South Africa buries apartheid former president
South Africa today said goodbye to former president PW Botha, a man who in life was associated with some of the worst excesses of apartheid, but whose death has shown the strides a bitterly divided country has made toward reconciliation.
Botha, 90, South Africa’s last hard-line white leader, died eight days ago at his home in the seaside resort of Wilderness on the south coast.
President Thabo Mbeki, whose governing African National Congress party was brutally repressed during the turbulent years of Botha’s presidency, attended the funeral with his wife Zanele.
His attendance was an extraordinary gesture, but has angered some black people, who see it as a betrayal of all those who suffered under Botha’s regime.
Former President FW de Klerk, the last white president of South Africa and the man who ousted Botha in bitter fight for the control of the National Party in 1989, sat next to Mbeki during the funeral service in the tiny resort town of George, where the Outeniqua Mountains reach down to the Indian Ocean.
Many former members of Botha’s cabinet, National Party politicians and some officials from Mbeki’s office were also in the Mother Church, a majestic white Dutch Reform Church in the heart of George. White flowers decorated the church and Botha’s simple wooden coffin.
In accordance with Botha’s last wishes, Psalm 23 was read and his daughter Rozanne Visagie sang the hymn “Walk with God”.
Jordanian Christian missionary Bahjat Batarseh, who was introduced to Botha about six years ago, spoke during the service about how the former president would ask him about the Middle East and they would pray together.
“I am asking you South Africans, this is your nation. Live like a family. Bury the past or the past will bury you,” Batarseh said.
In a country ashamed of its past, Botha has been remembered as the last staunch defender of apartheid. He declared a state of emergency in 1986 and presided over some of the worst reprisals against the black majority during four decades of the country’s legalised racial repression.
When apartheid ended and South Africa sought to heal its wounds and build a multiracial democracy, Botha steadfastly refused to testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated the atrocities of apartheid and offered the possibility of amnesty to those willing to confess their crimes and demonstrate remorse.
Botha was seen by many not only as a symbol of a brutal system of racial repression, but as an example of the white South Africans who never embraced change and tried despite the turn in the tide of history to cling to their old life of privilege and prejudice.
Former President Nelson Mandela, who was not expected to attend the funeral and who spent 27 years at hard labour as a prisoner of apartheid, set a tone for the country’s reaction to the death when he gave Botha some credit for taking initial steps that led toward South Africa’s largely peaceful transition to democracy.
“While to many Botha will remain a symbol of apartheid, we also remember him for the steps he took to pave the way toward the eventual peacefully negotiated settlement in our country,” Mandela said in a terse statement released a day after Botha’s death.
Botha resisted enormous international pressure to release Mandela and other political prisoners from jail. De Klerk released Mandela.
When Botha died, Mbeki and his government immediately sent condolences to the family, offered a state funeral and ordered flags flown at half mast until the funeral.
Mbeki said the government and the ANC had decided to offer state funerals to all former heads of state, even the captains of apartheid, as part of the commitment toward national reconciliation.
The family said it was grateful, but rejected the offer and chose to have a funeral in George followed by a private burial.
Botha was president from 1978 until 1989, the years of South Africa’s worst international isolation.
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