A VERY BURNING QUESTION

It was a very simple query put to me by the Firm in 1992: Do you by any chance know anyone high in the South African government? And the answer was yes.

Because of years patrolling southern Africa, I had a passing acquaintanceship with Pretoria’s foreign minister Roelof “Pik” Botha, even though by then I had not seen him for several years.

If the profession of foreign correspondent made a very good cover for a bit of “enhanced tourism” on behalf of the Firm, an established author researching his next novel was even better. It enabled me to go just about anywhere, ask to meet and converse with just about anyone, and pose just about any question. And all to be explained as research for a novel yet to be written—or not, for all anyone could prove.

Back in the seventies, the target had been the Rhodesia of Ian Smith and occasioned several visits to Salisbury, now renamed Harare. Once again my amiable but witless “Bertie Wooster” pose paid dividends. The men at the top were white supremacists, which is to say racial bigots.

There is no greater lure for the bigot than the earnest inquirer who, seeming basically sympathetic and right-wing, asks that the complexities of the situation be explained to him. No white supremacist can resist. As nothing other than a seeker after knowledge, I was favored with many hours of explanation—and classified information—from the likes of Rhodesian foreign and defense minister Peter van der Byl. He was a way-out racist who referred to his domestic staff—all Matabeles because he loathed the Shona—as “my savages.”

I do not think any of them suspected, as I listened, nodded, and smiled, that my views were the opposite of their own. But what they revealed was useful back home.

In the eighties, with Rhodesia now Zimbabwe, the target was the South Africa of the National Party, the originator and enforcer of apartheid, which was both brutal and tinged with insanity.

I once found myself closeted with General Hendrik van den Bergh, the head of the Bureau of State Security, the dreaded BOSS, and he insisted on telling me a story to prove not only his legitimacy but his sanctity as well.

“Let me tell you this, Mr. Fosdick”—he always called me Fosdick, forefinger waving, eyes alight—“I was standing once, quite alone, on the High Veldt when a great storm came up. I knew the land was riven with iron ore deposits and lightning strikes would be frequent and dangerous. So I took shelter under a large mwataba tree.

“There was an old kaffir standing nearby, also sheltering. And the storm raged with biblical intensity. The thunderbolts poured out of the sky and the thunder was enough to deafen me. The tree was struck and split down the middle, its core a smoking ruin. The old kaffir was struck and at once electrocuted.

“But the storm passed, Mr. Fosdick, and the sky cleared. And I was not touched. And that was when I knew, Mr. Fosdick, that the hand of God was upon me.”

I recall thinking that I was alone with the mast of one of the most brutal secret police forces in the world, and he was mad as a frog.

On another occasion, I was invited as dinner guest at the house of professor Carel Boshoff, head of the Afrikaner Broederbond, the Brotherhood, which was the intellectual and ecclesiastical (Dutch Reformed Church) origin and underpinning of the whole concept of apartheid.

Dinner proceeded with the usual courtesies until, over pudding, he asked me what I thought of the Homelands Policy. This was a particularly pernicious idea whereby the indigenous ethnic groups that made up the black majority would be allocated tracts of barren and often unworkable land, and be told that this was their true and original “homeland.”

As such, they could then have a token “government” and thus lose their citizenship of the Republic of South Africa (the RSA) and thus any rights they might have had in the first place, which were already few enough. I visited one of the “homelands,” Bophuthatswana, the so-called home of the Tswana people. It made the old American Indian reservations look like Shangri-La, although Sol Kerzner built a resort called Sun City on it to bring in a bit of tourist revenue.

Anyway, I was by then heartily tired of expressing views that were the inverse of what I really thought, so I explained exactly what I thought. My half-eaten dessert was removed and I was escorted from the house.

But in the course of all this, I met Pik Botha, the only man among them that I liked. He was practical rather than theoretical, had traveled very widely, and seen the outer world. I suspected that despite his position he was a moderating influence on successive presidents and probably privately despised the extremists around him.

By 1992 it was clear to anyone with eyes that the rule of the National Party and apartheid was finally moving to its close. There would soon have to be elections and they would have to be one man, one vote, which the African National Congress under its recently released and newly elevated chief Nelson Mandela would win. The white president, the last, was F. W. de Klerk, and Pik Botha was his firm ally and partner in reform.

