A decade ago the satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys portrayed a beer-paunched yob drunkenly staggering around the stage, yelling: “I’m a white South African – so fuck you all!” The audience would giggle nervously at their recognition of this familiar bully, the quintessential macho rugger-bugger, reckless, brainless and loud, flaunting his bigotry at all those unfortunate enough to be within earshot.
Later, Uys would transform himself into a similarly distasteful character – PW Botha. He would wag his index finger at real and imagined enemies, loll his tongue, and tell the rest of the world to go jump in the lake. The giggles would become louder and more nervous, even hysterical, for this man had real power to inflict misery.
We were wrenched back into the middle of another satire in the George Magistrate’s Court this week (Uys even welcomed P W back to the chorus line). Botha’s decision to opt for a public trial in front of a black magistrate rather than the easier options on offer from truth commission chair Desmond Tutu, who would have walked on coals to keep the ex-president out of court, defied reason.
His supporting cast of rightwingers, led by the improbable Shorty van Vuuren of the PW Botha Afrikaner Support Group, reminded one of Karl Marx’s aphorism that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
In the preceding 48 hours, Botha seemed poised to take the step that would have broken the stalemate, and settled the matter. But this was the same man who, 13 years ago, told the entire world to go to hell when he refused to cross another, mightier Rubicon. Then, he chose a path that drove South Africa to the brink of the apocalypse.
There are those who feel sorry for him. After all, the old boy is in retirement, he’s not well and he’s found happiness in a new relationship in the autumn of his days. What good will it achieve to dredge up the past?
But there are things we can never forget. There are millions of South Africans who did not need truth commission secretary Paul van Zyl to recount the evidence of State Security Council meetings to know that Botha has an enormous amount of explaining to do.
It was on his watch that the South African state was militarised in line with the ideology of total strategy in which any means no matter how brutal were deemed acceptable to counter the “total onslaught”. Thus the systematic elimination of political opponents became official state policy. Assassination squads such as Koevoet, C-1 at Vlakplaas, the Civil Co-operation Bureau, 5 Recce and Inkatha’s Caprivi trainees were ultimately Botha’s creations as much as the SS belonged to Adolf Hitler.
Botha’s disregard for sovereignty and his policies of destabilisation of neighbouring states destroyed Angola and sent the murderous Renamo bandits to cripple Mozambique. Under his two states of emergency, tens of thousands of activists were thrown into prison without trial, civil liberties curtailed, and the rule of law almost abandoned. His officers and proxies turned KwaZulu-Natal into a war zone in which thousands of people died.
All of this, we were told, was to uphold “Western Christian values” against “Godless communism”. Yet what a contrast we have seen between the grace with which President Nelson Mandela responded to a subpoena by going to court in the South African Rugby Football Union trial in Pretoria and the contempt which Botha displays for a similar piece of official stationery.
Tutu, who has displayed a generosity of spirit that is much closer to Christian principles than anything Botha ever did, has been too kind by half. In a fair world, he would be facing criminal charges for the people who were killed by his security structures – the Goniwes, the Mxenges, untold peasants in Mozambique – instead of the minor offence of ignoring a subpoena.
Instead of being grateful, Botha has responded with his old arrogance – the arrogance of the old white South Africa that in recent weeks has reared its ugly head in diverse places.
It is an arrogance that encompasses General Georg Meiring believing that Mandela would buy the silly plot theory that the military intelligence machine fabricated. It describes Louis Luyt, willing to kill rugby before relinquishing power, or the parents of Vryburg. It describes a white farmer shooting black children in cold blood for trespassing on his property.
The fact is that the Bothas and the Luyts and the Vryburg school board are anachronisms who cannot even claim to represent a significant number of white South Africans. Their discomfort reflects the change in the balance of power in our society.
More than a decade ago, Botha’s “principled defiance” meant he could send special forces to bomb Lusaka, Harare and Gaborone, to destroy a peace mission by murdering and maiming defenceless people. But now he commands no more legions or bombers.
South Africans were presented this week with the image of an unsteady 82-year-old who had once more failed to cross the Rubicon, this time a small stream.
Instead of admiring him for his strength and determination not to capitulate, for his ability to say “Fuck you all”, we avert our eyes from a ghastly sight – a laughing stock, an object of derision. Let us be grateful that we have come so far.