P. W. Botha was the almost perfect representative of the Afrikaner mentality. Born in 1916 into a ‘bitter-ender’ anti-British Boer family, he liked to boast in public that Afrikaners ‘had nearly brought the British Empire to its knees’.9 He had served as defence minister between 1966 and 1978, when he was known as ‘Piet Skiet’ (Piet the Shoot). He was extremely prickly at any criticism emanating from Britain. But his dour and charmless demeanour towards the outside world did him no harm in Afrikaner politics. He was sometimes called ‘the Great Crocodile’ because of his physical appearance and his political toughness. When he succeeded John Vorster as prime minister in 1978, however, he was not so stupid as to oppose all change. The following year, he made a famous speech, telling Afrikaners to ‘adapt or die’, eventually provoking a new Conservative Party to break away and oppose his reforms. It was with this unpromising, but not completely obdurate man that Mrs Thatcher decided to try to deal.
In November 1983, white voters endorsed in a referendum the new Constitution which Botha had offered them. It got rid of the all-white voting system, but gave votes only to Indians and so-called ‘Cape Coloureds’* who helped make up a tri-cameral Parliament. Blacks, still voteless, were given more autonomy in the more or less bogus ‘homelands’ which the South African government had earlier established to balkanize black power. A state president was invented to take charge of a multi-racial but white-dominated President’s Council. This role Botha designed for himself.
Although most international and internal black reaction to the changes was hostile, the British government gave them a cautious welcome. That month, at the Commonwealth Conference in New Delhi, signs appeared of disagreements which would soon become much more severe.† To the irritation of Commonwealth colleagues, Mrs Thatcher maintained her support for President Reagan’s policy of ‘linkage’ between Cuban withdrawal from southern Africa and the independence of Namibia. But in March 1984, after South Africa and Mozambique had signed the Nkomati Accord, which agreed better security co-operation between the two nations, Mrs Thatcher supported Botha’s consequent freezing out of RENAMO, the anti-Communist guerrilla movement in Mozambique, even though this annoyed some of her friends in the Reagan administration.‡ She felt strong enough to invite Botha on a ‘working visit’ to Britain to meet her.
Despite protests, most notably from Bishop Desmond Tutu,* who asked, extravagantly, ‘Would you have collaborated with Hitler when he perpetrated the holocaust?’,10 the meeting went ahead.† P. W. Botha came to Chequers on 2 June.‡ He arrived in a helicopter, but Mrs Thatcher did not meet him as he landed because of the danger that the helicopter’s blades would blow her hair all over the place.11§ In a plenary session, Mrs Thatcher set out her line to him: ‘Many people in Britain had relatives in South Africa. So that was a natural reservoir of goodwill. But our political attitude was affected by one enormous problem: we felt strongly that people’s rights should not be determined by the colour of their skin.’12 According to the South African Foreign Minister, Pik Botha, who was present, Mrs Thatcher was the ‘chairperson who ruled the roost’.13
Before this, Mrs Thatcher held a tête-à-tête meeting with P. W. Botha, entirely alone. Mrs Thatcher’s speaking notes for the meeting are a clue to her priorities. Beside the ‘General’ heading, Mrs Thatcher scribbled the words ‘Importance we attach to visit’. This was followed by:
Good to break isolation
Potential goodwill in West – but cannot be manifested because of internal situation
Our foreign policy dependent on internal liberalisation.14
Beside the last point Mrs Thatcher had written the words ‘Adapt or Die’, the phrase used by Botha himself in 1979. Botha, she reported to her private secretary, John Coles, immediately afterwards, had defended his constitutional changes and introduced a rag-bag of topics, including dropping hints (not taken up) that he wanted to buy new surveillance aircraft from Britain* and trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade Mrs Thatcher to close the ANC office in London.† For her part, Mrs Thatcher maintained the Gleneagles Agreement of 1977 which prevented sporting contacts. She opposed the forced removals of blacks, bringing Botha up sharply with a personal example. She recalled that when she had visited South Africa as education secretary, she ‘had met a person in District 6 of Cape Town who had told her that he was obliged to move for the second time because land was being cleared for whites. Was Mr Botha saying that the object of removals was not to make way for whites?’15 She also asked Botha what happened to people who refused to be moved. ‘We have ways of persuading them,’ he replied. She found this remark ‘offensive to her concept of individual liberty’.16
Towards the end of the meeting, Mrs Thatcher ‘took the opportunity to raise the case of Nelson Mandela. Mr Botha said that he noted the Prime Minister’s remarks, but that he was not able to interfere in the judicial process.’‡ This passage of arms – the seeking of an imprisoned dissident’s release by Mrs Thatcher and the attempted fob-off – mirrored almost exactly what happened whenever Mrs Thatcher pressed Soviet leaders for the release of leading prisoners of conscience such as Andrei Sakharov. In both cases, the tactic was to raise the issue, against the will of the interlocutor, without letting it prevent other negotiations or discussions. By using the phrase ‘raise the case’ rather than ‘demand the release’, Britain could avoid provoking a direct refusal. Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned since 1963, but Mrs Thatcher seems to have been the first British prime minister to request the South African government to release him.
