Apartheid Leader’s Museum Exhibit Fails to Exert Its Old Draw

At the corner of York and Courtenay streets at the center of this erstwhile timber town, museum guard Ben Rasi stands watch over a hand-carved ivory AK-47 rifle, hunting trophies of buffalo, wildebeest and kudu and a dazzling array of gold, silk and other collectibles from around the world.

The P. W. Botha Collection, housed in a two-story annex to the George Museum, is the former South African president’s grandiose tribute to himself. Paid for in the early 1990s by the white minority government and tailored to Pieter W. Botha’s every specification, the sanitized display presents the last strongman of racial separation as a courageous, devoted patriot largely misunderstood by his critics.

But as Botha faces a criminal charge in court here today for refusing to testify before a government commission about his apartheid-era security forces, changing perceptions of the presidential exhibit speak volumes about how far this country has slipped from the clutches of its racist past--and how out of step the defiant apartheid leader and his mostly Afrikaans-speaking followers are with the rest of South Africa.

“Most people of all colors walk in here and see that sign and turn right around,” said Rasi, pointing to a “P. W. Botha Collection” plaque overhead. “Then they usually ask where they can find the Nelson Mandela room.”

It is perhaps too early in the furious South African make-over to expect George, Botha’s home district during his almost four decades in a whites-only Parliament, to erect a tribute to Mandela, a black man he demonized and kept behind bars throughout his 11 years as prime minister and later president.

But there have been remarkable changes in George, and Botha’s prosecution today in a hometown court for defying the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is only the most sensational example. Not only will Botha’s judge be black, but the town’s mayor is black and so are about one-third of its 120,000 residents, many of whom weren’t even counted before 1995, when municipal borders did not extend to the main black suburb of Thembalethu.

“Botha is one of the old-timers here now,” said the Rev. Johan van der Merwe, pastor at George’s Dutch Reformed Church, the town’s largest congregation and an occasional place of worship for the former president. “The older folk really love him, but political views have shifted away from his kind of politics. If he were the George representative now, he would not enjoy the support he once had.”

Van der Merwe should know. He underwent an agonizing epiphany of his own several years ago, abandoning his pro-apartheid sermons to preach to all races an inclusive message that rejects most of his life’s teachings--and Botha’s political prescriptions. Once a Botha loyalist, Van der Merwe now calls on him to come clean with the truth commission, a government panel investigating apartheid-era abuses, but which, in Botha’s view, is an anti-Afrikaner tool of a hostile black government.

“I have come to see that some very evil things were done in the name of politics and a ‘just cause,’ ” Van der Merwe said. “Every now and then, with new disclosures about the past, the nightmare becomes even more terrible and terrifying for me.”

The beacon of new thinking in George has also shone behind the walls of the town’s most explicit link to Botha, albeit in more muted ways.

For almost three years, the George Museum has entrusted Rasi, an unemployed photo technician from Thembalethu, with guarding the collection of its most famous benefactor. Ironically, the Botha display speaks to a South Africa that the black security guard was never allowed to know; and during the bleakest years of racial separation, he was not even permitted to visit white museums.

Rasi performs his duties cheerfully and competently, even chatting up the former president when he checks in every month from his home 10 miles away in Wilderness. But twice a year, when the Thembalethu choir packs the museum hall for a concert, Rasi sees to it that the display cases are carefully concealed and the bronze Botha bust, usually fixed on a pedestal at the entrance, is stashed in a storeroom.

“We don’t want to see any of this if we don’t have to,” said Rasi, 34, the choir’s director. “He didn’t do anything for us black people.”

The historical imbalance of the exhibit is glaring, even to Anne Nortje, a divorced Afrikaans-speaking homemaker who has been giving tours of the collection since it opened in 1992. A talkative, amiable narrator who has escorted hundreds of children through the hall, Nortje stumbled this week as she approached a display case with the ivory AK-47. The rifle and a host of other ivory carvings were gifts to Botha from Jonas Savimbi, the UNITA rebel leader in Angola who was secretly supported by South African military forces in the 1970s and 1980s. Although Botha’s government ultimately justified the brutal intervention in the name of anti-communism, an important clandestine aim was to destabilize the former Portuguese colony to ensure it would not challenge Pretoria or its apartheid policies.

