Piet Koornhof was as good an actor as you will find in politics.
He could at the drop of a hat feign hurt, joy, puzzlement, anger, innocence or whatever emotion a situation required.
This is what made him such an accomplished politician.
National Party politics was a complex mixture of racism, self-preservation, cruelty and self-justification. There was petty and grand apartheid - the first being the domain of racists who wanted absolute racial segregation for its own sake, and the second group one that supported "separate freedoms" for ethnic homelands.
The twocamps fought bitterly, until Dr Andries Treurnicht finally formed the Conservative Party in the 1980s on the grounds that President PW Botha had abandoned the basic ideology of of apartheid.
Up until that time, leading members of the ruling party often spent much of their day just trying to hold the opposing factions together. It was a tough task.
They had, on the one hand, party supporters dearly wanting to believe they were as true as ever to apartheid's basic beliefs. On the other hand, there were those who were becoming progressively uncomfortable with apartheid.
They started to realise the world's patience was fast running out.
Koornhof held the two camps together - a task he was well-suited for. It required duplicity of an exceptional quality.
He had concluded in a doctoral thesis at Oxford that apartheid could not work.
Yet, on his return to South Africa, he assumed leading roles in the National Party and the Afrikaner-Broederbond, whose very purpose was to implement apartheid and persuade all and sundry that it was the only logical path for the country.
When challenged on the contradiction by the opposition in parliament, he responded that he would not have been granted his doctorate had he written that apartheidcould work.
Opposition members burst out laughing, and Koornhof's annoyance switched swiftly to a self-satisfied "heh-heh" smile that frequently charmed both friend and foe.
Switching from indignation to good humour was indeed one of his greatest skill.
He would lambaste you as a journalist for asking a "foolish question" - but soon after, he would have his arm around your shoulders, proclaiming how delighted he was to have you as a comrade in the fight for the greater good.
I saw him employ this tactic the very first time I went to interview him as the political correspondent of the Pretoria News. It happened back in the '70s and arriving with me at his office was then-Bishop Desmond Tutu, who told me he had been summoned because of his earlier call for a coal boycott of South Africa. Koornhof led Tutu into his office looking stern.
Not much later, the two of them re-emerged heartily laughing and slapping each other on the back. I suspected they were not laughing about the same thing.
It was already clear at that stage that the diminutive clergyman had too good an understanding of human nature - and politics - for that.
Koornhof had another skill that was of good use to a regime that could no longer be honest with itself or the outside world: he was the master of obfuscation. He could sound off non-stop for an hour or more, seeming to provide the deepest possible insights into government thinking. But, on trying to dissect his speech afterwards, you found it was impossible to make sense of it.
Dr Van Zyl Slabbert, as leader of the opposition, once read back a pre-edited version from Parliament's Hansard record of Koornhof's reply to a question he had asked him across the floor.
It went on and on and made no sense at all. It was a lot of words strung together meaninglessly.
And who laughed most heartily of all at the gobbledygook? Koornhof, of course. His mastery of double-speak got increasingly tested at National Party congresses where, as minister of sport, he tried to get increasingly exasperated party members to understand why racial integration at some levels of sport was proof of the success of segregation. And then to relieve the tension, he had little tricks - like ending off his speech by telling the audience: "When I was a kid my mother said to me, 'Piet, you better be a clever and sweet little boy because, Piet, people are not going to like your face'."
With his long nose, big ears and political juggling acts, he was a cartoonist's delight. And how his sceptical audiences enjoyed the relief provided by such little self-deprecatory jokes. We political writers of the time used to say that Koornhof did not convince his party followers - he just exhausted them.
Koornhof probably was the biggest intellect in the John Vorster and PW Botha cabinets. His true view of apartheid was most likely best reflected by his doctoral thesis. But as a son of the old Western Transvaal Afrikaner heartland, he would have been profoundly conscious of the fears and prejudices of his Nationalist kin.
The task he therefore set for himself as minister of sport, and later of co-operation and development, was to string along his party's followers - while all the time trying to do the opposite of what he was telling them.
You would thus hear him inform Nationalist congresses of what a resounding success separate development was turning into. And then, addressing black audiences, he would carry on about how, like piano keys, black and white could make beautiful music together.
The great sadness about people like Koornhof is that they were so caught up in their own political wrangles that they seemed unable - or unwilling - to understand the hurt wrought by policies like the forced removals his department of so-called co-operation and development presided over.
It is nevertheless to his credit, and perhaps indicative of the qualms he suffered, that he at least was one of rulers of the time who had the good grace to go to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to seek atonement.
I have often wondered how much his extraordinary love affair with a coloured woman after retirement had to do with the release from bondage of a supreme intellect who had for so much of his life been caught up in horrible ideologies he thought he had no choice but to assist.