PIK Botha, the apartheid’s government’s foreign minister for 17 years, is considering joining the African National Congress, and called in a Sunday newspaper on fellow Afrikaners to do the same. Botha said in an interview with the City Press newspaper that the time had come for whites, especially Afrikaners, to reach out to blacks in South Africa. He said South Africa’s first black president Nelson Mandela had shown the way, and had been a better leader than his own National Party leader F.W. de Klerk. “Mandela succeeded in his bid to reach out to whites without bitterness. De Klerk just did not manage to reach out to blacks.” Botha told the newspaper, which has a predominantly black readership, that his political change of heart had come about because he felt that “whites, especially Afrikaners, must get down from their pedestals.” Botha gave no indication of when, or if, he would seek to join the party.