By Herbert Beukes
Africa is dying
“Africa fatigue” is a phrase often heard when appeals to donor
nations for poverty alleviation go unanswered. There are reasons for the
reluctance. The frequency of the appeals and over-stretched donor states are
valid excuses, but poor administration and management of resources, and
profligate spending by corrupt leaders long shielded by “political
correctness”, have certainly contributed to the fatigue. The condition is not a
new one. During South Africa’s isolation years, Pik Botha never tired of
reminding the world of this state of affairs and warned that the generosity of
Western nations would turn into fatigue. It was his way of telling African
leaders to clean up their administrations and start looking after the needs of
their own people.
As staff members we used to enjoy good natured banter about his
“Africa is dying” stump speech. It derived from a letter I had drafted for him
to the then chairman of the Organisation for African Unity. Politics aside, as
far back as the late seventies, Pik Botha had warned in those speeches of the
unfolding tragedy of unsafe drinking water, broken roads, neglect of hospitals
and schools, poor financial control, waste of agricultural resources, etc. In
those years, when political correctness dominated the discourse and muted
critics’ voices, his views were summarily dismissed as racial bigotry, apartheid’s
voice. It did not deter him then and, ironically, today it has become almost
vogue to hear similar language about Africa’s misery at economic development
summits of the industrialised nations.
Seeking
out company
Nurture your mind with great thoughts. Benjamin Disraeli
When you listen to
someone spontaneously referring to persons of standing, you get
an idea of what it is about such people that attracts the attention and
stimulates the interest of others. It is also a means of gaining insight into
the worth and respect that the speaker attaches to such people. You can assess
their ranking in his estimation by how often their wisdom inspires his own
opinions. With this as a guide, there were
some names that rated highly in Pik Botha’s estimation, among them Henry
Kissinger, Franz Josef Strauss, Brent Scowcroft, Jacques Soustelle, Carl Sagan
and later, Richard Hawking.
The characteristic that all these people shared was their
intellect. When you are in the company of a great mind, you listen. If you must
talk, you ask a question in the hope that you might learn something new from
the answer. This was central to Pik Botha’s relationships with people like
Kissinger and Strauss. He often set time aside for meetings with Kissinger,
Strauss and Soustelle in order to learn the latest of their thinking on issues
that troubled the world. He realised that these people were continually exposed
to many other great thinkers in their disciplines, so when he met up with them
again he would benefit from their latest insights.
Developing personal friendships with such strategic thinkers
enabled Mr Botha, for instance, to gain an understanding of what was happening
in East/West relations and between the former USSR and the East bloc States and
in the People’s Republic of China much earlier than his colleagues back home.
When a visit to France was being planned, Pik would make sure that an
appointment with Jacques Soustelle was included in his schedule of meetings. He
was France’s Mr Africa and could provide informed views on the latest African
perspectives that would otherwise have been virtually inaccessible to us.
These were the things Pik Botha enjoyed talking about in the
office, on the road or in flight. He never seemed to tire of discussing ideas
that challenged his mind. His
stamina for asking questions on the meaning of events in the larger context of
what was happening in the world was inexhaustible. He was driven by a need to
know what was not self-evident. Occasionally, his questions were rhetorical, a
probing of thought, rather than in expectation of any response. Reduced to
their essence, the questions would focus on the meaning of being, of existence
and purpose, of life itself. His soliloquies, I learned, were not intended to
be disturbed by dialogue.
Then there was his fondness for Roman
and Greek myth. He would often draw analogies from situations in classical
mythology.
Pik Botha had acquired the image of a reformer, as someone who wanted to change
the flow and direction of politics in the country. The irony was that his
support among the general public was always stronger than his standing in Party
structures. He remained surprisingly philosophical about the resistance and
criticism from fellow Nationalists and would remind us that he would continue to
strive for change even if it did not always achieve much.
He likened his toiling to change the system, to the Greek legend of Sisyphus, condemned to roll a heavy
stone up a hill. Whenever he neared the top, the stone rolled down again. The
effort would be repeated over and over, so that his labour seemed futile. I
later read an interpretation of the myth as personifying politicians aspiring
for political office and the quest for power, in itself an "empty
thing", being likened to rolling the boulder up the hill. The analogy also
proved to be a fairly accurate description of the small group of well-intended
reformist politicians who, at the height of National Party control, were up
against an obdurate and inflexible system.
At the time of some
nasty political upheavals in the National Party, when Mr BJ Vorster was state
president, the Sunday Times carried a front page report with Mr Vorster’s face
depicted as Olympus showing cracks all over. This brought to a head a period of
unflattering political revelations, recriminations and personal tension between
president and prime minister. The report caused consternation and a lot of
unhappiness among supporters in the respective camps. In Greek mythology, it
was at Olympus that king Zeus had held court where, according to Homer, the
whole sky belonged to Zeus alone and no wind could ever shake the untroubled
peace. That formerly impregnable bastion, the National Party, was now showing
signs of serious breakup, with the peace badly shaken and the political sky no
longer the Party’s alone.
The report also had
unintended consequences. It was known that I enjoyed a relationship of trust
with the reporter who wrote it and, I gathered, for that reason I was seen as
suitably placed to learn who had been the source for some of the information in
the report. My mistake was that I ever tried. I should have known better. It
was not my business to want to know how the reporter had got to the
information. The momentary uneasiness was moved out of the way by a simple question.
She asked whether I would ever entrust her with information in future if, at my
insistence, she disclosed her source to the higher-ups? I apologised for even
raising the matter. I learnt a lesson that day, to be ever watchful for the
seductiveness of power abuse, however presentable and innocuous it may be
dressed up. Trust and integrity have no substitute. Period.
It was also the time
that Carl Sagan, astrophysicist and cosmologist, was popularising the natural
sciences in writings and lectures on a very cerebral subject. What little head
knowledge I had of stars and constellations and galaxies had been awakened by
Pik Botha’s fascination with the mysteries of the universe. It was a sort of
basic adult education for me on a subject that had nestled outside my fields of
interest. Pik would read and then tell us about Sagan’s “billions and billions
of stars” and about distances of millions and millions of light years and
temperatures that defied comprehension. But it was the concept of the black
hole that truly captured Pik Botha’s fascination and he delighted in explaining
his understanding of some of these mysteries to us. Stephen Hawking was not as
established and popular an authority yet as he was later to become but his work
in the field of quantum gravity in the context of black holes added so much
spice to Pik Botha’s menu.
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