20 TIME December 6/December 13, 2021
DIED
F.W. de Klerk
Polarizing apartheid fi gure
BY RICHARD STENGEL
IN 1991, TWO YEARS AFTER HE BECAME
President of South Africa, F.W. de Klerk,
who died on Nov. 11 at the age of 85,
secretly met with Nelson Mandela at
Tuynhuys, the President’s residence in
Cape Town. Mandela was the most fa-
mous political prisoner in the world.
De Klerk was a longtime National Party
functionary who had succeeded the fero-
cious P.W. Botha as head of the country’s
racist apartheid government.
It was the fi rst time they had met, and
prison offi cials had hurriedly ordered a
three-piece suit and tie for Mandela. The
meeting was formal, but cordial. The two
discussed the future of South Africa and
Mandela’s possible release. Mandela re-
called all of this to me in 1993 when I was
working with him on his autobiography,
Long Walk to Freedom. We discussed
de Klerk many times during 60-plus
hours of taped interviews.
Mandela’s relationship with de Klerk
was complicated. There are some who
thought he was too willing to see the
good in de Klerk. When I later asked him
about that, Mandela was thoughtful. Yes,
he replied, he often did trust people and
was sometimes betrayed by them. But
when I asked him whether de Klerk mor-
ally disapproved of apartheid or was just
a “political incrementalist,” he rejected
the premise of my question. “When you
are negotiating, you have to accept what
a man says. He says apartheid has failed;
he wants to bring about a nonracial soci-
ety... We must accept that he does want
democratic changes.” For Mandela, the
only way you could tell whether to trust
someone was to trust them.
And that’s what he did with de Klerk.
In the end, they avoided a possible civil
war and achieved a free South Africa.Stengel is a former editor of TIMEEXONERATED
Muhammad Aziz
and Khalil Islam
BY ZAHEER ALIOn Nov. 18, Muhammad Aziz
and Khalil Islam—convicted
of the 1965 assassination of
Malcolm X—were exonerated.
But what does it mean to restore
years of damage, not just to these
men but to communities harmed
because of their wrongful convic-
tions? Malcolm worked tirelessly
to challenge the violence of the
carceral state. His legacy requires
us to ask these questions.
For decades, activists and
scholars have done just that,
including historian Manning
Marable in his 2011 book
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,
for which I was a lead researcher.
I’m glad to see two people who
I believe are innocent vindicated.
But it’s the state that is doing the
vindication—so do we then look
away from the state’s culpability,
not only in the investigation of this
case but in the events that led up
to the assassination?
Make no mistake, this is
justice with an asterisk.Ali is executive director of the
Hutchins Center for Race and
Social Justice at New Jersey’s
Lawrenceville SchoolDIED
Glen de Vries, entrepre-
neur who fl ew to space
in October with William
Shatner via Jeff Bezos’
aerospace company Blue
Origin, in a plane crash on
Nov. 11 at 49.
> Wilbur Smith,
famed South African
novelist, on Nov. 13
at 88.
> Winter, a bottlenose
dolphin who starred in the
2011 fi lm Dolphin Tale,
on Nov. 11 at 16.CHARGED
Myanmar’s ousted
leader Aung San Suu
Kyi with election fraud
by the military junta
on Nov. 16. (Election
monitors have found
no evidence of this.)SENTENCED
Jacob Chansley, the
“QAnon Shaman,” to
41 months in prison
on Nov. 17 for his par-
ticipation in the Jan. 6
Capitol riot, among
the longest sentences
handed down thus far.SUSPENDED
Approval of a major gas
pipeline from Russia to
Germany on Nov. 16.DEBUTED
Ji-Young, the first Asian
American Muppet o n
Sesame Street, on Nov. 15.THE BRIEF MILESTONES
Aziz, left, and Islam pictured after
their respective arrests in 1965
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