The meeting was no breakthrough. Sensing Botha’s instinctive anti-Britishness (as she did with some other leaders, such as Mugabe and the Israeli leader Menachem Begin), Mrs Thatcher ‘did not particularly warm’ to him.17 In the opinion of Charles Powell, who took over the subject of South Africa as part of his brief when he replaced John Coles shortly after the Chequers summit, Mrs Thatcher ‘mentally wrote Botha off after Chequers’.18 This was not the case: the meeting did establish a basis of dialogue. Botha and Mrs Thatcher began to exchange occasional letters which, though quite often bursting into recrimination, did show mutual respect and an interest in each other’s positions. At least in the early stages, Mrs Thatcher had some hopes of Botha personally. In any case, it was ‘important to be seen to be trying’:19 she felt that reform would only come from within South Africa itself, and that, when it did, the South African government would see in her a trustworthy external interlocutor who could help it move forward. Her greatest fear was that the combination of white oppression and black violence would set the country aflame.
The following year, 1985, was probably the one in which her fear seemed most likely to be realized. International attention on South Africa had grown, symbolized by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Desmond Tutu in November 1984. In January 1985, announcing further reforms, Botha said publicly for the first time that he would release Mandela if he ‘unconditionally rejected violence as a political instrument’. Mandela refused the offer, as he was bound to do since it did not extend to his ANC comrades, but the precedent of an offer being made at all was notable. Discussing it with Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Mrs Thatcher wrote that it was impossible to overlook ‘the difficulty which his [Mandela’s] refusal to renounce violence, however understandable in the South African context, presents President Botha’.20 How could he retain his white constituency if he were to release someone actively committed to an armed struggle against its rule? In March, on the anniversary of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, the black township of Langa played host to a funeral procession for fifteen black activists killed by police the previous week. In the ensuing disturbances, police shot and killed at least another nineteen people. Black activists retaliated with a new weapon – ‘necklacing’ – in which a petrol-filled tyre was put round the victim’s neck and set alight. Mrs Thatcher, who sometimes fastened on a particularly extreme form of behaviour with strong personal horror, as with the IRA’s ‘dirty protest’ (see Volume I, p. 597) in the Maze Prison, wa
s deeply shocked.21*
But when, in June, South African forces raided suspected ANC bases in Botswana, Mrs Thatcher was furious. She wrote to Botha warning him that, if such a thing were to happen again, Britain would have to ‘take specific steps to mark her repudiation of it’.22 When Botha wrote back that she should understand his predicament, since she had always strongly condemned the IRA, her reply was sharp:
You mention the IRA. There have, as you know, been a continuing series of terrorist incidents in Northern Ireland in which some 2000 soldiers, policemen, prison warders and ordinary citizens have lost their lives. What would the international community think if Britain retaliated by launching attacks across the border into the Irish Republic, where many of the terrorists are?23
Britain, she reminded him, ‘stood almost alone in the international community … attempting to resist pressure for economic measures against South Africa’. She was always clear that the IRA comparison did not work: Irish republicans could vote in democratic elections, supporters of the ANC could not. A few days later, Botha imposed a state of emergency, the first since Sharpeville.
