South Africa Foreign Minister Dies at Age 86, During Apartheid

Roelof ‘Pik’ Botha, South African foreign minister during apartheid, dies at 86

Roelof "Pik" Botha, right, greeting Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1997.

By gowidenews October 12 at 7:45 PM

Report reaching us says that,
Roelof “Pik” Botha, who spent decades at the center of South Africa’s political and diplomatic life as the last foreign minister under apartheid rule and who later served in the cabinet of the country’s first black president, Nelson Mandela, died Oct. 12 at a hospital in Pretoria. He was 86.

The cause was heart disease, his family announced.

Mr. Botha joined South Africa’s foreign service at 21 and held prestigious diplomatic assignments, including simultaneous appointments in the 1970s as ambassador to the United Nations and to the United States.

He occupied an ambivalent place in South African public life, seen by some as a moderate voice in a brutal government and by others as a wily political survivor who was the public face and voice of a racist system clinging to power.


“He was way ahead of his political base in the Afrikaner political establishment” in his moderate political views and skepticism toward apartheid, Chester A. Crocker, a U.S. diplomat who worked on South Africa’s transition to majority-black rule, said in an interview. “He was an unforgettable, stunning performer. He was a very colorful guy at the negotiating table.”

As early as the 1970s, Mr. Botha had publicly admitted that South Africa’s race-based apartheid policies were unjust and caused hardship, yet he also defended the white regime as it became an international pariah.


Roelof "Pik" Botha in 1991. (Liu Heung Shing/AP)
In 1974, shortly before South Africa was expelled from the U.N. General Assembly, Mr. Botha pleaded for his country in a speech to the U.N.’s Security Council.

“Black Africans need not conduct a freedom struggle against my government,” he said. “Being an African country, we understand African aspirations. We have stolen land from nobody. We have conquered no people. We threaten no one.”

Mr. Botha first served in South Africa’s parliament as a member of the National Party in 1970 and was often seen as a future prime minister, the country’s highest political office at the time. But his comparatively moderate views were increasingly out of step with the conservatism of the party’s white Afrikaner base. Some were suspicious of his cosmopolitan ways and openly speculated that he might have been a communist sympathizer or Soviet spy.

At diplomatic receptions, Mr. Botha reportedly said, “nobody would talk to us and nobody would talk to the Russians, so we ended up always having to talk to each other.”

He became foreign minister in 1977, a year after the Soweto student uprising, in which at least 176 protesters were killed by police. Oppressive measures were enacted against the country’s restive black majority, which made up about 70 percent of South Africa’s population. International sanctions were tightened, leaving South Africa’s white government more and more isolated.