The dramatic flourish of a significant figure videotaping his final message to be viewed after his death is the stuff of movies. So, in some ways, it was fitting that F.W. de Klerk recorded a statement watched the world over after his death from mesothelioma on Nov. 11 at age 85.
Frederik Willem de Klerk, a man who upheld an unjust system until he didn’t, who meant to obstruct reform but then freed Nelson Mandela and shared the Nobel Peace Prize with him in 1993, was the president of South Africa’s last apartheid government.
“I, without qualification, apologize for the pain and the hurt and the indignity and the damage that apartheid has done to black, brown, and Indians in South Africa,” de Klerk said in his video statement. “Allow me in this last message to share with you the fact that since the early ’80s, my views changed completely. It was as if I had a conversion. And in my heart of hearts, I realized that apartheid was wrong. I realized that we had arrived at a place which was morally unjustifiable.”
Mandela and de Klerk jointly won the Nobel Prize in 1993 after eradicating segregation between black and white South Africans during apartheid. De Klerk was also responsible for the 1993 release of Mandela, who became the first black president of the country in 1994.
De Klerk’s role in apartheid remains a brutal and divisive part of his history for both his erstwhile supporters and black Africans who eventually benefited from his change of heart. De Klerk was blamed for the deaths of thousands of anti-apartheid protesters and black South Africans, while white citizens in favor of apartheid viewed his ultimate reversal as a betrayal.
The cinematic nature of de Klerk’s legacy isn’t limited to his final statement. Veteran correspondent Richard Stengel spent hours interviewing Mandela for Mandela’s own career retrospective as well as Stengel’s books about him and recalled Mandela’s impression of his first meeting with de Klerk in 1991. De Klerk proposed a reform built around “group rights,” but that would only perpetuate a “separate and unequal” reality for the black majority.
“I told him that I totally rejected that,” Mandela told him. “I referred to an article which was written in Die Burger, which is an Afrikaner newspaper — the mouthpiece of the National Party in the Cape — in which the editor said that the concept of groups rights was conceived as an attempt to bring apartheid in through the back door. And I said to Mr. de Klerk that if your own paper says that, then you can imagine what we say.”
De Klerk’s response impressed Mandela. He told the jailed dissident: “Well, my aim here is no different than yours … If you don’t want the concept of group rights, I will remove it.” Mandela left thinking, “He is the type of leader we can conclude an agreement with.”
That turned out to be prophetic. Though the post-apartheid transition was a difficult and bloody one, eventually, Mandela defeated de Klerk in free and fair elections to become South Africa’s first black president. His deputy in the ensuing national unity government? F.W. de Klerk.
He is survived by his wife Elita and their two children.
Misty Severi is a breaking news reporter for the Washington Examiner. Seth Mandel is the executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
