PW Botha and Kenneth Kaunda Hold an Otiose Meeting
On 30 April 1982, President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia met the apartheid Prime Minister, P.W. Botha, in a mobile home that had been set down in the middle of the African bush across South Africa’s border with Botswana to discuss the political situation in South-West Africa (Namibia) and South Africa. Official sources hinted that the mobile home had been devised to enable the two leaders to confer across the border without involving either Zambia or Botswana in what could be construed as a formal gesture of recognition of the South African racist regime.
This was the first meeting between any leader of a Front Line State and a South African premier since the Victoria Falls meeting between apartheid Prime Minister B.J. Vorster and Kaunda on 25-26 August 1976. The two leaders were together for nearly four hours and parted amicably after approving a communiqué of only four sentences. The meeting on 30 April took place at the initiative of the Zambian President, who told a South African interviewer in March 1982 that he was ready to meet Botha to try to head off “potentially explosive developments” in southern Africa.
Both Governments avoided being more specific about an agenda for the talks, but it was presumed that they were supposed to inevitably dwell on the stalled diplomatic effort to bring independence to the territory of South-West Africa, which later, after independence, became known as Namibia. Afrikaner sc
