Litnet

Bill Nasson and PW Botha

The British monthly periodical, The Oldie, has a delicious column called “I once met”. To provide its material, the magazine encourages its aged readers to put down their walking sticks, stop chewing their false teeth, and submit memories of any personal experiences of chance meetings with famous or notorious people. Over a number of years, readers have been treated to a series of vivid vignettes, such as someone’s recollections of chatting to a young Adolf Hitler on a bus; of serving food in a restaurant to Brian Epstein, the manager of the rock band The Rolling Stones; and of stopping to assist an injured woman hiker, who turned out to be the crime novelist, Agatha Christie.

This is how I once met PW Botha. An odd episode, it was in the Cape Town suburb of Plumstead in 1971, or about halfway during his long term as South Africa’s scowling minister of defence. Following my recent matriculation from high school, I had failed in my application for a government permit which would have permitted me to pursue studies at the University of Cape Town, rather than at the apartheid institution designated for students of my pedigree, the dusty University College of the Western Cape.

Gritting my teeth, I turned to post-school correspondence study through the University of London’s Overseas Examination Board, and, for a time, found local warehouse work at the Plumstead factory of the international British company, Plessey. Its Cape Town plant supplied electronics, telecommunications and, significantly, defence equipment. This last field provided the circumstances in which Die Groot Krokodil took to the waters of Plumstead, in a manner of speaking.

Plessey’s ostentatiously blue-chip British management went to extraordinary lengths in its South African operation, to render unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s. In other words, it virtually overdid apartheid. Plessey Plumstead was a microcosm of some apartheid utopia, a full-dress version of petty separateness, overlooked by the portraits of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II which adorned its office walls. Not only did the factory have separate front entrances for its “European” and “non-European” assembly workers, but they even clocked in and clocked out at different times – 20 minutes apart. The hooters which sounded for segregated tea breaks and lunch breaks – also taken at different times – had distinctively different tones. The envelopes containing your weekly earnings were either pale blue or pale yellow, depending on who you were. A zealous Nationalist cabinet minister might have been impressed, perhaps even touched, by this meticulous display of adopted South African patriotism. It was Plessey’s icing on the cake of its various strategic contracts with Pretoria which were helping to sweeten its balance sheets.

Then, one day, Plessey paid tribute to an obvious cabinet member, PW Botha. With the resumption in 1970 of limited British arms sales to the Republic by Edward Heath’s conservative government, in 1971 the company’s Plumstead works was assembling munitions components for the navy. Our goods despatch area received a surprise visit from one of the factory managers, upon which he informed us that we needed to look our best on the following day, as Minister Botha would be touring the plant as a guest of the company. We workers deferred to the news of this honour as a matter of course. After the manager had left, someone said that it would be fun to see whether “Worslippe” Botha would be allowed through the “European” entrance on Main Road. It was a joke shared by everyone. At my school, in the later 1960s, he had often been referred to disparagingly as “Worslippe” or “Amandelroom”, with his ancestry considered to be a sticky business. As mockery, it was unpleasant as well as irreverent, but at the time it was one of the more amusing ironies of those grim apartheid years.

Meeting PW Botha in the flesh was, however, an unsmiling occasion. After having cleared away damaged boxes and polished packing tables, we lined up for the minister’s party. Wearing his trademark pork-pie hat, and accompanied by a few officials and Plessey directors, the minister of defence walked in, carrying about him a peculiar air of vagueness or distraction. Perhaps he was bored. When we were pointed out as the men of Goods Despatch, Botha walked right up to us and stopped, pursed his (or those) lips and gave us a stern look. There was a strangely expectant and dry silence. Then he turned away and walked out briskly, leaving his small entourage to catch up.

Politics aside, it was a breathtakingly rude occasion. I was left wondering whether we had been expected to bow or to curtsy. But PW Botha wasn’t the Queen. For that matter, he hadn’t asked each of us what we did, which is what the Queen usually does.

There is a later, fairly bizarre twist to this little story before it ends. Almost three decades later, I was invited to the “1998 International Conference on the British Commonwealth and the Allied War Effort, 1939-45”, at St Antony’s College, Oxford. The subject I was given was the wartime contribution of Jan Smuts, the South African field marshal who was not short of practice in bowing before a British monarch. At the drinks party which concluded the conference, one of its more elderly participants came up to me and introduced himself. A small man clutching a big drink, he was, I discovered, Lieutenant General Stanley Menezes, a veteran of the Indian Army, who had fought against the Japanese in Burma in the Second World War. Born in the early 1920s, he was an Indian Roman Catholic who, unlike the Hindu troops with him, had not minded having to eat their donkey transport animals to avoid starvation. General Menezes informed me that, as he’d noted that I was from South Africa, he wanted to discuss one or two of my country’s leaders.

There was, most obviously, Jan Smuts. Had he been a vegetarian, he wondered. Menezes had dug up the fact that Smuts and Gandhi had once both attended a meeting of the London Vegetarian Society. Once early enemies, could they not later have become friends through a shared taste for beans and lentils? I suggested gently that, as evidence, it looked like a rather long shot. Stanley Menezes’s other great interest was in a more recently prominent political figure.

“Do you know very much about your country’s ex-president, PW Botha?” Sensing that he was trying to wind me up, I shrugged. “No,” the general insisted, “I’ve got interesting information about him; you see, I’ve been researching your leader Mr Botha for quite a few years.” Bored by retirement at the United Service Institute in Delhi, General Menezes had taken up genealogical study of some Bengal families. That, he exclaimed triumphantly, had led him to the seventeenth-century Dutch Bengal of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, to its trade routes, to its slavery, and to the early Cape Colony. He had PW Botha’s original ancestry all mapped out, and would show it to any interested visitors to Delhi. “Don’t laugh,” said Stanley Menezes, “but I’ve discovered that your president is actually from Bengal. He’s an Afrikaner who is an Indian.” As I took my leave of him, he said that I would be welcome to visit the United Service Institute to see his long family tree history of PW Botha’s tropical origins, and to view his watercolour portrait, painted from newspaper photographs, of the one-time MP for George.

It was weirdly improbable and amusing to have encountered an Asian soldier-student of Die Groot Krokodil in the senior common room of an Oxford college. In a way, Stanley Menezes was a human bridge across which to return to the era of Plessey South Africa. Or, perhaps, a double fold in the life of memory – a before and an after which was also a before.

Menezes outlived Botha by six years, dying in 2012 at the age of 89. I can’t help wondering if he had ever come across one of the prime minister’s speeches, in the House of Assembly in April 1979, in which he had stated proudly that no “Indian community in the world” was “better off than the Indians in South Africa”. It is all too tempting to imagine his satisfied reaction: “See? Your leader was speaking more truly than he could possibly have known.”

• Also read: Nuwe Geskiedenis van Suid-Afrika by Hermann Giliomee and Bernard Mbenga