THE former South African President P.W. Botha died tonight from a stroke at his home in the small Cape Province town of Wilderness at the age of 90.

Pieter Willem Botha was Prime Minister of South Africa from 1978 to 1984, and President from 1984 to 1989. South Africans nicknamed him the “Great Crocodile” for his fearsome manner and habit of wagging his index finger when declaring there would be no surrender to black majority rule.

He lived the final 12 years of his life under an African National Congress Government. As head of state he had allowed the repeal of some apartheid laws, but was determined to crush the outlawed ANC movement, both at home and abroad.

Mr Botha imposed a policy dubbed “total onslaught” in which the formidable South African military machine raided across borders to attack camps of the ANC guerrilla army Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation).

Mr Botha was born into a Afrikaner farm family in the Orange Free State. He first worked for the Afrikaner National Party at the age of 19 as a party organiser. He was notorious for wielding a bicycle chain as he led raids on meetings of rival parties.

He was elected to Parliament as a National Party MP in 1948, but his rise to power really began in 1966 when he was appointed Defence Minister in the Vorster Government in 1966. When Vorster resigned as Prime Minister in the wake of a corruption scandal in 1978, Mr Botha succeeded him.

With his defence background, he pursued an ambitious military strategy, arguing that the preservation of his apartheid government was crucial to stem the tide of African communism in neighbouring Angola and Mozambique after these two former Portuguese colonies obtained independence in the mid-1970s.

In the 1980s he began to develop a secret nuclear weapons programme in collaboration with Israel. By the early 1990s South Africa had at least six nuclear bombs, but these were destroyed when it was clear that the ANC would take power in the wake of Nelson Mandela’s release from life imprisonment.

Although deeply conservative, Mr Botha recognised that some form of constitutional concessions to black people were necessary, while preserving white pre-eminence. “We must adapt or die,” he said.

He stood down in favour of F.W. de Klerk who later steered South Africa towards the country’s first multiracial elections in 1994 which were won by Mr Mandela’s ANC.

The National Party has since folded and its last leader, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, is now a member of the ANC Government.

Even in retirement, Mr Botha retained his defiant streak and refused to appear before the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which implicated him in human rights violations.

During an interview ahead of his 90th birthday this year, Mr Botha said that South Africa would have “gone down the drain” had it achieved liberation in the 1960s and 1970s. In the same interview, he said he had never regarded blacks as inferior because “many blacks and Coloureds co-operated with us”.

A fortnight ago he was treated in hospital for what doctors said at the time was a routine check-up, denying reports that Mr Botha had suffered another stroke after the first one in 1989 that forced him out of politics.

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