No Nelson Mandela without F W de Klerk

“Without F W de Klerk, there could never have been a Mandela.”

This was the view of a senior Western diplomat, expressed not in the wake of de Klerk’s death from cancer this week, at age 85, but that of his ‘partner’ in the ‘great experiment’ which was the ‘rainbow nation’, birthed primarily by these two men.

Joint recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize for that extraordinary achievement, Nelson Mandela went on to become a global icon of non-racial inclusivity and moral leadership.

De Klerk slipped into a semi-private retirement, causing some controversies over seeming defensiveness towards the system of racial separation which he was instrumental in deconstructing.

In recent years, as the glow has come off the early promise of the ‘rainbow nation’, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu described the newly-minted non-racial South African democratic order, it has become the ‘in thing’ in some political circles increasingly to deny De Klerk’s role and minimise his contribution to South Africa having avoided the precipice of all-out race war towards which it had been hurtling.

But that assessment seems to be considered a viable understanding of De Klerk’s role largely by people who were not around to see first-hand the extreme and extraordinary transition required.

That transition had to take place first within De Klerk, and a few others like him in the then-ruling National Party which created and enforced apartheid, then by degrees in other Afrikaners, and eventually a majority of white South Africans.

This was no small feat, and without it a fullscale civil war, with race issues at its base but with tribal and other animosities also playing out in violence, would almost certainly have been the disastrous culmination of the struggle for freedom among South Africa’s oppressed black masses.

That scenario was generally held as likely in political and diplomatic circles in the late 1980s as SA endured increasing pressure from global disinvestment and anti-apartheid campaigns, even as there was a ramping up of the domestic armed struggle for freedom from race-based systemic oppression.

Facing these two realities, it is claimed by some political scientists in the wake of De Klerk’s passing, his moves towards the opening up of South Africa’s political space, which then led to a negotiated and relatively peaceful transition to majority rule, were merely responses to overwhelming forces, deserving little merit.

But for those who lived through apartheid, not least the intensifying internal battle to make the country ungovernable, but also the battle within the then ruling party over how it was to extract itself from a self-made trap, that construction of events does not accord with the facts.

While the National Party faced revolt, violence and international isolation, not as mere threats but as hard and seemingly insoluble realities, it is still nothing short of amazing to observers with direct experience that the National Party, once a hair’s breath away from being correctly described as a fascist regime, could move so far and so quickly.

The reason lies almost solely in De Klerk, and his self-described “awakening” in the 1980s to the unworkability of apartheid, its deep dysfunction and, eventually, to its moral repugnancy.

Reviewing De Klerk’s last message to his fellow citizens, recorded just a few days before his passing early Thursday from mesothelioma, a form of lung cancer, critics of De Klerk, most young enough to have been babes in arms when the events they have been commenting on took place, have been loath to honour De Klerk with much more than “doing what he had to do”, as a necessity, not out of a conscience over apartheid’s evils.

But De Klerk, in his final message, went out of his way to say apartheid was “wrong”, that it had caused much pain, suffering and damage to generations of “black, brown and Indian South Africans” and that he was truly sorry for that.

Some political critics were constrained by De Klerk’s dying testament to admit that he appeared sincere, perhaps only at last and perhaps to help put a shine on his legacy, yet his feelings seemed evident as he declared his earlier convictions in the correctness of “separate development”, the softer-sounding English version of apartheid, to have been entirely wrong.

That some remain sceptical of the depths of De Klerk’s eventual rejection of apartheid is hardly surprising.

De Klerk, in his 40s, was unrecognisable relative to the man he was to become.

The son of an Afrikaner establishment figure, he was early into politics and young into parliament in the early 1970s.

He was a rising star in the then ruling party, becoming education minister and interior minister in the cabinet of P W Botha, a securocrat hardliner but also another Afrikaner leader who ‘saw the writing on the wall’ and attempted to reform apartheid, but whose will to overthrow that system of racist repression was insufficient to the task.

It took De Klerk, who succeeded Botha in 1989 as party and national leader, along with a few of like mind, to respond to the reality that the only hope of avoiding a racial bloodbath of unparalleled proportions in global history was to negotiate a compromise with the anti-apartheid forces.

The once arch-conservative De Klerk, among the least likely to negotiate his own people out of power, set about doing exactly that – in order to save not only fellow white Afrikaners, but all South Africans, from the horrors of civil war.

Mandela was of the same mind.

Despite numerous disagreements and outright verbal fights, some taking place in full view of those observing the all-party talks of the early 1990s in which the beginnings of what later became South Africa’s non-racial constitution were hammered out, this single realisation – that they as leaders had first to find each other so that all South Africans could do the same – dominated their interactions.

De Klerk served under Mandela as a Deputy President in a ‘reconciliation cabinet’, as did others in his once ‘anti-black’ party.

He and Mandela not only received the Nobel peace prize together, they came to respect each other and even be friends.

Some here find they can still not forgive De Klerk for his political roots in apartheid, others, like Mandela himself, see a man who had the “courage” to rise above the limitations of his own upbringing and beliefs.

Chris Erasmus is a veteran journalist, editor, publisher and commentator, and is the Nation Media Group Correspondent in South Africa, a position he held from 1985 to 2004, resuming in 2017. Erasmus has covered major stories for NMG such as the ‘township rebellion’ of the mid to late 1980s, the end of the apartheid regime and the dawn of democracy in South Africa. He filed this piece from Cape Town.