Nevertheless, there was something “our political masters,” as the Friends put it, urgently wanted to know, and the “received wisdom” (as they also put it) was that an inquiry via our embassy in Pretoria was not the right channel. Too formal, too undeniable. What was needed was a quiet inquiry in a very private situation.

It was summer in Europe, winter in South Africa, and both parliaments were in recess. Ministers were also taking their holidays. It was known that Pik Botha had two passions: game fishing and big-game hunting. But the winter seas off the Cape of Good Hope were too rough, so it would probably be a game lodge for the foreign minister.

Then it was discovered he would indeed be vacationing for a week on a game lodge in the South African section of the Kalahari Desert.

These lodges are situated in the corners of simply enormous game reserves where the natural fauna—mainly antelope—are protected from their natural predators such as lions, leopards, and crocodiles. So they overbreed. The numbers have to be culled to preserve the life-support system. To defray costs, licenses are issued, and amateur hunters, escorted by professional game wardens, are allowed to track and shoot limited numbers for a fee appropriate to the size of the animal being taken.

Personally, I will take out of circulation either something that is a pest or vermin and has to be culled for the preservation of the rest of the ecosystem or if it will definitely reappear on the dining table. Or, like rabbit and wood pigeon, both. But not for fun and not for a wall trophy. But this would have to be an exception. The question was very important.

Of course, there had to be a cover story, and it was sitting at home doing schoolwork. My two sons would come with me.

Over the years, I had tried to introduce them to as wide a variety of adventurous holidays as possible, so that they could perhaps latch onto what really enthused them.

Thus we had been snorkeling and diving in the tropics, skiing and snowboarding in the Alps and Squaw Valley, flying, riding, and shooting. My older son, Stuart, had decided already; he was a passionate fisherman and has remained so. Shane had no particular preference, but had demonstrated on the estates of friends that he was a crack shot, a natural.

The game reserve where Pik Botha would spend part of his vacation in the Kalahari was discovered and bookings were made for me and the boys for the same week. So we flew to Jo’burg, thence to Krugersdorp, and thence by light aircraft to a dusty strip in the grounds of the shooting lodge.

It was a very convivial week, and Pik Botha was affable when we met again. He was eager to bag himself an eland and spent days tracking them. I thought it wise at least to “purchase” something for Stuart and Shane. On the second day, Stuart bagged his impala and was delighted when the forehead and horns, stripped to whitened bone, were presented for him to hang on his wall.

Shane was lectured lengthily by a warden as to what he should do, listened politely, and then from the back of a stationary truck put a bullet through the heart of a blesbok with a snap shot at 150 paces. The buck was photographed, but the real picture was the warden’s face. After that, he became their mascot.

My opportunity came on the penultimate day. A very small party would camp overnight in the wilderness. There were Pik Botha and his “minder” from Pretoria; the two sons of the owner of the ranch; my two lads and me. Plus two game wardens and several African porters.

After a long day tracking, the porters built a fine fire of brushwood, a barbecue and a braai provided a meat supper, sleeping bags were unrolled, and we settled down to sleep. The atmosphere was intensely relaxed and I thought the moment was ripe. We were all around the dying fire with the four sleeping boys between the foreign minister and me. So I asked quietly, “Pik, when the rainbow revolution comes and the ANC takes over, what are you going to do with the six atom bombs?”

South Africa had long had atomic bombs, built with Israeli help. Everyone knew this, despite the strict secrecy surrounding them. London also knew there were six and they could be carried by the RSA’s British-built Buccaneers.

That was not the problem. Nor was the moderate Nelson Mandela. The problem was that the ANC Party had an ultra-hard-line wing, including several devoted pro-Moscow Communists, and even though the USSR had been disbanded by Mikhail Gorbachev the previous year, neither London nor Washington wanted nuclear bombs under the control of the anti-West extremists. It only took Nelson Mandela to be toppled by an internal coup as so many African leaders had already been and . . .

My question hung in the air for a few seconds, then there was a low chuckle from across the embers and a reply in Pik’s Afrikaans-inflected voice.

“Freddie, you can go back home and tell your people we are going to destroy the lot.”

So much for an elaborate cover story. The old buzzard knew exactly what I was, who I was asking for, and what they wanted to hear. I tried to share the joke.

But, to be fair, they did. Before the de Klerk government handed over power, they destroyed all six. Three of the casings are on display somewhere, but that is all. Three of the Buccaneers still fly out of Cape Town airport, but only for tourist rides.