The world reacted. France imposed a unilateral freeze on new investment in South Africa, and called for a UN Security Council resolution demanding voluntary sanctions. In the United States, the moderate line of the Reagan administration was assailed, with the White House coming under increasing pressure from Congress. Most devastating was the decision of big American banks, led by Chase Manhattan, to stop rolling over loans to South African companies and freeze all unused lines of credit. There was a run on the rand and, in August alone, $400 million – about a tenth of the banks’ loans – was withdrawn from South Africa. The situation was made more desperate by a big speech by P. W. Botha in the same month. It was hinted in advance that this might include a serious offer to Nelson Mandela and was billed by Pik Botha as a signal that the President would now lead white South Africa ‘across the Rubicon’ to negotiation. When it actually came, however, P. W. Botha backed off, probably because of warnings from the military. He told his supporters that he would not lead them ‘on a road to abdication and suicide’.*
Those unfriendly to Mrs Thatcher laid blame at her door: ‘Mr Botha wants to bludgeon the blacks into submission. He knows he will be supported by Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan and Chancellor Kohl.† They have made it quite clear that blacks in their view are expendable,’ wrote Desmond Tutu.24 Mrs Thatcher had had precious little benefit from her stand against sanctions so far, and plenty of obloquy. As she had implied when she complained to Botha about his attack on Botswana, she was isolated. Now the Commonwealth decided to make her feel it.
Mrs Thatcher was never instinctively enthusiastic about international institutions, although some, such as NATO, she regarded as essential. She resented their loquacity and what she saw as their hypocritical self-righteousness. She also regarded many of them as conspiracies against Western interests, keen to impose limits on her country’s power. The Commonwealth was a particularly awkward case in point. It was, of course, the British Commonwealth in origin, though no longer in name. In principle, Mrs Thatcher liked the idea of a global family of ‘the English-speaking peoples’ – a phrase of Winston Churchill’s which she loved to borrow. She was instinctively sympathetic to the Old Commonwealth of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and to new Commonwealth countries which took democracy seriously, most notably India. In practice, however, she was annoyed that the Commonwealth refused to look at the tyrannical practices of some of its own members, and she felt that it liked to forge a too easy unity over South Africa, designed to put Britain in the dock. She was particularly incensed that Commonwealth countries which had little or no trade with South Africa tried to lay down the law on economic sanctions, and was scornful of those countries – such as Canada and the Frontline States‡ – which carried on trade while pretending not to.* The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings (CHOGMs) were, she thought, inordinately long, pointless and ill organized. They often took place in hot holiday places, where pictures of leaders having fun at taxpayers’ expense played badly at home. She felt that the leaders of poor countries spent far too much money on these jamborees. Mrs Thatcher was not blind to the cost to Britain. As Malcolm Rifkind, then the Foreign Office minister on the subject, recalled, there was a feeling that ‘we provide a lot of funding for the Commonwealth, a bit like America and the United Nations, and all we are getting is a lot of stick in return. Occasionally she would have thought, why are we part of this organization?’25†
The CHOGM at Nassau, in the Bahamas, in October 1985, toxically combined all the things she disliked with the subject of South African sanctions. As was often the case before summits, Mrs Thatcher conducted trench warfare with her own officials to keep down the numbers of the British delegation, even trying (though failing) to exclude the Cabinet Secretary, Robert Armstrong (‘The Prime Minister said she was tired of arguing about the subject’).26 She refused daily hair appointments as being too extravagant,27 though Caroline Ryder, her diary secretary, slipped them back into the programme without permission because she thought they would be needed in the Bahamian heat. She also refused Lord King’s offer of the use of Concorde to fly in the British delegation. She feared this would upstage the Queen who, as usual, was attending as head of the Commonwealth. ‘Stick to VC10,’ she scribbled.28 As the conference approached, she became uneasily aware of the Sovereign’s strong interest in getting Commonwealth agreement over South Africa. Charles Powell told her that the outcome on South Africa ‘appears to be of great concern to the Palace’,29 and that the Queen would like to arrange an audience on 17 October, the day before the conference began, ‘in the hope that she may be able to use what you tell her with other Commonwealth leaders’.30‡
