‘Great Crocodile’ Ends 50-Year Public Career : Botha Ruled Ruthlessly, With Skill

President Pieter W. Botha, South Africa’s first white leader to begin dismantling apartheid, was a contentious and hot-tempered, ruthless and skillful politician who, over 50 years in public life, assumed a larger-than-life stature.

“He may love children and dogs for all I know, but I have only encountered him as an aggressive, hostile politician,” said Helen Suzman, the liberal white politician. As one of Botha’s contemporaries, she often found herself at the wrong end of Botha’s finger-wagging diatribes.

With his resignation Monday, the 73-year-old man they called the “Great Crocodile,” for his fearsome temper and his bite, ended an era that saw the National Party take its first small steps toward reforming apartheid, the system of racial separation that the party instituted.

‘Not Given to Philosophy’

“He has a very great tenacity of purpose, a very great willpower,” Zach de Beer, co-leader of the liberal Democratic Party, said a few months ago. “But he’s also an irascible man, not given to philosophy.”

Botha’s 11 years in power marked a rocky time for South Africa and its white minority-led government. More than 20,000 people were detained without trial under his rule, press freedom was significantly curbed, dozens of anti-apartheid organizations were severely restricted and he presided over the longest and most severe state of emergency in the country’s history.

The tricameral Parliament that Botha introduced in 1984, giving Indians and mixed-race Coloreds--but not blacks--representation in national affairs, was rejected by most anti-apartheid leaders. It touched off two years of violent unrest, in which about 2,000 people died, and brought on a wave of economic and cultural sanctions that severely hurt his country.

‘Adapt or Die’

However, in campaigning for his new constitutional plan, he persistently challenged the white electorate to change its way of thinking. At one point, he told National Party supporters to “adapt or die” and criticized one party delegate for complaining about having to stand in line with blacks at the post office.

Botha led his party slowly to the left, embarking on what he called an incremental reform process and triggering a flight of whites to the right-wing Conservative Party. That party grew to supplant the liberal Progressive Federal Party as his government’s official opposition in Parliament.

Under his tenure, the hated pass laws that restricted the movement of blacks were tossed out along with bans on mixed marriages, sex across the color line and social segregation. He also opened the way for increased black participation in the economy, which created a black middle class that has today become a formidable force for change.

Under his rule, the face of apartheid began to soften, with movie theaters, buses, trains and other facilities beginning to be opened to all races in major urban areas.

Botha was the first South African president to visit Soweto, the sprawling black township outside Johannesburg, and thousands of blacks turned out there, and in other townships he visited, to see him.

Committed to Segregation

“I think we can’t say he did not do anything,” one senior black activist said not long ago. “He did quite a lot. During his era, the things that he did were considered revolutionary.”

But Botha remained committed to segregation of housing, schools and hospitals despite a growing housing crisis for blacks and glaring disparities in spending on education and health care for blacks and whites.

Anti-apartheid leaders criticized his brand of reform as superficial. He was unable to lure any legitimate black leaders with his various constitutional “power-sharing” schemes because he and his party steadfastly continued to oppose a one-man, one-vote system.

Botha’s unpredictability was legend. In August, 1985, with the world proposing sanctions against South Africa, many expected Botha to launch a sweeping program of apartheid reform. Instead, he delivered one of the most defiant speeches of his political career, criticizing “our leftist critics abroad” and “greedy world powers who are entertaining the idle hope of eventually pouncing upon the riches of our country.”

The next day saw sharp declines in the values of the South African rand and gold, one of the country’s primary exports. Many political analysts believe it was then that Botha’s attempts at reform began to stall.

‘A Spoiled Brat’

Pieter Willem Botha was born in 1916 on a farm in the Orange Free State. Connie Mulder, one of Botha’s later opponents in National Party politics, remembered the young Botha as “a spoiled brat” who rode to school every day on a Shetland pony and, one day, wordlessly rode his horse through the house of a schoolmate.

He later left law school to enter politics, winning his seat in Parliament with the National Party takeover in 1948 and quickly earning a reputation as a rough politician. He worked as a National Party organizer and became widely known for his skill--and for successfully breaking up opposition party meetings.

Botha came to power in 1978 when Prime Minister B. J. Vorster resigned in disgrace after the disclosure that one of his departments had misused millions of dollars for political purposes. In the party race for prime minister, Botha defeated Roelof F. (Pik) Botha--now the foreign minister--Connie Mulder and Frederik W. de Klerk, the man who replaces the once-powerful state president today.

Made Few Friends

Botha did not make many friends in his years at the helm of this country, even among his own party faithful, and he often humiliated Cabinet ministers in front of their colleagues.

His associates have said he is a regular churchgoer and a devoted family man. He and his wife, Elize, have five children.

But when his party turned on him earlier this year in search of a younger leader, and the party leaders emerged from under his thumb, he found few friends in politics willing to stand up for him.

“He has a gift for making enemies as other men have a gift for friendship,” Ken Owen, editor of Business Day, once wrote.