Pieter
Wolvaardt joined the Department of Foreign Affairs in 1969 as a raw
Afrikaans youngster. By his own admission, although born and bred in
Smithfield
, it wasn’t until after he joined DFA that he came to realise it wasn’t
‘Smiffield’ but Smithfield
.
He served his apprenticeship at home in the
Union
Building
and as a junior diplomat in Brazil
from 1970 to 1973. He went through the thick of the apartheid days when the
world ignored South Africa
and most countries cut ties, officially defending the indefensible but all
the time knowing that apartheid was wrong. They were interesting times.
After spells in
London
and
Lisbon
he found himself back in
Pretoria
on the South American desk just in time for the Falklands War between Great Britain
and the Argentine erupted in 1982. He takes us into the time when South Africa
was performing a balancing act between those two countries and going through
all manner of difficulties in the process.
In 1986 while serving as ambassador in
Buenos Aires
he was expelled from the country after
the SADF mounted simultaneous raids against ANC installations in
Botswana,
Zimbabwe
and Zambia. From 1986 to 1990 he was in
Brazil
and in 1993 he accompanied President F W de Klerk on a succession of
successful official visits to a series of countries in
South America
.
In 1994 President Nelson Mandela appointed him as
South Africa
’s first Ambassador to Mexico. He retired after a successful career with the Department of Foreign
Affairs in 1998.
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