The Rubicon not crossed: The secret stroke and ‘reformist’ PW Botha’s disastrous speech

The majority of the cases of gross human rights violations that came before the Truth Commission were perpetrated between 1985 and 1990. It was a period of heightened resistance by the UDF, Cosatu and the ANC – and also the time of a state of emergency, mass detentions without trial, and the lawlessness of death squads such as the South African Police unit at Vlakplaas and the SADF’s Civil Cooperation Bureau and Directorate of Covert Collection.

The National Party’s chief negotiator (and today ambassador in Washington), Roelf Meyer, told me in an interview in 2008: “My only regret is that we didn’t start the process in 1985, when we should have. It would have saved so many lives, and the negotiations would have been a different ball game.”

In fact, the negotiations process did almost start in 1985. PW Botha had started scrapping many apartheid laws in the early 1980s. He initiated contact with Nelson Mandela in jail, and he sanctioned people like academic Willie Esterhuyse and senior men from National Intelligence to meet with Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma in secret.

Niël Barnard, Botha’s closest confidant and head of the National Intelligence Service, told me in 2007 that “around the time of the Nkomati Accord” (with Mozambique) of March 1984, Botha was “starting to think along the lines of a negotiated settlement in South Africa”. He appointed Chris Heunis, the minister of constitutional development, to head a special cabinet committee to consider constitutional alternatives. These were then put to a cabinet meeting at the Old Observatory in Pretoria in early August 1985. Heunis proposed, among other things, that blacks be appointed to the cabinet and the President’s Council as a prelude to negotiations with the black majority on how they would gain full citizenship in a unitary state. It was radical stuff at the time.

Botha “did not blow a gasket, and we all thought this was going to be our new way forward”, a cabinet minister told me. If Botha had implemented these proposals, it would have meant “the end of apartheid and the old South Africa”, Pik Botha told his biographer, Theresa Papenfus. “And if we released Mandela, started dismantling apartheid and negotiating with black leaders – well, there’d be no going back either. We’d have to go ahead, for better or worse.”

FW de Klerk wrote later that the Old Observatory decisions “meant that several of the pillars on which grand apartheid had rested would be destroyed… Together these new guidelines meant nothing less than that the ideology of grand apartheid was something of the past. We believed these new announcements, provided they were properly presented and marketed, would draw the world’s attention and convince the international community that things were really changing in South Africa.”

This was the message PW Botha was supposed to deliver to South Africa and the world on 15 August 1985 at a National Party congress in Natal. Senior members of the departments of constitutional development and foreign affairs prepared the speech, and the foreign affairs ministry spread the word far and wide that “something big” was coming.

Pik Botha himself apparently added the words at the end of the speech: “We have crossed the Rubicon.” He and other reformists in the party were convinced they were on the brink of a negotiation phase that would bring about peace and democracy. Pik told whoever would listen that the speech was going to be “the biggest thing in South Africa since the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck”.

But a ruptured blood vessel in PW Botha’s brain seems to have played a major role in determining that Van Riebeeck’s arrival remained for the time being the more important event. Instead of crossing the Rubicon, Botha was defiant and belligerent when he gave his speech, his finger wagging aggressively on the television screens of an estimated 300 million people worldwide. He said he wasn’t going to lead white South Africans “on a road to abdication and suicide”. Mandela was in jail because he had planned a revolution, and he and his friends would only be released if they renounced all violence.

The Rubicon speech was a public relations disaster that put the apartheid state under immense pressure. South Africa was immediately hit with a new wave of severe sanctions, disinvestments and boycotts – even by Ronald Reagan’s America. The rand collapsed. “Our reputation was in tatters, and it was impossible to get money anywhere in the world,” the finance minister at the time, Barend du Plessis, told me. According to Pik Botha: “The speech caused events to gather speed and created eddies in the apartheid river that we later recognised as the first signs of the demise of the National Party government.”

So what had happened to the “reformist” PW?

A former chairman of the once powerful, secretive Afrikaner Broederbond, Professor Pieter de Lange, told me during an interview in 2008 that he used to meet Botha regularly on a one-on-one basis during the early 1980s. When he met him again in mid-1985, he knew “something had happened – I could see it clearly”. Botha also mentioned to him that he was planning to retire soon. “I then met with FW [de Klerk] and told him he should check the military hospital records to find out if PW had had a stroke. And so it was confirmed that it did happen. I had no doubt that PW was different after that stroke. It wasn’t the old PW I had met so many times. Perhaps it was just a small spot [kolletjie] that died, but something was dead in his brain. And then the old guy hit the brakes. We lost three, four years, more.”

Botha’s stroke was possibly the best-kept secret in the country at the time. It seems only the medical staff who treated him, and possibly his closest associate, Niël Barnard, knew about it. More than one source confirmed to me that “Dr Death”, the controversial cardiologist Wouter Basson, the head of the SADF’s chemical and biological warfare programme, was appointed to care for Botha after his initial treatment, to make sure the news of the stroke did not leak out.

Botha suffered another, more serious stroke in January 1989 and could not hide his illness that time. But he was in denial about it too. When his cabinet eventually forced him to attend a meeting where he was asked to resign, Botha apparently shouted that there was nothing wrong with him and said, according to one cabinet minister: “Show me all the pills in your pockets!”

Barend du Plessis told me in an interview some years ago that Botha “sometimes behaved like an absolute maniac” in the years after 1985. He recalled a sensitive meeting Botha had with a group of agricultural leaders when one farmer asked to be excused because he wanted to go to the toilet. Botha screamed at him: “You will sit in that chair. I don’t care if you pee in your pants. You will sit there and you will listen until I have said everything I wanted to say.” But, Du Plessis said, “I have also seen PW Botha cry.” It was during this time that Botha acquired the nickname “Groot Krokodil”.

One can only ponder how different our history would have been had the blood vessels in the Groot Krokodil’s brain remained intact and had he actually delivered the original Rubicon speech. DM