F.W. de Klerk: a hero of our time

03 February 2010

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Few rulers give their empires away, says Rian Malan, but 20 years ago, for the good of his country, de Klerk did just that. South Africa owes him a great debt

I almost punched an Englishman the other day. We were sitting in a bar, talking about the 20th anniversary of F.W. de Klerk’s Great Leap Forward of 2 February 1990 — the day he rocked the world by announcing that he was about to unban the revolutionary movements, free Nelson Mandela and turn South Africa into a land of peace and justice. I was explaining why I thought de Klerk’s move was an act of heroism almost unparalleled in the history of humankind, but the Englishman didn’t want to know. ‘De Klerk was a loser,’ he said, ‘a racist battered into submission by sanctions, township violence and global isolation, and then forced to do a decent thing that should have been done decades earlier.’ The corollary was of course that Mandela was a sweet old man who shouldn’t have been locked up at all, and the ANC an army of hymn-singing moderates who just wanted to establish a democracy like Great Britain’s. Like I say, I wanted to moer him, and I’d better explain why.

De Klerk’s February speech changed everything in South Africa forever. In weeks to come, there’s going to be a lot of debate about this — the consequences that were good, those that weren’t, his alleged failures at the negotiating table and so on. There will also be a revival of the old debate about what exactly pushed de Klerk over the edge. Pop psychologists will say he must have had a Damascus Road experience, something that caused him to abandon apartheid and embrace the brotherhood of man, but there is no hint of any such event in de Klerk’s autobiography. Rightwingers will accuse him of selling out to international capitalism, but that’s even more absurd than the leftist notion that he was brought to his knees by a ‘catastrophic’ military defeat at Quito Carnavale. (Quito Carnavale was the town to which Russia’s Cuban and Angolan surrogates retreated after suffering a ghastly thrashing at the nearby Lomba River in 1987. The Boers attempted to take Quito, too, but their ancient jets were outclassed by Soviet MIGs, so they gave up the pursuit and came home. Fidel Castro airbrushed the embarrassing bits out of existence and recast the rearguard action as a victory.)

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kevwrite

February 16th, 2010 10:32pm Report this comment

Rian Malan, a known apologist for so-called verligte ("enlightened") Afrikaners, like de Klerk and stooges of the ilk of Thabo Mbeki, leaves out a very key piece of information, which would certainly have totally undermined the image he was trying to create of his hero.
The uncultured and lowly-educated PW Botha, egged on by his genuinely, forward-thinking Foreign Minister, Pik Botha, had decided in the mid-Eighties to "cross the Rubicon", “take the plunge”, almost an eon before; given the circumstances which prevailed in those troubled times.
At the eleventh hour, one man stood in his way, the same FW de Klerk, who indicated that he would lead a break-away of conservative, Transvaal Nationalists -- not quite the epitome of pragmatic liberal Christian democrats your correspondent was trying to make de Klerk measure up to -- if Botha made any concessions to the blacks.
For the next five years, one must assume, de Klerk's recently departed verligte editor brother, Wimpie,should be given the credit for finally persuading him to achieve his delayed Damascene conversion.
Either way, there are legions of dead, suffering and scattered-to-the-four-corners, black and white South Africans who would have far preferred the earlier release from Nationalist rule, which real-politiek Botha offered.
De Klerk's reasons initially were selfish, and related to ego and power; and later opportunistic, nothing more and nothing less.
That he has become more urbane and broadened his own outlook over the last 20 years should not cloud what happened at the time.
Go an moer someone else, Rian, that Englishman had it pretty damn right.

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