P.W. Botha, the unapologetic leader of apartheid-era South Africa who led his country into deepening racial crisis as head of state from 1978 to 1989, died Tuesday at his home in Wilderness, a southern coastal town. He was 90.
No cause of death was reported.
"Peevee" Botha was the bald, bespectacled mandarin of the ultra-right Nationalist Party. His trademark was a finger-wagging belligerence that earned him the nickname "Groot Krokodil," or great crocodile, in Afrikaans, the Dutch language that was his native tongue.
He held a variety of portfolios before becoming defense minister in 1966. During the next decade, he used his position to advocate a strong nationalist image that resisted outside interference with his country's apartheid system of racial segregation.
He engineered massive increases in the military budget to minimize the effects of the international arms embargo against the apartheid government. He also saw the militarization of his country as a way to safeguard South Africa from foreign invasion and internal subversion. To international derision, he undertook incursions into Angola and South West Africa (later Namibia) to end leftist guerrilla uprisings and the "forces of chaos, communism and socialism."
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As prime minister and then state president, he veered wildly between upholding and reforming apartheid, which his party initiated after coming to power in 1948.
Years after he left office and a new, black-led leadership emerged, Botha remained defiant during investigations into his regime's hard-line racial policies that led to killings, tortures and disappearances. On a technicality, he successfully evaded testifying before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, formed to probe apartheid-era crimes.
"I did not authorize murders," he said to reporters. "I will not ask forgiveness for fighting the Marxist revolutionary onslaught."
Elected prime minister in 1978, he advocated a program of "adapt or die" that surprised many white South Africans for its reformist ring. This approach was partly because of the moderating influences of a strong political challenger during the election. However, to many blacks, Botha's efforts appeared cosmetic, and many in his white base charged him with surrendering needlessly.
Right-wing elements within his party abandoned him in 1982 to form another political party. Soon after, Botha helped craft a new national constitution that bestowed greater authority to himself by changing his title to the state president. During the next few years, he repealed some restrictive laws, including the ban on interracial marriage and the passport system that prevented blacks from living freely away from their designated townships.
As rioting continued, he declared a state of emergency in 1986, curbing press freedoms and making arrests of black political leaders.
After a stroke in 1989, Botha resisted calls within his own party to resign. "I am not a sulking old man," he said. In a matter of months, he arranged a meeting at his official Cape Town home with Nelson Mandela, a leader with the banned African National Congress who was serving a long prison sentence.
Mandela later wrote in a memoir that Botha broke all expectations of the "old-fashioned, stiff-necked, stubborn Afrikaner who did not so much discuss matters with black leaders as dictate to them." He said the president was amicable and smiling and "completely disarmed me," though he declined to agree to the unconditional release of Mandela and other political prisoners.
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Within months, Botha resigned from the presidency and his party. Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and worked with Botha's successor, F.W. de Klerk, to hold fair elections. In 1994, Mandela became the first black president of South Africa.
