De Klerk Dies: The President Who Ended Apartheid

F. W. de Klerk announced in February 1990 that Nelson Mandela would be freed and the ANC unbanned. He was the last apartheid-era State President of South Africa. He hadn't been expected to do it; his party had elected him as a conservative. He chose to end the system instead. He and Mandela shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. He died in 2021 at 85, still debating with historians about whether his motives were moral or pragmatic. Frederik Willem de Klerk was born on March 18, 1936, in Johannesburg, into an Afrikaner political dynasty: his father and uncle had both served in the cabinet. He practiced law before entering parliament as a member of the National Party, the party that had created and enforced the apartheid system since 1948. He served in multiple cabinet positions under P. W. Botha, including education, mines, and internal affairs, and was considered a party loyalist without reformist tendencies. When he became State President in August 1989, few expected dramatic change. Yet on February 2, 1990, he delivered a speech to parliament that effectively dismantled the legal framework of apartheid: unbanning the ANC, the South African Communist Party, and the Pan Africanist Congress, lifting media restrictions, and announcing Mandela's release after 27 years in prison. The negotiations that followed, conducted between de Klerk's government and Mandela's ANC over four years of painstaking and often acrimonious talks, produced the 1994 democratic elections that brought Mandela to the presidency. De Klerk served as one of two deputy presidents in Mandela's government of national unity before withdrawing the National Party from the coalition in 1996. His legacy remained contested: he insisted he acted from moral conviction, while critics pointed out that apartheid was already economically unsustainable and internationally isolated.