The Face of Apartheid, Frozen in Time

[MountainLaurel]

Here's hoping he's smoking turds in hell today.

Pieter W. Botha sputtered and bellowed, mad, sweating, his bald, waxen-looking head glistening in the glare of a South African courtroom.

"Die Groot Krokodil," Afrikaans for "the great crocodile," had been trapped by the laws of a country he never wished to see. He'd spent his entire life, like generations of his people before him, with his proverbial boot on the neck of South Africa's black majority. But that day in 1998, he faced a black judge, in a land ruled by a black president, Nelson Mandela. Botha, a man frozen in amber, still pining for the days of apartheid and white minority rule, was beside himself with rage.

With his death yesterday at the age of 90, the memory of that day comes flooding back. The former South African leader, among the hardest of the hard-liners, was being held accountable, even in some small way, for the apartheid era. Sure, I had to endure the droplets of spit that kept flying from Botha's mouth and landing on my notepad and hands as he ranted, but that was a petty inconvenience in a moment of such import.

A throng of reporters gathered before him. Though his charge was a minor one -- contempt of court for defying a subpoena from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission -- he became the first and only apartheid-era political leader ever to be prosecuted after apartheid's end.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/01/AR2006110100006.html

[Ellis Wyatt]

1. South Africa is a great country

They assume anyone there who doesn't have a South African accent is from England. There aren't any Americans there.

And I highly recommend going on safari in Kruger.

[MountainLaurel]

2. Will add it to my list of places to see

:hi: