How nasty Pik unwittingly saved the Madiba concert

Has Pik Botha been dead long enough for us to be honest about him? It was said after he died that he was garrulous, eccentric and warm-hearted. In fact, he was a man of irrepressible nastiness who belittled and humiliated those who had less power than he did.

In his memoir, High Noon in Southern Africa, the US diplomat Chester Crocker, who got to know Botha well as they negotiated the fate of Namibia, expressed his disgust at Botha’s behaviour. Following a long bilateral meeting in Cape Verde early on in Crocker’s relationship with him, “we watched in amazement as a member of the SA cabinet” ,a barely disguised reference to Botha, “willfully delayed an SAA jumbo jet and then tried to intimidate the enraged commander into silence”.

The encounter, Crocker remarked, “served as a warning of things to come. We wondered about the ‘policy process’ among grown men who took such evident delight in making spectacles of themselves in the presence of foreigners, strangers and their own countrymen from SAA.”

Crocker likened Botha to Gabon’s dictator, Omar Bongo, who once held a commercial flight on the ground for two hours to finish a conversation with Crocker. “These African leaders,” Crocker remarked, “black and white, represented a laboratory of Lord Acton’s dictum about absolute power.”

It was also said of Botha after he died that behind his bonhomie was a razor-sharp mind; he lulled his adversaries with his garrulousness as he went in for the kill. In fact, Botha was seldom on top of his brief. On a flight to Maputo in 1984, en route to bilateral talks that would seal the Nkomati Accord, the famous nonaggression pact between Mozambique and SA, Botha summonsed a senior aide, Jan Heunis, to sit next to him. In his memoir, Heunis recounts how Botha asked him, straight-faced and without shame, to explain the draft accord as he hadn’t read it.

It was also said when he died that Botha was a visionary, for he understood long before most of his peers that apartheid was morally indefensible. In fact, Botha was one of hundreds of people in the apartheid elite who were too cowardly and too comfortable to follow through on what they knew. He crossed swords with PW Botha only after PW had a stroke and was on his knees.

And when FW de Klerk pulled out of the government of national unity, causing Botha to lose the cabinet seat he occupied in Nelson Mandela’s government, he promptly joined the ANC in a cynical bid to keep his position. The one thing Botha really did know was the side on which his bread was buttered.

If there is anything for which we should remember Botha, it is for the consequences of his tactical blunders. In 1988, the British Anti-Apartheid Movement took the greatest risk in its history: it went deep into debt to make possible a concert at Wembley to celebrate Mandela’s 70th birthday. The BBC had agreed to be the anchor broadcaster, providing the satellite feed to broadcasters around the world. It was to be the most widely broadcast live music event in history.

In the prelude to the concert, Margaret Thatcher’s government began applying behind-the-scenes pressure on the BBC to withdraw from the event. And the pressure was working.

“It began to appear as if the BBC might pull out,” one of the concert organisers, Alan Brooks, recalled years later. “And if the BBC had pulled out, that was an end to satellite coverage ... One band and then another … would have pulled out, and we’d be left with a halfempty Wembley stadium and a bill running that high, and we [would have been] staring bankruptcy and the end of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the face ...”

At the last minute, Brooks continued, “Pik Botha blundered into the arena with a strong attack on the BBC for doing this concert, and from the moment that happened we knew we were safe, because there was no way that the BBC could back down under the onslaught of the SA regime.”

And so Botha saved the British Anti-Apartheid Movement from bankruptcy. And he facilitated the success of a global music event that made Mandela the most famous human being on the planet.

Now there’s a legacy to celebrate.