P. W. Botha
P. W. Botha ruled South Africa from 1978 to 1989, as prime minister until 1984 and then as the executive state president the new constitution made him, the defence minister of twelve years who brought the generals into the government through the State Security Council. He ran the country as a total strategy against a total onslaught, the phrase for the ANC, the Soviets and the sanctions together. There was the war in Angola and Namibia that ended in the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988 and the withdrawal. There were the raids on Maputo, Maseru, Gaborone and Harare, the destabilisation of Mozambique through Renamo, and the death squads of Vlakplaas. There was the tricameral parliament of 1984 that gave the Coloured and Indian populations chambers and the African majority nothing, which set off the township uprising of 1984-86 and the state of emergency that put thirty thousand in detention. There were the reforms of the pass laws abolished in 1986 and the mixed-marriage law repealed and the black trade unions legalised. There was the Rubicon speech of August 1985 in which the world had been told he would cross it and he did not, so that the rand fell by a third in a week and the American banks called the loans. He met Mandela in July 1989 for tea in his office, in secret, a month before the stroke and the party's revolt that gave the country to de Klerk. He was born in Paul Roux in the Orange Free State in 1916, the son of a Boer War commando, left Grey University College without a degree to be a National Party organiser in the Cape at twenty. He entered parliament in 1948 for George, the seat he held for thirty-six years. He was defence minister from 1966, building the arms industry, Armscor, and the bomb, six of which were made and dismantled before 1994. The finger-wagging, the temper that the cabinet called the great crocodile's, and the refusal in 1998 to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for which he was fined and the conviction was overturned on a technicality, were the last years' image. He said he had nothing to apologise for. He lived at the Wilderness on the Garden Route until his death in October 2006 at ninety, when the government offered a state funeral that the family declined.
- Lived: 1916 CE – 2006 CE
- Nationality: South African
- Roles: prime minister, president, politician
