The death of PW Botha
The man who failed to cross his Rubicon, the architect of total onslaught and the leader of apartheid up until 1989, was buried on Wednesday. Curiously, PW Botha’s death has resulted in some surprising statements – including from President Thabo Mbeki – on how he contributed to the downfall of apartheid. Liepollo Lebohang Pheko gives her views.
The news arrived last week that the former president of Apartheid South Africa PW Botha had died, aged 90. Many people’s recollection of Mr Botha was of a mercurial man of iron will and a short fuse. For the younger generation he is the man who refused to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. However, for most of the African population recollections are more brutal, more sinister and altogether more harrowing.
The outpouring of grief has thus left me aghast at the rehabilitation of Botha into an anti-Apartheid icon. This, coming on the heels of the acres of column space dedicated to Adrian Vlok’s foot washing (Former Apartheid law and order minister Adrian Vlok washed the feet of Revered Frank Chikane as a show of remorse for his sins under apartheid), leaves hearts sore and emotions high.
One of the worst things about the reconstruction of Apartheid as a social construct rather than a colonial, imperial struggle like any other in Africa is that it places the perpetrators on par with the oppressed. In so doing it removes the culpability of the oppressor, thus revising a vicious and deliberate holocaust into an unfortunate misunderstanding which we all suffered and were equal victims of. This is completely false.
A profoundly disturbing feature of this dispensation is the indecent haste with which the African majority is expected, if not ordered, to forgive, forget and to move on. We are denied the right to grieve, to demand answers, to be angry, to be skeptical.
I am not a psychologist but I suspect that this fast tracked pseudo-healing is going to bear us bitter fruits. Anybody who has ever tried to live in denial is bound to trip up on the mountain of issues swept under the carpet. We deserve to be in the moment of our truth and face the reality of our pain, our anger, our loss and all our suffering.
Against this backdrop, moves to honour Botha are on a par with honouring any Nazi leader of the Third Reich. The Jewish holocaust has not been forgotten and even we who had no culpability in its architecture or doing are reminded of its significance by the victims. We deserve the same remembrance of self, of how we were brutalised, of the many children unborn because of Botha’s policies, of the bodies lying in unmarked graves buried on his watch, of fathers who never came home and of mothers who died of heartbreak. We deserve to recall the heroes slain in 1960, 1976 and all the years before and since then. We deserve to mourn and celebrate every drop of blood shed.
As the government made overtures to honour the dishonourable with a State funeral at our expense, yet another opportunity was missed to leave a priceless legacy of truth and self-knowledge to our children about the authentic heroes of the African liberation struggle.
As Botha is buried, I will spend time reflecting on the state of my country and all its contradictions. I will ponder on how a simple issue of freedom became so tied up in narrow class and white capitalist interests. I will think of new stories to tell my children about exile, identity and sacrifice, about what a truly African vision of this country looks like. None of my oppressors will be in that vision.
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