nazis got in with a minority vote, so did the National Party. They won more seats, but received a minority of the votes of those who at that time were eligible to vote (at least, so I read once, I should probably check that again). Up until that time, a slight majority of Afrikaners thought the National Party was a bit nuts. But once in the parliamentary majority, they quickly consolidated power. This should be a warning for the US: a minority party getting into power thanks to the EC, gerrymandering, and voter purging, and then consolidating that power until they do indeed represent the majority, by the use of propaganda and normalization.
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