Union Buildings

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Wednesday 29 March 2017

A remarkable man (Part 3)

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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