Africa Up Close

Frederik Willem (‘F.W.’) de Klerk, the last leader of apartheid South Africa, died on November 11, 2021.

Nothing new was expected of de Klerk when he became President of South Africa in 1989. A member of the ultra-conservative “Dopper” wing of the Dutch Reformed Church, he progressed through the strict rites of passage common to Apartheid leaders–membership of the Voortrekkers, the Federation of Junior Rapporteurs, the Afrikaans Student Union, and the supreme accolade of an invitation to join the Broederbond, the elite, secret society dedicated to promoting Afrikaner interests. His father, Senator Jan de Klerk, was almost elected (ceremonial) State President, and he served as Labour Minister under Prime Minister J. S. Strijdom, who was married to F.W.’s aunt. Like them, his politics were hard-line and traditional.

Liberal-minded white South Africans viewed de Klerk, who had served as a National Party minister in various posts since the late ’70s, as a laggard. Many predicted that even the tepid reforms of his predecessor, P. W. Botha, would be rolled back under his presidency.  His own brother, Wimpie, wrote that F.W. was “too strongly convinced that racial grouping is the only truth, way and life” to ever break from apartheid.[i]

Then came his famous speech at the opening of parliament on February 2, 1990. The reforms that De Klerk announced ushered in the most profound changes to South Africa’s race relations in 350 years and eventually led to the negotiated transition from apartheid to constitutional democracy.

Over the next thirty years, he was asked to explain his motives countless times. On occasion, he invoked the divine, once telling a Los Angeles Times reporter that “God had instructed me to do so.”[ii]  De Klerk usually responded with some amalgam of “it was for the good of the country” and “I wanted to dismantle the injustices of apartheid”.

This was the story he told himself. International audiences generally took him at his word. Many –perhaps most– South Africans did not.

In his own country, De Klerk was stalked by accusations that he was a political opportunist bent on preserving the wealth and privilege of white South Africans in a transition to black rule that had become inevitable in the face of mounting economic and political pressure from abroad and popular unrest at home.

While charitable commentators saw a damascene conversion in his decision to release Mandela from prison, unban the African National Congress (ANC), and scrap race-based laws, critics to his Left said that circumstances had forced his hand. Afrikaner nationalists on his Right called him a traitor.

History will praise de Klerk for staying the course. Under near constant threats to his authority, he proved a tactician of rare skill and grit. He steamrolled the all-powerful security establishment.  Inquiries into state-sponsored violence were launched and recalcitrant generals were fired. Most dramatically, he secretly dismantled their ultimate backstop: South Africa’s nuclear weapons arsenal. Lingering fears that Afrikaner nationalists might use the arsenal to cling to power were quashed.

In 1992, when conservatives bayed for de Klerk to be reined in, he called their bluff with a whites-only referendum. More than two-thirds voted in favor of continuing his reforms. Negotiations with the ANC on a new constitution gained an irreversible character. When he first opened the discussions, de Klerk probably neither foresaw nor desired their culmination in unqualified majority rule. However, he still joined Mandela’s unity government in 1994 as one of two deputy presidents, before stepping down a few years later.

In retirement, de Klerk was feted abroad as a peacemaker, reformer, and global statesman. His status shrunk considerably whenever he returned home.  From his beautiful house in Cape Town overlooking the Atlantic, he cut a rather isolated figure. His periodic interventions on issues of national import riled most South Africans, a reaction for which de Klerk only had himself to blame.

In the face of the sharpest allegations against him–that he knew about the death squads who murdered liberation fighters, that he never accepted that apartheid, which made blacks second-class citizens in their own country, was a crime against humanity–he dissembled. In his final video message recorded days before his death, he apologized “without qualification” for the suffering his regime inflicted on “black, brown and Indian” South Africans. A moment of expiation that moved some but was too little, too late, for his detractors.

In my own reading of his path, de Klerk shares a likeness with the resourceful Sicilian prince, Tancredi, of Giuseppe Lampedusa’s The Leopard, discerning how to cling to power and wealth in a changing world, who famously warns his uncle: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”.

And yet, de Klerk’s evident pragmatism can never fully explain what he held in his heart, why he defied his inheritance. We know from his background that he believed as an article of faith that South Africa was the God-given, Afrikaner state. Not a transitory, historical state of affairs, but, as Hermann Giliomee wrote, “something permanent, natural and outside of time.”[iii] His Camelot was under threat but not on its knees.

In 1993, he received the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Nelson Mandela, inasmuch for not resisting change as choosing it. The dint of moral equivalence between the two leaders irked many at the time and still does to this day.  De Klerk spent most of his career upholding a system that dehumanized millions of people; Mandela spent 27 years in prison for opposing it.

Although Mandela often spoke angrily of de Klerk during their negotiations, he willed himself to see the good in a man he had every reason to despise. Through gritted teeth, the mutual trust that was forged between them made possible a new destiny for South Africa.

In the difficult choices and compromises made by both men in the early 1990s there is an essential truth about building peace: it can be an ugly business.

[i] [i]As quoted in Frank Welsh, A History of South Africa (London: Harper Collins, 2000), p. 501.

[ii] Cited in Melvin Bruce Cauthen, Jr., ‘Confederate and Afrikaner Nationalism: Myth, Identity, and Gender in Comparative Perspective’, unpublished Ph.D. Thesis (London School of Economics, 1999), p. 71.

[iii] Hermann Giliomee, ‘Afrikaner Nationalism 1870-2001’, in Alan Fischer and Michael Albedas (eds.), A Question of Survival: Conversations with Key South Africans (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1987), p. 16.

Image credit: Nobel Peace Prize winner and former South African President FW de Klerk addresses the Trinity College Law Society after he was presented with the Praeses Elit Award as a recognition of his key role in ending apartheid and his outstanding contribution to reconciliation in South Africa. [Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images]

Terrence McNamee is a specialist in development, governance and security issues. After completing his PhD at the London School of Economics, he worked for 8 years at the Royal United Services Institute in London. Then as Deputy Director of the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation until the end of 2017. In 2006 he was a visiting expert to the Prism Group, ISAF IX based in Kabul, Afghanistan. From 2008 to 2009, he was a Delegate on the Government of Denmark’s Africa Commission. He is published in Foreign Policy, The New York Times and The Financial Times. As well as, Editor or co-Editor of numerous monographs and books. In 2013 he served as an advisor in Malawi to then President Joyce Banda. He was Head of Mission for an international election observation mission for Lesotho’s national elections in 2017. McNamee is also writer and historian of the acclaimed photographic history of the twentieth century, CENTURY (Phaidon Press, 1999, edited by Bruce Bernard).