Obituary | Apartheid’s apologist

Obituary: Pik Botha

Pik Botha, South Africa’s longest-serving foreign minister, died on October 12th, aged 86

THERE WERE few things Pik Botha liked more than telling a story, except, perhaps, being at the centre of one. Eyes flashing and with a stage performer’s perfect timing, he would cast his spells. He did it best if he had a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other (better yet, one or two already in him, as they helped bring out his mischievous streak). And there was plenty of mischief to be made. At a government bosberaad, or country retreat, he decided to liven up an evening by throwing ammunition into the campfire, sending his cabinet colleagues diving for cover as the bullets exploded. At a boring diplomatic dinner in Geneva he selected a long-stemmed rose, sniffed it and then ate it before working his way through several more. Even his nickname, Pik—short for pikkewyn, Afrikaans for penguin—hinted at an impish character. He picked it up as a baby, but it stuck and he kept it because it rolled off the tongue so much more easily than the sober Roelof Frederik with which he was christened.

Listen to this story.
Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.

There was more here than showmanship. When, in the late 1980s, peace talks aimed at getting South Africa and Cuba to pull their troops out of Angola’s civil war broke down, he walked over to the hotel bar and offered a whisky to his Cuban counterpart. By the end of the evening neither man could walk without help, but they had the outlines of a deal.

In the half-century in which he represented South Africa, first as a diplomat and then for almost 20 years as its longest-serving foreign minister, he deflected or delayed sanctions aimed at ending apartheid, or white rule. He was by far the most eloquent defender of a system that denied millions of black people the vote, that uprooted hundreds of thousands from their homes and that was maintained by the barrel of a gun and tip of a sjambok.

Henry Kissinger was a role model and told a biographer that he was “fiery, intelligent and discreet”. Margaret Thatcher embraced his arguments against sanctions: that they would be ineffective while making black people poorer. Instead of isolating South Africa, he argued, Western leaders should allow verligte (enlightened) whites to reform apartheid gradually. To do so he had to paint himself as a liberal held hostage to conservatives within his party.

It helped that most of his cabinet colleagues and the apartheid-era presidents he served did little to conceal their racism. P.W. Botha (no relation), who led the country from 1978 to 1989, would wag a finger—both temper and voice rising—when challenged over the immorality of apartheid. Pik Botha, instead, would lean forward, hunching his rugby-player’s frame, and earnestly explain that he abhorred racism and did not want to lord it over blacks.

He may have even believed it himself. In 1977 he stunned his party by rejecting routine segregation, saying he was not prepared to die “for an apartheid sign in a lift”. A decade later he infuriated it by saying he was prepared to serve under a black president.

The son of a rural schoolmaster, his closest childhood friend was Frans, a local black boy. Starting school without Frans was unthinkable. So his father Roelof found a spot for Frans near the door of the Paul Kruger School near Rustenburg. Friendship was one thing, but the blood of his ancestors ran thicker still. Like that of his grandfather, Johannes, who fought against the British in the Anglo-Boer war. Johannes had joined a guerrilla band after the conventional war was lost, fighting on for almost two more years among a group known as the bittereinders until their final, unconditional surrender.

Having been conquered once, he would say, Afrikaners would never again negotiate their own destruction. More than any of his colleagues, he could see that the battle over apartheid would not be won or lost in the townships, but in the court of international public opinion. As a lawyer he had faced that court when he went to The Hague to defend a challenge to its rule over South West Africa (renamed Namibia after its independence in 1990). South Africa’s legal team won the case in 1966, but having seen how unpopular apartheid was abroad, Mr Botha came home a reluctant reformist. In a submission decades later to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission he said that he had realised “you gain nothing by winning the legal battle if you lose the moral battle.” He went into politics, winning his first seat in 1970. In his maiden speech in parliament he urged South Africa to sign the UN Declaration of Human Rights. This was too radical a thought for many, as was his call a year later to give “coloureds” (people of mixed race) the same political rights as whites. He found little willingness in his party to embrace the view that, in order to survive, apartheid had to reform. But his promises of change were eagerly received overseas.

Over time, he said different things to different people, casting himself as a good man in a rotten system, a liberal who had campaigned from within. In 2000 he told a black newspaper that he planned to join the ANC because he identified with its fundamental values. Later, at a meeting of mostly Afrikaners he denied ever having joined the party. It was too much of a stretch. For so long, he had argued for a power-sharing agreement that preserved the essence of white rule while ending international isolation. Such a deal could never be reached with the ANC. As much as Mr Botha knew that apartheid could not survive, there was still something of the bittereinder in him. Just as they had fought on for a doomed cause, even as their farms and homes were burned to the ground, his defence of the system served only to prolong its horror.

This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition under the headline "Apartheid’s apologist"

China v America

From the October 18th 2018 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Discover more

Amnon Weinstein turned grief into music again

The restorer and reviver of Holocaust violins died on March 4th, aged 84

Frans de Waal taught the world that animals had emotions

The Dutch-American primatologist died on March 14th, aged 75


Toriyama Akira was probably Japan’s greatest manga master

The reclusive but tireless creator of “Dragon Ball” died on March 1st, aged 68