Mrs Thatcher was as restrictive in her attitude to the content of the conference as she was to the arrangements. In her speech at the opening session, she tried to move the focus away from South Africa. As Charles Powell put it, ‘Our purpose is to try to get South Africa a bit into scale by “losing” it in the context of wider problems such as East/West, arms control etc.’31 She also opposed the idea of a Commonwealth contact group for South Africa and, of course, resisted economic sanctions: ‘she had heard it all before,’ she told the Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney on the first evening at Lyford Cay when he argued for new measures. Sanctions ‘would only damage industry which was in the lead in breaking down apartheid’.32 Mulroney, who wrote in his memoirs that ‘the Queen personally asked me to work with other leaders to prevent a major split within the group’ (that is, between Mrs Thatcher and all the rest),33 tried to win Mrs Thatcher over by telling her how a British initiative over South Africa would make Commonwealth members ‘all stand in line and salute’.34 Mrs Thatcher was not tempted, believing, on the contrary, that the Commonwealth liked to treat Britain as a target, not a guiding star. The Labor Prime Minister of Australia, Bob Hawke,* tried a similar line to Mulroney’s, saying that he did not want to embarrass the United Kingdom, and urging her to support the idea of a Commonwealth mission of eminent persons to South Africa. She disagreed, saying that the ‘normal diplomatic channels’ were better than special groups, as she had found when dealing with China over Hong Kong: ‘The South African regime would never negotiate with a pistol to its head.’35 She also thought it was ‘unrealistic’, in South Africa, to envisage ‘one man, one vote in a unitary state’: better to look to federal solutions to replace apartheid.36
In her separate discussions in the same two days with Kenneth Kaunda and with Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, she was equally disinclined to accept the proposition that there had to be a revolution to end apartheid. To Kaunda, who ‘sobbed into his big white handkerchief’37 about the possible break-up of the Commonwealth if there were no agreement at Nassau, she emphasized the need to give dignity to the black population and preserve a strong economy at the same time. She reminded Mugabe that his own Patriotic Front in Rhodesia had been made to give up violence. So
me ANC leaders were heading the other way, she said – she wanted to support the moderates. ‘History showed’, Mugabe retorted, ‘that the moderates were always doomed.’38 She hotly replied that support for terrorism meant supporting the people who had murdered Mrs Gandhi the previous year. Mrs Thatcher insisted that she wanted to be ‘a builder not a destroyer’. Accordingly, she emphasized to Mugabe, he must be in no doubt that she would not go along with economic sanctions. She said the same to the BBC. She recalled that in Rhodesia economic sanctions ‘had not worked – they never do … I am not willing to start on that road.’39 No one could accuse her of not being clear.
Commonwealth leaders did, however, accuse her of stirring things up. As the leaders gathered for their ‘retreat’ to settle key business in Lyford Cay that Friday, her statement against sanctions, Charles Powell reported, was ‘clearly taken as a provocation by the Africans and others’.40 The following day, an informal drafting committee of Mugabe, Mulroney, Kaunda, Hawke and Rajiv Gandhi* sketched out a proposed agreement, which they showed her. For two hours, Mrs Thatcher explained to them why it was unacceptable. In Powell’s view, ‘Their approach at this stage bordered on the naïve: an expectation that the Prime Minister would join the majority out of goodwill for the Commonwealth.’41 Things went downhill after that, with a three-hour, wider meeting which was, ‘at times, acrimonious, particularly exchanges between the Prime Minister and Mr Hawke’.† While this was going on, Brian Mulroney – always keen to exercise his considerable personal charm on Mrs Thatcher – passed her a handwritten note which said, ‘I have concluded that this meeting is the ultimate test of the patience of any reasonable person of a conservative persuasion.’42 If he was right, she failed his test pretty badly. Overnight, the British went off to prepare their own text. Sonny Ramphal was ‘dejected … and spoke of a damaging and perhaps irreparable split in the Commonwealth’.43
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