“It was our children who were fighting there, and [the government] didn’t even tell us,” said Nortje, her voice heavy with disbelief and shame as she located Angola on a display map. “The truth is now coming out.

“I didn’t even know the blacks in this country were oppressed,” she went on. “I know how that sounds, but it is true. It is a part of our history, and I can’t wipe it out. I am just sorry I was a part of it.”

Not everyone at the George Museum is as forthright as Rasi or as contrite as Nortje, but the growing discussion about what to do with the Botha exhibit reflects a broad consensus among the mostly Afrikaans-speaking staff that something has to give. Museum officials don’t hide that they would like to use at least some of the Botha annex for other exhibits. But they recognize that the presidential connection gives them exposure beyond this town’s size and historic significance.

Already a narrow storage room has been cleared of excess Botha collectibles and handed over to an environmental group that catalogs flora in the Western Cape province.

Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, Botha, 82, and in poor health, has already removed some of his favorite items from the museum and may give others to his children or offer them for sale, officials said. Under a 1990 agreement with the national government, Botha retains ownership and control of the collection for 12 more years.

It is for that reason, as well as a lack of money, officials say, that the exhibit has never been updated to reflect Botha’s contentious historic role. In short, they say, he simply won’t allow it.

But provincial authorities, who now have jurisdiction over the museum, have hired a George lawyer to negotiate a new contract with Botha. Because of budget problems, the province will probably hand over museum operations to a community foundation. Attorney Fanie Botes said the new agreement will be between Botha and the private Heritage Trust, which intends to balance the need to overhaul the exhibit with the desire to preserve it. “He is a part of history, and we cannot ignore that, bad or good,” Botes said.

The museum will be closed today because of large crowds--some unfriendly to the former president--expected in George for the opening of Botha’s criminal proceedings. Depending on the case’s outcome, some Botha admirers expect interest in him and the museum to grow, particularly among disaffected right-wing Afrikaners who share his contempt for the present government.

A group of 11 retired apartheid-era generals has already established a Botha defense fund, and should he be sent to jail--the contempt charge he faces carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison--some believe that he will emerge as a bigger-than-life Afrikaner folk hero.

“He has come out strong as an Afrikaner, saying, ‘I will not take this bashing,’ ” said retired Gen. Constand Viljoen, head of the army during much of Botha’s administration and later a political opponent. “Already this has brought Afrikaner groups together that were not previously talking. If this eventually causes a greater solidarity within the Afrikaner people, Mr. Botha will go down well in history.”

Helen Suzman, a retired lawmaker who was long the lone anti-apartheid voice in Parliament and one of Botha’s fiercest political enemies, agrees that Botha will probably be identified as an Afrikaner hero for “being the guy who gave the finger” to the truth commission. But, Suzman says, unlike a decade ago, South Africans need not fear “the irascible bully” or his right-wing entourage.

“This is one of those melodramatic countries where the guy is always getting shot on Sunday,” she said. “I normally can’t stand him, and he can’t stand me, but the old boy is acting completely in character. I have to admit to a first glimmer of liking for this man.”

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BACKGROUND

Pieter W. Botha served as prime minister and later as president of South Africa from 1978 to 1989, when he resigned after suffering a stroke. The last of the ironfisted leaders of the apartheid system of racial separation, he was succeeded by Frederik W. de Klerk, who helped set in motion apartheid’s end. Botha is believed to have answers to questions about the former white regime’s deadly security forces; former Cabinet officials have implicated him in crimes against anti-apartheid activists. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, created to investigate such crimes, subpoenaed Botha on three occasions, but he has refused to testify. Today he is expected to appear in criminal court on a contempt charge.