F.W. de Klerk / The Times 11.11.2021

On February 2, 1990, President FW de Klerk used the opening of South Africa’s white parliament to deliver the most important speech in his country’s history.

It was a speech prepared in such great secrecy that FW, as he was known, had not even let his wife know what he would say. Journalists were summoned at 6am to be told, behind locked doors and under the strictest embargo, what he would reveal a few hours later. “After today South Africa will never again be the same,” he said as he waited to enter the chamber, and he was right.

As millions watched on live television, De Klerk proceeded to announce the legalisation of the African National Congress (ANC), the imminent release of Nelson Mandela, and that the time had arrived for negotiating a new political system.

It was an astonishing speech from a man raised in the heart of Afrikaner nationalism, the scion of a political family who had done so much to develop and enforce South Africa’s pernicious system of apartheid over the previous 40 years.

The speech led, after four years of tortuous negotiations, to the dismantling of apartheid, South Africa’s first democratic elections, the country’s first black-majority government after more than three centuries of rule by the white minority, and its emergence from international pariah-hood. South Africa’s last white president legislated himself and his National Party (NP) out of power but into the history books.

De Klerk and Mandela were jointly awarded the Nobel peace prize for their relatively peaceful transformation of a country that had been hurtling towards civil war, but De Klerk never received the acclaim bestowed on his fellow laureate, with whom his relations were always strained.

His critics accused him of presiding over egregious security force violence and human rights violations during his presidency, a charge that he always denied but was lent some credence by South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Nor was it entirely clear whether De Klerk dismantled apartheid out of high principle, or whether his hand was forced by sanctions, South Africa’s deepening international isolation and the real prospect of racial conflagration.

Perhaps, like the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, he simply lost control of the process that he had set in train. He failed to secure all the protections for South Africa’s white community that he sought.

Conservatives claimed that he had betrayed the white minority, suggesting that his initials stood for “Farewell Whites”, and liberals accused him of pandering to hardliners.

Far from providing an effective opposition to the ANC, his deeply divided party, which had governed South Africa for nearly half a century, swiftly disintegrated in the new era.

In a sense De Klerk’s estrangement from his fellow Afrikaners was reflected on a personal level, too. In 1998, shortly after resigning as his party’s leader, he divorced Marike (née Willemse), his wife of 39 years. Soon afterwards he went outside the Afrikaner tribe to marry his longstanding lover, Elita Georgiadis.

For a man often regarded as cautious, conservative and lawyerly, De Klerk’s long life certainly did not lack historical or personal drama.

Frederik Willem de Klerk was born in Johannesburg in 1936 to a family whose Huguenot forebears had arrived in the Cape in 1688 to escape religious persecution in France, joined the Boers’ Great Trek north to escape British oppression in the late 1830s and fought in the Boer War of 1899-1902.

His great-grandfather was a South African senator, and his grandfather twice stood unsuccessfully for parliament. His father was a cabinet minister, and an uncle, JG Strijdom, served as prime minister from 1954 to 1958. From birth, in short, he was steeped in Afrikaner culture and nationalism, with all that that entailed. Apartheid was officially institutionalised by the South African government when he was 12.

As a teenager growing up on the family’s smallholding at Krugersdorp, west of Johannesburg, he was a member of the Voortrekkers, the Afrikaner equivalent of the Scouts. He helped in his father’s election campaigns, and established a branch of the NP’s youth wing at Krugersdorp’s Monument High School. As a law student at the conservative Potchefstroom University he became a leading member of the national Afrikaans student union.

In one way only was De Klerk not a member of the Afrikaner mainstream. His family belonged not to the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk, the dominant Dutch reformed church that produced every postwar South African head of state before him, but to a small, breakaway denomination called the Gereformeerde Kerk. The latter’s relative open-mindedness may have helped him realise in later life that the long-term interests of Afrikaners were not best served by the continued enforcement of apartheid.

While still a student De Klerk met Marike, persuaded her to be his partner in a debating competition — sports were not his forte — and married her shortly after he graduated cum laude in 1958. They went on to adopt three children: Jan, Willem and Susan. Willem, the younger son, who became a public relations executive, died of cancer last year. De Klerk is survived by Jan and Susan.

Marike was thought to be even more conservative than her husband. She was once caught on tape describing “coloured” South Africans as “left-overs”, and strongly objected to Willem’s plans to marry a girl of mixed race. He backed down.

