The South African president who released Nelson Mandela
On 2 February 1990, F.W. de Klerk had been in office for just five months when he delivered a speech that stunned the world. At the opening of South Africa’s white parliament, he declared that the African National Congress was being legalised; and that its leader would be released from prison “unconditionally”. Nine days later, in a blaze of global publicity, Nelson Mandela walked free from jail after 27 years behind bars, paving the way for the dismantling of the apartheid regime – a regime that de Klerk and his family had done much to develop and enforce. For their work to ensure the relatively peaceful transition to democracy, de Klerk, South Africa’s last white president, and Mandela, its first black president, were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. But whereas Mandela was met with cheers at the prize ceremony in Oslo, de Klerk was booed. He would remain a divisive figure, said The Times. He was praised for his courage in ending white minority rule, in the teeth of fierce and furious opposition from his own Afrikaner constituency; and for his skill in overseeing that tortuous process. But many in South Africa held him responsible for the brutal violence of the security services when he was in office, and believed that he had not only been complicit in the crimes of apartheid, but had never truly repented them.
Frederik Willem de Klerk was born in Johannesburg in 1936. His ancestors had arrived in South Africa in the 17th century, and he grew up steeped in Afrikaner politics. His father was a minister in the government that instituted apartheid in 1948. He volunteered as an activist in his teens, and was involved in student politics at university. After graduating, he set himself up as a lawyer in Vereeniging, in the Transvaal. He was elected to parliament in 1972, and in the 1980s held numerous cabinet posts in P.W. Botha’s government. In this period, the government was clamping down viciously on black resistance groups, and South Africa was becoming a pariah state. De Klerk gave little indication that he’d be the one to release it from its ignominy. Associated with the right of his party, the verkrampte, he defended segregation in education, and in 1986 he backed Botha’s decision to impose a draconian state of emergency. Three years later, Botha suffered a stroke and stepped down as party leader. De Klerk defeated three candidates from the “verligte” (“enlightened”) wing of the party to succeed him. No one expected his presidency to be transformative. Desmond Tutu described his appointment as “musical chairs”. Yet five months later, he made the speech that signalled the end of the apartheid era.
Many white South Africans branded him a traitor, while black South Africans were convinced that he had not undergone any Damascene conversion, but was merely a pragmatist, bowing to the inevitable, said The Washington Post: South Africa was “virtually bankrupt” and becoming ungovernable; it could not endure any more years of isolation. His critics said that, far from wanting to usher in majority rule, he’d stood by while shadowy armed militias stoked violence in the townships, in an effort to show that black people were not ready to govern. But in a memoir, he rejected blame, said The Guardian. He said he had had no involvement in the violence, while noting that he’d had to appease the security forces, in order not to lose control of them. In that period he also took the dramatic step of dismantling South Africa’s nuclear weapons programme.
In 1994, the first multiracial elections took place peacefully, and Mandela was sworn in as president. De Klerk served as his deputy in a national unity government, but relations between the two men had always been strained to the point of hostility, and he withdrew in 1996. Later, de Klerk referred to the injustices of apartheid, while continuing to insist that he had not approved of its worst excesses. Many were furious when, in his testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he refused to accept that apartheid constituted a crime against humanity. Yet in a video statement released posthumously, he apologised “without qualification” for the “pain and the hurt and the indignity and the damage” caused by apartheid. He had, he said, changed his views since the 1980s. “It was as if I had a conversion. And in my heart of hearts, I realised that apartheid was wrong. I realised that we had arrived at a place which was morally unjustifiable.”