Artist Beezy Bailey has been forced to dismantle the temporary work after altering the statue to make Botha look like a young black warrior -- something that would have been unthinkable in apartheid South Africa.

Botha's likeness was shrouded in a blanket and his face smeared white to resemble a young black man who has completed his initiation rights of passage.

The general's peaked cap was topped off with a cardboard hat for the exhibit, part of Cape Town's week-long "One City, Many Cultures" arts festival.

The festival, which opened Wednesday, is meant to celebrate the cultural diversity of Cape Town's citizens.

Artist Bailey drove his message home by hanging a placard with the Xhosa word Abakwethu -- the initiated -- over the old general's name.

The outcry at the exhibit has been led by traditionalwhite Afrikaners who since the fall of apartheid in 1994 have increasingly voiced concern that their culture is being consigned to the dust bin.

Bailey said he received a flood of phone calls from furious Afrikaners who felt he was defacing the likeness of one of their leaders. One man threatened to kill him.

"What is going through their heads is a very strong Christian, Calvinist sense that their history is being destroyed," he said.

Botha, who has proudly sat on his bronze horse outside the gates of parliament for decades, was a brilliant Boer war general who subsequently became the then Union of South Africa's first Prime minister in 1910.

"It was nothing personal against Botha and should not be misconstrued as an insult against Afrikaners," said Bailey.

"I thought it symbolised the initiation of South Africa into a new democracy. It is indeed painful such as the circumcision these (Xhosa) guys undergo.

He said he thought in its new form the statue "was much more relevant to the modernparliament going into the new millenium."

Many black people loved what he did, he said. "A black man walked past the statue and raised his fist in the air and said `beautiful'."