De Klerk set himself up as a lawyer in Vereeniging, an industrial town in Transvaal, specialising in company and mercantile law. Over the next 12 years he was active in local politics, met NP leaders through his father, and joined the secretive and elitist Afrikaner Broederbond. He supported the prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd’s plans for separate black homelands. He also rejoiced when Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, believing “we had broken the back of a communist-inspired revolutionary conspiracy”. In 1972 Vereeniging’s MP was appointed ambassador to Rome and De Klerk was elected to parliament in his place. Six years after that John Vorster, the prime minister and a friend of his father, promoted De Klerk straight from the back benches to the cabinet, with a joint portfolio as minister of posts and telecommunications, and of welfare and pensions.

Over the next 11 years De Klerk held a succession of ministerial posts, though none of the most senior ones, and became the NP’s leader in Transvaal, which would later serve as his power base. He sat on the repressive state security council, though he claimed he was never told the “innermost operational secrets of the security forces”. He supported President PW Botha’s imposition of a draconian state of emergency in 1986 to counter escalating black violence and what he labelled “the revolutionary threat” posed by resistance groups such as the ANC.

De Klerk was complicit, at the very least, in the brutal excesses of the apartheid regime, though he used his memoirs to emphasise his efforts to relax racial barriers in sport and mining, improve education for black people and repeal legislation banning inter-racial sex and mixed marriage, which his father had introduced.

In 1989 the ageing and imperious Botha suffered a stroke and stood down as NP leader, but not as president. The party was by that stage split between reformers known as “verligtes” (“enlightened people”) and conservatives known as “verkramptes” (“cramped people”). De Klerk defeated three verligte candidates to win the party leadership, and then engineered Botha’s reluctant resignation from the presidency. After parliamentary elections three weeks later, De Klerk — balding, chain-smoking and with a bent nose from a youthful hockey accident — replaced him as president.

He adopted a more modest and frugal presidential style; he also used his inauguration speech to talk of reconciliation and the need for a new South Africa, but at that stage was still regarded as a staunch supporter of apartheid. “I don’t think we’ve got to even begin to pretend that there is any reason for thinking that we’re entering a new phase. It’s just musical chairs,” the Most Rev Desmond Tutu, then Archbishop of Cape Town, said.

De Klerk’s older brother, Wimpie, an outspoken liberal, predicted that his sibling would spurn bold steps in favour of “small compromises, drawn-out studies and planning processes . . . he will move slowly and cautiously, protecting his flanks as he does so”.

De Klerk confounded his critics. He allowed Tutu to lead a huge protest march in Cape Town and also began to rein in the security forces and release political prisoners. He even held a secret meeting with Mandela, who was smuggled into the president’s official residence under cover of darkness. “We both reached more or less the same conclusions: that it would be possible for us to do business with each other,” De Klerk said later.

Then he delivered his stunning address to parliament in February 1990, winning praise from around the world. Nine days later Mandela was released after 27 years in prison. “No one had dreamt that I would do so much, that with one stroke I would remove all the reasonable obstacles to genuine constitutional negotiations,” De Klerk wrote in his memoirs, The Last Trek: A New Beginning. Returning to Johannesburg after the first trip to Europe in living memory on which an Afrikaner leader had been made to feel welcome, his eyes were filled with tears.

The negotiations that led to South Africa’s first democratic, multiracial elections four years later were beset by crises: walkouts, boycotts, strikes, demonstrations, frequent acts of violence perpetrated by black militants, white extremists and the security forces, and a deteriorating relationship with Mandela caused by De Klerk’s failure to halt attacks by elements of those security forces seemingly determined to sabotage the peace process.

“The ANC’s continuous vilification of the security forces, together with their vitriolic accusations that I, myself, was either personally involved in security force violence, or had lost control of the security forces, caused deep disaffection and tension between Nelson Mandela and me,” he recalled. He labelled Mandela’s attacks “the height of hypocrisy given the ANC’s own deep involvement in violence”. In 1993 alone, 3,706 South Africans died in political violence.

Yet in his memoirs De Klerk compared his dealings with the security forces to a man given two fierce watchdogs, both so thoroughly spoilt by their previous owner that they disliked and resented him. “I knew that if I pulled too hard, I might choke them, or they might slip their collars and cause pandemonium in the neighbourhood.”

De Klerk was also confronted by some furious white opposition to his reform programme, and in 1992 he took the courageous step of calling a whites-only referendum to secure a proper mandate for it. After a frenetic campaign masterminded by the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency, he won 69 per cent of the vote. “Today we have closed the book on apartheid,” he declared. “Today we have written in our history the fundamental turning point.”

