T he former Prime Minister and State President of South Africa, PW Botha, passed away a few days ago at his home, Die Anker (The Anchor), in Wilderness, George, during the night of 31 October. I take this opportunity once more to convey our condolences to his wife, Mrs Barbara Botha, and the rest of his family.
In terms of government regulations, the late PW Botha was entitled to a state funeral, like all other former and serving South African Heads of State. Our movement and Government took the decision to honour all these leaders equally, including the captains of apartheid, because of our commitment to the success of the process of national reconciliation.
During the difficult years of our transition to democracy, to date, we remained convinced that the new South Africa could only be built, successfully, on the firm foundation of unqualified respect for the ubuntu principle and practice of forgiveness, as well as acceptance of the eminently humane proposition that 'the quality of mercy is not strained...It is an attribute to God himself'.
Duly exercising its rights, the Botha family has informed the Government that the Will of the former State President included the request that he should be laid to rest in a private, as opposed to a state funeral. Our Government has unequivocally accepted this decision and will therefore do everything we have to do in tribute to the former State President fully respecting this decision.
PW Botha passed away 70 years after he took up his first official position in the National Party. In 1936, at the age of 20, he began working for the National Party as an organiser in the then Cape Province. He was first elected to Parliament during the watershed elections of 1948, which brought the National Party to power. This victory represented the realisation of the passionately held dream that had inspired General JBM Hertzog and his colleagues, when they formed the National Party in 1913, a few months after the establishment of the ANC.
Botha ended his political career in August 1989, when he resigned from his position as State President, being succeeded by FW de Klerk. For just over 50 years he had been a loyal activist and leader of the National Party.
At the point when he went into retirement, it could be said that various developments inside and outside our country indicated that the old order could not survive much longer, while the new order could not yet be born. We could say that as much as our country had reached its crossroads, so had PW Botha.
Having succeeded BJ Vorster as Prime Minister in 1978, two years after the Soweto Uprising, PW led the apartheid government during a decade that saw the campaign of repression to defeat and destroy our liberation movement reach its highest levels of intensity and brutality in the years since the establishment of the ANC, claiming many lives.
Twenty years ago this year, on 12 June 1986, PW Botha addressed a joint sitting of the three Houses of the apartheid parliament and, among other things, said:
"Because I am...of the opinion that the ordinary laws of the country are inadequate to enable the Government to ensure the security of the public or to maintain public order, I have decided to introduce a State of Emergency throughout the entire country, including the self-governing (Bantustan) national states
He also said: "In this climate of increasing violence, it is not possible for the reasonable majority to continue the search for a peaceful and democratic solution. The Government is well aware of the fact that stricter security action will elicit strong criticism and even punitive measures from the outside world...
"I want to say candidly to the outside world: we have seen clearly what happened in Angola, as well as in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iran. We shall consequently prevent our heritage of more than 300 years of civilisation being needlessly sacrificed on the altars of disorder and decline. No responsible government can allow the normal political and economic activities in its country to be disrupted indefinitely by extra-parliamentary and violent action."
The Rubicon
The previous year, in August 1985, PW Botha had delivered what turned out to be the infamous "Rubicon speech", but in which it had been expected that he would announce major initiatives towards ending the apartheid system. Instead, he insisted that nothing would change.
The following day, on 16 August 1985, the President of the ANC, Oliver Tambo, issued a Statement in which he said:
"Last night, the people of South Africa and the rest of the world were treated to an arrogant reaffirmation by PW Botha that the apartheid system will continue unchanged. At a time when every thinking person in our country and abroad is saying apartheid must end now, the ruling group could not help but show itself for what it is - a clique of diehard racists, hidebound reactionaries and bloodthirsty fascist braggarts who will heed nobody except themselves.
"Systematically, Botha rejected each and every measure whose implementation could be construed by some as possibly contributing to the solution of the South African problem. He prescribed the same solutions which have produced the crisis that is now devouring the lives of our people daily.
