Introduction

President PW Botha’s speech on 15 August 1985 to the National Party (NP) of Natal was the turning point at which white rule in South Africa failed to turn. Botha was expected to use the speech, broadcast to a huge international audience, to turn around the South African crisis that had worsened after the outbreak of uprisings in the townships in September 1984. Spurning the expectations of bold reforms, Botha projected himself as the uncompromising leader of a white minority determined to fight to the end for its survival. The speech triggered a massive outflow of capital and intensified sanctions against South Africa. A line in Botha’s speech, “Today we have crossed the Rubicon”, promptly became the object of scorn and ridicule.

Today it is still a major question why Botha refused to give a speech that the world would have considered as a true crossing of the Rubicon. A journalist recently speculated that Botha’s courage deserted him at the last moment, while two historians attribute Botha’s Rubicon speech to the “evolutionary regression” of his character. FW de Klerk, Botha’s successor, and Andreas van Wyk, Director General of Constitutional Development and Planning at the time of the Rubicon speech, both believe that he was irked by the high expectations raised by RF (Pik) Botha, Minister of Foreign Affairs, in a visit to Europe a week before the speech. Robin Renwick, British ambassador to South Africa, maintains that the security chiefs had persuaded the president to enforce the status quo with strict security measures. Anton Rupert speculated that a critical intervention was a threat by De Klerk, Transvaal NP leader at the time, to withdraw his party from the NP’s parliamentary caucus.

This article reviews the existing explanations for Botha’s stand and adds another two. One is that Pik Botha, in briefing American, British and German diplomats on the pending speech, presented a package of reforms that the cabinet had recommended to the president as a fait accompli in order to force his hand. Another interpretation is that Pres. Botha had accepted the package, but decided to spread the announcement of it over the four NP provincial congresses. The alternative interpretation is that Botha was shocked by the groundswell of sanctions his speech had triggered and then announced the entire package in an attempt to salvage the situation.

Read the full article here: Great expectations: Pres. PW Botha’s Rubicon speech of 1985