He took one other dramatic and unprecedented step. With the Cold War over, he ordered the dismantlement of South Africa’s semi-secret nuclear weapons capacity.

In November 1993 the negotiators agreed an interim constitution that provided for a five-year government of national unity. Five months later the ANC won South Africa’s first multiracial elections with 62.6 per cent of the vote, and the NP came second with 20.6 per cent. After 342 years of white rule Mandela became South Africa’s first black president. De Klerk surrendered power with dignity and grace, and became the second deputy president. His country was readmitted to the family of nations and he and Mandela were awarded the Nobel peace prize.

In his acceptance speech of the prize he said that his rejection of apartheid was “not a sudden change, but a process of introspection, of soul searching, of repentance, of realisation of the futility of ongoing conflict, of acknowledgment of failed policies and the injustice it brought with it”.

De Klerk was a controversial choice, and the ceremony was not an entirely pleasant occasion. As he stood with Marike on the Grand Hotel balcony overlooking Oslo’s main street, the crowd below jeered him and cheered Mandela. He reflected on the irony of the two men having “travelled so far to be granted the world’s highest accolade for peace and reconciliation — while the relationship between us was characterised by so much vitriol and suspicion”.

He was “seething”, he later wrote, about a speech that Mandela made after the ceremony, but “I once again managed to bite my tongue”. Meanwhile in South Africa their faces appeared on T-shirts and salt and pepper shakers as symbols of racial harmony.

Despite the general euphoria the tensions continued with the government of national unity. De Klerk and his fellow NP ministers felt slighted and ignored by their newly empowered ANC counterparts, but unable to criticise the policies of a government of which they were part. Having adopted a new constitution in May 1996, the NP withdrew from the unity government one month later. The following year De Klerk resigned as leader in order, he said, to free the party of the “baggage” of its apartheid past and give its new leader time to prepare for the general election of 1999.

De Klerk’s timing was good. The party, deeply divided and haemorrhaging support, rapidly imploded. But there may have been another reason for his departure. Six months after resigning he shocked devout fellow Afrikaners by announcing that he was divorcing Marike. He admitted a seven-year affair with Georgiadis, the wife of a Greek shipping magnate whom he had met in London. He explained that they had broken off their relationship for two years to try to save their marriages, but failed.

“It was one of the most painful decisions I have ever taken,” he wrote, but “I chose to move forward, to accept public exposure, censure and humiliation, and to seek God’s forgiveness and that of all those affected.” De Klerk married Georgiadis in 1999 and went to live on her farm at Paarl, near Cape Town, and she survives him along with his two children. In 2001 Marike was murdered at the age of 64 by a security guard in the beachfront Cape Town apartment where she was living.

After leaving politics De Klerk gave speeches around the world and founded the Global Leadership Foundation, which discreetly mentors inexperienced world leaders with quiet words in their ears. He also set up the FW de Klerk Foundation to promote causes he believed in, and indulged his love of golf. His trials, however, were not over.

He was obliged to testify twice before Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose creation he had opposed — he had fought unsuccessfully for a general amnesty for those employed by the state during the apartheid era. He apologised for the suffering caused by apartheid, but insisted that neither he nor his government had authorised the beatings, killings and torture inflicted on apartheid’s opponents by renegade members of the security forces. Mindful of those who did not believe his initial apology, he apologised once again “without qualification” in a video released after his death.

In a 1998 report the commission said that De Klerk’s lack of candour made him “an accessory to the commission of gross human rights violations”, and accused him of having “contributed to creating a culture of impunity”. He took legal action to block publication of those findings. The report contained a blacked-out page instead. In 2003 the commission published diluted wording, agreed in advance with De Klerk’s lawyers, which said he had knowingly withheld information from the commission about state-sponsored human rights violations.

De Klerk never ceased to protest his innocence. Gross violations did occur, he admitted, but “we deny responsibility for actions of which we were not informed; which we would not have approved; which were often diametrically opposed to the reform initiatives that my government and I had launched”.

He accused the commission of setting out to “discredit and humiliate me” and concluded: “Those who are trying to drag us down to the sordid level of the murder squads . . . are robbing us of our right to stand with honour as the co-founders of our new nation.”

Frederik Willem de Klerk, President of South Africa, was born on March 18, 1936. He died of cancer on November 11, 2021, aged 85