The End of "Die Groot Krokodil"
PW Botha has died. The man who refused to recognise that apartheid was dead, and who epitomised the worst militaristic excesses of Afrikaner Nationalism, has been almost invisible and irrelevant in recent years, as his country has moved confidently and mostly successfully away from his vision of South Africa.
There have been many boring, standard obituaries, and predictably superficial items on places like CNN. The best and most balanced that I have read thus far is this one from Gerald Shaw, former political writer and Deputy Editor of the Cape Times, in which he points out that under PW's watch, the first steps were taken to dismantle apartheid. Unfortunately he suffered a major failure of nerve in 1985 with the disastrous Rubicon speech, in which he backed away from major reformist initiatives at the last moment, and instead flailed away at his old targets, with disastrous consequences for the country. His sabotaging of the highly-promising Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group initiative in 1986, who were on the verge of reconciling the government with the ANC was another example of his cowardliness in not going all the way. It fell to FW De Klerk, five years later, to complete the historic process, with courage and persuasion of the white electorate.
The M&G today has a very similar piece by Dries van Heerden, another former political reporter. Worth quoting:
"I believe the hindsight of history will treat Botha much kinder than
the quick appraisals following his death this week at his home in the
Wilderness. For the image of a finger-wagging, self-righteous, smirking
Groot Krokodil who defiantly refused to appear before the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission to account for the excesses of his
administration is still too vivid in our collective memory.
However,
Botha also deserves credit for the process of change he initiated in a
period of history when white society was at its paranoiac and
intransigent worst. During his reign the dismantling of the apartheid
edifice gathered speed -- first with the abolition of the largely
inconsequential mixed-marriages and immorality acts, and later with the
scrapping of the Group Areas Act and the noxious influx-control
measures.
It can be argued that these changes came about not
through the design of Botha but as a result of an inevitable chain of
small events. At least it happened during Botha's watch, and he had to
suffer a right-wing revolt in his own ranks and the break-up of his
beloved National Party as a result of this."
Business Day has a similar balanced appraisal today.
I have two personal memories. On the day of the Rubicon speech I was in Johannesburg, hosting some telecomms luminary from the USA who was talking to an IBM conference. A colleague took him to the SABC building for a TV interview, and came back with the news that the whole building was buzzing with talk about the leaked version of the speech, in which the ANC would be unbanned, Mandela released, all the things that De Klerk would later implement. When I arrived back in Cape Town later that evening, I was stunned to discover that none of it had come to pass. Perhaps not as stunned as Pik Botha and Chris Heunis, who had been actively promoting the speech and associated reforms!
Second, I remember one afternoon in June 2006, driving up the old DuToit's Kloof Pass, enroute to Johannesburg and a European business trip followed by a holiday in Tsilivi (Zakynthos, Greece), when PW came on the radio announcing the re-imposition of a State of Emergency to deal with unrest in the wake of the collapse of the EPG mission. I recall the bitter disapppointment I felt knowing that many more lives would be lost in this crackdown, and resolved that I should get myself and my family away from South Africa. This I seemed to have accomplished a few weeks later, when I negotiated an assignment at IBM's marvellous facility at La Gaude, in the mountains above Nice. What a life that would have been! Unfortunately, before I could take up the assignment, IBM decided to quit South Africa, and all those plans came to nought. At least I got to stay through the transition that ensued, and was on the Grand Parade in Cape Town the unforgettable evening that Nelson Mandela was released.
Speaking of whom, some people may have been surprised at Mandela's magnanimous response to the death of PW. In fact, as this quite fascinating article by John Carlin in London's Independent* points out, the two men had a lot of respect for each other, stemming from a secret meeting they had had on 5 July 1989, which Carlin claims was the real start of the process of the removal of apartheid, and the transition to democracy. Thus, this photograph from one of my Flickr contacts, which I instantly dismissed as a fake, may not be too farfetched.
I guess the real difference between the two men may be that whereas Madiba has over and over again demonstrated the generosity of his spirit, PW Botha remained a bitter and mean old man to his death, and that is how he will be remembered.
Finally, how could anyone take him seriously after seeing Pieter-Dirk Uys' wonderfully savage and accurate caricatures of him in shows such as "Adapt or Dye". PDU's own reminiscences are also published in the M&G today - under the apt title "He Was My Bread and Botha".
* link changed because the Independent hides its archives - thankfully, someone blogged the full text.
Appended Sunday, 5 November 2006
Thanks Ben for your comment. My most loyal reader. Everything you say is correct, but I don't think you can believe that either I, or any of the distinguished journalists I link to, are unaware of or deny in any way, the atrocities committed by the National Party under PW Botha particularly, but also by his predecessors Vorster, Verwoerd and Strijdom. I, and they, mentioned it in passing, but the emphasis was on a wider, more historical context. I find it interesting that, a day later, both Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma published articles emphasizing PW's contribution to the transition, and hardly mentioning his bloody record. Of course, there are other articles on the other side of the ledger, and I have linked one of them in my first paragraph above to make clear I do not forget about the repression. I was there, after all. And by the way, I find it grotesque and absurd that flags are flying at half-mast and that he was offered a State funeral.
Finally, PW Botha, as a professed Christian, has to account for himself before his Maker, a judgement more final and significant than yours or mine, as illustrated in Zapiro's marvellous cartoon from Friday.
1:27:04 PM 
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