58
BOTHA, WILLEM
but dropped out in 1935 to help found the white supremacist National Party. This organization was zealously committed to the separation of all Africans by their races, with political power exclusively reserved for whites. Botha initially sought work as a public information officer, and in 1948 he gained a seat in Parliament from the George district in Cape Province. He held it for the next 32 years. That same year the National Party was swept to power and immediately acted out its credo by establishing strict racial separation laws, known collectively as apartheid. South Africa had always known some degree of racial separation, but now barriers were codified and systematically enforced. Botha continued on as a party operative until 1958, when Prime Minister HENDRIK VERWOERD made him minister of the interior. Thereafter his sterling credentials served him well as he successively acquired important government portfolios. Botha’s rise to national prominence began in 1966 when he gained appointment as defense minister in the administration of BALTHAZAR VORSTER. In this capacity, he made indelible contributions to the maintenance and survival of apartheid in South Africa. Botha increased the defense budget 20-fold and acquired modern weapons systems for the military. Disregarding an international arms embargo against South Africa, Botha orchestrated programs to help the country become selfsufficient in military technology—including a small cache of nuclear weapons. The size of the armed forces was also enlarged through universal conscription of white males, and South Africa quickly emerged as a regional superpower south of the Sahara. As defense minister, Botha did not hesitate to employ preemptive strikes against neighboring states that harbored guerrillas from the banned African National Congress (ANC), a leftist resistance group. Namibia, Mozambique, Tanzania, and other frontline states were repeatedly attacked until governments there agreed to ban ANC activities on their soil. Botha, an avowed anticommunist, committed South African soldiers to Angola, where they fought with Cuban forces deployed by Fidel Castro. This aggressive combination of limited warfare and muscle flexing greatly buoyed Botha’s national profile and popularity among white Afrikaners, so in 1978 he succeeded Vorster as prime minister. Once in power, Botha displayed a distinct dichotomy to his leadership. Realizing that South Africa could not endure forever, he advised his countrymen to “adapt
or die.” He then implemented cosmetic changes to the apartheid system, dismantling some of its longstanding policies, like the ban on interracial marriage, authorizing of African trade unions, and allowing black Africans in urban centers to own property. Such tinkering led to howls of protest from extreme Afrikaner elements in the National Party and they split off to form the new, hardline Conservative Party. Undaunted, in 1982 Botha pushed through constitutional amendments creating a three-house (tricameral) legislature that allowed mixed race and Indian representation for the first time. The office of prime minister was then abolished and Botha was reinstated as president on September 14, 1984. However, no accommodation was made toward the black majority, and whites firmly controlled the reins of power. Instead of fostering amity, Botha’s reforms exacerbated black impatience at home and alienated world opinion abroad. New economic sanctions were enacted against South Africa while Africans took to the streets in violent protest. Botha’s response was to unleash police and state security forces against them, and at one point an estimated 40,000 people were confined. Another 4,000 citizens died in confrontations with security forces. On the international scene, Botha did manage to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the ongoing conflicts in Angola and Namibia, but Western nations, joined now by the United States, refused to lift their embargos. When Botha fell ill in January 1989 party officials moved quickly to replace him with the more moderately disposed F. W. De Klerk. Botha resigned from public life on August 15, 1989, both admired and reviled as the “Old Crocodile” of South African politics. But by March 1992 the rule of apartheid ended as Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first black executive. As clever and ruthlessly determined as Botha was, even he could not forestall the eclipse of a violent, hated regime based solely on racial division. In the mid-1990s, Botha was repeatedly summoned before the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission for frank discussion of his role in maintaining the apartheid state. Three times he blatantly ignored their subpoenas and was finally charged with contempt in 1998. However, old and ailing, he successfully appealed his conviction and no further action has been taken against him. Botha, true to his Afrikaner heritage, remains a strident critic of South Africa’s new, multiracial government.