Obituary - Pik Botha, South African politician

Died: October 12, 2018

PIK Botha, who has died aged 86, was the last foreign minister of South Africa's apartheid era and a contradictory figure who staunchly defended white minority rule but eventually recognised that change was inevitable.

Internationally, Mr Botha was the most visible representative of apartheid at the height of protests and sanctions against the racist rule that ended with Nelson Mandela's election as the country's first black president in 1994.

As such, the longtime foreign minister was vilified around the world while drawing the ire of his own boss, President PW Botha, when he said in 1986 that South Africa might one day have a black leader.

Pik Botha, who was not related to the apartheid-era president, later served as minister of mineral and energy affairs under Mr Mandela, and said in 2000 that he would join the African National Congress, the ruling party that had led the movement against white minority rule for decades.

He made few public comments in recent years during the scandal-marred tenure of former president Jacob Zuma, who resigned in February.

Mr Botha was absolutely delighted when Cyril Ramaphosa, a key ANC negotiator during the transition to democratic rule in the early 1990s, replaced Mr Zuma as South Africa's leader, Mr Botha's son said.

Mr Botha, also a former South African ambassador to the United States, was foreign minister from 1977 until the end of apartheid in 1994.

He was involved in negotiations in the late 1980s that led to independence in neighbouring Namibia and the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola, where South Africa had been involved in a conflict of Cold War proxies.

The reduction in regional tensions was followed by the 1990 release of Mr Mandela, who had spent 27 years in apartheid prisons.

In 1996, Botha dropped out of active politics after leaving Mandela’s Cabinet when the National Party, the ruling party during apartheid, pulled out of South Africa’s national unity government. He has said he opposed the party’s decision.

He made few public comments after that, though said in some interviews that he felt remorse and was even haunted by apartheid’s legacy while highlighting his efforts to change the system from within and oppose international communism.

In the 1996 interview with O’Malley, Botha pondered the hard choices he made as apartheid’s frontman.

“Now you can say to me, but I should have resigned and gone into the desert and isolated myself and shout and kick. That was one choice, yes,” he said.

“The other one was to say the things I did say to change people’s minds and to try and be a factor in the transformation that took place,” Botha said. “Maybe I should have resigned and maybe I should have left politics, but I hung in there.”