Pik Botha

Roelof Frederik "Pik" Botha (27 April 1932 – 12 October 2018) was a South African politician who served as foreign minister in the last years of apartheid. He retired in 1996.

Quotes

• If we don't stand together, we will never catch up and the industrialised nations won't care. I predict it here today as your brother.
  • at the signing of the peace protocol in Brazzaville in 1988
  • Quoted in Shaun Johnson, Strange Days Indeed (1993), p. 39

• Senator, some of us strongly believe that Americans are the last people that can go around the world preaching morality. What we are doing to the blacks in Africa today is what you have already done and continue to do to the American Indian.
  • To Senator Ted Kennedy
  • Quoted in The Namibian newspaper, 27 Apr 2011[1]

• A new era has begun in South Africa. My government is removing racial discrimination. We want to be accepted by our African brothers.
  • At the signing of the peace protocol in Brazzaville in 1988
  • Quoted in The Daily Maverick newspaper, 2 September 2011[2]

• His [Nelson Mandela's] death is irreversible, his legacy, undying. All of us, the government, the voters, civil society, the churches, are faced with an inescapable challenge: are we going to honor and sustain his legacy or deviate from it?
  Indeed, leaders across the globe ought to reflect on his legacy – particularly while they have the option to resolve disputes through peaceful negotiations instead of violence; abolish all nuclear devices or retain them to destroy our planet; take the quantum leap required to avert the lethal consequences of climate change and the depletion of the planet’s natural resources or enjoy our daily greed to such an extent that it forbids us to preserve our planet for our children to survive.
  • "Ex-South African foreign minister reflects on his relationship with Mandela", Fox News (December 7, 2013)