Pieter Willem Botha Quotes

I just came from South Africa, a place that had been in a perpetual uprising since 1653, so the uprising had become a way of life in our culture and we grew up with rallies and strikes and marches and boycotts.

I think there's something very dark in the South African psyche. I think we live a lot of the time in a state of a very low-grade civil war; the levels of violence in South Africa are extremely high. In a way, the civil war that never happened is being played out in a covert way, so we live with a lot of very ugly things.

While apartheid was in operation, the set-up was a gift for writers if you were looking for a big theme.

Being a white South African, I enjoyed the better things that that country gave to a small percentage of its population.

My mother was a member of the Cape Coloured community. 'Coloured' is the South African word for the half-caste community that was a by-product of the early contact between black and white.

South African ministers are anxious to deal out fair treatment, but are hampered by public opinion…and a degree of racial prejudice of which they themselves, as individuals, are largely free.

Our differences - in race, sexual preference, economic - have always been used as distractions to keep us divided. We get so wrapped up in our own stories that we can't hear each other.

There are so many people out there struggling with racism, or their sexuality or where they're brought up or how wealthy their family was ans these issues are not hidden, they were in the late 19 century and they're still important today.

Apartheid was baked hard in the mining industry because that's where it originated.

I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti.

When African-Americans come to France, the French show them more consideration than they would show an African or a Black Caribbean. When African-Americans come to France, the French people are like, 'Oh, wow. Oh my God.' But if it's an African, they're like, 'Whatever.' It's all because of the past, because of our history.

It is wrong to divide the nation white against black, native born against immigrant or one religion against another. It is also wrong to divide people by income. East Germany was not an improvement over South Africa. Obama divides Americans against each other. This is wrong.

Poverty and the rule of race that is called apartheid drive the Transkeian migrant from security on the land to work in the cities, and then back again.

I wanted to make a black story about South Africa. Unfortunately, no producer in the United States would put one penny into a black story.

Racial discrimination, South Africa's economic power, its oppression and exploitation of all the black peoples, are part and parcel of the same thing.

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

I have always thought that the rapid economic development of South Africa would in the long run prove to be incompatible with the government's racial policies, and recent events have tended to confirm my opinion.

In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights.

We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation's greatness.

Black history is American history.

If it were in our national security to deploy to South Africa under apartheid, would we have found it acceptable or customary to segregate African American soldiers from other American soldiers, and say, 'It's just a cultural thing'? I don't think so. I would hope not.

... mainstream churches now spend more time preaching against apartheid and colonialism than they do against real sins like pinching secretaries and pilfering from the office coffee pool. The Southern Baptists, because they were fortunate enough to flourish in a region where the false sun of the Enlightenment never shone, succeeded in escaping this grim fate.

The possibility of a liberal capitalist democracy in South Africa is exactly nil. The racialist propaganda amongst the whites and their desire to maintain what they imagine to be a profitable situation makes it utterly unthinkable that there can be a political alignment that favours a liberal white group. In any case the political immorality, cowardice and vacillation of the so—called progressives amongst the whites render them utterly useless as a force against fascism.

I beg that some shadow of a colour bar, some little inequality between white and black before the law be retained.

Instruction! Instruction! is what the Boers lack above all else; they call themselves Christians, and Kaffirs and Hottentots heathen, and for this reason they believe that they are permitted anything.