‘I’m not here to see the dead white one — I’m waiting for the black one,” said a coloured woman as she draped herself over the Dutch Reformed Church wall next to bored-looking policemen patrolling the perimeter and gates of the church grounds.
It’s PW Botha’s funeral in George and a woman selling McDonald’s burgers in the shop next to the Moeder Kerk says quietly: ”It’s a pity those Boere only eat koeksisters and not burgers after their funeral. Even at his funeral PW spoils the fun.”
The Groot Krokodil was buried in his beloved Wildernis on Wednesday. About 1 200 mainly white Afrikaners, a couple of tricameral and old Labour Party coloured politicians, and President Thabo Mbeki and his black bodyÂÂguards filled the church.
On the steps outside the church a man with a brown patchwork leather jacket stood talking to a woman who looked like Evita Bezuidenhout — long nails, big hair, big bosoms and all. Ferdie Hartzenberg and hundreds of ooms with a fantastic variety of facial hair — snorre (moustaches), beards, beards-with-snorre, beards-without-snorre, short sidies with snorre, long sidies with beards and so on — and women wearing flowery dresses gathered on the church steps while black and coloured people peered over the walls.
Shortly after Mbeki, his wife, acting Western Cape premier Leonard Ramatlakane, Botha’s widow, Barbara (Tannie Elize died years ago), and four of the five Botha children and grandchildren had filled the front pews of this austere old church, an oom with no snor but a big white beard blew on a ramshoring (ram’s horn).
In another pew somebody explained that Botha loved the sound of the ramsÂÂhoring and blew the thing himself. General Constand Viljoen shrugged when I asked him why the ramshoring. ”Never heard of it in church,” he said.
Never before has a greater number of hearing aids, walking sticks and a variety of kieries, suspenders straining over massive beer-boeps, short perms and long grey wisps of hair unsuccessfully combed over vast bald skulls gathered in one church. It happens when you live for 90 years.
Kent Durr, the former ambassador and Nat politician, wanted to talk about the ”great Botha: he grew up with the smell of the burnt down Boer-houses in his nose”. The Anglo-Boer South African War of 1899 to 1902, when British soldiers burnt down farmhouses belonging to Boere — ”that made him who he was”.
The ramshoring was not the only oddity at Botha’s funeral. Botha befriended a Jordanian Evangelist, Bahjat Batarseh, who was introduced as a man who travels and meets the rich and famous and infamous, and then prays with them. Batarseh got the churchgoers clapping their hands and laughing loudly at his jokes about evolution and blacks. ”A black man once told me: ‘There will be no blacks in hell.’ So I asked him why and he said: ‘They’ll be late for Judgement Day. By the time they arrive, it will be all over.’”
To loud applause from the audience, the Jordanian asked people to bury the past ”otherwise the past will bury you”. He said Botha ”was not perfect, but nobody is”. Outside the church people spoke about Mbeki and the Jordanian evangelist exchanging phone numbers.
It’s not clear why Mbeki ordered our flags to be flown at half-mast for almost a week. Apart from Botha’s family and old colleagues who wanted to pay their last respects to this man, who governed our country through its darkest, most oppressive and bloodiest years (from 1978 to 1989), I didn’t see a nation in mourning. It’s also not clear why our president felt the need to attend Botha’s funeral.
If an unsuspecting traveller had wandered into the NG Kerk on Wednesday she would’ve thought, ”Here lies an old deeply religious man loved by a large very elderly white community and one important black man.”
Nobody mentioned apartheid. Nobody mentioned the states of emergency, the detentions without trial, the thousands who went into exile, the troops in the townships, the state-sanctioned violence and oppression of blacks. Nobody breathed a word of Botha’s refusal either to acknowledge the role he played in the dehumanising policies that the former government imposed on its citizens or to apologise to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. ”I will never ask for amnesty. I do not apologise to people — only to God,” Botha said.
And, most shocking, nobody mentioned the finger that Botha waved at us for those 11 long years while he was in power.
If former president Mandela had died before Botha, would Botha have attended his funeral? If Mbeki had died before Botha, would the old Krokodil have shuffled into a church in Soweto or the Transkei? I don’t think so.
Driving out of George, you see a big advertisement reading ”4 000 Groot Krokodille”. God forbid!