"In particular, while falsely and cynically claiming to be a democrat, he scorned the very notion of the right of all South Africans to vote for the government of their choice. He pledged to perpetuate the criminal bantustan system, further to balkanise our country and to continue the land dispossession of the African majority, which is confined to a little more than ten percent of South Africa.
"With his hand over his heart, he projected himself as the great defender of so-called minorities while making an unequivocal commitment to the oppression of the overwhelming majority of our people. As part of this objective, he undertook further to refine the system of influx control, to modernise the pass laws and make them cost-effective so that more families can be broken up and more people deported to the desolation of the bantustans
"Botha reiterated his determination to keep Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners in jail, offering to consider their release if they accept conditions which they have already rejected and will continue to reject. Rather than bow to the demand of our people and the international community to release and talk to these genuine leaders of our people, Botha promised to negotiate with his salaried employees whom he pays to help him administer the criminal apartheid system.
"Posturing like a pathetic dictator...PW Botha stood last night pretending that he can withstand and defeat all the forces at home and abroad that are engaged in struggle to end the system of white minority domination.
"He promised our people more brutal repression, boasting of the might of the murderous apartheid armed forces on whose behalf he spoke and whose views he reflected so faithfully. He who is responsible for the massacre of so many people throughout Southern Africa had the cheek to blame the victims of state terrorism for the violence of the apartheid system."
And yet, on 5 July 1989, the same PW Botha who had refused to release Nelson Mandela, met this prisoner of the apartheid state he led in Tuynhuys, the Office of the President in Cape Town. Five years later, in 1994, this prisoner, who was ultimately released in 1990, walked into Tuynhuys to occupy the same office that PW Botha had vacated just over a month after he had met Nelson Mandela.
On the eve of the 5 July meeting, Nelson Mandela had written a Statement, which he presented to PW. In this Statement he said:
"The deepening political crisis in our country has been a matter of grave concern to me for quite some time and I now consider it necessary in the national interest for the African National Congress and the government to meet urgently to negotiate an effective political settlement.
"At the outset I must point out that I make this move without consultation with the ANC. I am a loyal and disciplined member of the ANC. My political loyalty is owed, primarily, if not exclusively, to this organisation and particularly to our Lusaka headquarters where the official leadership is stationed and from where our affairs are directed.
"In the normal course of events, I would put my views to the organisation first, and if these views were accepted, the organisation would then decide on who were the best qualified members to handle the matter on its behalf and on exactly when to make the move. But in the current circumstances I cannot follow this course, and this is the only reason why I am acting on my own initiative, in the hope that the organisation will, in due course endorse my action.
"I must stress that no prisoner irrespective of his status or influence can conduct negotiations of this nature from prison. In our special situation negotiation on political matters is literally a matter of life and death, which requires to be handled by the organisation itself through its appointed representatives.
"The step I am taking should, therefore, not be seen as the beginning of actual negotiations between the government and the ANC. My task is a very limited one, and that is to bring the country's two major political bodies to the negotiating table.
"I must further point out that the question of my release from prison is not an issue, at least at this stage of the discussions, and I am certainly not asking to be freed. But I do hope that the government will, as soon as possible, give me the opportunity from my present quarters to sound the views of my colleagues inside and outside the country on this move. Only if this initiative is formally endorsed by the ANC will it have any significance...
"It is perhaps proper to remind you that the media here and abroad has given certain public figures in this country a rather negative image not only in regard to human rights questions, but also in respect to their prescriptive stance when dealing with black leaders generally.
"This impression is shared not only by the vast majority of blacks but also by a substantial section of the whites. If I had allowed myself to be influenced by this impression, I would not even have thought of making this move. Nevertheless, I have come here with an open mind and the impression I will carry away from this meeting will be determined almost exclusively by the manner in which you respond to my proposal.
"It is in this spirit that I have undertaken this mission, and I sincerely hope that nothing will be done or said here that will force me to revise my views on this aspect...
"The key to the whole situation is a negotiated settlement, and a meeting between the government and the ANC will be the first major step towards lasting peace in the country, better relations with our neighbour states, admission to the Organisation of African Unity, readmission to the United Nations and other world bodies, to international markets and improved international relations generally.
