92 The Economist November 20th 2021
Obituary F.W. de Klerk
T
o makethecloseacquaintanceofF.W.deKlerkwastolookin
to the face of a voortrekker. Although he had been comfortably
brought up in suburban Johannesburg, his blue eyes still seemed
to stare across the veld and the mountains the Afrikaner volkhad
crossed on the Great Trek in the 19th century. And his set jaw
seemed ready to declare, as he often did, the bluntbutcourteous
words: “You are wrong.”
His people had taken wagons eastwards to escape the imposi
tion on Dutchspeaking Boers of English imperialism, English an
tislavery laws and the English language. For him the Boer wars
against the British, in which his grandfather fought, were the first
anticolonial conflicts in Africa, and the Boers were another Afri
can tribe. His own Huguenot ancestors had arrived there in 1688.
That made him an African born and bred, through and through, as
well as one of a strictly Calvinist people destined by God’s hand to
find their dwelling place in southern Africa.
The de Klerks survived grandly. His uncle became South Afri
ca’s prime minister in the 1950s, and his father also served in gov
ernment. Both men built up the National Party, which in 1948 in
troduced apartheid. Under this system it was illegal for different
races to marry, socialise, own property or work without permis
sion across much of the country. In 1970 black South Africans were
barred from citizenship and expected to move from the cities to
“Bantustans”, distinct tribal states, leaving whites as the majority.
To Frederik, as he grew up and studied behind the walls of his
own culture, this seemed how things should be. God, having creat
ed the different races from Adam, also allotted the boundaries
where each race should live. Apartheid was Scripture, to the letter.
But then in 1993, as president, he took the whole system down.
The first step came in 1990, when he vowed in Parliament to be
gin negotiations to end it. The African National Congress (anc),
the main group resisting apartheid, was to be unbanned and itsleader, Nelson Mandela, released from prison. Conservative mps
were shocked, and heckled him. They knew him as a firm suppor
ter of apartheid, especially when, as education minister, he rein
forced it in the universities. He was also a member of the Broeder
bond, a secret brotherhood that protected Afrikaner interests.
Now he was betraying them.
He brushed that accusation aside. First, he had always been a
pragmatist, despite the tough talk. Politics, as Bismarck said, was
the art of the possible. The silver thread in his career was loyalty to
party policy, so he proposed only as much as he thought the party
would bear. At some points he sounded ultraconservative. At oth
ers—as when he oversaw the repeal of the Mixed Marriages Act—
he seemed liberal, almost revolutionary.
Second, his speech was no Damascene moment. His conver
sion had been gradual. It began when he had to deal with black and
coloured (mixedrace) clients in his first legal practice in Vereeni
ging. As a politician after 1972, he became still more involved with
other races. By the late 1980s he had started to look hard at himself,
on his knees before God, to find out where he and the party should
go. Apartheid was under increasing strain. The Bantustans were
struggling. In the slums and townships on the outskirts of cities,
where most of the black population had stayed, misery and indig
nation were sparking into violence. And his country, beset by
sanctions, was now isolated in the world.
Publicly he boasted that South Africa could get round sanc
tions. Privately, he knew it was teetering over the abyss. And it was
not just the economy or the violence that worried him. He was a
member of an increasingly beleaguered tribe, and his bold dis
mantling of apartheid was not just to ease the lives of the black
majority. It was also to ensure that Afrikanerdom was saved.
The aftermath was hard. In South Africa’s first allrace elec
tions, in 1994, the ancswept the board with twothirds of the vote,
a share he thought unhealthy. He was appointed deputy president
in Mandela’s new Government of National Unity, which felt hu
miliating. And working with Mandela, despite some mutual re
spect, was a strain. When they jointly won the Nobel peace prize in
1993 he found himself seething during Mandela’s speech, biting
his tongue to keep his fury back. It wasn’t the only time. There
were silent spells, too, and arguments even in the street.
Frankly, he felt he had done more than Mandela to bring apart
heid down. To convince his own party had been bruising. At one
peak in the terrible unrest he had defied his own generals, who
wanted to bring in martial law. The chief reason for Mandela’s
coolness towards him was that he would not apologise for apart
heid, or declare it intrinsically evil. But almost to the end, he could
not do that.
He managed to admit the pain caused by it, and to call it “un
fortunate”. But he still agreed with the premise. A separatebut
equal space for each tribe to develop was not morally repugnant to
him. His own people had wanted that, when they set up indepen
dent Boer republics in Transvaal and the Orange Free State. And it
could be a racial success. America had clobbered him, but on a vis
it there in 1976 he had seen more racial incidents in a month than
in South Africa in a year.
When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission spoke to him
in 1995, he defended the state security forces who had backed the
racist status quo with ever increasing violence. He denied that
they had ever been authorised to carry out killings, least of all by
him. Such abuses by rogue whites were always overplayed. And he
resented being nagged to prostrate himself. Only at the end, in a
video released posthumously, did he utter the word “wrong”.
In 1989, when he took the oath as South Africa’s president, he
refused to say “So help me God”, after the chief justice. Instead he
said clearly, in Afrikaans, “So help me the triune God, Father, Son
and Holy Spirit”. When he retired from politicsandwrote his
memoirs, he gave them the bland subtitle “A NewBeginning”. But
their title, much more fervent, was “The Last Trek”.nBuilder and dismantler
Frederik Willem de Klerk, last president of apartheid South
Africa, died on November 11th, aged 85