P. W. Botha, the South African leader who struggled vainly to preserve apartheid rule in a tide of domestic racial violence and global condemnation, died yesterday at his home in South Africa. He was 90. His death was reported by The South African Press Association in Cape Town, quoting the security staff at Mr. Botha’s home on the southern Cape coast.
Mr. Botha was a combative, irascible son of a well-to-do Afrikaner farm family who dropped out of college to work for the right-wing National Party, then rose through the ranks of South Africa’s political establishment, gaining a reputation as the “Old Crocodile” for his ability to charm, outwit and crush his opponents.
In 1978, Mr. Botha became prime minister and proceeded to engineer the creation of a new Constitution, one that held out the promise of limited reform of apartheid policies. When the Constitution came into effect in 1984, Mr. Botha became president. “We must adapt or die,” Mr. Botha told his constituents after becoming prime minister.
As opposition to apartheid spread, Mr. Botha’s room to maneuver shrank. “He was caught in a bind between wanting to show the international community that he was not inflexible, and not wishing to appear weak within his own country,” the journalist Allister Sparks wrote in his 1995 account of the end of apartheid, “Tomorrow Is Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa’s Road to Change.”
Yet for a while Mr. Botha’s methods seemed to belie Alexis de Toqueville’s dictum that “the most perilous moment for bad government is when it seeks to mend its ways.” Mr. Botha was re-elected in 1987. Two years later, as opposition to his intransigent style grew within his own party, the president suffered a stroke and resigned. He was succeeded by F. W. de Klerk, who legalized opposition parties, freed Mr. Mandela and other political prisoners, and made the agreements that eventually brought apartheid down.
Source: New York Times
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