"An accord with the ANC, and the introduction of a non-racial society, is the only way in which our rich and beautiful country will be saved from the stigma which repels the world...
"Lastly, I must point out that the move I have taken provides you with the opportunity to overcome the current deadlock, and to normalise the country's political situation. I hope you will seize it without delay. I believe that the overwhelming majority of South Africans, black and white, hope to see the ANC and the government working closely together to lay the foundations for a new era in our country, in which racial discrimination and prejudice, coercion and confrontation, death and destruction, will be forgotten."
Most significantly, in this Statement, after pointing out that "the media here and abroad has given certain public figures in this country (especially PW Botha) a rather negative image not only in regard to human rights questions, but also in respect to their prescriptive stance when dealing with black leaders generally", Nelson Mandela said, "If I had allowed myself to be influenced by this impression, I would not even have thought of making this move (of requesting to meet PW)."
But was Nelson Mandela correct to adopt this extraordinary stance towards an apartheid leader who belonged so firmly to the 'class of 1948', the eminent architects of the apartheid system who could correctly and proudly claim that they were 'Present at the Creation' of this system, and whom Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela's close friend and comrade, had only four years before described as "a pathetic dictator"?
Dismantling the laager
In 1986, in New York, I had the privilege to spend a good number of hours I can never forget with the then Rector of the Rand Afrikaans University, (presently the University of Johannesburg), Professor Pieter de Lange, who was also the Chairperson of the then powerful Afrikaner Broederbond, the very heart and engine of Afrikaner power.
Professor de Lange told me and asked me to inform Oliver Tambo that the apartheid government, led by PW Botha, would repeal or amend various quintessentially apartheid laws. These were the Immorality and the Mixed Marriages Acts, which prohibited sexual relations and marriage across the colour line, respectively, and the Group Areas Act, which defined where each of our national groups could live, resulting in the forced removal of millions of black people to their defined racial and ethnic ghettoes, whose results continue, to this day, to bedevil our sustained efforts to build a non-racial society.
Professor de Lange told me that he and the rest of the Broederbond, of which PW Botha was a member, knew that these reforms would have little meaning to the ANC, given that its central demand was the creation of a democratic and non-racial political order.
However, he urged that the ANC should understand that the Afrikaners had constructed the apartheid system as a protective wall, a laager, intended to ensure their very survival as a people. Surrounded by hostile millions of black people in our country and continent, they felt that they needed to construct an apartheid laager.
The legislative reforms that PW Botha's government would undertake would begin to dismantle this apartheid wall. Professor de Lange said that soon enough, once they saw that the legislative reforms did not expose them to any threat of destruction by 'the black hordes', the Afrikaners would begin to question whether, in any case, they needed any of the other elements of the apartheid system.
He confidently asserted that in the aftermath of the legislative reform, the Afrikaners would come to understand that in reality they did not need the apartheid system, including its core element of white minority domination. They would realise that what had come to threaten the security of the Afrikaner people was the apartheid system itself.
Professor de Lange asked me to inform my own President, Oliver Tambo, that he held the firm view that if all political formations in our country did not agree on its post-apartheid future by 1990, we would all be faced with what would become an apocalyptic and barbarous violent racial conflagration.
When I expressed concern that the perspective he presented to me, in the peace of a New York hotel, would be resisted with reckless violence by the likes of Eugene Terreblanche and his Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), he said that faced with a choice between a disastrous racial war and peaceful coexistence among the diverse people of South Africa, the Afrikaners and the Broederbond would opt for the latter, and would never allow that Terreblanche and his bitter-enders should stand in the way of this outcome.
One short account of the years of the Botha Presidency correctly reports that during the year 1986, and as I was informed by Piet de Lange, "some apartheid legislation was repealed, including many aspects of the Pass Laws, the Mixed Marriages Act, Section 16 of the Immorality Act..., and the Prohibition of Political Interference Act (which forbade multiracial political parties) - (and the Group Areas Act was relaxed.) Some petty apartheid laws were repealed due to a lack of police manpower, which was focused on political surveillance rather than crime prevention. With the pass laws repealed, blacks began to move into urban areas."
