PW Botha — An Apartheid Ghoul

There is a little shop of apartheid horror with a gothic bookshelf, forever emblazoned with the collected works of Pieter Willem Botha. For so many victims of a racist conflict that claimed the lives of countless youths, both black and white, PW Botha represented the ideology of a cruel and inhumane system.

It is pointless trying to rehabilitate the paragon, although a mere mortal, a post-mortem will show that he was heartless, but had been kept alive with science and logic — the strange wonders provided by a daily dose of opiates, heroin and methamphetamine, dispensed by the likes of Dr Death and the Truth Commission. Wouter Basson or someone resembling him, is said to have eaten PW’s liver, before rigor mortis set in, and to have proclaimed that it was infused with the intoxicating blood of the poverty stricken masses.

If Madame Tussard were alive, she would no doubt put up a wax-work effigy of the eternal apartheid ghost, or perhaps a brown-shirted werewolf sans silver bullet, a National Party vampire without a stake through a deep chest cavity, next to the followers of Hitler and Stalin. Yet compared to these two megalomaniac fascists, PW was lame and impotent. He is also rumoured to have suffered from a strange malady associated with intermittent bouts of flatulance and priapism a permanent erection of the penis whenever ‘Die Stem’ was played.

Although a Nazi sympathizer, PW failed in his master-plan to create a nation of Bantustans cooking up separate development within the context of a bizarre ‘tricameral’ parliament that excluded Africans, and merely implicated other ethnic groups in the aegis, administration and final control, of the apartheid system.

PW Botha’s supreme gift then, to all of us, was the formalization of an absurd ‘rule by proxy’ created by the drunkard, John Vorster. He is also credited with the ‘total onslaught’ strategy against communists, Jews, anarchists, gypsies and homosexuals. If members of Botha’s cabinet, were not brainwashed power addicts and hypnotized control freaks, then Botha must have picked up a herion habit as a young boy, in the SANDF.

The legend of the National Party infatuation with a gangly boy from the Paul Roux district in the Free State, ignores his membership of the Ossewabrandwag, a group of foul-smelling brown-shirts, who hated Blacks, and of course, Catholics. PW’s corpse is also said to have the aroma of a camphorated whore from Babylon, in the Free State.

Needless to say, PW the Man, was first elected to South Africa’s national parliament from the town of George in the Southern Cape, as a member of the National Party in 1948. When BJ Vorster resigned in 1978, following alchohol poisoning and his inability to utter anything coherent as prime minister, Botha was elected as his successor by parliament. Botha’s reign steadily descended into a profound form of national psychosis, after successive ‘States of Emergency’ in which a military putsch created by the securacrats Magnus Malan, and Adrian Vlok, installed an effective ‘Junta’ following the Information Scandal.

During the civil war that insued, PW was likened to a Roman emperor, a Nero fiddling with his penis while the townships burnt, until he eventually went stark raving mad, and had a stroke after attacking his own cabinet for selling out to the ‘communists’ and cavorting with prostitutes.

PW will be remembered for his political complexion, with the rubbery consistency of a piece of marbled ham, and sickly sweet complacency of mutton fat. His putrid finger that never crossed the Rubicon, will no doubt rot away in a grave, or be incinerated into dust along, with a classification card marking him as a ‘white’ person, a scion of the human race, whose apoplexy about ‘racial purity’, ‘immorality’ and ‘moral prudery’ continue to entertain millions of South African’s who now flock to the tomb of one of the last great ghouls of modern history.