Ex-leader of S Africa’s legacy ‘big but uneven’
Last white president who stunned the world when he scrapped apartheid, dies aged 85
F.W. de Klerk, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela and as South Africa’s last apartheid president oversaw the end of the country’s white minority rule, has died at the age of 85.
He passed away at his home in Cape Town after a battle against cancer, a spokesman for the F.W. de Klerk Foundation confirmed yesterday.
The Mandela Foundation called his legacy “big” but “uneven, something South Africans are called to reckon with in this moment”.
South Africa’s last white president stunned the world when he scrapped apartheid and negotiated a peaceful transfer of power to a black-led government under Mandela.
But while he was feted globally and shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the revered Mandela, de Klerk earned scorn from many black citizens outraged by his failure to curb political violence in the turbulent years leading up to allrace elections in 1994.
Many right-wing white Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch and French settlers who had long ruled the country under de Klerk’s National Party, viewed him as a traitor to their causes of nationalism and white supremacy.
Frederik Willem de Klerk’s metamorphosis from servant of apartheid into its wrecking ball mirrored that of the former Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev. Both men rose to the pinnacle of power before moving to reform or dismantle the systems that had nourished them for decades.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and communism in Eastern Europe helped pave the way for de Klerk to launch his own bold initiatives. “The first few months of my presidency coincided with the disintegration of communism in Eastern Europe,” de Klerk wrote in his autobiography.
Less than three months after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, de Klerk opened the way for an end to more than four decades of apartheid with a bombshell speech to parliament on February 2, 1990, that “unbanned” the African National Congress and announced the release of its leader after 27 years behind bars.
In 1993, he shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela, who won the presidency the following year in the first multiracial elections in Africa’s biggest economy.