Only in a posthumous video did de Klerk apologise unreservedly for apartheid. If only he could have done it alive





By Sharon Davis

When President F.W. de Klerk rose in the South African Parliament on February 2, 1990, most expected he would announce some mild reforms. His party had presided over the racist apartheid system for five decades. Could a leopard really change its spots?

By the time he sat down 35 minutes later, he had announced a series of seismic changes. South Africa would never be the same again. The African National Congress was unbanned and nine days later, Nelson Mandela walked free after 27 years in prison. Within four years, he would become the nation’s first democratically elected leader.

De Klerk is often touted as a great reformer. However, following his death, at 85, on Thursday, there is evidence aplenty for a more nuanced view of his achievements. The short, dour, uncharismatic leader had set in train a series of events that he could not control.

Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk with their Nobel Peace Prize Gold Medal and Diplomas, in Oslo, in 1993.


As he gave his history-making speech, his nation was in turmoil. South Africa had become an international pariah, and economic sanctions, in which Australia played a big role, were biting deep. Domestically, the black townships were in revolt. Millions of people had taken to the streets and could not be subdued despite a draconian state of emergency. Internationally, the Berlin Wall had been torn down and the Cold War was over. To his credit, the deeply conservative but pragmatic de Klerk realised that apartheid could not be enforced for much longer and to do so would lead his nation into further conflict and economic despair.

While I was reporting from South Africa during those years, it became apparent that de Klerk and his National Party colleagues were frequently wrong-footed in negotiations with Mandela about a new dispensation. De Klerk often seemed to underestimate the political intelligence of his opponents. Perhaps it was because the National Party had not needed to negotiate with anyone for decades, their rule enshrined by an array of racist laws. De Klerk had wanted a federated system which enshrined a form of political privilege for whites. Mandela was not having a bar of it.


During the 1994 election campaign, I followed de Klerk to a rural meeting with impoverished black farmworkers and their bosses. This Afrikaaner heartland was his natural constituency, but he proceeded to lecture the workers about the evils of “communism” under an ANC government using a ridiculous analogy about chickens and eggs. It was as if he was talking to a group of children, a thoroughly misguided attempt to maintain the political status quo even as the ground was shifting underneath him. Meanwhile, as the on-again, off-again negotiations with the ANC continued, there was a darker development emerging which clouds de Klerk’s legacy.

For at least four years after Mandela’s release in 1990, a deadly battle unfolded in the black townships. Many of the township residents believed the country’s shadowy security forces had been unleashed against the ANC. One day, I toured Soweto after a Kombi van had driven the streets, its occupants randomly shooting people. All the residents I spoke to said those in the Kombi had black faces but “white hands”. They firmly believed white men had blacked their faces before embarking on the killing spree, part of an unrestrained effort to sow fear and ultimately destabilise the negotiations under way.

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission would later confirm the existence of security force death squads working the length and breadth of the country. My interviews with these apartheid-era killers confirmed this. Some were completely unrepentant about their deadly work, believing they were soldiers in the fight against the ANC “communists”.


Mandela called on de Klerk to rein them in. De Klerk disavowed any knowledge of the death squads but his denials were difficult to believe. The apartheid state was highly structured and well documented internally, and for decades the chain of command had extended from the president down. Had all that suddenly changed overnight? He was defiant and defensive in press conferences and in his appearance before the truth commission, sitting slightly hunched, swatting away questions, even as power was slipping from his grasp.


Despite all this, de Klerk, along with Mandela, was awarded the Nobel peace prize for his role in South Africa’s transition. He served as deputy president under Mandela in the first government of national unity. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the anti-apartheid veteran and himself a Nobel Peace Prize winner, believes de Klerk occupies an “historic but difficult” space in South Africa.

So, what is his legacy? De Klerk was not a great reformer but a political pragmatist, forced to negotiate by pressure applied from abroad and within his troubled nation. Nevertheless, his initiatives took courage and alienated many within his own constituency.

In his lifetime, de Klerk was never able to denounce as morally repugnant the system his party had enforced for decades. As late as last year, he was telling the BBC that apartheid was not a crime against humanity. In a posthumous video, he has now apologised unreservedly for “the pain and the hurt and the indignity and the damage” caused by apartheid. If only he could have done that while he was alive.

Sharon Davis is a journalist who covered the South African transition to democracy from 1989 to 1997, including for The Sydney Morning Herald and the ABC.

Most Viewed in World