South Africa
Louis Botha
1862–1919 Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa
A Boer general who had fought the British in the war of 1899–1902, Botha became the first Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and led a policy of reconciliation between Afrikaners and English-speakers. In 1914 he agreed to Britain's request to seize German South West Africa, which split his own people. When Boer officers and old comrades rebelled in the autumn of 1914, he took the field himself, defeated the rebels and treated most of them leniently, and then led the conquest of South West Africa, taking Windhoek in May 1915. He represented South Africa at the Paris Peace Conference and died in August 1919, two months after signing the Treaty of Versailles.