Even from his cell in the apartheid prisons, Nelson Mandela understood that however meaningless and 'cosmetic' these PW Botha-led legislative reforms might appear to be to all of us as activists of the African National Congress, they nevertheless communicated the strong message that PW Botha represented more than the "rather negative image not only in regard to human rights questions" conveyed by "the media here and abroad...(of) certain public figures in this country". For this reason, at least, he refused to be told by the media that to engage PW to urge him to accept a negotiated resolution of the apartheid question, would constitute a fruitless exercise. Not too long after I had met Professor de Lange in New York, Oliver Tambo agreed that a small ANC delegation should engage a similarly small group of prominent Afrikaner personalities in a series of confidential conversations that went on perhaps for up to two-and-half years, in my recollection.
The ANC delegation included Comrades Jacob Zuma, Aziz Pahad, Tony Trew and myself. The Afrikaner group was led by Professor Willie Esterhuyse, and included the late Marinus Daling, Wimpie de Klerk (brother to FW de Klerk), Moff Terreblanche, a stockbroker, Marinus Wiechers, Professor Sampie Terreblanche (Moff's brother), and Attie du Plessis, brother to the then Minister of Finance, Barend du Plessis.
This interaction, authorised both by Oliver Tambo and PW Botha, led directly to the first formal negotiations between the ANC leadership in exile and the Botha government. The first and secret meeting in this process of negotiations, which assumed its public form in 1990, took place in a hotel in Lucerne in Switzerland on 12 September 1989.
Jacob Zuma and I represented the ANC at this first meeting. The South African government, now led by FW de Klerk, was represented by two leading officials of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), then led by Dr Niel Barnard, Mike Louw and Maritz Spaarwater. These two delegations were enlarged at the subsequent meetings that were also held in Switzerland. Joe Nhlanhla and Aziz Pahad joined the ANC delegation, while Niel Barnard and Fanie van der Merwe joined the delegation of the then South African government.
PW Botha had authorised the Lucerne meeting, proposed by Nelson Mandela at the Tuynhuys meeting on 5 July 1989, before he resigned as State President in August of the same year. In this regard, Professor Esterhuyse had been given the task to inform me to inform Oliver Tambo and the rest of the leadership of the ANC that the Botha government was now ready to talk directly to the ANC.
He also had the responsibility to advise us about all the necessary logistical details of what PW Botha and the NIS proposed we should do to link up with those delegated to meet us, jointly to decide the date, time and venue of the meeting that finally took place at a hotel in Lucerne, Switzerland, eight days before FW de Klerk was inaugurated as State President, and successor to PW Botha, on 20 September 1989.
Ultimately, the ANC and Government delegates who were meeting in Switzerland agreed both on the conditions that needed to be created to enable negotiations to take place, including the release of Nelson Mandela, and negotiated all the issues that had to be addressed to enable the ANC delegation to travel from Lusaka to Cape Town in 1990, to begin the open negotiations that led to the 1994 elections. The meeting that negotiated the return of our leaders was held in Geneva on 20-21 February 1990.
During 1986, PW Botha defiantly declared a State of Emergency to hold back the liberation tide that threatened to engulf the apartheid system. During the same year, the Afrikaner Broederbond, of which PW Botha, like Willie Esterhuyse, was a member, initiated a process to dismantle the apartheid edifice to whose construction PW Botha had dedicated his life.
In this regard, and fully understanding the intent of the legislative reforms, he was ready and more than willing to take all necessary measures, however brutal, to guarantee the permanent security of the Afrikaner people
Honestly and unapologetically he believed that in this context, he was acting in defence of the very survival of the Afrikaner people, which he was certain could only be saved from 'die swart gevaar' (the black danger), by a faithful implementation of the policy of 'separate development of racial and ethnic groups', based on the entirely false proposition that it was possible to build a confederation of state entities of 'equal but separate' racial and ethnic ghettoes.
This would guarantee the Afrikaners their own 'volkstaat' that would last for all time. It would be protected from the 'swart gevaar' both by its own strong security forces, which PW Botha had built into a formidable force as Minister of Defence and later as Head of Government and Head of State, and by the similar but dependent black volkstaat entities, that would act to defend their sister Afrikaner volkstaat, whatever the final form it would take, given the reality that had been created by the historical evolution of South Africa.
The peace of the brave
In 1989 PW Botha, the ultimate guardian of the keys of the apartheid jails, opened the prison gates to allow his most prominent prisoner to come to Tuynhuys, the very seat of apartheid power in Cape Town. He did this to initiate a process that would, within a few years, liberate from apartheid bondage this particular prisoner, the majority he represented, and our people as a whole, enabling all these to walk in freedom, away from the individual prison cells and the larger jail whose perimeter was then and finally defined by the national borders identified in the consensus Constitution of liberated South Africa of 1996 as the full extent of our national territory.
In the same year, 1989, Oliver Tambo began a process that led to the adoption by the ANC, its Allies and the rest of the South African Mass Democratic Movement, the Southern African Frontline States, the OAU, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the United Nations General Assembly of what came to be known as The Harare Declaration.
The 1989 Declaration spelt out what needed to be done by all of us as South Africans, to arrive at a negotiated resolution of the centuries-old conflict in our country, occasioned by the imposition of colonialism and apartheid.
The Declaration also constituted an unequivocal statement by our movement and the rest of the world, that the entirety of the national and international movement for our liberation, united against apartheid, was, as Nelson Mandela had proposed at the 5 July 5 1989 meeting with PW Botha at Tuynhuys, ready to begin conversations with those whom history had defined as our oppressors, to translate into reality, with them, the vision that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.
Oliver Tambo led the process that resulted in the universal acceptance of The Harare Declaration, and its inherent founding principle of national reconciliation, despite the fact that all humanity had united to denounce as a crime against humanity, the system the oppressors sought to perpetuate, at a high cost in terms of human lives as well as the dignity of the African and black masses throughout our Continent and the rest of the world.
At the beginning of 1989 PW Botha suffered from a slight stroke that ultimately led to his retirement from active politics, having opened the door to the liquidation of the inhuman system of apartheid to whose construction and defence he had dedicated his life. He left the challenging task of the completion of the work he had started to his successor, FW de Klerk.
Later in 1989, Oliver Tambo suffered from a massive stroke that effectively took him out of active politics, creating the possibility for which he had hoped for, for many decades, that his close friend and comrade of these decades, Nelson Mandela, would, finally, officially assume leadership of his beloved movement, the African National Congress.
The fates determined that Oliver Tambo, born in 1917, a year later than PW Botha, should leave the world of the living in 1993, a year before the realisation of his lifetime dream of the liberation of all our people.
The fates decreed that PW Botha should depart the world of the living only a few days ago, 13 years after the death of an outstanding South African and African patriot, and world statesman, Oliver Reginald Tambo.
Tragically, Oliver Tambo and PW Botha never had the opportunity to meet. But of them we can say, echoing the words of the Palestinian, Yasser Arafat, when he spoke of the Israeli, Yitzhak Rabin, that they were partners in the creation of the peace of the brave that is our blessing, but, again tragically, seems, still, to be beyond the reach of the sister peoples of Palestine and Israel.
During the night of 31 October 2006, after I was told that PW Botha had departed our world, to join our common ancestors, I asked a compatriot who knew PW well to assist me to find the appropriate words in which I should communicate to the nation the heartfelt condolences both of our Government and my own, on the occasion of the fortunately peaceful departure of PW from our world.
He suggested that I should say: "Time will adjudicate the place and the role of Mr PW Botha in the history of our country.
"For now, it can be expected that his political followers and supporters will mourn the passing of what has been to them a respected and inspiring leader.
"On the other hand, many fellow South Africans will remember with understandable repugnance the miseries which the policies of his party and his government caused in their lives.
"Whatever the emotions his death might elicit, however, there can be no doubt that his years at the helm were a most crucial decade in the shaping of our country's destiny."
In the most complete reproductions of the outstanding Shakespearian Tragedy, "Hamlet", the last sentence of the play reads: "The rest is silence."
